September 29th, 2009. In a city cemetery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a woman with no name was buried in an unmarked grave.
Nobody knew who she was, when she was born, or who had loved her. She had been dead for close to a century.
September 29th, 2025. >> 16 years to the day after that burial, police in Saskatoon said her name out loud for the first time in more than a hundred years.
DNA had given it back to her. She had been found in 2006, 2 m down an abandoned well inside a wooden barrel.
That barrel should have dropped all the way to the bottom of the shaft. It didn’t.
Something stopped it on the way down, and that small fact is the only reason this story has an ending at all.
She went into that well sometime from 1916 to 1918. She came out of it in the summer of 2006.
>> [music] >> For nearly 90 years, she lay in the dark, and for 19 more years after that, she was known only as the woman in the well.
There was no missing person report for her, no death record, and no photograph. In a town of about a thousand people, a grown woman disappeared, and the paper trail simply closed over her.
This is the story of how a woman nobody ever reported missing got her name back after more than a century, and of the one question that her name still cannot answer.
And to understand who she was, you have to start with the town that lost her.
Welcome to Cold Case Reckoning, where the oldest files get a second look, and the people inside them get remembered.
If a woman lost for a century already has a hold on you, subscribe now, because the record she left behind is stranger than it looks.
Now, back to the prairie more than a hundred years ago. In the early 1900s, the Canadian Pacific Railway did what it often did in Western Canada.
Instead of building its rail yards inside an existing town, it built them on land it controlled 3 miles east of Saskatoon and let a new community grow up around the tracks so that it shared the real estate profits with no one.
Saskatoon itself was young. It had only become a city in 1906 when the neighboring settlements of Nutana and Riversdale joined it.
In 1907, the railway made the spot its divisional point. [music] The settlement became a village and in 1912, with about a thousand residents, it became the town of Sutherland.
It was named for William Charles Sutherland, [music] who had served on Saskatoon’s town council before Saskatoon became a city.
A new town hall was finished in January 1912 at the corner of Egbert Avenue and 108th Street.
Just to the west lay the lands of the new University of Saskatchewan. Sutherland was a railway town in every [music] sense.
Men worked the yards and the trains. Strangers came and went with every arrival. And in 1912, on the corner that is now Central Avenue and 108th Street, a man named William Shore opened a hotel.
The Shore Hotel did well at first. When the city ran a streetcar line out to Sutherland in 1914, passengers waited for the cars inside it.
>> [music] >> Shore told the Saskatoon Daily Star early that year that his business was booming and that his receipts had doubled since the streetcars arrived.
Not everyone approved. Town councilors complained that a hotel was no place for women and children to stand around waiting for a streetcar.
Beside the hotel, on the neighboring lot, there was a well. That same year, 1914, water mains reached Sutherland from Saskatoon.
Before then, water in Sutherland was delivered by horse-drawn tank to barrels kept in people’s kitchens or it was hauled up from wells.
After that, the private wells were no longer needed. The city archivist would later conclude that the well beside the Shore Hotel must have been abandoned by the time anyone put anything into it.
Then [music] came 1915. That spring, under Premier Walter Scott, the province ordered every bar to close by 7:00 in the evening.
On July 1st, 1915, [music] Saskatchewan abolished bar licenses altogether, the first province in Canada to take the liquor trade out of private hands.
>> [music] >> Across Saskatchewan, 406 bars closed. Hotel owners had depended on those bars for most of their income, and the effect [music] was immediate.
In the first 3 weeks alone, 46 hotels shut their doors. For hotels like the Shore, the money was gone.
In 1927, the building was torn down. >> [music] >> Decades later, a gas station went up on the site, with fuel tanks buried in the ground near where the well had been.
That is the world. Now, the woman. Everything that follows comes from what was found with her, because for 19 years, that was all anyone had.
She was small, about 5 ft 1. She was somewhere between 25 and 35 years old.
Her hair was light brown going on red. Her DNA would later show she was of Irish ancestry.
She had a cavity and a tooth that had abscessed. She was dressed with care, a fitted jacket, a high-collared blouse made of [music] silk, a long skirt, a belt with a flower decoration on it, and around her neck, a fine gold necklace, broken.
A clothing and textile historian named Carol Wakabayashi examined the garments and dated them to between 1910 and 1920.
The city archivist, Jeff O’Brien, noted that the style was typical of roughly 1908 to 1916.
Investigators would later write that her clothing, her jewelry, and the dental work in her mouth all suggested a woman of the middle class or higher.
That last detail will matter. For 19 years, a jacket, a blouse, a skirt, a belt, and a broken necklace were the whole of what anyone knew about her.
No name, no age closer than a decade, no year of death. Just the clothes she was found in, and the place she was wearing them when the world found her again, which was inside a barrel 2 m down a well under a gas station.
How she got there is a question no one has ever been able to answer in court.
How she was found is a story about one loose board. If it is already hard to sit with a woman known only by her clothes, hit the like button because it tells the platform this story deserves to reach more [music] people.
Now, June 2006. June 29th, 2006. A construction crew was working the corner of Central Avenue and 108th Street [music] in the Saskatoon neighborhood of Sutherland, digging out the old underground fuel tanks at a former gas station.
Sutherland had been part of the city for 50 years by then. Nobody on that crew was looking for a well.
They found one anyway, the wooden cribbing of an old shaft. And then, as forensic anthropologist Ernie Walker would later describe it, a human cranium came out of the well and rolled down the embankment.
Walker, a professor of anthropology and archaeology at the University of Saskatchewan, was called to the site.
So were police. One of the officers who helped in those first hours was a constable named Cameron McBride.
He will come back into this story. The recovery was slow and dangerous. Walker would later call it a difficult retrieval with no question about it.
The ground was soaked with gasoline and contaminated groundwater. Walker’s team used heavy equipment to dig around the shaft, then took the well apart board by board, working carefully so that no evidence would drop deeper into the water below.
He admitted, years later, that he had also been a little worried about his own people dropping to the bottom.
Inside the well, they found the barrel. It was made of wood, and it was lodged about 2 m down.
It had been dropped into the shaft from above, and it should have gone all the way to the bottom.
It hadn’t because a piece of the well’s cribbing had broken loose and jammed across the shaft.
Unknown to the individual that dropped it, as Walker put it, that piece of wood blocked the barrel from going any farther.
Inside the barrel was a burlap sack, and inside the sack were the remains of a woman.
With her were bottles and glassware. With her, too, rolled into a ball, were a man’s vest and a pair of men’s trousers.
Whose they were, police have never said. And there was the broken gold necklace. Every object that came out of that shaft would be studied.
The clothing, the glassware, the remnants of the barrel itself. Then came the part nobody expected.
Because the barrel had stopped where it did, in a mixture of ground water and gasoline that had seeped from the tanks above, her body was astonishingly well preserved.
Her clothing and her hair had survived, and so had some of her organs. >> [music] >> Walker was able to take DNA samples from two of her teeth and from her hair.
That summer, the Saskatoon Police Service and the province’s chief coroner announced that the death was being treated as suspicious, and an autopsy confirmed it.
Police would later say that injuries to her body showed she had been assaulted before she was killed, and that she had been partially dismembered before she [music] was placed in the barrel.
That is as far as this story needs to go into what was done to her.
So, by the end of that summer, investigators had a great deal. They had her clothing and experts who could date it, along with her height, her age range, and her hair color.
Most important of all, they had DNA from a woman who had been dead for something like 90 years.
The kind of evidence most historical cases never get. Walker later summed up the problem in a single line.
“Back in 2006,” he said, “we had nothing to compare it to.” And into that silence, a story about who she must have been began to form.
A story that sounded reasonable and was almost entirely wrong. If that barrel is staying with you, subscribe to the channel because what comes next is [music] how a city decided who she was without ever knowing her name.
Back in Sutherland, [music] the story started with the hotel. The well sat on the old Shore Hotel property, and the hotel had a reputation.
In 2006, as police went public with the discovery, Jeff O’Brien was drawing a [music] map of the old town for investigators.
He told CBC News that back in 1912, city council had discussed complaints about an illegal liquor establishment and loose women in Sutherland.
From there, the possibilities he laid out were the obvious ones. A traveler, a prostitute, someone who fell into the well by accident, or a murder victim.
It is easy to see how the picture formed. >> [music] >> A railway town, trains arriving full of strangers, a hotel with a doubtful name, a woman nobody seemed to be missing.
The simplest explanation was that she had come from somewhere else, [music] and that no one in Sutherland had ever known her at all.
None of it was unreasonable. Given what investigators knew in 2006, most people would have drawn exactly the same conclusion.
Police were frank about the obstacle. “There weren’t a lot of records kept.” Allison Edwards of the Saskatoon Police Service said that summer.
The best estimate police could offer was a window of 20 years. Judging by her clothing and the objects [music] in the well, she had died sometime between 1900 and 1920.
And sitting quietly in the evidence was the detail from her clothing. Middle class or higher, a fine gold necklace, dental work that someone had paid for.
Nobody built a theory around it. In June 2009, police tried a different approach. On Wednesday, June 24th, 2009, they unveiled two facial reconstructions to reporters.
A drawing and a sculpted bust of her head and shoulders. The bust showed a young woman with fair skin, hazel eyes, and long wavy auburn hair coiled into a bun at the back.
CBC News called the case Saskatchewan’s oldest cold case. The lead investigator, Sergeant Phil Farian, was asked whether it would ever be solved.
“I believe it’s still possible.” He said. At the same event, Farian disclosed details police [music] had held back for 3 years.
Details that left no real doubt she had been murdered. By then, dozens of people in Saskatchewan had come [music] forward and some had given their own DNA to see whether they were related to her.
Investigators hoped a face would narrow the list for the next round of tests. The hope was simple.
Somewhere in some family album, somebody might recognize that face. About 30 people called from across Canada and from as far away as France.
Each one searching for a missing mother, a grandmother, a great aunt. None of them matched.
Three months after the reconstruction was unveiled on September 29th, 2009, the woman in the well was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Saskatoon.
The grave had no name on it because there was no name to put there.
A decade later in 2019, a local history column revisited the case and reached the conclusion most people already had.
Despite everything police had done, the writer concluded, her identity would probably [music] never be known.
The column ended with the same questions people had been asking since 2006. Was she a prostitute?
Did she work at the hotel? Was she a transient? Or was it a domestic killing?
13 years after the discovery, the story about her was still being told in the language of the Shore [music] Hotel.
But the reason no one could find her had less to do with who she was than with what had happened to the records of the town she lived in.
Every identification of unknown remains rests on the same simple idea. Somewhere, somebody wrote something down.
A missing person report, a death registration, a worried letter to the police, a photograph in a file.
For the woman in the well, that something did not exist. There was no missing person report.
There was no death record. There was no photograph. Think about that for a second.
A woman in her 30s in a town of about a thousand people vanished sometime in the middle of the First World War [music] and no official document anyone could find recorded that she was gone.
Part of the reason is the town itself. Sutherland ran its own affairs until January 1st, 1956, when it joined the city of Saskatoon.
Some of the town of Sutherland’s records survive in the city archives. Council minutes, bylaws, ledgers, voters lists.
Though most of what remains dates from after 1920. Even those papers have traveled. They went from the city of Saskatoon to the Saskatchewan Archives Board in [music] 1985, then back to the city archives in 1991.
The town’s police records did not make the journey. According to Sergeant Darren Funk of the Saskatoon Police Service, police records older than 1956 were destroyed when Saskatoon annexed Sutherland.
He does not know whether her death was ever investigated at the time, or whether anyone even reported it.
>> [music] >> That uncertainty cuts both ways. It is possible that someone did report her missing, >> [music] >> and that the report was later burned or thrown away with the rest.
It is possible that no one ever did. The surviving record cannot tell us which, and this story will not pretend that it can.
“We tried to find police reports, but we couldn’t find anything.” Funk [music] said. “Police,” he added, “absolutely still have questions.”
The second limit was the science. The DNA from her teeth and hair produced a profile, but a standard forensic DNA profile is built to [music] answer one question.
Does this sample match a specific person who is already on file? She was not on file.
A woman born in 1881 was never going to be in a police DNA database.
Testing at the University of Saskatchewan had also recovered her mitochondrial DNA, which passes from mother to child.
That kind of DNA can confirm a relationship along a mother’s line once you have a candidate.
It cannot hand you a [music] name. So, the investigation fell back on the only method left.
Find a candidate, then test. Over the years, police received hundreds of tips. They worked through the possibilities one at a the By the time the case was solved, investigators had ruled out more than 50 women.
>> [music] >> Some through DNA comparison, others through records and research. Year by year, the picture sharpened without ever coming into focus.
In 2006, the window was 1900 to 1920. By the time Darren Funk opened the file in 2025, it described a woman of Irish ancestry, about 5 ft 1, 25 to 35 years old, who had died sometime between 1910 and 1925, most likely between 1915 and 1920.
It summed up everything anyone knew about how she died in a single line. Assaulted, perhaps killed, put in a barrel, and thrown [music] down a well.
The investigation was closing in on the right years. It had no way of closing in on the right person.
More than 50 [music] women. Each of them a real person somebody had lost. Each of them eliminated.
And every year that passed carried the people who might have remembered her further away.
Anyone who had known her as an adult was long gone. The living memory of her, if it survived anywhere, had thinned to a name on a family tree that [music] no one had any reason to connect with a well in Saskatchewan.
That was the true failure in this case. Not a lazy investigation, and not a cover-up anyone can point to.
A woman was taken out of the world, and then, one lost record at a time, the paper version of her was taken out of the world, too.
What kept her from disappearing completely was a handful of people who refused to let the file close.
The first was Ernie Walker. He had stood at the well in 2006 and overseen the slow work of taking it apart.
In the years that followed, through the reconstructions, the false leads, and the burial, he kept coming back to the same thought.
“I used to say that she wanted [music] to be found,” he said. It was an unscientific thing for a scientist to say, but the physical facts gave it weight.
The barrel should have reached the bottom of the well, and it didn’t. Her body should not have survived the better part of a century underground, and it did.
Something had kept her within [music] reach, and the profile his team had built of her was a good one.
When the identification finally came, they would learn just [music] how good. The second was the police service itself.
Over 19 years, a number of investigators were assigned to the case. It passed through the historical [music] case unit, major crimes, and missing persons.
It drew in the University of Saskatchewan’s archaeology department, the provincial coroner service, the Western Development Museum, the city archives, and the city’s [music] infrastructure department.
Nobody solved it. Nobody let it go, either. Years later, as chief, Cameron McBride, the constable from the well, would say that the costs of this kind of technology and expertise keep rising, and that his service would keep paying them, so that cold cases have the best chance of being solved.
In 2023, Saskatoon police sent forensic evidence to Astrium, a private DNA laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas.
Astrium specializes in exactly the kind of evidence most labs struggle with, tiny amounts of human DNA that is degraded or contaminated.
Its scientists managed to build a DNA extract from skeletal material more than a hundred years old, and to develop a far more detailed genetic profile than anything that had been possible in 2006.
That work turned up a few distant relatives, three of them, scattered across the United States and Europe.
Then, in January 2025, a sergeant named Darren Funk joined the Saskatoon Police Service’s Historical Crime Unit.
He chose this case, he said, because it was one of the oldest on record.
His approach was to set the unit’s oldest unsolved files beside its newest ones, and ask what had changed.
What tools existed now that had not existed when each case went cold. He read through two decades [music] of investigative work and expert reports.
Against what looked like impossible odds, he would later say, the investigators before him had [music] kept working every avenue that was available to them at the time.
He picked up where his predecessor had left off, tracked down four more extended relatives, and started cold calling them, trying to convince strangers that he really was a police officer, >> [music] >> and that this really was about their family.
Every call ended the same way. Nobody knew of any missing women in their family, Funk said.
Seven relatives. Seven living people carrying some small fragment of her DNA, and not one of them had ever heard of her.
Funk didn’t know it yet, but seven was the problem, and the answer was waiting in a classroom in Ottawa.
If the thought of a woman with seven living relatives and nobody [music] who remembered her is weighing on you, hit like.
It genuinely helps more people find stories like this one. Now, Ottawa, in the early summer of 2025.
In June 2025, Funk traveled to the Canadian Police College in Ottawa for training [music] in historical death investigations.
One session was a case study presented by the Toronto Police Service about how a technique called investigative genetic genealogy had solved [music] two murders in Toronto from 1983.
Before going further, it is worth understanding what that technique actually does. A standard police DNA profile [music] compares a small set of markers against a database of known people, mostly people who have been charged with or convicted of [music] crimes.
If the person you are looking for is not in that database, you get nothing.
Investigative genetic genealogy works differently. [music] It reads hundreds of thousands of points across the genome, the same kind of data a consumer ancestry test produces, >> [music] >> and compares them against people who have uploaded their own DNA to genealogy databases that permit police matching.
It does not look for the person. It looks for that person’s cousins. Then, genealogists take [music] those cousins, build out their family trees through generations of birth, marriage, and census records, and search for the point where all those branches meet.
The method became famous in 2018 when it identified the Golden State Killer in California.
There is a catch. The two largest consumer DNA companies, 23andMe and AncestryDNA, have said they will not open their databases to these searches.
Police can only work with people who have chosen to opt in elsewhere, a much smaller pool, though one that keeps growing.
>> [music] >> In Canada, Toronto police were early adopters. In October 2020, they announced [music] that genetic genealogy had identified the man who killed 9-year-old Christine Jessop [music] in 1984, a case that had produced one of the most notorious wrongful convictions in the country’s history.
The case study Funk had just heard was the same technique at work [music] in the killings of Susan Tice and Erin Gilmore in 1983.
The killer’s name, by pure coincidence, was Joseph [music] George Sutherland. Genealogy had narrowed the suspects in that case to five brothers from a remote community in northern Ontario.
The man it pointed to had never been a suspect and had never been questioned.
He pleaded guilty in 2023. After the session, Funk sat down with a Toronto genealogy expert and talked about the woman in the well for 3 hours.
She told him something that changed the shape of the whole case. With proper genetic genealogy, she said, they should be working with something like 5,000 genetic relatives, not seven.
The earlier work had found a handful of cousins in a pool that should have held thousands.
Days later, Saskatoon handed the genealogy work over to the Toronto Police Services Investigative Genetic Genealogy Team.
Toronto received the file on July 3rd, 2025. And then, in Funk’s words, “Eight days later, they identified our Jane Doe as Alice Spence.”
19 years and then eight days. And no, that’s not a typo. From the day her skull rolled down that embankment to the day Toronto put a name on her, 6,952 days had passed.
The genealogists needed eight. The first name the genealogy actually produced >> [music] >> was Alice Burke.
Toronto’s team was confident from the genetics that this was the woman from the well, but nothing about an Alice Burke connected her to Saskatoon.
Police searched local records for her and found nothing. As Funk put it, the genealogist knew exactly who she was.
They just didn’t know how she had ended up in Saskatoon. Then they found a marriage.
Alice Burke had married a man named Charles Spence. And when investigators searched for Alice Spence, she appeared in the records of Saskatoon in 1913 and 1914 living with her husband and her daughter in Sutherland, within meters of the well, her own neighborhood.
Her name was Alice Spence. On July 16th, 2025, a family in Sherwood Park, Alberta, began getting phone calls and voicemails.
According to Cindy Camp, the calls came from a genealogist named Jennifer [music] Ford and a Toronto police detective constable named James Atkinson asking about a relative the family had never heard of.
Camp’s younger daughter, Lisa, got the first messages. The family assumed it was a scam.
They searched online, called the Toronto Police Service to confirm the callers were real, and only then heard the story of the woman in the well.
“The whole thing was a total shock,” Camp said. She told the Canadian press she had been stunned, in disbelief.
That is the last step in every genetic genealogy case. The family tree produces a candidate, but a candidate is not an identification.
>> [music] >> To confirm it, investigators collect reference DNA from living relatives and compare it directly against the unknown profile.
Camp and her daughters provided DNA samples. They matched. By late summer, the identification was confirmed.
And here is where the story comes back to [music] the barrel. Every step of this, the profile author and built, the cousins, the family trees, the reference samples from Alberta, depended on DNA from two [music] teeth and a few strands of hair.
That DNA existed only because a barrel meant to sink out of sight had caught on a broken board 2 m down in water and gasoline that kept her from crumbling into nothing.
The woman in the well had a name. Now the question was, who Alice Spence had been?
And once investigators knew where to look, the records began to answer. Alice Burke [music] was born in September, 1881, in Michigan to Irish immigrant parents.
She was one of five children. According to the family history released when she was identified, she was born in the mining town of Negaunee to Thomas Burke and a mother recorded as Bridget [music] or Mary Golden.
The same history lists a sister, Sarah, and three brothers, John, William, and Christopher. More than a century later, police would find that most of her descendants had never heard of her or of how she died.
In 1902, when she was about 20, she moved to Duluth, Minnesota with her mother and two of her brothers.
She worked there as a seamstress and as a clerk. On August 1st, 1904, according to a Minnesota marriage certificate, she married Charles Irvine Spence.
The following year, she gave birth to a daughter. They named her Idella. In 1913, the family left Minnesota and moved north [music] across the border to the young railway town of Sutherland, Saskatchewan.
Alice was about 31. Idella was seven or eight. The First World War would begin the following summer.
Their home was a few blocks from the well. Think back to the clothing in the barrel.
A fitted jacket, a silk blouse with a high collar, a long skirt, a belt with a flower on it, a fine gold necklace.
Clothes a city archivist dated to roughly 1908 to 1916 >> [music] >> and that investigators judged to belong to a woman of some means.
Those were not the clothes of a stranger passing through on the train. They were the clothes of a local woman, a wife, a mother, a woman who had once earned her living with a needle.
The theory from 2006 had it backwards. She was not from somewhere else. She was from a few blocks away.
Every assumption built on the Shore Hotel had pointed outward, toward the trains and the strangers on them.
The answer had been a few streets over the whole time. In February 1916, when she was about 34, >> [music] >> Alice gave birth to a second daughter.
The baby died the same day she was born. That same year, a special census was taken across the prairie provinces, and a census taker recorded the Spence household in Saskatoon.
Charles, Alice, Idella, about 10 years old. It seemed small at the time, one line in a government return [music] written by someone counting heads.
Today, it is the last record anywhere that shows Alice Spence alive. After that census, her name stops.
It does not appear in a death registration. [music] It does not appear in a missing person report.
It does not appear in any newspaper notice of her passing. Police found no photograph of her at all, except in a sense, one.
Back in 2009, when forensic artists built that bust and that drawing, they were working from a skull, her surviving hair, and an estimate.
In 2025, after the identification, Ernie Walker was shown a photograph of Alice’s daughter Idella.
“I am stunned by how close we came,” [music] he said. “The file stood apart,” he said, “because so much time had passed, a hundred years >> [music] >> and almost nothing to go on.”
For 16 years, a careful likeness of Alice Spence had been in the news in the city where she had lived and died.
There was simply no one left alive who could recognize her. Investigators now had her identity, and they had a window for her death.
After that 1916 census and before February 1918. Why February 1918? Because of the next document in the file.
And this is the point where the story has to slow down and be careful.
>> [music] >> In February 1918, the Saskatoon Daily Star ran a short item under the headline “Spence’s home in Sutherland destroyed.”
The house had burned. Nobody was home at the time. Nothing was saved. The article offers almost nothing else.
Police used that fire to close the window. They believe Alice was killed sometime between the 1916 census and the fire in 1918.
The 1921 census found Charles living with Idella, then about 15, along with a housekeeper and the housekeeper’s young son.
On May 16th, 1923, Charles died of a heart attack. Idella was 17 and she was an orphan.
Those are the facts police released. Here is what they have not released. >> [music] >> Saskatoon police say they believe they know who killed Alice Spence.
They will not say who. “We have circumstantial evidence that we believe we know who did it,” Funk said, “but it’s 100 years old.
>> [music] >> Whoever that person was, police say, has been dead for a very long time and has no way to stand in a courtroom and answer.
The case is closed. No one will be charged.” Funk has said that any comment on who killed her would be purely speculative and in the end inconsequential because the killer would be long dead.
So, it needs to be said plainly, police have named no one. No court has ever heard this case.
Nothing in the public record establishes who killed Alice Spence and this video will not guess.
A name spoken without evidence about someone who can no longer answer it would be its own kind of injustice.
That is the honest complication at the end of this case. The science that gave Alice back her name cannot give her a trial.
Identification is not justice. [music] It is the thing that has to come first. Without a name, there is no No to examine, no family to tell, and no grave that says who lies in it.
With a name, at least, those things become possible. Idella grew up, raised a family, and lived out her life.
She died on March 1st, 1995 in British Columbia. According to her granddaughter, Cindy Camp, she never spoke about her mother.
Camp asked a cousin who had lived in California whether their grandmother had ever said anything about it.
The answer, Camp said, was no. Not at all. Like many people who lose their parents young, Camp said, Idella chose not to dwell on the past.
Camp does remember one thing her grandmother told her, that a fire had destroyed some records.
Camp always assumed she meant the town hall. Nobody knows now what Idella was told about her mother as a child or what she understood.
Camp said she wishes she could talk with her grandmother, even for [music] an hour, to hear her side of the story.
The family has ordered a headstone for the grave at Woodlawn Cemetery, one that will carry Alice’s [music] name.
When her identity was announced, they were still waiting on an official death certificate, more than a century after her death.
Camp has said the news left her heartbroken. She cannot imagine anyone doing that to another person.
On September 29th, 2025, Camp stood at the police news conference in Saskatoon with three generations [music] of her family, her daughters, Sarah and Lisa, and her granddaughter, Bailey.
Now that they knew they were genetic matches, she said, it was important [music] for Alice to have her place.
She spoke about feeling connected not only to Alice, but to the generations of women who came before her, women whose stories, she said, deserve to be known.
And she thanked the investigators for giving Alice back her name. Camp put the whole case into a single sentence.
“We know she was murdered and put in the barrel,” she said, “but we don’t know [music] by whom.”
And so, at the end of this story, the barrel is where we finish. At the beginning, it seemed the woman in the well had been forgotten because nobody ever looked for her.
That she had arrived [music] from nowhere, known to no one, and that this was why the world let her go.
That is not what happened. She had a husband, a daughter, a mother and brothers, a home, a line in a census.
She lived a few blocks from the well. She was not lost among strangers. She was erased from the record, one missing report and one destroyed file at a time, until a barrel in the ground was all that remained of her.
On September 29th, [music] 2025, at police headquarters in Saskatoon, pieces of that barrel were laid on a table, not far from the bust that had been made of her face 16 years earlier.
The barrel was meant to make her disappear. A single board, broken loose inside an old well, stopped it 2 m down.
Because of that board, she was preserved. Because she was preserved, she could be named.
And the constable who had helped at that well in 2006, Cameron McBride, was by then the chief of police and said the outcome was especially satisfying for [music] him.
Ernie Walker said it most simply, “Alice Spence is not invisible anymore.” She was born in Michigan in September 1881.
[music] She worked as a seamstress and a clerk. She married in 1904. She had a daughter named Idella and a second daughter who lived for a single day.
She moved to a railway town in Saskatchewan in 1913. [music] She was about 35 years old.
She was wearing a fitted jacket, a silk blouse with a high collar, a long skirt, a belt with a flower on it, and a gold necklace.
Her name is Alice Spence, and she deserves to be remembered for who she was, not just how her story ended.
If Alice’s story stayed with you, subscribe and share it with someone who believes every unnamed person deserves a name.
This has been Cold Case Reckoning. Until next time, remember them.
