Two nights ago I was watching Canada’s Fifth Estate (a CBC news show) about a crime that’s haunted one of Canada’s prairie provinces, Saskatoon, for 46 years:

Beautiful 22-year-old nurse Alexandra Wiwcharuk went for a walk along the bank of the South Saskatchewan River and then disappeared. Her body was accidentally discovered in the bushes…13 days later.

“Exactly what happened to Alex Wiwcharuk that night is still not completely known and her killer remains unidentified and unpunished,” I heard.

When Alex’s case went cold, her family members…nieces of Alex who were little girls when she died…took up the cause to try to find out who killed her and why… “To bring justice,” they said.

As tears welled in my eyes while I watched, I kept thinking, “How eerie…Cindy was a nurse…Cindy was missing for two weeks before her body was found in some bushes…I’m a family member who’s searching for an answer…and here is a mysterious death that is a cold case and I just wrote a Blog post asking if there were any other female family members who had experienced a mysterious death!”

What a coincidence!

Granted, there are several obvious differences between the two cases…there is no question whether Alex’s death was a murder or suicide—it’s obviously a murder…and there’s no questions about whether Alex had MPD (or something else), nor are there any questions about if she was in collusion with someone else or not!

But still…I can truly say I understand what it’s like to live with the “not knowing”…to feel what gets labeled as an obsession about that…to have a quest for closure and answers…the desire to find completion.

And thanks Patricia for contacting me about the show. It means a lot to have a friend who makes the connection between Cindy’s case and Alex’s and understands that I would have wanted to watch the airing.

(By the way, there’s a repeat airing about Alex on CBC-TV on Oct 26 in case you missed it…I know someone on the teacher’s chat board who missed the ending and was wondering if the ladies found their aunt’s killer, so I imagine there are other people who would like to see the repeat airing.)

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James