Sam from the septic tank: the story of one terrible find (7 photos)

People have dirty thoughts, souls and actions. And there are also dirty deaths. What’s especially offensive is that the character in question was unable to influence this fact in any way.





About 70 kilometers southeast of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, the small town of Tofield is adjacent to the large Beaverhill Lake. Not far from Tofield is a farmhouse which at that time belonged to Mr and Mrs McLeod. The couple left for a while and left the house unattended.



Tofield

One day in April 1977, while the McLeods were removing a pump from a septic tank, they discovered something terrible. Someone used a 1.8 meter deep tank as a place to dump the body. It became obvious that someone had brutally tortured the victim. However, the body was in a state of decomposition, and investigators at first could not even determine its gender. Then they found out that the deceased was a man. Investigators gave him the nickname Septic Sam.

The deceased was about 1.70 - 1.75 tall, dark-haired, weighed about 80 kilograms. He was wearing a white T-shirt under a button-down work shirt, jeans and boots. In their opinion, the deceased was young, no more than 20 years old.

Painful death





The place where the body was found

After the McLeods discovered the body, police immediately began an investigation. There was nothing on or around the corpse that could indicate his identity. But a few things were clear. The fact that someone had thrown it into the septic tank indicated some really foul play. The autopsy only confirmed this. There were burn marks on his clothes, most likely from a blowtorch. In addition to cigarette burns, there were also burns on the man’s skin. Someone tied the poor guy up and beat him severely.

The autopsy revealed a little more information about the man's horrific final moments. Before his death, he was mutilated and shot twice in the head and chest. After all this, someone threw the man head first into the septic tank. The killer tried to dissolve the body using quicklime. However, instead of speeding up the decomposition process, as the criminal believed, quicklime slowed it down. This was due to a small amount of water in the tank.

Investigation without leads



Reconstruction of the deceased's face and his shoes

Neither the newspaper articles nor the artists' drawings of the man led to any leads. Investigators sent Septic Sam's dental records to 800 (!) dentists, but none of them could identify any of their patients. It seems more likely that the man was a visitor, perhaps a seasonal worker. Or the killer moved him very far from the crime scene.

Details after exhumation



During the autopsy, it turned out that Sam was seriously ill in early childhood. Judging by the marks of teeth and bones, he fell ill around the age of five. Two years after his discovery, investigators brought in Dr. Clyde Snow to help with a possible identification. The corpse was exhumed and Dr. Snow took 125 measurements of the skeleton. He entered the received data into a computer program. This work led to several conclusions. Septic Sam turned out to be seven years older than originally thought and may have been Native American.



Anthropologist Dr. Clyde Snow

Four years later, the investigation has stalled again, despite widespread press coverage. The police decided to release additional details in the hope of giving impetus to the investigation and obtaining some new information. The killer wrapped Sam in a yellow sheet and tied it with nylon rope. In addition, detectives found that Sam may have been tied to the bed during the torture. There were burn marks on his work shirt, jeans and one sock. But none of these additional details took the investigation any further.



One of the reconstructions of Sam's appearance, made from clay by Cyril Chan

Locals whispered that the bullying and the attempt to hide the body in such a dirty place confirmed the fact that Sam himself was a criminal who was taking revenge for the atrocities he had committed. Although he could simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and witnessed the crimes of others, for which he paid.

It seems that the true identity, as well as the motives of the killer, will now forever remain a mystery.