How police solved the century-old mystery of ‘the woman in the well’

REGINA — Cindy Camp’s great-grandmother was only a name on the family tree until police called.

An investigator told her it was believed Alice Spence had been killed more than 105 years ago, her body dumped in a well in Saskatchewan.

Camp and her daughters were asked in the summer to provide DNA samples. They matched.

“I was stunned, in disbelief,” Camp said in a phone interview from her home in Sherwood Park, Alta.

She said her father knew nothing of Spence, and his mother never talked about the woman — her mother.

“I talked to my cousin who had lived in California … and I asked, ‘Didn’t Nana ever say anything about this?’ And she said, ‘Nope, not at all.’”

For police, naming the woman was a breakthrough.

The case is believed to be the oldest one solved with investigative genetic genealogy in Canada.

Known as “‘the woman in the well” for nearly two decades, she was found in 2006 during an excavation of old gasoline tanks at a Saskatoon service centre, police said.

Her body, preserved by a mix of water and gasoline, had been wrapped in burlap and put inside a barrel with bottles.

Also found were a fitted jacket, high-collared blouse, long skirt, broken golden necklace, and a man’s vest and trousers.

An autopsy determined she died under suspicious circumstances, and police started investigating what they believed to be a homicide.

A truly historic homicide.

“We have a woman that was never identified, and everybody deserves a name at the end of the day,” Sgt. Darren Funk with Saskatoon police said in an interview.

Based on an analysis of the body and clothing, he said the woman died sometime before 1920. She was of Irish descent, between age 25 and 35, and stood five-foot-one. She had a cavity and an abscessed tooth.

Investigators spent years piecing together timelines. They built genealogy charts using a police DNA database. They found three distant relatives in the United States and Europe.

They also had a drawing and a sculpture of what her face might have looked like, hoping someone would have information. But there were no solid leads.

That all changed this year, when Funk took another run at the case in January. He found four more extended family members.

“I was cold-calling these relatives, trying to get their buy-in, trying to explain that I’m a police officer and the task I was doing,” he said.

“Nobody knew of any missing women in their family.”

He later went to the Canadian Police College in Ottawa to learn more about historical death investigations.

In a class, he said, officers shared a case study on how genetic genealogy was used to arrest Joseph George Sutherland in the 40-year-old killings of two Toronto women. Sutherland was convicted last year of second-degree murder.

Funk met with a Toronto genealogy expert after the class. They talked for three hours about how they could solve his case.

“She figured that we should have about 5,000 genetic relatives, not just the seven,” Funk said.

Days later, Saskatoon police handed over the genealogy work on the woman in the well case to Toronto police, as they had more expertise in the field.

Within a few days, they had a name: Alice Burke.

Police couldn’t find any information about her in Saskatoon.

“They knew through DNA mapping and everything through genetics that this was our lady in the well,” said Funk. ‘They just didn’t know how she got to Saskatoon.”

Then they found her.

Police discovered Alice Burke had been married to Charles Spence.

Searching Alice Spence in records, they discovered she had lived in Saskatoon in 1913 and 1914 with her daughter and husband — metres from the well she was dumped in, said Funk.

There were no missing person or death reports for her, and no photos.

The family’s home burned down in 1918, possibly after her death. Her husband died of a heart attack years later, leaving their daughter — Camp’s grandmother — an orphan.

Funk declined to comment on who might have killed Spence, saying it would be purely speculative — and inconsequential. The killer would be long dead.

Police records older than 1956 were destroyed when Saskatoon annexed the community of Sutherland, where the body was found. He doesn’t know if the death was initially investigated.

“We absolutely have questions. We tried to find police reports, but we couldn’t find anything,” Funk said.

Camp recalled her grandmother telling her about a fire that had destroyed records. Camp said she assumed it was a town hall that burned, not the family home.

“Knowing now what I know, I would love to have a talk with her one last time, just give me five minutes to ask what she was told about what happened.”

News of the killing has left Camp horribly upset, she added.

“I can’t imagine anybody doing that to someone. It just breaks my heart.”

Camp said she has ordered a headstone for the unmarked grave where her great-grandmother now lies in Saskatoon.

“I think it’s important that we know family.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 19, 2025.

Jeremy Simes, The Canadian Press