Dolores Palmer was a 35-year-old woman living with her husband on a dairy farm west of Medicine Hat, Alberta. The couple occupied a separate residence on the property from her father-in-law, Alfred Palmer. Dolores worked on the dairy farm and also held a part-time position as an assistant teacher with the Seven Persons Early Childhood Services School, giving her a life that was closely tied both to the family farm and to the surrounding rural community.
On December 30, 1990, the quiet of
the Palmer farm was shattered when Dolores and Alfred were discovered at the rear entrance of the farmhouse suffering from shotgun wounds. Investigators determined that they had been shot with a. 410-gauge shotgun. Dolores' injuries were fatal, and she was pronounced dead at the scene. Alfred was still alive and was rushed for emergency treatment before being airlifted to Calgary, but he succumbed to his injuries the following day. What had begun as an attack on two members of the same farming family had become a double homicide.
The killings left investigators with the difficult question of why someone had gone to the rural property and opened fire on Dolores and her father-in-law. Alfred had spent his life farming and had been active in the community, at one point serving as a councillor for the Municipal District of Cypress. Dolores' work included helping on the farm as well as assisting young children at the Seven Persons school. Publicly available accounts of the investigation do not establish a motive for the shootings or describe evidence identifying the person responsible.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police ultimately treated the deaths of Dolores and Alfred Palmer as an unsolved cold case. Information about the killings was circulated through an RCMP cold-case appeal asking anyone with knowledge of the crime to contact the Redcliff RCMP or Crime Stoppers. Despite the passage of decades, publicly available records continue to list the Palmer killings among Canada's unsolved homicides. No named suspect, arrest, criminal charge, trial, or conviction connected to the murders has been publicly reported in the available online material. The person who shot Dolores and Alfred at the farmhouse on December 30, 1990, therefore remains unidentified, leaving the double killing unresolved.
