Original subtitles

(ominous music)

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] A murder in a major Canadian city

on the prairies.

- Her property is strewn about the area like her boot.

Other things, like her purse with her identification,

is found inside a garbage can.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Police have no suspects

but have previously warned of a sexual attacker.

- The police were aware of the sexual attacker

who'd been operating in Saskatoon in the fall of 1968.

- [Narrator] A police force pushing for resolution.

- Because in this case,

people dug in so hard.

Many are still dug in.

- [Narrator] Lives can be ruined

through the pursuit of one unwavering idea.

(dramatic music)

- It's so bad.

When the system fails like this,

it's just so bad.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] And the tragedy doesn't always end

with the murder victim.

(dramatic music)

- The unsolved ones we have to stand up.

- And approach these cases in a way outside the box.

- Let the world know

those out there that did commit a murder,

there are people that are coming after you.

- There's just a lot of good people

trying to do the right thing.

(muffled radio chatter)

- Because it's something that

you have to be passionate about.

- Solve this and bring some peace to the family at least,

I'm just doing my job.

(dramatic music)

(gavel banging)

(eerie music)

- [Narrator] A Canadian prairie city in mid-winter.

In the early morning,

people go about their routines,

getting ready for work and school,

with no idea about the tragedy that has occurred.

- The morning of January 31, 1969,

in Saskatoon it was minus 40 degrees.

There was ice mist in the air,

and what they encountered,

school children, I believe, on their way to school,

found the body of Gail Miller

(eerie ominous music)

in a snowbank in a back lane.

- [Narrator] The children run home

to tell their parents about what they found,

and the local police receive a call soon after.

(suspenseful music)

The police are on the scene in the early morning.

They find Gail Miller with her stockings down by her ankles

and only wearing a single boot.

Until she goes in for an autopsy,

they can only guess whether or not

she has been sexually assaulted.

- Beyond looking at the evidence on the body itself,

such as stab wounds to the victim's abdomen and neck,

investigators will have to scoured the area

for possible evidence.

The snowy Canadian winter is a double-edged sword.

Things like blood can be easily seen against the white.

Other evidence can easily be concealed or missed.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] These kinds of assaults on women

have been happening with enough frequency

that warnings are issued to the public.

- The police had published a warning in December of 1968,

warning women about an attacker

who was sexually assaulting women

in a particular area of Saskatoon,

and then this happens.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] Saskatoon is the largest city in Saskatchewan,

the province found in the center of the Canadian prairies,

known for its wonderful summers,

but long, brutal winters.

- Gail Miller was a nurse's assistant

who was going to school and working in Saskatoon.

- [Narrator] Gail shows a passion for working

with children from a young age.

She is born in 1948,

and grows up in Laura,

a small community just west of Saskatoon.

When she is 12, she begins babysitting

for a baby that's terminally ill.

- By all accounts, a wonderful person,

and starting to lead her life and pursue a career.

(gentle music)

She lived in a home about a block away

from where her body was found.

She had, I think, two or three roommates.

- [Narrator] There is little doubt

a promising future had been stolen from Gail.

(dramatic music)

The area where Gail lives and her body is found

is familiar to the police,

as it's where they've previously warned

of a sexual predator.

- The police, obviously, went to the scene.

They canvassed the whole area.

- [Narrator] The first officer on the scene finds a sweater,

that looks to be torn from Gail,

along with her missing shoe.

- They were able to identify items belonging to Gail Miller.

The contents of her purse, identification,

some of her clothing it was strewn in a way

leading away from where she had been located.

- Her property is strewn about the area like her boot.

Other things, like her purse with her identification,

is found inside a garbage can.

(dramatic music)

- When they were seizing biological samples

from the clothing of the deceased,

from the body of the deceased,

they found some residue in the snow

that was supposedly semen.

They wouldn't have the same sort of DNA level technology,

but they had tools at the time, and they used them.

- [Narrator] The police scour the neighborhood

for any information they can find,

anything that might lead them to a possible suspect.

(dramatic music)

- You never know who might have seen

or heard something when investigating a case,

and when a murder happens in an alley,

there's at least a chance

that a passerby witnessed something

that could assist the police in their investigation.

It doesn't always lead anywhere,

but it's a starting point.

(gentle dramatic music)

- [Narrator] While the case is focused

on Gail Miller's murder,

there is still a sexual predator on the loose

and more women being assaulted.

- People inside the police department

had developed what they called a modus operandi,

an MO for how this attacker had attacked his victims.

What were some characteristics

of what did this person do when he attacked?

They wrote to the RCMP to try to see

if they had some resources available

that could help them build a profile.

- [Narrator] But even with a profile in mind,

they still don't have anyone to link it to.

Although their identity is unknown,

police still believe the killer

could be linked to the recent sexual assaults.

(eerie music)

With no major suspects,

they begin offering a $2,000 reward

for any information leading to the conviction

of Gail's murderer.

(tense music)

After offering the reward,

more women come forward reporting incidents.

The police eliminate 160 possible suspects

and are still no closer to finding a person of interest.

Finally, the investigators think they have a break

when a man walks in with information

that is exactly what they are looking for.

A month after Gail's death,

police are approached by a man

named Albert Shorty Cadrain.

Cadrain claims that his friend, David Milgaard,

visited him on the morning that Gail was murdered.

- Milgaard had driven overnight with two friends

from Regina to Saskatoon to visit a friend

who by crazy coincidence happen to live

about a block away from where Gail Miller's body

had been found.

They were having trouble locating the friend's home.

They stopped at a motel.

They help some people who were stuck in a back lane,

and then eventually they got to where they wanted to go,

and then carried on.

They then traveled on further west

just having sort of a carefree road trip

of 16-year-old, 17-year-old kids.

How Milgaard gets onto the police radar screen

is that, yes, they post a reward, and Cadrain,

the friend that Milgaard had gone to visit,

goes in and implicates Milgaard.

And says that he had seen blood on Milgaard's pants

the morning of the murder, and that changed everything.

- [Narrator] Milgaard is accused

of being seen with blood on his clothes

soon after the murder is known to have taken place.

If this blood belongs to Gail,

the police may already have their culprit.

(dramatic music)

(tense dramatic music)

(gentle somber music)

(dramatic music)

On a late January morning in 1969,

children on their way to school

are met by a terrible sight.

Gail Miller's body is found

in the snow and down an alley.

(dramatic music)

Soon after, the police arrive on the scene.

Gail is a 20-year-old young woman

working as a nursing assistant

in a pediatric ward of the local hospital.

Her life is unfortunately cut short.

When the police offer a $2,000 reward

for information leading to a conviction,

their first major suspect comes to light.

- Milgaard had driven overnight with two friends

from Regina to Saskatoon to visit a friend.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] After Cadrain approached police

implicating Milgaard, they begin a search for him.

Milgaard is found in his home city of Winnipeg

and is brought in for questioning.

(tense dramatic music)

- When police require investigating

an accused person in a different jurisdiction,

it requires assistance from the police in that jurisdiction.

So generally they just reach out to them,

and then they will work together to get

the alleged criminal off the streets.

- Cadrain reveals to the police

that Milgaard and his two friends

had visited his house that morning,

and all three of them get interrogated,

and all three of them say,

"I don't know what you're talking about."

And Milgaard was very cooperative

and tried to reconstruct where he'd been.

It was dark and he didn't really know his way around,

but he tried to reconstruct his way around.

And he was trying to be as helpful as possible.

- [Narrator] David tells the police

about his time in Saskatoon,

how he and his friends got lost,

and how they had helped someone

who had gotten their car stuck in the snow.

(dramatic music)

The friends that David had been

traveling with are interviewed.

Their stories match much closer to what David has said

than the version that Cadrain had told.

- Separating witnesses during questioning

is extremely important.

It allows the police to corroborate details,

and even small details and differences

between people's stories can have a huge impact

on how the case goes.

Separating them allows the police to do their job properly.

Not only do they corroborate evidence,

it really shows if they're hiding anything.

Those details that are hidden will come out.

- Everybody, his friends as well, said,

"You know, nothing happened.

"We'd gone into Saskatoon.

"We got lost.

"We finally found our way to Cadrain's,

"and then we headed off to Edmonton."

(dramatic music)

- This was a group of kids

picking up a friend for a road trip.

They were in Saskatoon just a short period of time.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] According to Cadrain,

Milgaard showed up to his home

with blood stains on his pants

and acted suspicious the rest of the road trip.

(eerie music)

With no leads on the sexual attacker in Saskatoon

and pressure mounting,

the police decide to dig deeper into Milgaard.

- The police start to harden their view

that Cadrain might be correct.

If that's true,

then in the police's mind

when Milgaard and his friends said nothing happened,

it must mean that they weren't telling the whole story.

So the police created a roadmap of what they wanted

or believed they could get from Nichol John and Ron Wilson,

the two friends, and they took them to Saskatoon.

- [Narrator] Milgaard's friends are questioned again

and admit that there is a 12 minute period

where they don't know where Milgaard is.

(tense music)

After helping one driver get unstuck from the snow,

their own car breaks down,

and both David and one friend

go in opposite directions

in search of help.

(suspenseful music)

- Twelve minutes might seem like a lot,

but it takes far less than 12 minutes to commit a murder,

and 12 minute window when there's no witnesses

or any suspects to see what happened,

it's enough to build a case around.

- Then they put Nichol John into a women's prison overnight,

and they put a polygraph operator in with Ron Wilson,

and they started working on them.

Gradually, the police got them from, "Nothing happened,"

to Wilson implicating Milgaard

saying he saw blood on his pants,

and Milgaard making admissions

that he had stabbed her or had fixed her

or whatever his words were.

And they got Nichol John to the point

where she said that she was an eyewitness,

and saw Milgaard do it.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] The police get enough from David's friends

that they are able to put together an idea

of what happened on the morning of the murder.

- There's no question the police put a lot

of pressure on both Ron Wilson and Nichol John.

- [Narrator] Even with his friends going on record

as to what David has done,

he continues to deny everything.

- The police were aware of the sexual attacker

who'd been operating in Saskatoon in the fall of 1968,

and they were quite public in the media

that they were linking that sex attacker to the murder.

(sinister music)

- [Narrator] Four months after the murder of Gail Miller,

David Milgaard is officially arrested

and charged with her murder.

- One of the unique aspects of the case was that

in Canada currently the law is that

when you have a preliminary inquiry,

there's a publication ban.

The media can't publish

the evidence of a preliminary inquiry.

Milgaard's preliminary inquiry happened

just before that law took effect.

So all the evidence at the preliminary inquiry

was on a daily basis published

in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.

And then when it went to trial, obviously,

there was plenty of coverage as well.

It was kind of a big deal in the local media.

(eerie music)

- [Narrator] Things only get worse for Milgaard.

While being transported to testify at the trial,

Ron Wilson tells police he hears from Lapchuk and Melnyk,

who were partying with Milgaard in a Regina Motel

just four months after Gail Miller's murder.

Milgaard is teased about being responsible.

He responds by asking for his pairing knife

and acts out how he stabbed her 14 times.

- It became sort of this large part

of the final nail in his coffin at the trial.

- [Narrator] Milgaard's trial garners much attention,

and over 40 people testify.

(tense music)

- And the Crown kind of gave a general theory

about how this homicide had occurred

and how Milgaard fit into that picture.

You know, the defense, I guess,

tried its best to try to rebut that.

So the jury was just left with this sort of still image.

And once they had that information,

then they were fully on the rails

to go and arrest and prosecute successfully,

and they convicted.

(tense dramatic music)

(gentle music)

(tense dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Late January, 1969,

kids on their way to school

find Gail Miller's body in a snowy alley.

The case looks to be going cold

until a $2,000 reward prompts citizens to come forward.

- Cadrain, the friend that Milgaard had gone to visit,

goes in and implicates Milgaard,

and says that he had seen blood on Milgaard's pants

the morning of the murder, and that changed everything.

- [Narrator] After a series of interrogations

of Milgaard and his friends,

the police have eyewitness testimony

that Milgaard may have been responsible.

- The police got them from, "Nothing happened,"

to Wilson implicating Milgaard.

- [Narrator] When Milgaard and two acquaintances

learn of Gail's murder on the news,

Milgaard jokingly acts out that he stabbed her.

- The police start to harden their view

that Cadrain might be correct.

- David Milgaard is convicted exactly one year

after the murder of Gail Miller.

(gentle music)

Milgaard spends the next decade in prison

before getting a glimpse of freedom in 1980.

- After he got convicted,

the family was resigned.

Like what are they going to do?

And not a lot happened for many years,

nine years roughly.

Then what happened is David escaped.

(gentle dramatic music)

- [Narrator] After a decade in prison

for a crime he swears he did not commit,

David Milgaard is desperate enough to live

a life on the run if it means his freedom

and not having to go back to prison.

(suspenseful music)

Milgaard is let out on a day pass

to attend a family barbecue in Winnipeg.

- David was on a temporary absence

from the prison and didn't come back,

and he was leading a life in Toronto,

had a girlfriend, and was selling jewelry

and stuff on the street in 1980s era Toronto.

They were obviously looking for him,

and David sensed the presence of law enforcement,

and he ran,

and he got shot.

(gunfire blasting)

(heartbeat pulsating)

(somber music)

- [Narrator] His mother Joyce

is immediately by his side at the hospital.

- When he was in the hospital,

Joyce decided that she had to do something,

and so in 1980, she said, "I'm not going to wait."

They'd tried to get lawyers.

They'd tried to get some help.

- [Narrator] Milgaard's desperate attempts to be free

has led not only to him being shot,

but a mother's resolve to prove that

the Saskatoon Police really did have it wrong.

Basing the case on loose timelines,

flawed interrogations, and unreliable tips,

David's conviction, being one of tunnel vision,

and a system that clearly was wrong.

- Nobody was interested,

"in something he didn't do," as the lyric goes.

And then she took it on herself.

And so she posted.

She put up a reward,

and posted the reward all through Saskatoon

saying, "Anybody who has any information tell me."

(gentle music)

My first week at work was the week of March 3, 1986.

Day three, the Wednesday,

was when we met Joyce Milgaard,

and in walks Mrs. Milgaard, and my boss,

Hersh Wolsh, hauls me out of the hallway,

and says, "Asper, get in here,"

and introduces me to Mrs. Milgaard.

She's pointing her finger on the desk,

and going, "My son is innocent."

He had 17 years in at the time.

She says, "You need to do something about it."

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] Joyce tells David Asper

about what her son has gone through,

the trip that led to his arrest,

the interrogations, and his conviction.

- When Mrs. Milgaard first came to see us,

she gave us bags and boxes of documents,

and there were sort of two piles.

One pile was his life in prison,

and the second was all the trial

and sort of all the court stuff.

And I didn't know where to start.

And I started with his life in prison.

It still affects me to this day

to have read through the words

of Corrections Canada describing

a somewhat scattered 17-year-old kid

gets sucked up into that system and not do well,

which understates what his experience was.

- [Narrator] David Asper travels to prison

to meet with David Milgaard.

(dramatic music)

- I was actually shocked when I met him,

because on paper you read this whole

horrible story of his incarceration,

and you're not sure what you're going to get.

And in popped this very affable, friendly,

very engaging human being.

And I was really surprised.

It's one of the most enduring things

that people should understand about him

is that, he would say it quite openly,

the system took him, but it didn't own him.

It owned him maybe for a little while,

and then once he got on his feet,

it didn't own him.

Wouldn't let them.

- [Narrator] David Asper has a lot of work ahead of him,

but after seeing David Milgaard's resilient attitude

and his mother Joyce's dedication,

he's motivated to prove Millard's innocence.

(pensive music)

Back in Winnipeg,

David Asper continues to build his case.

- I mean, the first thing I did

when I began my representation of David

was I read the trial transcript,

and I could see, on its surface,

I could see how he could have been convicted.

I can see that, and I said to him,

"Okay, tell me why.

"You know, tell me what's wrong here."

Whether you say that it was an illegal

or an overbearing interrogation,

isn't really the point.

The point is that it had enough pressure

that two young kids went from, "Nothing happened,"

to becoming the core of the Crown's case

against David Milgaard.

And how did that happen?

And we know there were questionable techniques.

The police brought in a polygraph examiner

to work on Ron Wilson.

And you can see in some of the police documents

where they were clearly of a view that either

Wilson was a witness or he was involved.

Okay, what does that mean?

So now it means that the police are saying to Wilson,

"You're either a co-killer with Milgaard or you're innocent

"and maybe you have some evidence for us.

"What's it going to be?"

- Sometimes when involved in an interrogation,

more needs to be done than simply asking a question

and getting the truthful answer.

But the fact of the matter is,

using scare tactics and twisting the words of children

is not going to be good police interrogation

no matter what the ultimate conclusion is.

- It's a reworking of a universal lie

that's known in polygraph, which is,

if I ask you, "Have you ever hurt anybody?"

If you say no,

that's probably not a credible answer.

If you say yes,

I'm going to use it to say,

"Well, if you hurt somebody before,

"maybe you hurt somebody in the back alley in Saskatoon."

I don't think police want to get the wrong person,

but there's this psychological switch that clicks

without malice where the mindset completely changes,

and then everything becomes about sort of fulfilling

that theory of the case to the exclusion of everything else.

And that's what happened here.

(gentle dramatic music)

- [Narrator] A key piece of evidence

in David Milgaard's trial

was the testimony citing his alleged reenactment

of the murder in a motel room.

But the moment is called into question.

If it happened at all,

it appears to have been teenagers joking around.

- That evidence came out of the blue for the Crown attorney,

where Milgaard supposedly reenacted the murder.

It came from two people charged with robberies,

who got stunningly low sentences

for pleading guilty to those robberies.

- [Narrator] These are the same two people

Ron Wilson mentions to police, Lapchuk and Melnyk.

- It was early in the case, and I had a witness.

We had a witness whose evidence initially was,

"No, that never happened."

And then it evolved,

"And maybe it did happen,

"but it was all a joke."

By this point, Milgaard had been questioned

and whatever happened in there is sort of irrelevant

because he didn't commit the crime.

To this day, I think the one thing

the jury didn't have the benefit

of understanding or seeing,

which is that if you take what the Crown said happened

and you locate everybody, it's not a diorama.

It's not like a frozen image.

It's dynamic.

And when we took

what the Crown said happened on its face

and set it in motion, it made no sense.

(dramatic music)

And so I took my own little VHS camera,

and I went myself.

I did all the walking.

I did all the movement and timed it.

And when I did that and videotaped it,

it just hit me like, "Holy smokes,

"like there's no chance any of this happened

"the way it was portrayed for the jury."

Okay, it didn't happen that way.

It couldn't have happened that way.

That's when I kind of knew that

there was something seriously wrong here.

- [Narrator] Lawyer David Asper and Joyce Milgaard

are certain that David did not kill Gail Miller,

but the question then remains, who did?

(tense dramatic music)

(gentle music)

(dramatic music)

Gail Miller is found dead

on a winter morning in 1969.

Exactly one year later,

David Milgaard is convicted for her murder.

David Asper is brought onto the case

by David Milgaard's mother in hopes of freeing her son.

- My first week at work, day three,

was when we met Joyce Milgaard.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] And going over the evidence,

reveals holes in the original court case,

including questionable tactics that were

put to use when witnesses were being interrogated.

- It had enough pressure

that two young kids went from,

"Nothing happened," to becoming the core

of the Crown's case against David Milgaard.

- [Narrator] But just believing David is innocent

isn't enough to get him out of prison,

and no one is working harder to prove

his innocence than his mother Joyce.

Since Milgaard was put behind bars,

his mother Joyce has been leading

the charge to free her son.

- And she was relentless.

She was analytical.

I don't know there was ever a moment

where she wasn't focused on getting David out of jail

and get getting this whole thing undone.

And they believed from day one that he was innocent.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] Their strategy changes

from trying to just prove David's innocence

to trying to find another suspect.

(gentle dramatic music)

A big break finally comes when Asper and Joyce

get a tip about a man named Larry Fisher.

(sinister music)

- We'd been taking all these steps,

and we initiated contact with

the Federal Department of Justice.

(gentle dramatic music)

And then out of the blue one day we got a tip,

and credit to Joyce because as soon as we heard the name,

she remembered seeing that name buried in the reports

when police were canvassing the neighborhood.

Sure enough, we went back.

We're looking at all the handwritten notes

from the police officers,

and there it is, February 4, 1969,

police talked to Larry Fisher

at the same bus stop that Gail Miller took to work.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] At the time of the murder,

Larry Fisher wasn't a suspect.

He was only questioned

as to whether he had witnessed anything.

However, he did give the police

one interesting piece of information.

- And he gave his address the same address as the home

that Milgaard visited that morning.

- [Narrator] There's a strange connection

in the house that Fisher lives at.

He also regularly waits at the same bus stop as Gail Miller.

- We got the tip,

and we had to go and do our own investigation.

The Department of Justice assigned the RCMP to it,

and they certainly didn't produce

what we ultimately produced.

- [Narrator] Larry Fisher is in and out of prison

throughout the 1970s and 80s for sexual assault

and attempted murder.

For all intensive purposes,

his MO seems to match what happened to Gail Miller.

(gentle dramatic music)

- When we prepared the chart of Larry Fisher's crimes,

we had sought outside advice from very, very wise lawyers.

We were confident that you could actually prosecute

Larry Fisher on the basis of what's known in law

as similar fact evidence where somebody's MO is so unique

and so consistent that you can show previous incidents

to prove something that he did that he's accused of now.

So we believed that we could show,

based on the whole pattern of Fisher's activity,

that he had murdered Gail Miller.

And we went public in a way.

We were on every talk show,

TV, radio, coast to coast.

(gentle dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Taking it even further in front of the media,

Joyce approaches Justice Minister Kim Campbell,

Campbell being the head of the

Department of Justice of Canada.

- I'd just like to give you this.

- Madam, if you want your son to have a fair hearing,

don't approach me personally, I'm sorry.

- Kim Campbell was coming out of an elevator,

and Joyce had set up all the media cameras.

When the Minister of Justice

was coming out of the elevator

and there was Joyce standing there

with a binder of materials,

she said, "Please, Minister.

"Please, will you talk to me about my son?"

And she just blew her off,

and walked right by.

And all the cameras were rolling,

and it just looked heartless.

And it was on the national news,

and it was a huge story, and it triggered,

like I've never seen at any other point in that case,

because it was the Minister of Justice

not even having the courtesy,

regardless of the substance of what she should see,

just blew right by Joyce.

(dramatic music)

I honestly believed that we would do our work.

We would summarize the case,

and we would contact the Department of Justice.

And we would link arms

and march together to get justice.

When I could see that,

that wasn't going to happen,

and not only was it not going to happen,

but that the attitude of the system was adversarial

to the idea, just to the very idea,

that there could be a wrongful conviction,

I was pretty resolute that I was not,

I was invested in not letting the system

once again grind down the Milgaards.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] David Asper and the Milgaards

are continually disappointed by the justice system

after their first wrongful conviction review is dismissed,

but they don't give up.

- When we got turned down,

I had to go tell David in the prison.

At the time they'd put him in the hole,

which is administrative segregation

or dissociation for he was behaving badly,

and he was not in a good state mentally.

And he gave me a pep talk.

Like I was the one.

I was seriously upset.

And he said, "Okay, we got to try harder.

"Keep going."

And he gave me the "Buck up, little soldier" speech.

Joyce was all over it, and we said,

"Okay, if we'd been fighting a little bit

"with the Federal Department of Justice up to that point,

"we're going to take it up to volume 12."

(tense dramatic music)

I was invested in not letting the system

once again grind down the Milgaards.

It did in the original proceedings.

It did because nobody would touch them or talk to them

through the 70s or the 80s

until the mid-80s when we got involved.

And I just wasn't going to let that happen.

We got mail from people all across the country,

not so much declaring Milgaard's innocence,

but who had concluded that there was enough

that a court had to have another look at this.

It was heartwarming because I remember I got

a particularly poignant letter from a veteran

who equated this battle with democratic principles

of justice and fairness and what was the war for

if the system's going to build such a wall

to protect itself from people

who it might have hurt.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] Being let down at every other step,

Joyce goes all the way to the top and speaks

to the Prime Minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney.

- A little while later,

when the Prime Minister Mulroney's in town,

and he pulls up and his motorcade pulls up to a hotel,

it's lots of security and the media cameras are all there

and Joyce is there and he walked straight over to Joyce,

and he expressed concern for her.

And I hear he talks about hearing

how David is struggling in the prison,

"And I know the Department of Justice

"is looking hard at your case."

He's warm.

He's the opposite of Kim Campbell.

And then things started to happen,

and all of a sudden we were given

a reference to the Supreme Court of Canada,

and then we got to have our say,

and the conviction was overturned.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] After more than 22 years in prison

for a crime he did not commit,

David Milgaard is free.

- It was the first day of Passover, April 16, 1992.

Passover, of course, is the celebration,

the Jewish celebration of the exodus from Egypt

from Pharaoh, from the evil Pharaoh,

And I will never forget going to our family Seder,

our Passover dinner that night having

achieved exodus for David Milgaard.

(eerie ominous music)

- [Narrator] With David Milgaard set free,

the media attention on the case

forces Gail Miller's family to live through it all again

and wonder if her killer will ever be brought to justice.

(tense dramatic music)

(gentle music)

(dramatic music)

In 1969, the body of Gail Miller

is found in a snowy alleyway in Saskatoon

after being murdered.

A year-long case leads to the conviction

and imprisonment of David Milgaard.

(dramatic music)

But his family spends the next

22 years proving his innocence

and getting his conviction eventually overturned.

- We were given a reference to the Supreme Court of Canada,

and then we got to have our say,

and the conviction was overturned.

- [Narrator] But even with David released,

there is still the matter of Gail Miller's real killer.

(dramatic music)

Her murder follows the same patterns

of similar crimes around Saskatoon at the time,

and the whole time David is locked away,

Larry Fisher is in and out of prison

for the same types of crimes.

(gentle music)

Now that David Milgaard is free,

his lawyers must expose Gail Miller's

real killer to exonerate Milgaard.

- They said that the fresh evidence

of Larry Fisher mattered,

and don't forget.

Larry Fisher testified at the Supreme Court,

and we prepared.

Hersh Wolsh and I, prepared for Larry Fisher.

And Hersh did an amazing job of getting Fisher to actually

walk through every single one of his crimes

and was actually correcting us on things

that we might have missed,

but in correcting us was actually bolstering the profile.

- While the technology wasn't what it is today,

they were still taking DNA evidence

found at the scene back in the 60s.

Having a suspect to test

that evidence against years later,

can be a nail in the coffin on a cold case.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Semen found at the scene of Gail Miller's

murder is tested against Larry Fisher's DNA,

and it connects him directly to the crime.

(dramatic music)

- And guess what?

When they finally had the DNA

sophistication or technology to read the semen samples,

Larry Fisher did it.

Everybody except the Minister of Justice knew that,

and then he was convicted.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In proving David Milgaard's innocence,

David Asper talks to other victims of Larry Fisher.

His victims go beyond the scope of the Gail Miller case.

- Just remember like you've got Gail Miller murdered.

You can't talk to Gail Miller.

Who I did talk to was the one he nearly murdered,

(dramatic music)

and literally she's got a scar from ear to ear

of where he slit her throat while he was attacking her.

It leaves a pretty lasting impression

about the person who did that to her.

Like monster,

monster's just a word.

It's beyond monster.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] In June, 2015,

Larry Earl Fisher dies in a prison hospital.

- There's multiple victims.

There's Gail Miller.

There's the earlier victims

who never got their closure.

There's the subsequent victims.

Milgaard is a victim,

individually, David is.

- [Narrator] Because the police choose

to focus all of their attention on facts

to fit the story as they thought it happened,

David becomes another victim in the situation

while Larry Fisher's other crimes

at the time remained unsolved.

(somber music)

- It's so bad.

When the system fails like this,

it's just so bad on so many fronts.

I am certain that I cannot imagine,

I've read, but I can't imagine

what it must have been like for David in prison.

I can't imagine what it's like to have a child,

a sibling murdered.

Like you can't imagine that.

Unless it's happened to you,

you can't imagine it.

For the public at large,

you can sort of shake your head.

You can think and try to empathize,

but these are deep, deep personal human wounds

that get inflicted when the system fails.

The shocking coincidence is that

the house where he went to visit his friend

was the place where they were renting the basement suite

of that home to the person who ultimately was convicted

of the murder of Gail Miller.

They could have solved the crime when it happened,

if they'd stayed on the path, on the theory,

that the killer was the rapist.

That was right in front of them.

(light somber music)

- [Narrator] But for David just leaving prison

doesn't rewrite the decades that he lost.

- There's no dollars and cents value

on the kind of things that are lost.

- Like I say there was no transitional planning,

and you've got a very complex psychology

from the time he was 17 until the time,

how ever old he was when he got out 40, almost 40.

And he had trouble.

He had a lot of trouble.

(light somber music)

- [Narrator] In May of 2022,

David Milgaard passes away

of complications from pneumonia

leaving behind a wife and two children.

From the time he was released from prison until his death,

David Milgaard fought for the rights of the incarcerated

to help ensure that no one would have

to relive his brutal experience.

- He was advocating for a system,

a better way, a better way of resolving

these kinds of wrongful convictions.

And the government of Canada keeps saying, "Yes, yes, yes."

And I've participated in consultations,

and, "Yeah, we're going to change the system."

Six commissions of inquiry have been consistent about

what the changes need to be.

Still no change.

And so, it would appear that the government is content.

That the system is imperfect,

and the way that we remedy

those imperfections is also imperfect.

- [Narrator] If not for the determination of a mother

to prove her son's innocence

and a lawyer's persistence to finding the truth,

justice for Gail Miller might never have been found.

(dramatic theatrical music)

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