Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  As results filtered in, O’Donovan reflected that he was still no closer to knowing how Tina had died, where she had died, and who had killed her. But the detective was satisfied that, regarding the forensic operation, his team had left no stone unturned. “Let’s get back to basics and start beating the bushes,” he told his team as they gathered for their regular morning briefing. He believed that knocking on doors and identifying potential witnesses would be the only way to uncover what Tina had done after leaving Sagkeeng and arriving in the city.

  5.

  THE LOW TRACK

  On June 30, after Tina had hugged Thelma goodbye and jumped into the car to be driven south to Winnipeg, the plan had been that she would spend one week catching up with her biological mother, Valentina, and her younger half-sisters. But while this had been the official aim of the visit, there were no doubt other possibilities on the teenager’s mind. Her previous escapes to Winnipeg had given her a brief taste of what it was like to live the unsupervised life of an adult, free to make her own choices. After the constrictions of home and school, the city presented opportunities to be explored with an anonymity impossible in the small, closed world of the reserve. When Thelma’s son and daughter, who were driving Tina that day, found Valentina’s house locked and empty, the teenager had insisted that she would be fine. She persuaded them to drop her at Valentina’s sister’s house nearby, reminding them that there were plenty of other relatives and family friends who could keep an eye on her. Her confidence had been reassuring, and they had seen no reason to worry.

  The Winnipeg where they parted company was the complicated, colourful, and dangerous world of the inner city, more specifically the North End, just blocks away from where Thelma had lived twenty years previously before packing up and leaving because of rising crime. It was the same district where O’Donovan had enjoyed training as a rookie cop and later cut his teeth as a homicide detective. For the teenager, these streets were the only Winnipeg she knew, and they would, just a few weeks later, become the site of her death.

  The North End was a short walk up Main Street from the rich commercial heart of the city, and barely a few blocks away from the elegant and gentrified buildings of Winnipeg’s historic Exchange District. But it was a different world. The change began a few streets south of where the Canadian Pacific Railway line crossed Main Street, where office blocks and civic buildings gave way to pawn shops, seedy-looking hotels, and the six-storey hostel of the Salvation Army. After the rail bridge and underpass, which felt menacing even in the middle of the day, there were more graffiti-sprayed low-budget hotels with boarded-up windows and chicken wire strung across their doorways. This was no accommodation for tourists. The guests who stayed here were, in the main, funded by social welfare cheques paid directly to the hotel management. Inside were dark, decrepit bars serving as crack houses. Outside, groups would loiter on the sidewalks, especially on warm summer nights. Young men in hoodies, drunks on bicycles, girls pushing strollers—all poor, mostly sick, and mostly Indigenous. If you didn’t belong here, there was no reason to stop. Most Winnipeggers sped by quickly in their cars.

  Because of the railway lines, which ran into a huge, sprawling rail yard to the south of the area, and the natural boundary of the Red River to the east, the North End felt cut off from the rest of the city. At its heart were eight to ten blocks of old clapboard and vinyl-sided houses that had become a predominantly Indigenous enclave. Farther north were immigrant communities: Ukrainian and Filipino families who had settled generations before and passed their houses down to children and grandchildren. The strong sense of community that Thelma remembered still existed and was visible in youth projects, walk-in health clinics, church meeting halls, and a wide range of help centres dotted throughout the area. But no amount of community support could shake the North End’s reputation for violence and vice, which it had held since the rail line arrived a century before. The district remained Winnipeg’s dark underbelly, a hub for organized crime run by gangs. Gang membership reflected the area’s mix of nationalities and was dominated by Indigenous leaders. The Manitoba Warriors dealt in drugs and prostitution. The Indian Posse made a living from armed robbery. Both frequently stole from homes and businesses to fund drug purchases. There were also mixed gangs. The North End Blood had Indigenous and Asian members; the Filipino and Vietnamese, in particular, were known for their violence. Somalis, Sudanese, and West Africans ran the Mad Cow gang and the African Mafia. Despite repeated attempts by law enforcement to clean them out, their dominance continued and had spread across the Prairies to Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, and Edmonton.

  The North End was also notorious for sexual exploitation. In the early twentieth century, when rapidly growing Winnipeg was becoming the Chicago of the North, its street prostitution was split into two districts. The “high track” operated around the ornate turn-of-the-century offices and theatres of Market Avenue, in the Exchange District. This was the more expensive trade, catering to an upmarket clientele. In contrast, a “low track”—rougher, riskier, and cheaper—had sprung up in the area running along the railway tracks. In more recent years, the high-track trade had moved away into massage parlours and onto online escort sites, while the low track had continued to operate and had extended out towards the city’s West End district, close to the University of Winnipeg. Here, on residential streets, sex workers waited at night for cars to slow down and drivers to call them over. Young and middle-aged women stood alongside transgender women and grandmothers. Most worked to fund an addiction. The police who patrolled the area estimated that 90 percent of those selling sex were Indigenous.

  From his years working the inner city, O’Donovan knew how easy it was for women to become mired in sexual exploitation, especially if they had been groomed from a young age. He had heard plenty of depressing stories. Like that of Jennifer, an Indigenous girl who had grown up in the North End in the 1990s. When she was fourteen, she and a friend had been walking to a 7-Eleven to buy Slurpees when they were stopped by two older Filipino men who asked if they wanted to party. Usually she would have said no or thrown rocks or sworn at them, but this time she agreed to go. Her decision led to her being used by a sex ring selling underage girls and being raped, at fourteen, by a man who gave her crack cocaine. It was the first time she’d had sex, and she was petrified, but she didn’t think to report it to the police because what had happened was quite normal among her friends. Nor could she tell her parents. Her home life was chaotic. She had run away several times from a mother who beat her when drunk. Some of her friends had even worse domestic situations to escape, and for them the sex ring became a place of safety. Jennifer knew they were severely abused at home, and that having sex with older men didn’t really faze them; they would just blank out. Now, as a mother herself, Jennifer refused to let her twelve-year-old daughter walk the streets alone for fear she might be sucked into a similar lifestyle.

  O’Donovan knew many more Indigenous girls like Jennifer. Samantha had been sexually abused by her grandmother’s boyfriend and had run away from home at eleven. At first, the older men she met on the streets had been kind to her, giving her gifts and taking her for rides in their cars. But they had also fed her drink and drugs and expected her to steal, deal, or sell sex for them. Many of her friends were raped, and she thought she had been too, but couldn’t be sure because it happened after she had passed out from drinking. As bad as it was for her, she said, it was far worse for the Indigenous girls who had drifted into Winnipeg from isolated rural reserves and weren’t as street smart as the city kids. These girls were often placed in foster homes or hotel rooms by Child and Family Services, but tended to escape. It didn’t take long before they were addicted to drugs and selling sex to fund their habit. In Samantha’s opinion, Indigenous girls were particularly prized by immigrants to Canada, who found their dark hair attractive. Even when she was heavily pregnant, men would proposition her for sex.

  Once on the streets, the women would struggle to turn their
lives around. O’Donovan knew of an Indigenous woman in her forties, Candace, who had been selling sex since the age of fourteen. She told him how the girls had developed their own safety system, warning each other about dodgy customers, watching out for each other as they worked. It was easy money if the dates were good and the men didn’t try to harm them. But there had been plenty of bad dates. Candace and a girlfriend had once been locked inside a house for two days and fed water laced with sedatives. They had escaped by prying open a bathroom window and jumping down from the second floor. Another time a customer had pulled a gun on her. Now she carried a weapon. The abuse came from everywhere. She remembered how a group of young men had once stopped their car and thrown eggs and rocks at her, calling her a dirty little Indian and telling her to get off the streets.

  For O’Donovan, trying to protect women like Jennifer, Samantha, and Candace meant targeting not only the pimps, gang masters, and drug pushers, but also the men who bought sex from them. The Winnipeg Police had joined forces with the Salvation Army, which had been running a “johns” program since the late 1990s to re-educate men arrested for buying sex. The program was open only to first-time offenders who did not already have a record of sex crimes. In the year before Tina went missing, its records showed that most men picked up were either Caucasian or Asian. Very few were Indigenous. They were all ages, white-collar professionals and blue-collar workers from throughout the city, the suburbs, and rural Manitoba. Part of their education was to understand that the women they purchased sex from weren’t doing it for pleasure or out of choice. They were doing it to survive, and for them it was a dangerous business.

  * * *

  —

  On the warm day in June when Tina arrived in Winnipeg, she seemed oblivious to these threats and her own vulnerability to them. As she told Thelma’s son and daughter, she wasn’t alone in the city. She knew plenty of friends and family who could look out for her if needed. So it was here that O’Donovan instructed his team to start their questioning, asking them to gather information on how often Tina’s relatives had met the teenager and when they had last seen her alive.

  Detectives began by interviewing Tina’s aunt, Angie Duck, who had taken Tina in when she arrived. Duck was hazy about the details. Tina had come over on “a cloudy and rainy afternoon,” she said, and had immediately wanted to contact her mother. Duck had obliged, and soon after, Valentina arrived to pick Tina up. O’Donovan already knew from Thelma that it was a few days after this that Tina sent Sarah the selfie showing her scratched and bruised face, saying their mom had beaten her up, though the detective had not seen the picture himself because it had apparently been deleted. Another relative later told reporters that Valentina had got drunk and “kicked the shit” out of her daughter.

  The next time Angie Duck remembered seeing Tina was a week or so later. Tina had been with Larry Dumas, the deaf friend who had brought her back to Sagkeeng after she had run away. On July 22 Tina came to her house again, this time with a new boyfriend she introduced as Cody. Duck was able to give a precise date of the meeting because Tina posted a picture of a family gathering on Facebook. In all the times Duck saw her niece, Tina never stayed over with her. The last time she remembered seeing the schoolgirl was the night after the family gathering when Tina walked by her house in the dark but didn’t stop to say hello.

  Detectives were keen to speak to Valentina, hoping to understand what had gone on between her and Tina that had led to the fight and beating. But when they arrived at her house, they found Tina’s biological mother intoxicated and insensible, broken with guilt and grief. She was unable to give a clear account of what had happened, except to say that after their first encounter, she and her daughter had not spent much time together that summer.

  Officers had more luck with Valentina’s part-time boyfriend, Joseph Nanacowap. The Ojibway-speaking man from the remote reserve of Lake St. Martin remembered seeing Tina four or five times, often with the boy she had introduced as Cody. The last meeting was in late July or early August. Tina and Cody turned up at his place in the North End saying they had nowhere to go, so he allowed them to spend the night on his couch. By early the next morning, the couple was gone. Nanacowap said he hadn’t been concerned about the teenager, who appeared happy and in control of her life. “She never seemed under the influence of alcohol and drugs,” he later said.

  The presence of Cody was mentioned by another witness, a family friend Tina had known since she was a baby. Steve Whitehurst, or Uncle Steve, had been a long-time friend of Tina’s father. He said Tina and Cody visited his house in the North End and left behind several shopping bags full of clothes for him to look after. A few days later, at the end of July, Tina returned and asked to use Whitehurst’s phone to contact a youth shelter where she had been sleeping. She confessed that she didn’t like it there and would prefer to stay with him. But Whitehurst had been wary. Cody seemed always to be at Tina’s side, and Whitehurst felt that the boy had a controlling influence. “You can stay at my place, but there are two rules. You can’t have your boyfriend over twenty-four seven, and I need to know where you are,” he told the girl. Not liking these restrictions, Tina had left. Shortly after, still in late July, Whitehurst took his family on a trip to Sagkeeng. He knew Thelma and Joe were looking for Tina and had spoken to them a couple of times about having seen her. Before he left Winnipeg, his wife messaged the teenager on Facebook to ask if she wanted a lift back home. It was only when they arrived in Sagkeeng that they received Tina’s reply saying yes. But by then it was too late and they never heard from her again.

  O’Donovan noted that Tina’s request for a lift conflicted with her earlier message to her sister saying, “Tell Momma and Papa I love them but I’m not ready to come home.” It appeared that within the space of a few weeks, Tina’s initial enthusiasm for the city had diminished and she wanted to find her way back to Thelma.

  Another relative who had seen Tina in the month before she disappeared was Lana Fontaine, an aunt on Tina’s father’s side. Fontaine lived with a brother and sister in Winnipeg’s West End, in an apartment complex on Furby Street, close to the faculty buildings of the University of Winnipeg. The Fontaines were the first people the police contacted when they attempted to identify Tina’s body. Lana Fontaine told detectives she had seen Tina several times, sometimes with her boyfriend Cody. Once, when it was cold outside, Tina dropped in to borrow a favourite sweater, a “white one with a rope belt,” while Cody waited on the street outside. “She looked happy, she always had a bright smile,” Fontaine said. The final time they met was the long weekend at the beginning of August, when Tina stayed for two nights, sleeping on a makeshift bed.

  Reading through the notes taken by his team, O’Donovan reflected that in the weeks Tina was in the city, her relatives had taken a hands-off approach with the girl. They knew she had “run away from Grandma again” and then fallen out with her biological mother, but none of them tried to make her stay with them or return to Sagkeeng. Nor had any of them kept Thelma regularly informed about her whereabouts. It was clear there had been problems throughout Tina’s extended family. Lana’s sister Robyn Fontaine later told a CBC reporter that she suspected Valentina and Tina had argued because Valentina tried to push her daughter into sex work, explaining it was something Valentina herself had been forced into doing at a young age. O’Donovan was unable to confirm this. But Valentina was not the only troubled adult in Tina’s life. Two years after Tina’s death, Lana Fontaine’s daughter, Jeanenne Fontaine, was accused of human trafficking for forcing a young woman into prostitution, a charge she denied, saying she had been exploited herself. A year after that, Jeanenne was shot dead in a drug house in the North End, targeted by mistake in a dispute over crystal methamphetamine. Violence, drugs, and instability seemed embedded in Tina’s family. In the summer of 2014 her relatives had provided her with shelter, food, and company when she wanted it, but none seemed able to give her a steady home. For their part, they told police that th
e schoolgirl seemed well and—aside from mentioning that she sometimes smoked weed—sober and happy. They made it clear that they loved Tina very much, but they hadn’t thought to curb her independence.

  Knowing that women were statistically far more likely to be killed by their intimate partner than by anyone else, detectives turned their attention to Tina’s two boyfriends. O’Donovan was already aware of Larry Dumas from Thelma’s description of him as a “real gentleman” for bringing Tina home when she had run away. When detectives located Dumas, he confirmed he had known Tina for five or six months and that, for some of that time, they had been a couple. He said they had broken up because Tina wanted them to sell drugs together and he had objected. Later, he found out from Facebook that she had started dating Cody.

  Dumas described a normal relationship with Tina despite his deafness, explaining how they communicated by writing messages on his iPad. The last time he had seen Tina was in Portage Place, the glass-roofed shopping mall on Portage Avenue in Winnipeg’s downtown. The mall, built in the 1980s, was a popular hangout for Indigenous teenagers, who spent hours in its large food court or by the entrance that led out to Ellice Avenue, a well-known location for drug deals. When Dumas met Tina and Cody there, there was some tension between the three of them, but it had been resolved and they had gone their separate ways. The last Dumas had heard from Tina was a message on Facebook at the beginning of August. He said he could account for his whereabouts for the two weeks after this and was happy to help police in whatever way he could. O’Donovan noted that he seemed an unlikely suspect.

  The homicide team quickly established that Tina’s second boyfriend was Cody Mason, an eighteen-year-old Indigenous youth from the northern Manitoba reserve of St. Theresa Point First Nation. A few months before Tina arrived in Winnipeg, Cody had travelled to the city with his father to help him recuperate from a car accident. Searching through airline manifests, detectives were able to verify that Cody checked in for a flight back to the reserve at 6:26 A.M. on August 6. Cody and his father had spent their last two days in Winnipeg in a hotel close to the airport, where staff identified a young girl matching Tina’s description as having stayed with them. Because the last confirmed sighting of Tina was after Cody had flown home, he was also not considered a suspect. He was due to return to Sagkeeng to attend Tina’s funeral, and O’Donovan made a note to interview him then.