Alexandra Wiwcharuk's body was exhumed in 2004, more than four decades after the beauty queen turned nurse was beaten, raped and left for dead in a shallow grave in 1962 along a Saskatoon riverbank.
Solving the murder of the 23-year-old spitfire packed into a 5-foot-1 frame - serenaded by Johnny Cash with Girl in Saskatoon a year before her death - had eluded police, but advances in DNA technology meant even a tiny fragment of DNA was enough to complete a profile of her killer.
Investigators said yesterday they have eliminated five "persons of interest" from a list of 13 to 15 suspects in the case that gripped the city and spawned a television documentary, a book and scurrilous gossip that endures to this day - yet police still haven't solved the crime.
But now, four of Ms. Wiwcharuk's nieces, who mused about playing gumshoe since they were children and started sleuthing in earnest this year, think they have.
"Some of it has been pretty exciting regarding her case, and there's been some leads that I don't think even the police have this information," said Patty Storie, who is now 48 and lives in New York State.
They have travelled extensively, interviewed countless witnesses - some of whom refused to talk to police, but felt comfortable opening up to the women, providing what they believe are the missing pieces of the puzzle.
"We could be way off the mark, but I don't think so. I don't think so," Ms. Storie said.
In 1962, Ms. Wiwcharuk had recently moved to the city from Yorkton, where she had been queen of the Kinette Skating Carnival and named to the provincewide Wheat Queen pageant. She had gone for a walk one May evening and was spotted wandering near the home she shared with roommates. When she failed to show up for work at the hospital later that night or return home the next day, people worried.
Two weeks later, a boy scrambling along the riverbank spotted a hand sticking out of the dirt. Ms. Wiwcharuk's skull had been bashed, but it was suffocation that killed her, examiners surmised after dirt was found in her windpipe.
There were questions about Ms. Wiwcharuk's character. There were rumours about the sons of prominent families in the city. There were complaints police weren't doing their jobs.
Celebrated Saskatchewan author Sharon Butala, who went to the same high school as Ms. Wiwcharuk, is among those who had been ruminating over the case for years. She put her own investigative skills to it and this year published The Girl in Saskatoon: A Meditation on Friendship, Memory and Murder.
Ms. Butala said she never set out to solve the crime, but desperately wanted to know what happened. In the course of it, she said she felt herself being followed and her telephone line being tapped. When she was done, the identity of the killer - or killers, as she and others have come to believe - "hit her like a ton of bricks."
Names, of course, are not being publicly uttered by either her or Ms. Wiwcharuk's relatives for legal reasons. Nor do they indicate whether they have arrived at the same conclusions.
"If that's the answer," Ms. Butala said she remembers thinking, "it explains absolutely everything about the gaps in the record, the mistakes, the failures, the silences and the way that the rumours proliferated and proliferated and the police didn't seem to do anything to put a stop to them."
Now Ms. Butala figures only public pressure on the police and Saskatchewan government will reveal the identity of the culprit.
Sergeant Phil Farion of Saskatoon's Historical Case Unit has been doggedly working the file since 2004, when he asked for the exhumation and came up with a viable, state-of-the-art, mitochondrial DNA sample. But even with it, forensic science doesn't work as quickly as television dramas would lead people to believe.
"We can't just solve these things in five minutes," said Sgt. Farion, one of two officers assigned to the unit, which is currently juggling 16 cold cases.
Some suspects are dead. Others haven't been found. Some people will provide a DNA sample, as will relatives of deceased suspects, while others will not.
There's also the possibility the killer is an unknown transient. Scouring the national DNA database of several hundred thousand nuclear DNA profiles of known offenders, has also proved fruitless.
The help of Ms. Wiwcharuk's nieces is appreciated, Sgt. Farion said, but he warned that he can't share information with them and that he remains realistic about the chances of closing the case.
Ms. Storie, along with sisters Lorain Phillips, who lives in Victoria, Gwen Taralson, who resides in Bonnyville, Alta., and Lynn Gratrix of Edmonton, remember the sadness about their aunt.
But now that their children have grown, they can have time to dedicate themselves to the case. They have a website ( ), are planning to erect a billboard in Saskatoon later this month and set up a toll-free tip line (1-866-794-1962).
"I do feel we are going to solve this case," said Ms. Gratrix, 52. "We do know, but we can't say."