David Milgaard's ordeal with the criminal justice system ended in 1999 when the Government of Saskatchewan paid him $10 million for wrongfully convicting him of murder and keeping him in prison for 23 years.

But for Saskatchewan citizens the ordeal hasn't ended yet.

They're still wondering if the horror of wrongful conviction could befall any one of them.

They're waiting on the report of Justice Edward MacCallum, who headed a 21-month-long commission of inquiry into the matter, to explain how the miscarriage happened and continued for 30 years.

Millions of tax dollars continue to fl ow to legal experts defending the actions of other legal experts and police who were involved in the debacle.

The commission, announced in February 2004, was given the mandate to examine the 1969 and 1970 investigation into the death of Gail Miller and the criminal prosecution that resulted in Milgaard's wrongful conviction.

The commission was also instructed to determine whether the investigation should have been re-opened based on information subsequently received by the police and the Department of Justice.

It will also make recommendations relating to the administration of criminal justice in Saskatchewan.

Advocates for the wrongfully convicted want Canada to change the way it deals with claims of wrongful conviction.

They want Canada to create an independent criminal conviction review board similar to one in England, but the law governing such matters is within federal jurisdiction, beyond the purview of the commission.

While MacCallum is the fi nder of fact in the Milgaard history, the following overview attempts to address the commission's mandate based on evidence from the commission.

The investigation and prosecution: Hard work, good faith, tunnel vision? Saskatoon police conducted an extensive investigation into Miller's January 1969 death. Offi cers went to the scene, gathered evidence, knocked on doors, retraced Miller's footsteps, interviewed people who knew her and many who didn't. They followed up leads, wrote letters and fi lled out investigation reports.

The investigation fi le thickened but today, no one person seems to have been responsible for reading through the entire fi le or doing an overview of it to ensure all leads were pursued.

Supt. Jack Wood was third in the hierarchy in the Saskatoon police department, with only the chief and deputy chief above him. Wood supervised three divisions: detectives, headed by Lieut.

Charles Short; identifi cation, headed by Lieut. Joe Penkala; and morality, headed by Insp. Hilmer Nordstrom. Detectives Raymond Mackie and Eddy Karst answered to Short.

Among the fl ood of details gathered lay clues that are now apparent but which were not recognized at the time.

A link, suggesting the crime may have been committed by Larry Fisher, who later confessed to other rapes in the area around the same time, went unnoticed.

Milgaard's advocates suggest investigators were so convinced by circumstantial evidence, which seemed to implicate Milgaard, that they were beset by tunnel vision, which caused them to overlook evidence that didn't implicate him.

Police initially thought Miller's murder might be connected to other rapes that had occurred in the area in recent months, but they abandoned that theory when Milgaard was identifi ed as suspect and could not be linked to the rapes.

Milgaard had visited a house two blocks from the murder scene. The victim's wallet and a tuque, apparently stained with blood, were found near the same house.

As police focused on Milgaard, no one recalled a brief reference in the fi le to Fisher, a construction worker who took the same morning bus as Miller. Fisher lived at the house Milgaard visited.

None of the investigators recalled a couple whose living room window faced an alley behind a funeral home.

In the days just after the murder, they told police who knocked on doors in the neighbourhood, they were watching out that window for a taxi that arrived about 7 a.m. They didn't see anything unusual at the entry to the alley.

Months later teenage witnesses gave statements saying they and Milgaard were in a car that was stuck at that spot for about 15 minutes. Nichol John and Ron Wilson said they got stuck immediately after passing Miller on the street as she walked to her 7 a.m. bus. It is during that time they alleged Milgaard killed Miller.

Apparently, none of the police remembered the neighbour's view of the alley after Milgaard was implicated.

Some witnesses said Miller used a different walking route to the bus than the theory required, but the evidence was downplayed.

About three months into the investigation, detective Mackie drafted an outline of the case with a theory of the murder.

The facts he relied upon included some that Milgaard's advocates say had not yet been proven or stated. Somehow, those points, some of which are now known to be untrue, made their way into incriminating, but false, statements later provided by the two teenage witnesses.

The statements were made after the pair were driven around the crime scene, were kept overnight in police custody and were interrogated by a polygraph expert from Calgary.

The fi les kept by Crown prosecutor Bobs Caldwell reveal long hours of work, attention to detail, respect for procedure and the law. Caldwell's belief in Milgaard's guilt was apparent years later in his candor when people asked about the case, his willingness to let people examine his fi les and a sense of duty to inform the National Parole Board about Milgaard's conviction.

Milgaard's advocates suggest Caldwell had tunnel vision, too.

He said he didn't attach any signifi cance to a number of documents in the fi le he received from the police, including a letter comparing Miller's murder to recent rapes.

Caldwell also was satisfi ed to leave unanswered the contradiction between teenage witness Nichol John's claim of seeing Milgaard stab Miller while stealing her purse, and the fact Miller's dress top and brassiere were removed before she was stabbed. John's story did not provide any opportunity for the clothing to be removed.

At Milgaard's preliminary hearing in the late summer of 1969, John refused to adopt the statement in which she described seeing Milgaard stab Miller.

That gave Caldwell time before the trial to prepare to use a new section of the Canada Evidence Act. It allowed the use of prior inconsistent statements to be used to cast doubt on a witness's credibility.

Both Caldwell and Milgaard's lawyer, Cal Tallis, told Chief Justice Alfred Bence they didn't think the jury should be allowed to hear the contents of John's damning statement.

But Bence disagreed and made an error in law that played a huge part in the resulting wrongful conviction.

Bence ruled that Caldwell should cross-examine John on the contents of the statement in front of the jury. Then he told the jury to disregard the contents of the statement and consider only whether they believed John's claim of forgetfulness when they knew she had given graphic details in the past.

Tallis told the commission the mistake marked a "devastating turning point" in the trial.

When Milgaard appealed the conviction, based in part on Bence's ruling, the Court of Appeal found Bence had erred, but it played down the importance of the mistake and upheld the jury's guilty verdict.

Murray Brown, the current head of public prosecutions for Saskatchewan, also believes the Court of Appeal erred in that decision, he told the commission.

The jury was almost certainly infl uenced by the judge's obvious skepticism of John's claim she couldn't remember what had happened, the commission heard.

As the 17-year-old John sobbed and said she couldn't remember the contents of the statement, neither the judge nor the jury seemed to consider that she was steadfastly refusing to repeat lies.

Mother's suspicion fuelled investigation Joyce Milgaard believed in David's innocence as sincerely as police and prosecutors believed in his guilt.

Her certainty in that and her growing doubt about the justice system may have caused her to have tunnel vision, too.

She made statements of suspicion and speculation often framed as fact. She sometimes misstated facts and accused people of deliberately keeping an innocent man in prison.

For the fi rst 10 years after the 1970 conviction, Joyce believed the system would eventually do right by David.

When his appeal failed in January 1971, and the Supreme Court of Canada later that year refused to hear the case, she pinned her hopes on the National Parole Board.

In the summer of 1980, David disappeared while out on an escorted temporary absence.

After 77 days of freedom, he was shot in the back by police trying to recapture him.

As she sat by David's hospital bed, Joyce decided she would have to get her son out of prison herself. She hired a lawyer, posted reward leafl ets around Saskatoon and issued a news release.

Thus began a remarkable media campaign that drew out witnesses, shaped public opinion and alienated authorities.

The rules of Canada's justice system require that a person claiming wrongful conviction submit an application for review to the federal justice minister.

The applicant must provide signifi cant new information that wasn't considered at trial. Although Joyce suspected mistakes had been made in David's case, federal authorities had no application to work with until Milgaard applied for the review in 1988, 18 years after his conviction.

There was nothing to trigger an investigation until then.

In 1981, police referred Milgaard's lawyer, who asked to see the police fi les on the case, to the Attorney General's Department. The answer fed Joyce's suspicion of police wrongdoing. She never followed up the referral and it is unclear whether the fi les would have been released to her lawyer if he had applied as suggested.

A radio reporter found a woman who cast doubt on the story of two boys who said Milgaard re-enacted the crime at a motel room party. That claim eventually formed half of Milgaard's fi rst application for a case review, but the woman, Debbie Hall, would eventually corroborate most of the story told by the boys, George Lapchuk and Craig Melnyk.

Peter Carlyle-Gordge, a Winnipeg journalist, helped Joyce track down and interview trial witnesses.

A key Crown witness, Ron Wilson, backed off his trial testimony of having seen blood on David's pants. Wilson told Joyce that for all he knew, a red stain on David's pants may have been Kool-Aid.

The weakening of Wilson's evidence bolstered Joyce's belief her son had been wrongly convicted, but she didn't know what use might be made of it then.

As they accumulated bits of information, Joyce's suspicion swelled to near paranoia. She began taping conversations related to the case without telling the other parties. She told the commission she wanted to remember accurately the things that were said. Despite the recordings, Joyce sometimes misstated facts discussed in the conversations, the commission heard.

She and Carlyle-Gordge tracked down witness John and used any method they could think of to talk to her. Milgaard's sister, Susan, posed as a resident of John's apartment building and tricked her into giving her unlisted phone number.

Instead of asking prosecutor Caldwell if they could see his case fi le, Carlyle- Gordge approached him with a halftruth, saying he wanted to research the Milgaard case as part of a book on famous murder cases.

Joyce switched lawyers. With the fi nancial backing of a friend, whom Joyce would later wrongly accuse of conspiring against David, she hired a lawyer for Nichol John and convinced her to meet with Joyce and her lawyer.

John insisted she couldn't remember what had happened on the day of Miller's death.

The Milgaard team placed newspaper ads and hired a skip trace service to seek witnesses.

After six years of trying to get new evidence, Joyce went to Winnipeg lawyer Hersh Wolch, who handed the matter to a junior lawyer, David Asper.

News reports, right and wrong, helped Milgaard win freedom Journalists covering the story over the years made errors in fact, misled and infl uenced sources, used an unnamed source who misled them and reported unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing.

Some were biased and many produced unbalanced articles.

One reporter "was used like a cheap whore," according to Brown, of Saskatchewan's public prosecutions branch.

Yet justice offi cials testifi ed at the inquiry that without the public pressure caused by the media, Milgaard's case would not have been referred to the Supreme Court, where his conviction was quashed in 1992.

Without the Supreme Court reference hearing, the 1997 DNA tests probably would not have been ordered. Without the DNA results, Milgaard would not have been exonerated and Larry Fisher would not have been charged with murder in Miller's death.

The media's interest in the case began small, with a few reporters producing local stories, as Joyce Milgaard sought help anywhere she could get it. Journalists often had resources and knew how to gather information.

While there were errors, there were also many solid, informative reports over the years.

When Milgaard's case landed in the hands of the inexperienced Asper, whose family owned a growing media company, Asper eschewed the traditional deference to procedure and spoke out against the way federal lawyers were responding to the claim of wrongful conviction.

Asper said he used the media to wage war on forces that kept Milgaard in prison.

Police and federal and provincial government lawyers, who had information Milgaard's advocates and reporters did not have, were dismayed at inaccuracies in the news.

Incorrect statements and unfounded allegations in news reports hardened many authorities against Milgaard. One lawyer compared the effect on authorities to that of the fabled villagers when the boy cried wolf.

Police and provincial lawyers didn't feel they should comment on a matter being handled by the federal Justice Department. Federal lawyers refused to respond to statements in the media, lest they appeared to usurp the justice minister's authority.

Reporters were left with a compelling, one-sided story. Sometimes they failed to check facts and took Joyce's or Asper's words at face value, often using quotations that summed up new information with colourful statements of suspicion and speculation.

A commonly reported fallacy was that Milgaard had provided federal offi cials with a witness who refuted trial evidence against him and with scientifi c proof exonerating him. Numerous news stories stated that claim and quoted Joyce or Asper criticizing federal offi cials for dragging their heels on the review and knowingly keeping an innocent man in prison.

Milgaard's advocated didn't know both claims had been investigated and both failed to undermine the conviction. The scientifi c evidence about semen found at the scene was not new and was, at best, worthless to Milgaard. Subsequent tests showed the evidence tended to link him to the crime, rather than rule him out.

Nor did Milgaard's supporters realize that Deb Hall's recollection of the motel room party, as told to the federal investigator, had changed to the point where it was more incriminating than the trial evidence given by others.

Another popular error perpetuated in the media was the suggestion that semen found in the snow at the murder scene was dog urine. The possibility was raised by Manitoba's chief medical examiner, Dr. Peter Markesteyn, who suggested the substance found outdoors at the unprotected site could have been contaminated. He didn't have all the lab worker's notes and didn't know if the substance had been tested to confi rm it was of human origin. The fi rst news reports on the topic quoted Markesteyn's question, but over time, the origin of the suggestion was less often quoted and it was sometimes presented as a fact.

The technician who analyzed the semen in 1969 testifi ed at the commission that he conducted the tests to prove the substance was human semen. His notes also show a vial containing the thawed substance also contained human pubic hairs.

Over the years, the story was covered extensively by the Winnipeg Free Press, the Globe and Mail, CBC television and radio and may other news outlets.

News stories about Milgaard's efforts to prove his innocence resulted in the anonymous phone tip that alerted his lawyer to the existence of Larry Fisher.

A later story about Milgaard and Fisher drew out another woman who identifi ed Fisher as the man who groped her on the street the morning Miller was killed, just a few blocks away.

In 1990 Winnipeg MP John Harvard raised questions about the case in the House of Commons. The story grew beyond the Prairie provinces to one of national interest. Milgaard's name entered the public consciousness. Support groups formed, people attended rallies and wrote letters.

Reporters watched May, 1990, as federal justice minister Kim Campbell refused to speak to Joyce in Winnipeg, and in 1991, they saw prime minister Brian Mulroney approach Milgaard with expressions of concern for David and a promise to help.

Canadians watched. Many were convinced by what they'd learned in the news and many conveyed their dismay to elected offi cials.

The public pressure, not the evidence gathered by Milgaard's team, led to the Supreme Court review and Milgaard's release in 1992.

Case reviewers assumed conviction was safe Lead investigators in two reviews, prior to the 1997 DNA tests, dismissed Fisher and concluded Milgaard probably was guilty.

Both began with the assumption the conviction was safe.

Federal lawyer Eugene Williams investigated applications to the justice minister under Section 690 of the Criminal Code, which is the last chance appeal of a conviction under Canadian law.W illiams's job was to look into the new and signifi cant grounds Milgaard put forward to support his claim. Williams said he was willing to look at other information if it arose during his investigation.

There was much more evidence against Milgaard than against Fisher.

For 20 years, people had believed Milgaard had committed the crime and had thought about their experience of him in that context. They had reason to remember details, coloured by belief in the conviction. For some, speculation mingled with memory.

At least some of the statements against Milgaard that Williams gathered appear to have been affected by that process.

At the time of Miller's murder, no one suspected Fisher, who had not yet been caught or charged with any rape. Signifi cant behaviors that might have been recalled, if people had been questioned at the time, faded from memory. Evidence that might have proved a link to the murder disappeared with time.

In 1991, Fisher was not completely unco-operative with investigators, but he stalled, leaving Williams with an uneasy feeling. That feeling wasn't enough to support an allegation of murder. Williams dismissed the uneasy feeling and accepted Fisher's denial.

As an agent of the federal Justice Department who believed the conviction was safe, Williams scrutinized statements helpful to Milgaard more rigorously than those which supported the conviction.

The commission examined Williams' interviews with Fisher's ex-wife Linda, who thought Fisher was the real killer, and with Nichol John, who maintained she couldn't remember events related to the day or the investigation.

Williams looked much more closely at Linda Fisher's statement than he did at the weaknesses in John's. While he seemed to cross-examine Fisher, he glossed over vague and questionable responses by John.

After Milgaard was released in 1992, the Saskatchewan government asked the Alberta Justice Department to oversee an RCMP investigation into allegations of wrongdoing brought by Milgaard advocates against Saskatoon police and Saskatchewan justice offi cials.

Insp. Murray Sawatsky oversaw a 12-member task force that worked diligently and uncovered signifi cant new information.

But once again, tunnel vision may have affected investigators' perspectives.

The investigation concluded there was nothing wrong with the original investigation.

When answers could not be found for Milgaard's suspicions, Sawatsky ruled against the possibility police had done anything wrong. He told the commission he couldn't think of any reason why John and Wilson gave false statements after Calgary interrogator Art Roberts questioned them.

When the 1997 DNA evidence led Saskatchewan justice to declare Milgaard factually innocent, it proved John and Wilson lied when they implicated Milgaard in Miller's death. That means they were telling the truth when they originally told police that Milgaard hadn't been involved in the murder.

Yet, Sawatsky told the commission, "In Nichol John's case, I'm not sure whether it was simply because she was unable to recall or, sometimes, perhaps, she felt that she could somehow be implicated. For any number of reasons, Nichol John was not forthright when police initially interviewed her," Sawatsky said.

Police methods that drew out the false statements from John and Wilson were said by Sawatsky to be, "Either very good police work or very poor police work, depending how it was done. . . .

What I assumed happened here, that's good police work," he said.

Neither re-investigation took a broad, overall view of the cases against Milgaard or Fisher. Instead, each isolated the individual aspects of the case. In many, if not all, instances where Williams or Sawatsky were called on to make judgment calls about the credibility of witnesses, they accepted evidence that supported the conviction.