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Saskatoon police search for a killer

He was a carefree teenaged hippie just passing through Saskatoon on Jan. 31, 1969 — the same day nursing assistant Gail Miller was raped and stabbed to death in a back alley. On the strength of sketchy forensics and unreliable witnesses, David Milgaard was convicted of the crime and sentenced to life in prison. Twenty years later, his case made national headlines as his mother Joyce confronted politicians in a bid to free her son from jail. By the time he was cleared in 1997, David Milgaard had become one of the most famous examples of wrongful conviction in Canada.

On the freezing morning of Jan. 31, 1969, 20-year-old Gail Miller set off to her job as a nursing assistant in the maternity ward of a Saskatoon hospital. But as she waited for her bus someone dragged her into a nearby alley and raped and murdered her. Miller's was the first murder in the city in close to two years and police are keen to find the killer. A CBC reporter is present as police describe the investigation.
• Gail Miller grew up in a large family in the small farming community of Laura, Sask. After high school she went to a Saskatoon technical school and trained as a nurse's assistant. She then got a job at Saskatoon City Hospital and was living in a boarding house at the time of her murder.

• Within three days of the killing, police had interviewed Miller's friends and family and eliminated any possible suspects in her neighbourhood. Stymied, they put up a reward of $2,000 -- over $10,000 in 2003 dollars -- for information leading to the conviction of the killer. It was an unusual move and hundreds of tips poured in.

• Four days after the murder, the Regina Leader-Post printed a short article saying police were looking for a link between the Miller murder and the rapes of three women in Regina the previous fall.

• The following day, police interviewed a young man named Larry Fisher at the stop where Miller had waited for her bus to work. He said that on the day of the murder he'd caught the bus at about 6:30 a.m. and had seen nothing unusual.

• Police considered and rejected quite a few people as suspects. Among them were a cab driver who'd said to his girlfriend, "What if I did it?" and a young, long-haired French-Canadian man who a police report said "may even be a sex pervert." They also investigated an old boyfriend of Miller's.
Medium: Television
Program: CBC News
Broadcast Date: Feb. 3, 1969
Duration: 0:49
Thanks to CFCQ-TV/Saskatchewan Archives Board

Last updated: September 11, 2012

Page consulted on April 15, 2013

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