Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  Following up on Steve Whitehurst’s recollection that Tina had run away from a youth shelter, detectives visited the Ndinawe group home in the North End. Although Tina had been referred here on July 23 by Southeast Child and Family Services and given a bed for two weeks, the shelter had no authority over the teenager. On July 26, Tina failed to make the curfew of 10:30 P.M. After waiting the better part of a day to see if she would reappear, staff reported her missing. The description they relayed to the police had been taken during Tina’s official check-in, and O’Donovan noted that Tina’s weight was stated as 45 kilograms (100 pounds), considerably heavier than the 35 kilograms (77 pounds) her body weighed less than a month later. A day after she was reported missing, Tina reappeared at the home. But a day after this, on July 29, she had walked out, saying she was going to stay with her auntie. When she didn’t return, Ndinawe staff again reported her missing, this time packing up her clothing and giving away her bed to another vulnerable young person.

  At the same time as interviewing witnesses, detectives were also following up on calls that were flooding into a special tip line. Tina’s story was still making headlines, and there had been an unprecedented level of public interest in her case, especially from an Indigenous community eager to help. Some leads were clearly mistaken, but others had potential. A fellow resident of Ndinawe contacted the police to say he remembered having a conversation with the teenager in which she said she had been dealing drugs with an ex-boyfriend, who she hadn’t named. She said her ex had worked for a man she called “the boss” and owed him $9,000, but he had run away without paying. She said she was continuing to sell on her own to make up the debt.

  A woman contacted the detectives to say she was sure she had met Tina one evening in mid-July when she and a friend were sitting outside in the North End. A couple of teenagers had walked by and stopped to pet the woman’s dog, and they struck up a conversation. The girl, who matched Tina’s description, told them she was from Sagkeeng and had been kicked out of home. The woman remembered the meeting because she had been concerned about the young woman’s safety; she had taken her aside to ask her if her boyfriend had been hitting her. The girl said no, but she confided that they were on their way to see their dealer. After an hour of chatting the teenagers left, but fifteen minutes later the women heard screaming coming from the direction in which they had walked. They heard an older woman shout “Why did you bring her here” and “Quit fucking looking at her” before the couple reappeared looking shaken. When the women asked what had happened, the girl replied, “I can’t control whether a guy likes looking at me or not.”

  There were a number of other sightings that placed Tina in the West End, close to the University of Winnipeg, in an area known to be connected to the city’s gang scene. One witness came forward to say she had seen Tina with two black males near an address on Spence Street. The district had a large African immigrant population, and this particular house was known to be a drug hangout. Another young woman came forward to report that she had met Tina at Portage Place on Sunday, August 3, and they had gone back to a friend’s house on Spence Street to smoke drugs. A few days later, the young woman related, on the morning of August 7, she had gone to a rooming house on Furby Street, three streets over from Spence. The Furby Street house was a well-known crack shack run by a Kenyan and a Nigerian who had connections to the Indian Posse. The woman had seen Tina sleeping in one of the rooms, looking uncomfortable under a dirty white blanket that had a flower design on it. The description triggered O’Donovan’s memory of the Chloe Green duvet cover and he made a mental note to have it shown to the witness.

  * * *

  —

  It was still only a few days after Tina’s body had been found, and O’Donovan’s team held an impromptu briefing in the Homicide Unit to talk through what they knew so far. The strongest theory seemed to be that Tina had been killed because of links to drugs and organized crime. The story that Tina’s ex-boyfriend owed a drug boss $9,000 indicated a possible motive. But to the experienced detectives, the details seemed too sketchy to be believed. When they interviewed Larry Dumas he had insisted that he had no knowledge of Tina owing money, and if she did, he said, it hadn’t been connected to him. Detectives had collected several reports of Tina selling small amounts of marijuana on the streets, but there was nothing to confirm that she had been involved in moving thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs. O’Donovan knew it would be unusual for a dealer to entrust such a young-looking girl with so much, especially one who hadn’t been in the city for long. He suspected the story of the $9,000 debt was just Tina talking herself up.

  The Kenyan and Nigerian men connected to the gang scene appeared a more promising lead. Detectives had been able to confirm that Tina visited their rooming house on Furby Street and that she met them in person. O’Donovan considered it was possible that the men either had a sexual interest in Tina or had fallen into an argument with her and that this had given them a motive for murder. He issued an alert to all police cruisers to be on the lookout for them.

  For the moment, the two men remained the main persons of interest in the investigation. O’Donovan was frustrated not to have made more progress, but with an absence of evidence it was impossible to identify an official suspect. Meanwhile, he asked for a media release to be circulated urging the public to come forward with information regarding Tina’s whereabouts specifically on August 8 and 9. From what he had learned from the forensic investigation, O’Donovan believed that these were the teenager’s last days alive and he knew that they would be the key to identifying her killer.

  6.

  TESSA TWOHEARTS

  The Thursday after Tina’s body was found, O’Donovan treated his team to their customary weekly breakfast. It was a practice he’d instigated when he’d become the head of the Homicide unit, and it had become a sacred moment of levity in the otherwise intense work week. O’Donovan favoured a café on Portage and Memorial where his group of thirteen mostly male detectives were less conspicuous in their plainclothes conformity of buzz cuts, pale shirts, and suit pants. As they walked to their table diners pointed them out, whispering that they recognized O’Donovan from his press conference. It was a new experience for the detective, and he felt awkwardly self-conscious. Ignoring the attention, he turned the conversation to Tina’s case. It wasn’t the only killing his team were working on, and he was mindful that they needed to stay focused. This morning he wanted to review the information they had been given from the Missing Persons Unit about Tina’s movements on August 8 and 9, a crucial piece of the jigsaw of her final days they were desperately trying to construct.

  The detective began by running through the list of the times Tina was recorded as missing. The first was on July 10, when Thelma alerted the police and Southeast Child and Family Services to the fact that the teenager had disappeared into the city. From the start, the Missing Persons Unit had marked Tina at risk of sexual exploitation, especially because of her known marijuana use at school. A week later, on July 17, patrol officers responded to a report from the North End that a girl was being dragged down a street by her arm and screaming for help. They arrived to find both Tina and Cody intoxicated. Tina was placed in a short-term detox facility and then given a room at the Capri Hotel on the Pembina Highway, to the south of the city.

  At the time, because of the scarcity of foster homes and shelters, it was common practice for CFS to use hotels to house at-risk youth. Hotels were meant to be a temporary solution before more suitable arrangements could be found, but stays often ran into weeks and even months. The hotel environment provided little protection against exploitation, drug use, and problems arising from mental health issues. CFS had contracted out the supervision of their charges to private agencies whose staff were unqualified to provide the one-to-one support often needed. In the year after Tina’s death, a CBC investigation found that the hotels had become magnets for drugs and sex work and that the contracted staff were failing to shield young people
from illegal activities. That same year, the Manitoba government said it was committed to stopping the practice. In Tina’s case, her stay at the Capri Hotel was brief. She ran away almost immediately, prompting the agency to file a second missing persons report with the police.

  For a week, the teenager remained off-radar in the North End before CFS found her a bed in the Ndinawe shelter. When Tina left, returned to, and then left the shelter again, the next two missing persons reports were issued. But it was the last report that O’Donovan wanted to discuss. It had been made on August 9, a day after Tina had once more been placed back into CFS care, and he wanted to reconstruct the events that had led up to it.

  Detectives were already aware of a sighting of Tina the morning before, on Friday, August 8, next to a property owned by the University of Winnipeg in the inner-city West End. There had been a summer storm that morning and the rain was falling hard. The property, named the Helen Betty Osborne Building after the teenage Indigenous girl beaten to death in 1971, had a parking lot tucked behind it. At around 10 A.M. a security guard received reports of a woman passed out under the overhang at the back of the building. Heading out to investigate, the guard found a young girl asleep behind a car. She was dressed in a green zip-up sweater, pink high-top running shoes, and a white skirt that had been pulled down to her ankles to reveal she wasn’t wearing underwear. There were marks on the girl’s legs that looked like mosquito bites or cigarette burns, and the guard was concerned that she may have been the victim of a sexual assault. When she couldn’t wake her, she called an ambulance.

  Later that day, O’Donovan’s team identified footage from a nearby security camera that was set to pan across the lot, capturing an image every few seconds. It showed a girl walking in the rain, holding a newspaper above her head and moving with a slight limp. O’Donovan immediately recognized her as Tina and winced at how thin and fragile she appeared. As it panned again, the camera caught an image of Tina sitting down next to the wall where she was found. A while later, it captured the paramedic team arriving and the girl being escorted to an ambulance. Slurring her words and appearing confused, Tina told the paramedics she had been out drinking the night before, smoking marijuana and taking gabbies, the street name for the epilepsy drug gabapentin.

  When Tina arrived at the Emergency Room of the Children’s Hospital, she refused to respond to the male doctor on duty, so Dr. Andrea Wilkie-Gilmore was called to examine her. Wilkie-Gilmore noted that Tina was not answering questions and avoiding eye contact. There was a smell of alcohol around her and a small blister burn on her lip, but otherwise the teenager seemed healthy. Wilkie-Gilmore ordered blood work and a toxicology screen and planned to return later in the afternoon. Tina fell asleep, waking only when a nurse came to draw blood and replace her soiled skirt with blue hospital pants.

  At 3:30 P.M., with some of the test results in hand, Dr. Wilkie-Gilmore returned for a second examination. The blood test confirmed that the teenager had been drinking, but the level of alcohol in her blood was low. The results of the toxicology screen had yet to arrive, so Wilkie-Gilmore asked Tina what drugs she had taken. The teenager wasn’t showing the tremors and jerky eye movements of a gabbie overdose, but it was clear she had ingested something. Tina now insisted she had only drunk alcohol and smoked weed. Because she had been found without underwear, Wilkie-Gilmore asked about voluntary or non-voluntary sexual activity. Tina didn’t answer. When Wilkie-Gilmore asked if she could conduct a gynecological exam, Tina refused. When she asked about the blister on Tina’s lip, the teenager replied that she “fell a few days earlier.” The doctor recognized it as the type of blister caused by smoking crack or meth through a plastic pen.

  “I tried to counsel her, to get her to open up to me. I told her about the dangers she could be in. I told her not to run from CFS,” Wilkie-Gilmore later said. But Tina remained impassive. With no medical reason to hold the teenager, Wilkie-Gilmore discharged her. Earlier in the day the hospital had contacted CFS, and a care worker had been sitting by Tina’s bed since the morning. Security camera footage recorded the moment the pair left the hospital building, the teenager trailing after the worker, still wearing blue hospital pants and carrying her skirt in a plastic bag. A few hours later, the toxicology results confirmed that Tina had tested positive for amphetamines, marijuana, and cocaine use. The hospital did not contact CFS to inform them, and CFS did not call back to find out the results.

  Kimberly Chute, the CFS worker called to the hospital, was not Tina’s primary case worker but a staff member who had been on the intake desk when the news had come in that the teenager was in the Emergency Room. Chute, who had a degree in social work, made sure she was up to date with Tina’s file before leaving. She was aware that CFS had registered the girl as someone at high risk of sexual exploitation. The file noted that Tina had been hanging out at Portage Place, which was likely to bring her into contact with pimps and drug pushers. It also indicated that although Tina did have a mother and relatives in the city, they were not able to provide her with a stable home and that Tina herself wouldn’t know what care was available to her through the government system.

  Chute had actually met Tina three times before. The first was at the Capri Hotel on July 17, when Tina had raised her concerns because she admitted to smoking crack. The second time was on July 23, when Chute saw Tina walking along the street. She had called out to the teenager and tried to persuade her to join her for lunch, but Tina said she was on her way to see her boyfriend. Chute had seen Tina once more, this time in her office at the end of July. CFS had passed on a message through Tina’s family that they were looking for her and could give her free bus tickets, so Tina had arrived with Cody and had stayed for a while to chat.

  On August 8, after picking her up from the hospital, Chute drove Tina to a McDonald’s while she waited for her colleagues to secure a placement for the night. She was conscious that the teenager looked thin and hadn’t eaten that day; she also knew that taking kids for a drive and buying them a burger was a good way to get them to open up. As they sat in the drive-through their conversation drifted to the subject of bicycles, a necessity in the city because of the large distances between neighbourhoods. Tina told Chute that she had owned a bike but had lost it and wanted to get a new one. Seeing an opportunity to persuade her to stay in social care, Chute suggested that if Tina remained in her placement, the agency could find the money to buy her one. Tina shook her head. “My friend Sebastian is going to find me a bike,” she said.

  Chute was not familiar with the name. “Who is Sebastian?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

  Tina shrugged her shoulders. “He’s a sixty-two-year-old meth user.”

  Concerned, Chute asked what Tina liked to do with Sebastian.

  “Just chill,” she replied.

  “Have you used crystal meth with Sebastian?”

  Tina just shook her head.

  Chute asked a few more questions, attempting to sound as relaxed as possible. But the teenager withdrew and the social worker did not want to alienate her. That evening she made notes on the troubling conversation, according to CFS practice. Later, when she heard that Tina’s body had been found in the river, she immediately turned them over to the police.

  By late afternoon, Chute’s fellow staff members had found a bed for Tina in the Best Western Charterhouse hotel in downtown Winnipeg. Once there, the social worker handed responsibility for the teenager over to a member of Complete Care, a private agency contracted by the welfare agency. On duty that day was Ngozi Ikeh, a single mother putting herself through college by working shifts. Ikeh had already prepared Tina’s room and began the process of checking her in, noting how tired she looked and that she was still wearing hospital clothes beneath her sweater. They chatted for a while and Tina seemed calm and quiet. Ikeh suggested she get some rest and remain in her room, but Tina said no, she had friends to meet at Portage Place. “That’s not a great idea,” Ikeh warned, pointing out that Tina’s hospital pants were f
limsy and the night was cool. But Tina said she would change back into her skirt. Within thirty minutes of arriving the teenager was walking out the door, promising to return by the curfew of 11 P.M. As a contracted care worker, Ikeh had no power to stop her, but she did record what she was wearing—the same clothes she would be found in two weeks later. That night Tina failed to return to the hotel, and at 2 P.M. the following afternoon, CFS registered her as missing to the police for the final time.

  * * *

  —

  O’Donovan instructed his team to search for security camera footage to confirm that Tina had gone to Portage Place after leaving the Best Western. Detectives found that the drive in the shopping mall camera had been overwritten, but they were able to locate pictures of Tina, dressed in her white skirt, outside a restaurant in the nearby West End. “I think she meant to go back to the hotel,” O’Donovan told his detectives, pointing out that Tina had not packed her belongings to take with her that night. He believed she had gone to find Sebastian to pick up a new bike. “We’ve got to find him,” he said, noting that Sebastian was an unusual name, so it shouldn’t be too hard. “If he met her, we need to see where she went afterwards.”