Glenavon is a village in southeastern Saskatchewan, in the Rural Municipality of Chester No. 125, reached by Highway 48 and Highway 617. It incorporated as a village on April 13, 1910.
In May 1950 the village saw an event unlike anything in its past. A young Polish émigrée, Anna Juswiak, took the train from Regina to Glenavon to meet friends of her fiancé, and her body was found the next day in the backyard of a local home. The RCMP traced a man using an alias to a hotel in Kipling and picked him up at the train station just before he could leave. He was John Woltucky, recently released from penitentiary. Two Kipling women identified him as the man who had stepped off the train with her.
The trial drew some 200 outsiders to a village of about 250 people, and a Regina Leader-Post reporter noted how many villagers left their homes and businesses to look over the scene themselves. Woltucky was convicted twice and sentenced to death both times. He escaped from the Souris Valley hospital in Weyburn in July 1951 and was later recaptured.
In April 2011 the village was shaken again when a 36-year-old local man died after a standoff with the RCMP in the unused old school building. Mayor Blair Arnott said residents were shocked, since it was not something you expect in a little town where everybody knows each other.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Glenavon, Saskatchewan” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.