Thirty-five years after her disappearance, Edmonton police are renewing calls for help from rural Albertans in locating the remains of Ruth Clarke, a senior believed to have been murdered by her own son in 1990.Clarke, 83, vanished in early November of that year. Last heard from on November 1, 1990, she was reported missing eleven days later after police were called to check on her welfare at the home she shared with her 42-year-old son, Ronald Clarke.What followed was one of Alberta’s longest unsolved suspected murder cases.Now, after decades of investigation, police say they believe Ruth’s body was hidden in a hand-dug water well on a rural farmstead less than an hour north of St. Albert — and they’re asking the public to help them find it.“Because of the vast area of land that may contain old hand-dug wells, we are reaching out to the public for assistance in hopes of finding Ruth’s remains,” said Staff Sergeant Kevin Harrison, of the Edmonton Police Service Historical Crimes Section.Investigators believe the well in question is either brick- or wood-lined, roughly 50 to 60 feet deep, and possibly covered or filled with debris or brush. It’s believed to be on private land, accessed by trails through bush or pasture.Efforts to locate the well in recent years — through landowner interviews, aerial mapping, and groundwater consultations — have so far come up empty.Now, police are specifically asking landowners in the rural regions around Morinville, Barrhead, Westlock, Rochester, and Redwater to come forward if they know of any abandoned wells that match the description.“We know it’s a long shot. But we’re hoping someone out there remembers an old well, maybe covered up decades ago,” Harrison said. “That one memory, that one piece of land, could help bring Ruth home.”Ruth’s nephew, Richard Wetmore, issued a heartfelt thank-you to the investigators who have never given up.“We are very appreciative for all that has been done, and that they continue to want to find her remains so that our family may be able to lay her to rest next to her husband, as she wanted.”While no charges have ever been laid, police have long treated Ruth Clarke’s disappearance as a homicide. Ronald Clarke, her son, has remained the focus of the investigation, but the absence of remains has left the case frozen in ambiguity.Now, investigators are hoping that Alberta’s rural memory — farmers, ranchers, or longtime residents — may help close a tragic chapter.“It is our hope that locating Ruth’s remains will bring some measure of resolution to those who knew and loved her, and have suffered through decades of ambiguous loss,” said Harrison.Anyone who recalls the location of an old hand-dug well in the areas north of St. Albert — or who remembers anything unusual about the Clarke family in late 1990 — is asked to contact Edmonton Police at 780-423-4567 or #377 from a mobile device
