The Woman in the Well: A Century-Old Murder Finally Solved

N.B. The Saskatoon Police announced this at the end of September 2025.
New details may emerge after the publication of this blog (8 October 2025).

What if Bella could be named today? In Britain, the “Woman in the Wych Elm” remains one of the most enduring mysteries of the Second World War—her skeleton discovered in Worcestershire in 1943, her identity still unknown. In Canada, a parallel case has just been solved: the “Woman in the Well,” hidden in Saskatoon since the 1910s and unearthed in 2006, has finally been identified as Alice Burke Spence—thanks to the power of modern DNA technology.

The Skeleton in the Well

On 29 June 2006, construction workers were excavating underground gasoline tanks at a convenience store in the east end of Saskatoon, a large city in Saskatchewan. As they dug, they uncovered the wooden cribbing of an old well. A human skull tumbled from the shaft and rolled down the embankment. Work stopped instantly. Police and a forensic anthropologist were called.

When investigators peered inside, they found an old barrel wedged partway down the well. Inside the barrel were skeletal remains wrapped in the remnants of a burlap sack. The police concluded that the body had been placed in the barrel, which had then been dropped down the shaft of the well. The barrel had lodged against a piece of broken cribbing, which had prevented it from going to the bottom of the well. Groundwater and gasoline seepage from the underground tanks helped preserve the bones, clothing, and reddish-brown hair. On top of the remains, police found a man’s vest and pants. The skeleton lacked a lower jawbone, and the upper left arm had been cleanly sawed off. Investigators quickly concluded it was a homicide—and that the man’s clothing likely belonged to her killer.

The Woman in the Well

Forensic archaeologist Dr. Ernie Walker determined the remains belonged to a Caucasian woman aged 25 to 35, possibly as young as 20. She stood about 5’1″, with a slim build and light brown to reddish hair. Beyond that, it was impossible to tell how long she had been in the well—or when she had been killed.

She had suffered from periodontal disease. One tooth had a filling, evidence of prior dental care, while another was badly decayed, and several had been lost to abscesses. Investigators speculated that she may have fallen on hard times—or that someone had prevented her from seeking treatment.

Investigators turned to clothing and textile historian Carole Wakabayashi to help date the garments. The woman had been well-dressed: a long black-and-white cotton poplin skirt with a ruffled hem, a silk bodice, black wool trousers (32-inch waist), and a vest. Beneath the vest and bodice she wore a white cotton corset with stays, pre-1920 in style, and over it all a fitted black jacket. Her lace-up leather boots, with pointed toes, were likely manufactured around 1910 and suited to spring or autumn wear. She also wore an 18-karat gold necklace, 24 inches long, likely of European or Montréal origin and dating from about 1910–1920. The pendant was missing. Taken together, her clothing, jewellery, and dental work suggested a time of death between 1900 and 1920—and pointed to a woman of middle- or upper-class means. Her fashion, in particular, was typical of the years 1908–1916.

The Land Around the Well

Further investigation helped narrow the time of death. In the 1910s, the area where the woman was found was known as Sutherland—a stand-alone railway community of about a thousand residents, three miles east of Saskatoon. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had purchased the land in 1908 from real-estate developer Albert Herman Hanson, originally from Wisconsin, and more than half of Sutherland’s residents worked for the CPR.

The well itself stood on two adjoining lots purchased by William W. Shore around 1912. That spring, Shore built the Shore Hotel on the eastern lot (Lot 1), a two-storey building that spanned the width of the property. On the western lot (Lot 2), he operated a livery stable and feed business, with a well near the front of the lot. According to City Archivist Jeff O’Brien, there is no evidence the land was occupied before 1912, suggesting Shore had the well dug for his business.

In 1912 the City of Saskatoon began installing water mains toward Sutherland, which became operational in 1914 and rendered private wells obsolete. That same year, Shore told the Saskatoon Daily Star that his business was “growing by leaps and bounds.” The new streetcar line now reached Sutherland, and passengers often waited for the car inside the Shore Hotel. Town councillors, however, protested that it was “not conducive to the morals of the community to have ladies and children awaiting the arrival of [street]cars in the Hotel,” and asked the city to build a separate shelter.

The hotel, however, appears to have been short-lived. According to the City Archivist, it was occupied only until 1914—a fate shared by other establishments such as the nearby Empress Hotel. That year the Shore Hotel changed hands three times at $50,000 apiece. After provincial Prohibition took effect in 1915, its value collapsed. In 1919 the Town of Sutherland foreclosed on the property for unpaid taxes. The building sat empty until 1927, when it was declared a public nuisance and demolished the following year.

Based on this timeline, investigators initially concluded the woman was likely killed between 1920 and 1924.

Who Was She?

Police commissioned a forensic artist to reconstruct the woman’s face and released the image to the public, hoping descendants might recognize her. No one did.

Investigators also extracted DNA from her bones, but no immediate matches were found. Over the years, more than thirty people contacted Saskatoon Police believing she might be a relative, yet none proved to be. The Woman in the Well remained a mystery. On 29 September 2009, her remains were buried at Woodlawn Cemetery as a Jane Doe—seemingly forever. As SaskToday wrote in April 2019, “Sadly, despite the valiant efforts of the Saskatoon Police Service, we will probably never learn her identity.”

As with the Bella case, internet sleuths soon took up the mystery. One 2010 thread proposed fifty possible victims—many from the Saskatoon area—but all were ruled out. Because Sutherland had been a small railway town of barely a thousand residents, armchair detectives speculated the woman might not have been local. If she were, surely someone would have noticed her disappearance? The absence of missing-person reports in surviving papers hinted that both she and her killer may have arrived by train.

Unfortunately, the local Sutherland newspaper was never preserved in any archive, leaving gaps in the historical record. And so the case lingered for years. Was the Woman in the Well destined to remain unsolved, like the Woman in the Tree? Ultimately, the answer was no—for Saskatoon Police had one crucial advantage the Worcester investigators no longer did: a preserved skeleton and testable DNA.

The DNA Breakthrough

In 2023, Saskatoon Police sent a bone sample to Othram, a forensic DNA laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas. Earlier testing at the University of Saskatchewan had recovered only mitochondrial DNA, but investigators hoped Othram could go further. Using Forensic-Grade Genome Sequencing®, Othram scientists built a comprehensive DNA profile of the woman and then passed it to their genetic genealogy team to search for familial matches.

The results were shared with Saskatoon Police, who worked with the Toronto Police Service’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) team to construct possible family trees and identify potential relatives.

A breakthrough came in June 2025, when several promising leads emerged. Relatives were contacted and submitted reference DNA samples, which confirmed a match. The Woman in the Well finally had a name: Alice Spence, born Alice Burke.

Alice (née Burke) Spence

Alice Burke was born in Michigan in September 1881, one of five children. In 1902, according to police, she moved to Duluth, Minnesota, with her mother and two brothers, where she worked as a seamstress and clerk. Additional research suggests her mother was Mary Agnes Burke (born 1855), widow of Thomas F. Burke, and that Alice’s surviving siblings were John (born 1877) and William (born 1884). On 1 August 1904, Alice married Charles Irvine Spence in St. Louis, Minnesota. Charles, born in 1878, came from a large Scottish family, many of whom had emigrated to the United States. The couple had one child, Idella, born 30 June 1905.

An ordinary woman living an ordinary life—until it ended in extraordinary mystery.

In 1913, Charles, Alice, and Idella moved from St. Louis to the small railway town of Sutherland, Saskatchewan. The move makes little sense until one realizes that Charles’s older sister, Margaret Irvine Spence, was married to Albert Herman Hanson—the same real-estate magnate who developed the land around the future Shore Hotel. At the time, Charles was working as a train baggage-man for the U.S. Express Company, which likely brought them north. A record from their return through the Ranier border crossing lists Charles as 5’5″ with a ruddy complexion, brown hair, and brown eyes, and Alice as 5’2″, fair, and blue-eyed—a near match to the 5’1″ skeleton later recovered from the well. By 1914, Charles had shifted into real estate, probably through his brother-in-law.

From 1915 to 1918 Charles ran a flour-and-feed business from their home on Central Avenue, just a block south of the Shore Hotel. His poultry regularly won prizes at local fairs. On 23 April 1915, Alice was hospitalized for an unspecified operation at the City Hospital. The paper noted only that she was “doing as well as could be expected.” The reason was never reported. In June 1915, however, the Saskatoon Daily Star reported that an automobile driven by C. I. Spence of Sutherland struck an eight-year-old girl on Second Avenue. Witnesses criticized his lack of care, though the child was not seriously hurt.

The 1916 census lists Charles, Alice, and ten-year-old Idella living on Central Avenue, where Charles operated his feed store. It is the last official record in which Alice appears. On 19 February 1918, the Saskatoon Daily Star noted that a fire had destroyed the Spence home the previous night (18 February) while the family was away from home. Nothing was saved.

By the 1921 census, Charles and Idella were living on a small farm north of Sutherland. Alice was gone. Sharing the house were a widow, Helena Chattaway, listed as the household’s housekeeper, and her eight-year-old son, George. Neither had appeared in any earlier local directories. Helena’s husband had died in 1913 in Toronto. At the time, her employment in the Spence household likely seemed unremarkable—but in hindsight, it adds a layer of unease.

Police now believe Alice was killed sometime between 1916 and 1918, based on subsequent review of local records and the family timeline. Her descendants knew little of her life—or her tragic end.

Saskatoon Police Chief Cameron McBride later said:

This investigation is a testament to the determination and innovation of investigators throughout all these years. As a Constable who assisted immediately after Alice’s remains were discovered, this is an especially satisfying outcome.

One might think the mystery was solved. One would be wrong. Knowing her name only deepened the question: who killed Alice Spence?

Who Killed Alice?

During the news conference announcing Alice’s identity, the police stated that they had circumstantial evidence about the killer. They thought they knew who he had been, but given that he was dead and could no longer defend himself, they were not going to identify him. That omission, of course, only fuels speculation. And the first suspect, as in most domestic homicides, is the husband. In Alice’s case, all eyes turn to Charles Irvine Spence.

One researcher, Terry Hoknes, manager of the Saskatoon History group on Facebook, has spent years researching this case and stated that “Alice was NEVER listed” in the Saskatoon newspapers as missing. One would think that if Alice had disappeared from the family home, Charles would have contacted the police. Her gold necklace was left behind—so robbery was unlikely. The missing locket suggested sentimentality, perhaps a photo removed by someone who cared. And then there was the February 1918 fire that destroyed the Spence home.

Was it Charles? He remains Suspect Number One, though we’ll never know for certain. The police have never released details about the man’s clothing found above the barrel—whether anything bore initials or markings. Was the killer a stranger, a neighbour, or the man she lived with? Was the fire meant to erase bloodstains, a struggle, a body moved in haste? We’ll likely never know. Charles evidently moved out of town to a farm after the fire. Living on a farm, in the middle of nowhere, new neighbours may not have asked too many questions, or even noticed what went on in the household.

But what of Idella? She would have been 11 to 13 years old when her mother disappeared. Surely Idella would have noticed if her mother was there one morning before school and gone when she got home in the afternoon? There is one narrow window of time, however, during which Idella was away from home. From 1913 to 1917, Idella attended Sutherland School. That autumn she enrolled at St. Alban’s College in Prince Albert, an Anglican girls’ school also attended by her cousin Idella Hanson. A December 1917 note in the Saskatoon Daily Star records the cousins home for Christmas with their uncle, Albert Hanson. It’s likely Idella was away when the Sutherland house burned in February 1918.

Perhaps her father concocted a story: “Your mother hasn’t been well, you know. The doctor thought a change of air would do her good. She’s gone to stay with relatives back east for a while.”

On 15 March 1918, the Saskatoon Daily Star noted that “Miss Idella Spence, of Sutherland, who is a student of St. Alban’s College, Prince Albert, has been operated on for appendicitis at the municipal hospital there. Her father, Mr. Charles I. Spence, who is with her, reports her condition to be favourable.” There was no mention of Alice.

On 23 May 1918, Idella and her cousin (Idella Hanson) returned home for the holidays, and it’s possible she didn’t return to St. Alban’s, as the Spanish Flu hit the area hard later that year. In 1919—April, November, and December—Idella appeared in Tulare, California, newspapers, featured in piano recitals and plays. Her aunt, Barbara (née Spence) O’Dell, lived there with her family. Her other aunt, Mrs. A. H. Hanson of Saskatoon, visited her sister in California regularly, and it’s possible that young Idella joined them for an extended stay. When Idella later married, the Tulare Advance-Register reported on her wedding and noted that she was “formerly of Tulare” and a niece of Mrs. R. C. O’Dell—suggesting a more prolonged residence there. The timing suggests Idella may have been sent to stay with relatives while her father rebuilt his life after the fire and established the new farm near Sutherland.

By 1920, Saskatoon newspaper notices show Idella performing in local piano recitals, concerts, and plays. In 1922 and 1923, she attended Nutana Collegiate. The 1921 census lists Charles and Idella living on the farm with housekeeper Helena Chattaway and her son George. Their apparently peaceful farm life would not last long.

On 16 May 1923, Charles brought his wagon to the Quaker Oats plant in Saskatoon’s Riversdale industrial area, at 18th Street West and Avenue N. He had picked up a load of seed grain and was heading east along 18th Street West when he collapsed. Passersby found him unresponsive and called police, who took him to St. Paul’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. According to the Saskatoon Daily Star, the next day, Charles was “a well-known and prosperous farmer.” He was the brother of Mrs. A. H. Hanson of 742 Spadina Crescent and a widower, leaving behind one daughter, Idella (age 17).

A widower. That tells us a lot. People had been told his wife was deceased—technically true; she was. There was just no public record of it in Saskatchewan, or anywhere else. He must have told people she’d died elsewhere. Circumstantial? Definitely. Likely? Probably.

As for Idella, a year after her father’s passing, she was working as a telephone operator and residing at 615 Avenue I. The following year, on 30 September 1925, Idella married Frank Broadbent in a quiet ceremony at St. John’s Cathedral. A newspaper article reporting on the wedding noted that Idella was the daughter of the “late Mr. and Mrs. Charles I. Spence”. She was given away by her uncle, A. H. Hanson, with his wife serving as matron of honour. Frank and Idella moved to Vancouver in 1938 and had four children. Idella passed away on 1 March 1995 in Richmond, B.C.

The Saskatoon Police in 2025 have been clear: they believe Alice was murdered, and they have circumstantial evidence pointing to a suspect. But with more than a century gone, and the man long dead, they will not name him.

The most straightforward reading of the evidence, however, points to Alice’s husband, Charles Irvine Spence. He was the one living with her when she vanished between 1916 and 1918. Her body was hidden in a well just blocks from their home—a place only someone local, with opportunity and knowledge, would use. By 1921, Charles was living openly with a new “housekeeper.” When he died in 1923, he was known as a widower. And by 1925, their daughter Idella’s marriage record named her as the child of the “late Mr. and Mrs. C.I. Spence.”

The story Charles told—that Alice had died “away”—seems to have been accepted by the community. But the discovery of her remains shows how much that story concealed.

We know who Alice was. We can trace the arc of her short life—from Michigan to Sutherland, from wife to mother to missing—but we still don’t know why she died, or who took her life. That question lingers, suspended in time. And it’s the same haunting question that echoes from another case, half a world away: the Woman in the Wych Elm.

Echoes of Bella in the Wych Elm

There are clear similarities to the Bella case—and crucial differences. In both cases, police were dealing with skeletal remains, supplemented by hair, clothing, shoes, and a piece of jewellery. Pleas for help to the public yielded no leads. The Worcestershire Police found Bella’s remains only a few years after her death, but were limited by the tools of their time. The Saskatoon Police found Alice’s body 90 years after her presumed death, yet because of the conditions in the well, her remains were remarkably well-preserved. Her clothing was in far better condition than Bella’s.

The Saskatoon Police had one tool unavailable to their wartime counterparts: DNA testing—the key that ultimately unlocked the case. The Worcestershire Police also had Bella’s skeletal remains, but those disappeared sometime in the 1960s. Were they buried in a pauper’s grave? There is no record. Were they thrown out? Were they mislabelled and misfiled? Are they deep in the dusty recesses of some archival basement? We don’t know.

Some Bella sleuths still hope her remains will be found and that DNA testing will finally answer the question of who was the Woman in the Tree. And yet… while that might solve one mystery, it leaves another unsolved. Even if we learn her name—who killed her?

Who killed Bella? Who killed Alice?

And why?

Epilogue—Whatever Became of…?

By 1931, Helena Chattaway had moved to Alberta, where she again worked as a housekeeper. Her son later married and had two children. Helena passed away in Nanton, Alberta, in 1961.

Idella Hanson, cousin to Idella Spence, went on to study in Boston after graduating from St. Alban’s College in Prince Albert. On 15 March 1921, she underwent an operation for appendicitis, and newspapers noted that her mother, Mrs. A. H. Hanson, travelled to Boston to be with her. On 5 December 1921, Idella died in Rochester, Minnesota, where she had gone five weeks earlier for treatment. Newspapers reported that she died as a “result of severe sun-burning this summer.” In the age before penicillin, one can only speculate that the severe blistering may have led to septicemia.

Sources

Note: This case has generated an enormous amount of material, both historical and contemporary. The sources below represent only a small sample of what’s available online and in print.

Ancestry – genealogical sources
Saskatoon Police – 2025 – news release on identity of the Woman in the Well
Saskatoon StarPhoenix – 2025 – Her name was Alice Spence: DNA identifies century-old Saskatoon body (has pics of excavation, relatives, displays)
CBC News – 2025 – Saskatoon police identify century-old remains of ‘woman in the well’ found in 2006
Doe Network site – 498UFSK – Unidentified Female
Reddit r/Unresolved Mysteries – 2023 – The woman in the abandoned well. Who was Saskatoon Jane Doe?
Reddit r/Unresolved Mysteries – 2025 – Saskatoon Woman in the well identified as Alice Spence
Find-a-Grave – burial site of the Woman in the Well
Saskatchewan Today – 2019 – Woman in the Well – Murder at Sutherland’s Shore Hotel – SaskToday.ca
Facebook – True Crime Investigators
CBS News – 2025 – Human remains found in Canadian well identified as woman born in 1881
Othram – DNA Solves – 2025 – Saskatoon and Toronto Police Services Team with Othram to Identify Canada’s “Woman in the Well”
Facebook – Saskatoon History – 1910 Map of Sutherland
Facebook – Saskatoon History – 1912 Map of Sutherland
Facebook – Saskatoon History – 2006 Star Phoenix article on the discovery
Facebook – Saskatoon History – History of the Shore Hotel
Facebook – Saskatoon History – 2009 Star Phoenix article on three-dimensional rendering
Facebook – Saskatoon History – 2006 Star Phoenix article
The Independent -2025 – Canadian police identify century-old remains of ‘woman in the well’ using DNA technology
Saskatchewan Postal Cards – Quaker Oats postcard – Wish You Were Here: Saskatchewan Postcard Collections
Henderson’s Directories – various years for Saskatoon
St. Alban’s College – History
Blog – Railway & Main: Small-Town Saskatchewan Hotels: The Woman in the Well: Murder at Sutherland’s Shore Hotel

Header Image – from Gemini AI