Beneath her body in the snow, investigators found half of a knife.
It was the blade of a small kitchen pairing knife snapped.
The handle, maroon plastic, turned up later in a neighboring yard.
No fingerprints could be identified on either piece.
Two months later, a wallet surfaced in the snow on Avenue O South in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
It belonged to the dead woman.
It lay a couple of doors from one particular house.
That house, 334 Avenue 0 O South is where this case turns.
On the morning of the murder, a 16-year-old named David Milgard walked through its front door.
He would spend 22 years, 10 months, and 17 days in custody for a murder he did not commit.
In the basement of that same house lived a young construction worker with his wife and their baby daughter.
Police spoke to him once that winter.
He was not treated as a suspect.
He was treated as a witness standing at a bus stop in a yellow hard hat.
For 30 years, 9 months, and 22 days, the answer sat two blocks from the crime scene, one floor down.
The victim’s name was Gail Miller.
She was 20 years old and she was on her way to a job caring for sick children when she was killed.
The investigation that followed produced a conviction within a year.
It was the wrong one.
This is the story of how a city convicted the visitor and never looked in the basement.
And it starts in a hamlet 60 km southwest of Saskatoon.
Welcome to Cold Case Redemption, where we follow the cases the system got wrong.
All the way to the end.
If you want to understand how [music] an entire justice system missed the man downstairs, subscribe now because this one deserves to be told properly.
Now, before we reach the morning of January 31st, you need to know who Gail Miller was.
Gail Oolina Miller came from Laura, Saskatchewan, a small farming hamlet on the prairie southwest of the city.
Her parents were Milton and Gene Miller.
According to the public inquiry that later examined her case, she was the second of eight children.
One of her younger brothers, Jack, was 14 the winter she died.
She trained as a certified nursing assistant in Swift Current in the southwest of the province.
In September of 1968, she moved to Saskatoon, then a city of about 129,000 people.
And on September 4th, she started work at City Hospital.
She was assigned to the pediatric ward.
Her job in the plainest terms was looking after sick children.
She rented a room in a boarding house at 130 Avenue O South in Pleasant Hill, a workingclass district on the west side of the city.
On work days, she walked to the corner of 20th Street and Avenue O and caught the bus across town.
When police later interviewed her family, her roommates, her friends, and her co-workers, including 29 men at the hospital, they found no enemies at all.
The inquiry records that she was extremely well-liked.
Decades later, a friend who asked not to be named told the journalist Byron Christopher that Gail had spent her first paychecks on gifts for her family.
That is very nearly everything the public record holds about who she was.
Almost everything written about this case since was about somebody else.
Now consider the world she was living in.
On the last morning of that month in 1969, the temperature sat around -41° C and an ice fog hung over the west side, badly obscuring visibility.
It would stay dark until about 7:30.
A young woman walking to a bus stop at a/4 to 7 was walking in full night.
And in the 4 months before, something had been happening in the lanes of that part of the city.
On October 21st, 1968, a woman was grabbed near 18th Street, taken into an alley at Knife [music] Point, and sexually assaulted.
On November 13th, a second woman was attacked a few blocks away in the same way.
On November 28th, a third woman was grabbed by a man with a knife and taken toward an alley [music] and got away only because a car came along.
Police believed one man was responsible for all three.
[music] They had no suspect.
The first two attacks happened 8 to 10 blocks from the lane where Gail Miller would be found.
[music] Police had those files, but the prosecutor who would later try this case was never told that detectives had once suspected the rapist [music] and the killer were the same man.
And the defense never learned of the attacks at all.
On the morning of Friday, January 31st, 1969, one of Gail’s roommates saw her in the house sometime between 6:35 and 6:45.
That is the last time anyone who knew her saw her [music] alive.
If Gail’s story is already sitting heavy with you, hit the like button.
It helps this channel keep telling the victim’s side of these cases.
And hers is the side that almost got lost.
Now, let’s go back to that Friday morning.
Shortly after midnight, three teenagers had left Regina in a battered 1958 [music] Pontiac bound for Saskatoon.
And then they said, “Vancouver.”
The driver was Ron Wilson.
Beside him was Nicl John, who had met the third passenger only days earlier.
The third was David Milgard, 16.
They plan to pick up David’s friend, Albert Cadra, in Saskatoon, and use his money for the trip.
For now, they are somewhere on the highway in the dark.
Gail Miller was thought to have left the boarding house at about 6:45.
Her body was found at about 8:30 face down in the snow in the lane behind 211 Avenue N South, roughly a block south of where she lived.
A child on the way to school found her.
She was wearing her winter overcoat, her uniform beneath it.
One of her boots was missing.
She had been sexually assaulted and [music] stabbed.
The autopsy that same day found that the fatal wound had penetrated her lung.
Then investigators took inventory.
They had a weapon.
The broken blade of a pairing knife lay beneath her body.
Its maroon handle was later found in a nearby yard.
Her missing boot and a sweater were buried in the snow close by.
Contents of her purse were scattered through adjoining backyards and the purse itself turned up days later in a garbage can.
Her wallet was not in it.
On February 4th, Lieutenant Joe Pankala of the identification division went back to the scene and found two frozen lumps in the snow.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Laboratory identified human semen from a man with typea blood who was a secret, meaning his blood type showed up in his other bodily fluids.
Her stained clothing went into [music] evidence and into a box.
So, consider what investigators had.
They had a weapon.
They had a blood type.
They had a pattern.
The Saskatoon police put more than 100 officers on the case with full-time help from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
[music] They canvased six blocks around the scene, checked the city’s dry cleaners for bloody clothes, and worked through their list of known sex offenders.
And that same morning at 7:07, about eight blocks away, another young woman reported being indeently assaulted.
An officer wrote two words across the top of her statement, unrelated assault.
By March 2nd, 1969, police had investigated and eliminated more than 160 potential suspects.
Nobody had been charged.
Think about that for a second.
They had a weapon, a blood type, a pattern, and 100 officers.
And the man who did it was not a suspect.
If you’re frustrated by how close they were, subscribe because what comes next is how this investigation finally found its suspect.
He wasn’t tracked down by a detective.
He was walked in through the front door.
Now, let’s go back to the police station.
On March 2nd, 1969, Albert Kadra walked into Saskatoon police headquarters with his brother Dennis and said he had information about the death of Gail Miller.
He was questioned by Lieutenant Charles Short, then by Detective Eddie Karst, [music] who took his statement.
Cadran said his friend David Milgard had turned up unexpectedly at his house that morning around 9:00 with two people Kadra had never met.
He said Milgard wanted to leave town right away.
He said Milgard changed his pants and shirt in the living room and that there was blood on them.
The inquiry later found that no police pressure was put on Kadra to say this, that police challenged his story hard, and that he never recanted.
He died in 1995.
Until that day, David Milgard was unknown to Saskatoon police.
He had been a troubled kid from about the age of five in and out of foster homes and a boy’s school, drifting between hippie houses in Regina, Edmonton, and Vancouver.
His record was theft, joy riding, and drugs.
None of it was violent.
But once police started looking, his morning looked bad, and it matters that you see it the way they did.
The car reached Saskatoon around 6:30.
Nobody had the address.
They drove up and down the avenues of Pleasant Hill in the dark between 20th and 22nd Street, which meant near the murder scene at around the time of the murder.
They pulled up beside a woman in a dark coat and asked her for directions.
They got stuck in the snow near Avenue N and 20th Street, and Wilson and Milgard set off for help in opposite directions.
Sometime after 7, Milgard walked into the Travalier Motel in his stocking feet, asking for a map.
Later at the Cadrain house, he took the car around the block alone in -40° weather in a car that kept breaking down.
Asked why, he told police, “I like to drive, I guess.”
On April 4th, Gail Miller’s wallet was found in the snow, a couple of doors from the Cadrain house.
But there was another side.
Walter and Sandra Danchchuk, whose alley the teenagers got stuck in around 7:30, had all three of them inside their home for about 40 minutes and saw no blood and nothing unusual.
And both of David’s friends backed him completely.
On March 3rd, Ron Wilson told the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “I’m convinced that Dave Milgard never left our company during the morning we were in Saskatoon.”
Nicl John said the same.
Detective Karst was not convinced of Milgard’s guilt.
After interviewing Jon again, he wrote on April 18th that if one believed her and she was very convincing, there is no way in which Milgard can be connected [music] with this crime.
There was one more thing in the file and nobody underlined it.
Police had been asked to look for a construction worker in a hard hat who normally caught the bus at Avenue O and 20th Street and who had not been on it that [music] morning.
On February 3rd, they found one waiting at the stop in a yellow construction hat.
He lived two blocks from the murder [music] scene in a basement suite.
He told them he had gone to work on January 31st.
They interviewed him as a witness who might have seen something.
His wife, asked during the doortodoor canvas whether she had noticed anything unusual, said she had not.
By May, police had looked at more than 200 people.
They could not eliminate Milgard and they could not charge him.
On May 16th, 1969, senior Saska Saskatoon officers [music] met with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and agreed that David Milgard was their prime suspect.
The plan was to go back to his two friends and this time to use a polygraph.
On May 23rd, 1969, Ron Wilson [music] and Nicl John were brought to the Sheran Cavalere Hotel in Saskatoon to be examined by Inspector Art Roberts of the Calgary Police.
By his own later testimony, Roberts went in believing Milgard was the killer and that his friends were holding something back.
What happened in that room was never properly recorded.
Roberts left no report, no preserved polygraph tracings, no list of questions.
What is known from his own account to the Supreme Court of Canada is that before any test, he showed Nicl John the victim’s bloody clothing and asked her, “What if this had been your sister?”
She never took the polygraph.
The next day, she signed a 10-page sworn statement saying she had seen Milgard grab a girl in the alley and stab her.
Wilson, who had given David an alibi for months, now said David had been gone around 15 minutes and came back saying he had fixed her.
And both of them now described something they had never mentioned before.
A kitchen pairing knife in the car with a maroon handle, the same as the murder weapon.
Decades later, the inquiry concluded that Jon’s account cannot have been true, that she was either mistaken or lying.
It stopped short of finding that she deliberately lied or that Roberts coerced her.
Wilson recanted in 1990.
The commissioner did not believe his later claim that police had pressured him, but the commissioner did conclude that without that session with Roberts, David Milgard would never have been charged.
He was arrested on May 30th, 1969 in Prince George, British Columbia, where he was selling magazine subscriptions.
He had gone to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Detachment himself after hearing they were looking for him.
His trial opened on January 19th, 1970 before Chief Justice Alfred Bence and a jury of 11 men and one woman.
The prosecutor was a crown attorney named Caldwell.
The defense lawyer was Calvin Talis.
On the stand, Nicl John did not repeat that she had seen a stabbing.
She said she could not remember.
The crown was permitted to read her May 24th statement to her in front of the jury line by line.
Asked whether it was true, she said she did not know.
The judge cut in, “What do you mean you don’t know?
You signed them.”
Jurors were instructed not to treat the parts she didn’t adopt as evidence.
The inquiry later found a real possibility that they did anyway.
Then two acquaintances, Craig Melnik and George Lapchuk, described a drugfueled party at the Parklane Motel in Regina.
They testified that when the murder came up on the news, Milgard straddled a pillow, made stabbing motions, and said he had done it.
Lapuk quoted him asking, “Where is my pairing knife?”
Milgard told his lawyer he had been stoned and that if he did it, it was a joke.
The defense had real arguments and Talis made them.
The window for the crime was minutes.
It was minus40 and the boys were lightly dressed.
The Danchuks and the motel manager, ordinary citizens who saw Millgard shortly afterward, saw no blood.
There were no fingerprints, no hair, no physical evidence tying him to Gail Miller.
Talis advised him not to testify because on the stand he would have confirmed much of the crown story, including that he’d carried a knife.
The inquiry called the defense skilled, thorough, and ethical.
On January 31st, 1970, one year to the day after Gail Miller died, [music] the jury found David Milgard guilty of murder.
He was 17.
The sentence was life.
What followed was a teenager growing up in federal penitentiies.
He committed 31 institutional offenses in his first 18 months.
He attempted suicide twice.
He escaped in 1980.
His younger sister Moren told Mlan’s that classmates hit her and yelled that her brother was a murderer.
Years later, visiting him, she found he wanted to know how sandfeld and what the sky looked like.
He wanted every detail of the world.
And through all of it, from the first interview to the verdict, nobody had asked a single serious question about the tenant in [music] the basement.
For the first 10 years, Joyce Milgard mostly fought for her son’s parole.
After his 1980 escape, she gave up on parole and started fighting for his innocence.
By November of that year, she was working on it almost full-time.
She had no new evidence.
She had a belief.
She offered a $10,000 reward and distributed leaflets across Saskatchewan with a Winnipeg freelance journalist, Peter Carile Gorge.
She went through the trial transcripts and tried to track down the witnesses.
One lead came early, and it seemed small at the time.
In the early 1980s, Carile Gorge spoke with members of the Cadrain family and learned that a man later convicted of rape had been living in their basement when Gail Miller died.
The Millgard side tried to reach his ex-wife [music] didn’t treat him as a serious suspect and let it go.
That ex-wife had already gone to the police.
At around 4 in the morning on August 28th, 1980, she walked into the Saskatoon police station.
Her ex-husband had just been charged with a violent rape in North Battleford.
Days earlier, David Milgard had escaped, and she knew he said he was innocent.
She told police that on the day Gail Miller was killed, she and her husband were arguing when news of the murder came over the radio and that she had said to him, “My knife is missing.
You’re probably responsible for killing that girl.”
She said his face drained of color.
She said he had not gone to work that morning, which was unusual for him.
A pairing knife was gone from their kitchen.
The statement was taken, recorded, filed, and referred [music] to an officer.
He did nothing with it.
The inquiry noted that she came in at 4 in the morning after drinking, more than 10 years after the fact, and described a knife that didn’t seem to match the weapon.
Then it delivered its judgment on whether the report should have gone further.
It should have.
Joyce knew none of that.
She kept going.
In 1986, she paid a $2,000 retainer to the Winnipeg lawyer Hersh Walsh.
On May 14th, 1990, Joyce tried to hand Federal Justice Minister Kim Campbell a forensic report in public.
Campbell walked past her, saying that seeing it could jeopardize the review.
The inquiry would later be hard on Joyce, too.
It found her tactics alienated witnesses [music] and officials, and that her media campaign hardened the people she needed.
Both of these things are true at once.
She was difficult and she was right.
Then in February of 1990, an anonymous caller phoned the office of Milgard’s lawyers and told them to examine the crimes of a convicted serial rapist because he could be connected to the murder of Gail Miller.
If Joyce Milgard’s refusal to quit is hitting you the way it should, tap like.
10 years of closed doors and the break came down to one phone call.
Here’s what that call set in motion.
The Millgards had filed their first application to the federal justice minister on December 28th, 1988.
Now, the tip gave them a direction.
Paul Henderson, an investigator with Centurion Ministries, found the tenants’s ex-wife in the village of Kando, Saskatchewan, and she told him what she had told police a decade earlier.
Ron Wilson recanted much of his trial testimony.
It wasn’t enough.
In February 1991, Kim Campbell rejected the application.
A second application went in on August 14th, 1991, built around the man from the basement.
On September 6th, Joyce approached Prime Minister Brian Molrron in public in Winnipeg, and he promised to look into it.
In his memoirs, Molrron wrote that Campbell had once brushed Joyce off with the words, “Madam, if you wish to have your son’s case dealt with [music] fairly, please do not approach me.”
And that he told Campbell her decision was not acceptable.
Campbell’s own memoir called his meeting with Joyce an inappropriate intervention.
In late November 1991, the case went to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The man from the basement appeared at the hearing and denied murdering Gail Miller.
On April 14th, 1992, the court gave its opinion.
It was not satisfied that David Milgard was innocent.
But it found new evidence, particularly the locations and pattern of the tenants sexual assaults that could reasonably have affected the verdict, and it recommended a new trial.
Saskatchewan declined to hold one and stayed the charge.
On April 16th, 1992, David Milgard walked out of Stony Mountain Institution in Manitoba, 39 years old.
It’s good to be out forever, he told reporters.
I’m just going home.
He was free.
He was not cleared.
For that, the case needed a science that did not exist in 1970.
In 1969, the best a laboratory could do with a biological stain was read a blood type, a trait shared by thousands of men in any Canadian city.
Genetic profiling works differently.
Instead of one shared trait, it reads short stretches of genetic code that repeat a different number of times in different people at several separate locations.
Compare enough of those locations and the combination becomes for practical purposes one persons.
The problem was quantity.
By 1992, the only known semen stain left on Gail Miller’s clothing was microscopic, and the tests available would have consumed all of it, possibly for no result.
So, everyone waited.
In 1995, the Federal Justice Department took another look, and 2 years of negotiation over which [music] test to use followed.
The clothing finally went to the Forensic Science Service Laboratory in England.
Using a stain mapping technique the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Lab in Ottawa couldn’t perform in 1992.
Scientists there found seammen staining that analysts in 1969 [music] and again in 1992 had missed.
It was on her dress.
It had been there the whole time.
And the dress existed at all because the prosecutor, Caldwell, the man the Millgard campaign had attacked for years, had kept the trial exhibits.
On July 18th, 1997, the result was announced.
The profile could not have come from David Milgard.
It matched the man from the basement.
The laboratory estimated that profile would occur in approximately 1 in400 million men.
That same day, the government of Saskatchewan apologized to David Milgard.
The man from the basement was living in Saskatoon again.
Late on the night of July 23rd, he loaded his van and a trailer and drove west.
He was arrested in Calgary on July 25th, 1997.
And charged with the rape and murder of Gail Miller.
His name was Larry Earl Fiser.
He was born on August 21st, 1949 in North Battleford, Saskatchewan.
He married his first wife, Linda, in December of 1967.
In January of 1969, he was 19, a construction worker living with Linda and their infant daughter in the basement suite at 334 Avenue O South.
The suite was two blocks from the lane.
He usually rode the same bus to work as Gail Miller.
He had no connection to the car from Regina.
He had no connection to David Milgard.
He had no connection to Gail Miller beyond a bus stop.
He simply lived there.
The three attacks in the fall of 1968, the ones detectives had once thought might be linked to the murder, were his.
So was an attack in West Saskatoon on February 21st, 1970, 3 weeks after David Milgard was convicted.
That summer in Fort Gary, Manitoba, he attacked two more women.
And that fall, he was arrested in Winnipeg.
Two Saskatoon officers went to Winnipeg to take his statements.
One of them was Eddie Karst, who had worked the Gail Miller investigation.
Karst testified he drew no connection between the man in front of him and the killer of Gail Miller.
In 1971, Fiser pleaded guilty to the Saskatoon attacks, not in Saskatoon, but in Regina, and his sentences ran concurrently with his Manitoba time.
On March 31st, 1980, about three months after his release from prison, he raped and slashed a 56-year-old woman in North Battleford.
He was sentenced to 14 years and came out again in 1994.
By the time Larry Fiser stood trial for Gail Miller’s murder, he had already spent more than 23 years in prison for other attacks on women.
That is almost exactly the span David Milgard served for his crime.
And no, that’s not a typo.
So, what about the knife?
The case against David Milgard had leaned on a maroonhandled pairing knife his friends said they saw in the car.
Now, a jury was going to hear a very different account of where it came from.
Fischer’s trial opened on October 12th, 1999 in York, Saskatchewan, moved from Saskatoon because of the publicity.
The judge was Justice Jerry Albbright of the Court of Queen’s Bench.
The crown prosecutors were Dean Sinclair and Al Johnston.
Fischer’s lawyer was Brian Bares.
Fiser pleaded not guilty.
The scientist came first.
Michael Barber of the British government laboratory had compared David Milgard’s blood with the stains on Gail Miller’s clothing.
Asked about it in court.
He answered, “It did not match.”
The crown told jurors the odds that the seaman came from someone other than Fiser were one in 950 trillion.
In an unusual ruling, Albbright allowed three women Fischer [music] had raped to testify to show the similarities between their attacks and the attack on Gail Miller.
One described being jumped from behind on a sidewalk late at night, a knife held to her throat and pulled into an alley.
Then Linda Fischer took the stand.
She told the jury her husband had looked guilty and turned pale when she accused him on the day of [music] the murder, and she identified the suspected murder weapon, the pairing knife with the maroon [music] handle, as one she and Larry had bought in 1968 at a grocery store in Saskatoon.
The defense fought on every front and some of its points were [music] real.
Bares told jurors David Milgard should not be ruled out and accused Joyce Milgard of offering people money and harassing witnesses.
He showed that the exhibit room at the Saskatoon [music] courthouse had been broken into in 1984, 1992, and 1993, and a court clerk admitted there was no way to know for sure the Miller exhibits were untouched.
[music] He noted that several scientists had examined the dress before 1997 without finding the large stains and suggested they might have been planted.
On the knife, the defense had its strongest point.
Linda Fischer did not identify it until she came to court in 1998.
She had failed to identify it on several earlier occasions and once expressed relief that she didn’t recognize it because it meant her ex-husband could not be the killer.
That point was fair, but the defense could not explain away a single genetic profile [music] found on two separate garments belonging to a man who lived two blocks from the lane and had attacked women at knife point in the same streets.
On November 22nd, 1999, after 13 hours of deliberation, the jury found Larry Fischer guilty of firstdegree murder.
He showed no emotion.
Gail’s sister, Dorine Dalum, had been in the courtroom every day of the trial.
When the verdict was read, she smiled and bowed her head.
On January 4th, 2000, Fiser declined an invitation to address the court.
Justice Albbright took only seconds.
I hereby sentence you to life in prison.
Because the crime fell under the criminal code of 1969, the question of parole was left to the National Parole Board.
Dean Sinclair later summed up what the trial had meant.
We had gotten the wrong guy, and it was important to get the right guy.
Fischer’s appeals failed in 2003 and 2004.
On September 9th, 2004, Saskatchewan formally acknowledged that David Milgard was factually innocent.
He had already received $10 million in compensation in May of 1999, 6 million from the province and 4 million from Ottawa.
The public inquiry reported on September 26, 2008, and it holds the honest complication in this story.
Commissioner Edward Macallum found that the original investigation was generally thorough and conducted in good faith.
Tunnel vision and misconduct, he wrote, had been alleged but not shown.
He was sharply critical of the Millgard group’s media campaign.
But he also found that the trial judges handling of Nicl John’s statement had damaged the defense, that police had failed to act on the 1980 report from Fischer’s ex-wife, and that Canada needed an independent body to review wrongful convictions.
None of that erases the failure.
It locates it.
Larry Fischer died on June 9th, 2015 at the Pacific Institution in Abbottzford, British Columbia.
He was 65.
Joyce Milgard died on March 21st, 2020 at 89.
David Milgard died on May 15th, 2022 in Calgary at 69.
On December 17th, 2024, David and Joyce Milgard’s law received royal ascent, creating Canada’s independent miscarriage of justice review commission.
But the Miller family had said the most important thing years earlier.
When David walked free in 1992, Gail’s brother Jack, the 14-year-old from that winter, told Mlan’s the family had supported David’s fight to get out.
David Milgard is not an issue with us.
He said the issue is the whole judicial procedure.
For 30 years, the murder of Gail Miller was a story about a car.
It was about a car from Regina, three teenagers, a wrong turn, and a woman asked for directions in the dark.
Almost everything the police built, and even the campaign to free David Milgard circled that car, and what happened when two boys got out of it.
The man who killed her was never in the car.
He lived two blocks away, one floor down.
Then there is the knife.
In 1970, it was the boy’s knife, the one his friends remembered, the one a witness said he asked for at a party.
In 1999, it was a wife’s kitchen knife from a grocery store, identified late and fairly contested.
The broken blade under her body pointed at whoever people were already looking at.
It never solved anything.
What solved it was a dress in an evidence box with stains nobody had seen, kept by a man who was certain he had gotten it right.
Now, set all of that aside.
Gail Miller was 20.
She was a certified nursing assistant.
She worked on the children’s ward at City Hospital.
She came from Laura, a hamlet on the prairie, the daughter of Milton and Jean.
She had lived in Saskatoon for 5 months.
On the last morning of her life, she was wearing her uniform under a winter coat, walking out into the dark to catch a bus to work.
Her name is Gail Oolina Miller, [music] and she deserves to be remembered for wh she was, not just how her story ended.
If this story stayed with you, subscribe and share it with someone who should know how close Saskatoon came [music] and how long it took.
This has been Cold Case Redemption.
Thank you for staying with Gail.
