FOR 44 YEARS, HE WAS ONLY “SEPTIC TANK SAM”. UNTIL NOW.
In April of 1977, on an abandoned farm just west of the town Toefield, Alberta, a man’s body was found at the bottom of an old septic tank.
Nobody could say who he was, and as the weeks went by, it started to look like nobody ever would.
Whoever had put him there had picked a farm that had been sitting empty for 2 years, and a tank that nobody had any reason to ever open again.
It would be 44 years before anybody could put a name to him, and for all of those years, the only thing anybody really knew about him was where he had ended up.
He was the man left at the bottom of a septic tank.
>> >> One day in April of 1977, a farmer named Charlie McCloud was building a new house on his property outside of Toefield, Alberta, a small farming town about an hour southeast of Edmonton.
The new house was going to need a septic tank, and for that, he needed a pump.
Now, Charlie could have just driven in a town and bought a new pump for a few dollars, but he knew where there was already a perfectly good one sitting in the ground.
About a mile from where he and his wife Mavis lived, there was an old farmhouse that they had also owned, and nobody had lived in it or touched it in about 2 years.
It had its own septic tank out back, and the pump in the tank still worked fine.
And so, he figured that he could just go in there and get that one.
On April 13th, 1977, which happened to be a warm spring day, Charlie and Mavis went out to the old place to fetch the pump.
Charlie got as far as pulling the cover off the tank, which was about 6 ft deep and still had some murky water sitting in it.
The first thing Mavis would remember seeing was a gray wool sock and then a brown shoe bobbing around in the water and the shoe appeared to be attached to a leg.
Mavis would later say that they went and got the cops real fast because they knew something was wrong.
They drove straight to the RCMP detachment in Tofield and told the officers that there was somebody headfirst down in their septic tank.
The corporal in charge of the detachment, a man named Ed Lamerz, grabbed another officer and the two of them followed the McClouds back to the farm.
And so the two Mounties grabbed an empty ice cream pail and got to work.
For about an hour they stood over that tank and scooped the liquid out one pailful at a time until there was enough of it gone that they could actually see what was down there.
It was a body and it was in bad shape.
It had been rolled up in a yellow bedsheet and that sheet had been tied up with nylon rope.
And then the whole bundle had been dropped into the tank headfirst.
On top of that, somebody had dumped a large amount of lime into the tank and the police figured that whoever did this was hoping it would eat the body away.
It hadn’t worked the way they had wanted it to.
Ed Lamerz would later say that they did him in real good and that if the lime done its job, there might have never been a body to find.
Getting him out took 6 hours of careful work with crime scene investigators backing up the two officers.
And once he was out, the remains were taken up to the medical examiner’s office in Edmonton.
Nobody at the scene could even say for sure whether they had just pulled out a man or a woman.
It would take the medical examiner months to answer that question, but eventually they could say that this was a man, probably somewhere in his late 20s with dark hair and a medium build.
He was wearing blue jeans, a blue Levi’s work shirt with snap buttons, gray wool work socks, and a pair of imitation Wallabee shoes.
According to the pathologists, before he died, this man had been tied up and beaten.
Somebody had gone at him with a small butane torch and with cigarettes, and the burn marks were still visible on what was left of his clothing.
He had been mutilated with something sharp.
And then, at the end of all of that, he’d been shot at least twice in the head and in the chest.
Pathologists found two bones that had been hit by the bullets, and they couldn’t rule out more shots because a bullet that never touches bone doesn’t leave anything behind on a skeleton.
Ed Lammerse didn’t know who this man was, but he already had a pretty good idea about what kind of people had done this to him.
He would describe them as cruel and vindictive people.
And in May of that year, he told the Edmonton Journal it was one of the most bizarre, disgusting, and baffling murder cases he had ever worked on.
He also figured they had to know the area.
The way he saw it, whoever did it had to know the old farm was sitting empty, and that there was a septic tank out behind it.
To them, it would have seemed like a pretty safe bet that nobody would ever look inside that tank again.
And if Charlie MacLeod hadn’t gone after that old pump, they would have been right.
There was nothing at the farm to suggest he had been killed there, though.
The tank was just where he had been dumped.
Wherever this had actually happened, nobody had any idea.
And the pathologists added one more problem on top of that.
They believed that he’d have been down in that tank for at least three or four months, and possibly as long as a year.
Which meant that this man had been gone for months by the time the MacLeod’s found him.
And in all of that time, nobody had come forward looking for him.
And so the detectives started working from the idea that he probably didn’t have any close family or friends around.
He was most likely just a transient or a migrant worker who was just passing through, and so nobody had really missed him.
Back in Tofield, a town of about 1,200 people, the details came out, and it scared everybody.
One neighboring farmer named Johnny Wood went straight out and checked every septic tank on his own property, and he was relieved to find nothing in any of them.
The man who owned the Diamond Restaurant >> >> in town started wondering if the killers might be some of his regular customers.
The manager of the Co-op store had the same worry about the people who shopped there every day.
More than a month after the discovery, the local paper, the Tofield Mercury, ran a full page on it under the headline, “Grizzly Murder Case Has RCMP Baffled”.
And Mavis McCloud would remember that for years after they found him, her family was scared.
She would say they were living like a bunch of zombies.
Everybody in town seemed to have their own theory about what happened.
Some people thought it was a drug deal that went wrong or bad debt.
Some thought it was a biker gang getting rid of one of their own or a husband who caught this man with his wife.
But all of it was talk and none of it went anywhere because nobody could even say who the victim was.
And so now the only thing investigators could really do was try to find out who he was.
They went through at least 250 missing person files and none of them lined up with the man in the tank.
In June of 1977, 2 months after the discovery, they sent x-rays of his teeth to all 800 dentists in Alberta.
He still had all of his teeth.
A few of them were filled and some of the dental work was fairly recent.
So somebody somewhere had been looking after those teeth.
And in case he had come from another province, they put notices in dental bulletins and magazines all across Canada.
Not one dentist ever recognized him.
The examination did turn up one more detail.
Something in his bones and teeth showed that he’d been seriously sick when he was about 5 years old.
But there was no way to know what this illness was, and it didn’t lead anywhere, either.
Week after week, the Tofield Mercury kept running the RCMP’s plea for information about any man who had gone missing in the area, and eventually the story dropped out of the paper.
The man from the septic tank was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in Edmonton, and there was nobody there to mourn him.
Almost a year after the discovery, the case was handed over to a corporal in Edmonton named Jamie Graham.
When he got it, the file had a title on it that pretty well summed up how much was inside of it.
It was just called unidentified human remains, followed by a file number.
Graham kept pushing local reporters to run the story again.
And every time they did, new tips came in, and every one of them got chased down.
A couple of times, the publicity even brought out people who claimed that they had done it, and investigators saw through every one of them pretty quickly.
Graham was honest about it.
He said the chances of solving this one weren’t all that good, but he didn’t want whoever did this to ever relax.
Then, in early 1979, a police officer in Calgary got in touch with Graham about something he had read in a police gazette.
There were a couple of forensic scientists in the United States who could take a skull and build back a likeness of the person’s face.
One of them was Dr. Clyde Snow, a forensic anthropologist in Oklahoma.
He had been working since 1967 with a medical illustrator named Betty Pat Gatliff.
And the two of them had worked on more than 60 skulls by that point.
Most of them cases that police had already given up on.
Just 3 years earlier, Snow had figured out that a dummy hanging in a funhouse in California was actually the mummified body of a real man.
Snow told Graham to bring him the skull and the rest of the bones.
And so the man from the septic tank was dug back up out of his grave in Edmonton.
His remains were packed up into a box and Jamie Graham got on a commercial flight to Oklahoma with that box sitting on his lap.
At the University of Oklahoma, Snow took around the 50 measurements of the skull and another 75 of the rest of the bones and ran them all through a computer program.
He came back with two conclusions and he wasn’t shy about either of them.
“I’m damn sure he’s a native”.
He told Graham.
“And I reckon he was 35 years old”.
There was a different picture from the one the RCMP had been working with.
To be careful, Snow put it in the official board as a man somewhere between 26 and 40 years old, most likely native but possibly Caucasian.
From the bones of his hands and the fingers, he could also tell them that he was right-handed.
Then Betty Pat Gatliff went to work on the face.
She covered the skull in little guide pins, built up modeling clay over it one layer at a time, put it in a pair of glass eyes, and added eyebrows, eyelashes, and hair.
And for the first time since the McClouds opened that tank, investigators had a face to look at.
Graham had it photographed and took it back to Edmonton.
By then, the people in the homicide unit had given that victim a nickname.
And then when the pictures of the clay face went out to newspapers across Canada.
The nickname went out right along with them.
They called him Septic Tank Sam.
The face brought in a whole new wave of calls from people who thought they recognized an old friend or missing relative.
Investigators spent months checking all of them, but none of them panned out.
By 1983, 6 years in, the RCMP decided to release some details they’d been holding back, hoping that something in them would jog somebody’s memory.
They told the police about the yellow bedsheet and the nylon rope.
They said that he had been most likely been laying on that sheet and tied down to a bed while he was being tortured because the burn marks on his shirt sleeves stopped just short of his wrists.
One of his socks showed where the sole of his foot had been burnt, and they said that it looked like somebody had cut the crotch out of his jeans with a pair of heavy farm shears.
They also said that he might have been in that tank for a full year, which meant he could have been killed as early as April of 1976.
None of it brought them any closer.
In 1995, almost 20 years after the discovery, the medical examiner’s office in Edmonton had a new computer program for building a face from a skull.
They worked on it with an anthropologist from the university there.
And in January of that year, they released Sam’s second face.
>> >> This time the computer gave them three versions of him.
Clean-shaven, with a mustache, and with a full beard.
At least 12 new leads came in from as far away as California and New Brunswick.
A woman in California called after a relative in Manitoba saw the pictures because her brother had gone missing from Vancouver around that time.
Somebody in Brunswick called about a brother who had disappeared while traveling out west.
Dental records ruled out both of them and every lead after that.
In 2000, a forensic artist with the medical examiner’s office named Cyril Chan had Sam dug up for the second time.
He spent 3 weeks studying the skull and then built a new clay face over it.
And this time he left the mouth open enough to show the teeth and used wooden eyes instead of glass.
Chan was confident, too.
There was one stretch where it looked like it might happen.
A family contacted investigators after seeing Chan’s reconstruction because the face looked a lot like a relative of theirs who had gone missing.
And all of the details they gave fit what was known about Sam.
The constable on the case at that point told reporters it was the closest profile they’d ever had.
In 2001, the Edmonton Sun ran it under the headline, “Police Closing In on Septic Tank Sam’s ID”.
By then, investigators had something that nobody before them had, which was a DNA profile from Sam’s remains.
They took samples from the man’s immediate family and even his uncles, aunts, and cousins.
It took several weeks, but when the comparisons were finally done, the DNA ruled him out.
In April of 2007, right around 30th anniversary, a reporter from the Globe and Mail went out to Tofield.
Ed Lamberts had retired from the RCMP in 1990 and was selling real estate in town.
He estimated that the case had cost at least a million dollars by then, and he didn’t expect it to ever be solved.
>> >> His boss at the time of the murder had gone to his grave still wishing it would get closed.
Lamberts said that time was against them, and he said that if they could just get the victim’s name, they could maybe figure the rest of it out.
By then, the file filled two large green filing cabinets in the basement of Tofield detachment, and the police there still suspected that he was a transient and not from Alberta.
Mavis MacLeod was 73 by then.
Over the years, she had gotten some strange phone calls about the case, and the strangest one came from a man in Britain who wanted to know if Sam might have been a cowboy and maybe his long-lost relative.
But she said that she had thought about it less and less as the years went on.
She had just one thing she wanted people to understand about the man she had found.
This guy belonged to someone.
In October of 2017, Staff Sergeant Jay Sivewright Zazulak with the Alberta RCMP’s Historical Homicide Unit told the Edmonton Journal about a new national DNA database that was coming.
Families with a missing loved one would be able to give a sample, and it could be checked against unidentified remains across the country.
It was exciting, he said, but he was honest that the chances of it breaking Sam’s case were slim.
Ed Lamberts was 76 by then, and he didn’t think it would help.
He said the only real hope left was that whoever did it would tell a priest or somebody right before they died.
Then, in April of 2018, police in California arrested a man they said was the Golden State Killer.
And the way they had found him gave police a whole new way of identifying people.
They had taken DNA from old crime scenes and run it through a public genealogy website and then built out family trees until they got to him.
And so the Alberta RCMP started looking at Sam’s case again with that in mind.
In 2019, they ran Sam’s DNA through the new national databases.
That profile was only a partial one developed back in 2012 and it didn’t match anybody.
So in 2020, the Alberta RCMP’s missing persons unit and the provinces medical examiner sent samples from Sam’s remains to Authurm, a private DNA lab in The Woodlands, Texas.
After months in a septic tank and more than 40 years in the ground, the DNA was in rough shape.
Authurm CEO David Middleman would later say it was very degraded and full of bacteria and only a small part of it was actually human.
But it was enough.
Authurm scientists built a full genetic profile out of it and their genealogist compared it against the people who had uploaded their DNA to public ancestry databases.
One of those people turned out to be related to Sam.
They had agreed to let their profile be matched against others and that was all it took to get started.
Out of that match, the genealogist built a family tree and the RCMP had a short list of people who could be Sam’s close relatives.
One of them was a woman who had lost track of both her brothers over the years.
Investigators got DNA samples from the family and sent them away for confirmation.
And by January of 2021, the RCMP had their answer.
The family relationship was real.
On June 30th, 2021, 44 years after Charlie McCloud pulled the cover off that tank, the Alberta RCMP had a news conference online and told the public who Septic Tank Sam really was.
His name was Gordon Edwin Sanderson.
His family and friends had called him Gordie.
Gordie Sanderson was born in Manitoba in October of 1950, and he was only 25 or 26 years old when he was killed.
He was an Indigenous man, which is exactly what Clyde Snow had told Jamie Graham back in 1979.
But the day before Gordie’s name was released, when the CBC looked at the RCMP’s own listing for the case, it described him as Caucasian.
You see, Gordie had a hard life.
When he was 9 years old, he was taken away from his family during what’s now called the 60s Scoop, when thousands of Indigenous children in Canada were removed from their homes by child welfare authorities and placed in care.
Gordie grew up in foster care.
The RCMP said that as an adult, he struggled with addiction and that he had some run-ins with police.
By the 1970s, he was living in Edmonton, about an hour’s drive from that farm.
He had a daughter, and the last time his family heard of him, he was heading down to Calgary to meet his younger brother, Arthur.
As far as the family knows, Gordie never made it to that meeting.
According to the RCMP, his older sister, Joyce, reported Gordie missing in the early 1980s, and she never heard anything back.
The RCMP would say they couldn’t confirm where that report was made or whether one was ever written up or received at all.
That man nobody had come forward looking for was the brother Joyce Sanderson had reported missing.
Joyce had lost track of Arthur over the years, too.
And so, in the course of the investigation, the RCMP were also able to tell her that Arthur had died in Edmonton several years earlier.
She got the news about both of her brothers.
And a memorial was being planned for the two of them together.
Staff Sergeant Zazulak said that the news was a lot for Joyce and the rest of the family, including Gordy’s daughter, to take in.
That morning, he said, there was mourning.
And there was relief.
And there was definitely some anger about what Gordy had been through in his life and what had been done to him.
At Authrum, David Middelman said that seeing Gordy’s picture had hit him hard because he was a young guy and his life had been cut short.
He said he was glad that they shared the photo because it was a reminder that these were real people and not just data points.
And it meant something to him that Gordy’s sister was still alive to finally get an answer.
Now that the RCMP knew who the victim was, they could finally start asking who had done this to him.
And they had a theory.
They told reporters that they believed Gordy Sanderson was killed by associates of his who were involved in various criminal acts in the Edmonton area.
They didn’t name anybody, and to this day, nobody had ever been charged with his murder.
Zazulak said it’s very possible that whoever killed Gordy had already died between how much time had passed and the kinds of lives some of the people around him were living.
Ed Lamberts, 80 years old by then, felt the same way.
He told the CBC that if the killer was still alive, he didn’t see how they would ever be punished because he didn’t know what that anybody was supposed to do with an 82-year-old man for something he did almost 50 years ago.
Charlie and Mavis McCloud both died before Gordie got his name back.
Their son Greg was 15 years old when his parents found the body.
He told the CBC that he never knew any of the details until that week because his dad never talked about it.
Their daughter said the same thing.
Their parents’ memories of finding him were bad ones and so they just didn’t bring it up.
But she said that she had always believed the killer was somebody local because they would have had to know the tank was there.
The tank itself isn’t there to look at anymore.
By 2007, it was built over and the spot where the McClouds found Gordie had become part of the subdivision.
And at the Tofield RCMP detachment, the file that was opened on April 13th, 1977 is still open.
According to the RCMP, the real homicide investigation only started the day they identified Gordie.
And so after 44 years, by their own account, the investigation into who killed him was only in its early stages.
