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You were listening to Canadian Gothic.

In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, there was a horrible secret that someone wanted kept hidden.

And for over 100 years they

got their evil way, but this secret refused to stay buried.

This is the story of a woman who had been erased from history.

She'd been murdered and her remains hidden beneath the ground in a wooden barrel.

But thanks to a series of coincidences that spanned over 100 years, her story, at least a good part of it, can now be told.

Tonight, in this episode of the Canadian Gothic, we're going to hear about Saskatchewan's oldest and coldest case.

This is the story of Alice Spence, formerly known as the woman in the well.

Alice Spence is not invisible anymore.

Forensic anthropologist Ernie Walker says Alice Spence's body was placed in a barrel and dropped down a well.

These composite drawings show what Spence may have looked like.

While her body was discovered in 2006, police believe she died sometime

between 1916 and 1918.

We're going to enter this story by following along with some otherwise forgettable excavation

work happening not far from present-day downtown Saskatoon in the summer of 2009. At the corner of 108th Street

and Central Avenue, which is now home to a strip mall that's seen better days, a work crew was

excavating the underground fuel tanks from an old service station. As the machines tore into the

earth, they uncovered something unexpected, the remains of a long abandoned well.

Although this well hadn't appeared on any of their site plans, it wasn't ancient or anything that would have typically delayed the crew's work.

But as you can likely guess by the fact that we're discussing it here, this well was different.

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