Summerland author Susan McIver.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED: Susan McIver

In 1957, Ralph Wilson Snair was found dead in a rental car on a rural road in Kansas.

The 67-year-old bachelor had been shot in the back of the head. His murderer was never found.

Now, almost 65 years later, his great-niece, Summerland resident Susan McIver, has turned the unsolved murder of her great uncle into a book, Long Time Dead: My Investigation into the Unsolved Murder of Ralph Wilson Snair.

"He was a very unlikely candidate for murder," McIver told iNFOnews.ca "He didn't drink, he didn't run around. He was really low risk."

Snair worked as a custodian in a local church, in a small rural farming town where such things didn't normally happen.

McIver was a teenager when her uncle was murdered and remembers her mother being very upset at the murder of her mom's favourite uncle.

It was at a family reunion in 2017 when someone mentioned Snair, and McIver got the idea to write the book.

McIver spent a decade working as a coroner in B.C. and used her experience to piece together the puzzle.

She took three trips to Kansas and visited the site where the car was found. She also found the police report, but as the case is officially still open she wasn't allowed to photocopy or photograph the report.

However, McIver was allowed to look at it, so spent three days transcribing the report by hand.

McIver contacted the coroner's office but the autopsy and coroner's report couldn't be found.

Then, one year later, she got an email saying someone had found the coroner's report in a corner of a dusty storage room.

McIver's book doesn't solve the mystery as to who killed her great uncle but she does however have an inkling of who did it.

"Three weeks before my uncle's death there was the reappearance in my uncle's life of someone called Weasner," McIver said, adding there's no first name in any police report.

Once Weasner reappeared, her uncle started to do unusual things.

He rarely drove and didn't own a vehicle, but was found dead in a rental car.

"I suspect he inadvertently became involved in the drug trade," McIver said.

While rural Kansas wasn't a hotbed of illicit drug use, it was a central point between cannabis and heroin coming from California and Mexico, then heading to Chicago.

McIver said the mystery still remains of who murdered her great uncle.

"At first I was... discouraged at not being able to really point a big arrow at somebody that did it, but it turned out that it's made the book more interesting to a lot of people because they can supply their own ending to it," she said.

For more information or to purchase the book go here.

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