Thirty-five years after David Milgaard was wrongly convicted of murder, a public probe has begun into what is considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in modern Canadian history.

As the Commission of Inquiry got underway in Saskatoon, Sask. on Monday, Alberta Justice Edward P. MacCallum began proceedings with an explanation of the scope of his probe.

Charged with reviewing Milgaard's wrongful conviction in the brutal 1969 murder of 20-year-old nursing aide Gail Miller, MacCallum said his inquiry is not meant to serve as another trial.

"I urge patience from the parties with standing, from the media, and from the public," MacCallum said. "Please exercise restraint in speculating what the facts might be in the end."

As for the facts surrounding Miller's death, there is little that remains a mystery. On Jan. 31, 1969, Miller's lifeless, partially clad body was found in an alley. She had been raped, and suffered 14 stab wounds to her body and another 15 slashes to her throat.

Milgaard, who was a teenager at the time, was convicted of the crimes and spent 23 years in jail proclaiming his innocence. With his appeals denied, he even made two attempts to escape prison.

But it wasn't until 1991 that the tide turned for Milgaard, when media reports implicating convicted Saskatoon serial rapist Larry Fisher in the crime prompted then-justice minister Kim Campbell to request a Supreme Court review of the case.

A year later, Milgaard was freed when the top court overturned his conviction. Five years later, DNA evidence was used to exonerate Milgaard. In 1999, the Saskatchewan government gave Milgaard an apology and awarded him $10 million compensation package -- the largest of its kind in Canada.

Another two years later, a jury convicted Fisher of the murder.

Now 52 years old, Milgaard is expected to testify at the long-awaited inquiry, but his lawyer, Hersh Wolch, says he won't be sitting through the entire proceedings.

"He squandered 23 years of his life in prison, and he's not going to spend another year reliving the horror," Wolch told The Globe and Mail.

Fisher has been granted standing and funding for the first two of the year-long inquiry's four phases.

Here's what the four-phase inquiry entails:

• The first phase will rebuild the Miller murder, the investigation and Milgaard's trial;
• The second will look at post-conviction information and how the case was reopened;
• The third will focus on how police and the Justice Department handled information that came out post-conviction; and
• The fourth will look at reasons why the system allowed Milgaard's wrongful conviction to happen.

Wolch told The Globe that final phase could provide some of the inquiry's most interesting revelations.

"It's worth providing answers about how an innocent man was found guilty while the guilty man went free," he said. "And it was so difficult to reopen this case, and why was that? How can that be changed in the future?"

Ten parties, including the Saskatoon police and the provincial Justice Department, have standing at the inquiry.

James Lockyer, the lawyer representing Joyce Milgaard at the hearings and a prominent crusader for the wrongfully convicted, said, "It's such a ghastly case and for that reason alone -- as a matter of conscience -- the country has to see it examined top to bottom to see what went wrong and how we can make sure it doesn't happen again.''

With files from The Canadian Press