by Joanna Jolly
In the interview room, Detective Sergeant Oliver picked up on the same train of thought.
“If Tina was angry and wanted to get out of the house quickly, why didn’t she use her bike?” he asked.
“Because by then her bike was only two wheels,” explained Morrison.
It seemed that after Cormier had left the house on Tina’s bike, he sold its frame for a bag of weed. When Tina asked for it back, Cormier pointed to the wheels and said, “There it is.” It was another reason why she had stormed out in a rage.
Morrison said his last view of Tina was of her running off down the alley, still screaming at Cormier. The truck remained outside the house for a couple of days, but then it disappeared. Much later, Holland and DeWolfe showed him the newspaper with Tina’s picture on the front page. Morrison remembered reading out loud that she was only fifteen and wanting to see what Cormier’s reaction would be.
“Frenchie said, ‘Holy shit, no wonder she didn’t put out,’ ” Morrison told the detectives.
* * *
—
With all three interviews concluded, O’Donovan pondered what to do next. It had been a phenomenally good day for his investigation, and he was pleased with how the questioning had gone. Despite their drug-fuelled lifestyles, the witnesses had been consistent. O’Donovan had been particularly impressed with DeWolfe, who would likely face a hostile reception back in prison for talking. Morrison had seemed reliable too. He had not given a lot of detail, but neither did he seem to be holding anything back.
The only reservation O’Donovan had was about Sarah Holland’s interview. She had confirmed Cormier’s predatory sexual interest in Tina but had not remembered the stolen truck. After Philippot and Francis had finished their interview, O’Donovan sent them back in twice more to ask her about it. Each time, she kept to her story and insisted that she had never seen it. This detail annoyed the detective, who would have preferred that all the accounts of what had happened at 22 Carmen tie up neatly together.
Still, there was enough to start building a case against Raymond Cormier. The next step would be to interview him and record his statement on video. O’Donovan was struck with an uncomfortable sense of both hope and worry: hope that he would get a confession, or at least a story, which would resolve the case, alleviate the crushing public pressure on his team, and fulfill his own desire to find out the truth; worry that Cormier would sit in silence and give them nothing. The detective had known cases where this had happened, and it had been impossible to move them forward. He glanced at the clock. By now it was late afternoon, and Cormier had been sitting alone for nearly two hours. It was time for his detectives to pay him a visit.
9.
“I DID NOT KILL THAT GIRL”
Interview Room 1 was approximately thirteen square metres in size, lit by a fluorescent light, and bare except for a metal chair and table bolted to the floor. Since 2:47 P.M. on October 1, Raymond Cormier had been locked inside this secure, windowless box. Detectives had checked in on him from time to time, either by sliding open a small window in the steel door or by watching the video feed displayed in the monitoring room. Despite having run from the detectives who arrested him, Cormier now maintained he had important information about Tina’s murder. But he had been told to sit tight until the detectives were ready, so had lain down on the floor and tried to fall asleep. He was coming down from crystal meth and feeling the withdrawal. “My hands are swollen, my body’s sore, and I’m hungry and tired,” he said.
At 4:16 P.M., Detective Sergeants Wade McDonald and Scott Taylor entered the room carrying two chairs, a cup of coffee, and a cup of water. As the senior of the two detectives, McDonald had been instructed to take the lead in the interview. He knew this might be the first of several rounds of questioning, and so he planned to proceed slowly.
Addressing Cormier in a friendly tone, he asked him to sit up. Cormier complied, slowly pulling himself to his feet and slumping down on his chair so that his head rested against the side wall. He was wearing a black long-sleeved T-shirt, and his shoulder-length hair was tied back in a ponytail. When McDonald offered him coffee, he refused it.
“You can call me Wade, and you can call him Scott,” began McDonald. “Can I call you Ray?”
“Doesn’t matter what you call me,” Cormier replied, turning his face to the wall so that it was difficult to hear what he was saying.
McDonald told Cormier that he wanted to make sure he understood what was going on, to which Cormier nodded that he did. He sat with his head bowed and his arms crossed in front of him.
“We’re arresting you for the murder of Tina Fontaine,” said McDonald.
“I don’t understand how you can arrest someone and not charge them,” Cormier snapped back. McDonald didn’t think it necessary to explain that this was normal practice.
“Don’t focus on me as the guy that did this, ‘cause I didn’t do it, right?” Cormier mumbled.
McDonald didn’t respond to this statement and instead asked Cormier if he would like to call a lawyer. Cormier replied that he would, but only if he was being charged. McDonald made it clear that he was free to call one at any time.
“You knew Tina Fontaine for how long?” the detective asked.
“Two weeks, maybe a month?” Cormier replied, adding that he had hardly known her at all and that she didn’t deserve what had happened to her.
McDonald wanted to know how they met. In a series of rambling answers, Cormier described how he had been cycling in the North End at around 4 A.M., heading towards the downtown area, when he first saw Tina and Cody. They had been walking in the other direction and had waved to him. He couldn’t remember who had shouted first, and he replied that if they wanted to get him to stop they better have something to get him high. They said they had a little weed to share.
When Cormier found out they were homeless, he took them to the basement of an apartment block for the night. After that, they bumped into each other five or six times. The teenagers bragged about dealing weed at Portage Place. Cormier said he thought Tina had had some sort of argument with her welfare workers, because she was sleeping on couches or in stairwells. By way of explanation of his own lifestyle, he told the detectives he was addicted to crystal meth, which he took nearly every day. It meant he hardly ever slept.
McDonald nodded slowly, taking in the details. The first interview with a suspect was about establishing a version of events and recognizing weaknesses that could be challenged later. He turned the conversation to 22 Carmen Avenue, in particular the events of August 6, when Tina arrived at the house on her own. He wanted to know what Cormier was thinking when he saw her.
“She was crying,” Cormier told him. “She was distraught. Cody had gone back to the reserve.”
After Tina had cycled there on her mountain bike, Cormier said they sat around drinking and smoking pot. The pot had run out and so he’d borrowed her bike to get more. Tina mentioned she was planning to sell the bike, so he felt she’d given him the green light to take it himself and sell it for dope. The money he got was enough for almost two grams of weed.
But when he returned, Tina demanded to know where her bike was. Cormier told her it was gone, and they got into a fight. She stormed out and he followed.
“She’s just yelling and screaming and I’m yelling and screaming, and she said something and I got pissed off and threw her weed at her feet,” he said. “And she’s gone. See you later.” Days later, he read in the newspaper she had been murdered.
As Cormier spoke, he kept his arms wrapped around him and his head close to the wall. His hair, some of which had worked free from his ponytail, had started to hang down over his forehead, obscuring his eyes and mouth. His speech was slurred and sometimes difficult to understand. But watching in the video monitoring room, O’Donovan noted that Cormier was quite coherent for a junkie coming down from a high. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully, and it was notable that he had not mentioned the stolen truck or the gardening
tools the other witnesses remembered.
Cormier continued with his story. When Tina turned up at 22 Carmen, she confessed to him that she’d just stolen $250 from an unnamed guy. “She’s kind of crazy a little bit, you know,” he said. “Like lost. Her mom and dad hurt her and everything like that.”
He said the man she’d ripped off wasn’t the only suspicious guy hanging around. When he and Tina were arguing outside, he noticed that there was a stranger with long dirty-blond hair walking on the sidewalk just behind her.
“What the fuck, man? Did she get murdered right after she left me, or did it happen the next day?” he asked. “After I left and you’ve got a pretty young girl, distraught and crying and screaming, hysterical a little bit. Is that person the one who went up to her and said, ‘Hey are you okay?’ ”
Cormier explained that what he was trying to do was think like a cop and attempt to figure out what had happened. The man on the street had raised his suspicions. And he had a third possible lead. This one concerned the apartment block where Cody’s dad had been living. He said there had been a crystal meth shooting gallery—a “jib house”—on the ground floor where sex workers would go to get high, and he had heard there was a murder there.
“What does Sarah think happened to her?” asked McDonald, his tone calm and level.
“She knows what happened to her. She got murdered. She got fucking skinned on and fucking murdered,” Cormier replied, his voice now animated, referring to his theory that Tina had been killed by a pedophile.
McDonald asked him about Holland. “Did you have a relationship with her?”
Cormier raised his head a little. “Oh, believe me, I wanted it so badly,” he said.
Now, seemingly warmed up, Cormier started to blurt out more information, flitting quickly between random thoughts. Tina had made him think of his own daughter, who had been given up for adoption. He had two sons as well. One of them was an auto body technician, living in Montreal with a wife and kids. Cormier said he had come to Winnipeg only because he’d been locked up in Stony Mountain prison, which was close to the city. He didn’t like it here because he had no friends, though there was a time when he thought he’d had a chance with Sarah. The last time he had seen Tina was the only time her boyfriend hadn’t been with her, her “royal guard,” as he liked to call Cody.
“Have you been with Tina intimately?” asked McDonald, his voice still calm and friendly.
“No, I never went there,” Cormier answered firmly, adding that he now knew Tina had been only sixteen.
McDonald raised his eyebrows. “She looked eighteen,” the detective said. He was challenging Cormier, wondering if he was deliberately recalling Tina’s age as sixteen rather than fifteen because he didn’t want to admit she was under the age of consent.
Cormier shrugged. “That’s what I thought too, and then I found out she was fifteen or sixteen,” he said, correcting himself. “And, fuck, if she was fifteen, that would have made me a pedophile. But I’m not a skinner or anything.”
McDonald wanted to go back over the events of the summer. Cormier told him he first met Ernest DeWolfe in Stony Mountain prison and described him as a “bad junkie.” He admitted he’d fallen in love with Sarah and called Tyrell Morrison “a piece of shit” for treating her badly. He said the first night he’d gone over to 22 Carmen, he had stopped Morrison from trying to rape her.
“I came close to committing the first murder of my life that night,” he said. “I still don’t know why I didn’t drive that screwdriver through his fucking heart.”
Cormier said he made a living from scrap metal, explaining how he would take the cords from abandoned TVs and electrical appliances and burn off the plastic to expose the copper wiring inside. The money from this and from collecting empty bottles was enough to fund his dope habit. McDonald asked if he’d ever stolen bicycles or vehicles. Cormier nodded yes, in the winter, when it was freezing, when he could find a car with the keys still in it. But, he stressed, the last vehicle he had stolen was in Calgary. He had never stolen one in Winnipeg.
“I believe one of the charges that they have on me now is for possession of a stolen vehicle,” he said, fishing for information. “Like, how do you know that’s not my vehicle?”
McDonald ignored the question and steered the conversation back to Tina and the last time Cormier had seen her. “Did you say it was a few days before she was found? How come you never called us?” he asked.
“Well, buddy, they got warrants out for my arrest and I knew that,” Cormier replied. He said he talked to Holland about going to the police a couple of times. But the combination of the outstanding warrants and his meth addiction meant he had done nothing about it.
Conscious that Cormier’s timeline of events did not match the account given by the other witnesses, McDonald asked again if the last time Cormier saw Tina was a couple of days before she was found. Again Cormier said that it was, or at least that’s what he remembered. He said it could have been a Friday night, but he wasn’t sure.
“So when you saw her walking and you threw dope at her, where did you go?” asked the detective. “Why didn’t you continue to follow her?”
His head still against the wall, Cormier seemed irritated.
“She’s hysterical, she’s yelling and screaming in the middle of the road, and I knew that person was over there, and I just…I had enough, I just threw it,” he explained, once again mentioning the stranger he’d seen on the street. “I walk away from people all the time that are homeless and distraught,” he said.
But the argument had forced him to see Tina in a different light, he continued. He now thought of her as being like his daughter, and his real daughter had once been homeless too. Though he admitted that when he’d first seen the teenager, he thought she was a “nice little tight…” His voice trailed off.
“First you admitted what?” asked McDonald, struggling to understand.
“Nice little tightie. A nice hot chickie. You know what I mean,” replied Cormier. “And then her age came, oh, no. That’s when I started to…” The rest of what he said was inaudible.
For the first time in the interview, Detective Sergeant Taylor spoke up. They were having a hard time hearing him, Taylor said, because his hair was hanging over his mouth. Cormier responded by saying that he knew he was a mess. He was sore and he wanted to leave. The detectives ignored his request.
Cormier continued to speak. “Sarah knew that she was just too young. Sarah’s like a straight-up mother…she’s like a hundred percent mother material.”
McDonald again asked Cormier what happened after the argument. Cormier explained that after he threw the bag of weed at her feet, Tina bent down to pick it up as he turned to walk away.
“Did she threaten you, to call the cops?” asked the detective.
“She said…She was going to…Like I said, there we were, yelling and screaming at each other.” Cormier was hesitating.
“Did she assault you?” asked McDonald.
“No.” Now his voice was firm. “She’s a fucking kid, man. She was angry ‘cause I just sold her bike.”
“When did she change from a hot ticket to a daughter?” McDonald asked.
Cormier said nothing for a few seconds. “I think it was that first night. And I might have said something derogatory about banging her.”
“You were going to bang her?” asked McDonald.
“Not that I was going to bang her. That I…It would be nice to get a b-job or whatever…Something sexual in nature or whatever. And then Sarah kind of said, ‘She’s kind of young, you know.’ ”
“Did you ever tell anyone you slept with Tina?”
“No.”
Feeling that he was beginning to get a clearer picture of Cormier’s relationship with Tina, McDonald asked him to describe exactly how close he had been to her. Cormier replied that Tina had shown him the tattoo on her back with her father’s name on it. If his own daughter had done that, he would be proud of her. His t
one became avuncular. It would have been nice to be in a position to help Tina and Cody, he said. If anyone had hurt his daughter like Tina had been hurt, he would have killed him.
“How could I forgive a pedophile for being a pedophile?” he explained, adding that he didn’t think there were any excuses for behaving that way. “I had a couple of bad things happen to me as a kid, but I don’t go around fucking skinning and fucking raping and killing,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “I can see fucking maybe escaping into drugs or medicating myself…It doesn’t change the fact that a sixteen-year-old was fucking butchered and fucking dumped.”
He said he hoped McDonald and Taylor found the stranger who’d been walking on the other side of the street when he and Tina were arguing. He described him as looking like Robert Plant, the lead singer from the rock band Led Zeppelin. Cormier noticed the guy because he was high at the time. The crystal meth did that, he explained; it heightened his awareness, made him notice every little detail.
“Some of her last words to me were ‘I’m homeless,’ and she’s crying and yelling and screaming,” he continued. “And I think she did threaten to call the cops that night. I think.”
McDonald’s response was quick. “On what?”
“I don’t know. It was something, stealing a bike or whatever. I don’t know,” replied Cormier, sidestepping any mention of a stolen truck.
“I’m not blind. I saw. She was a very beautiful young girl,” Cormier admitted. “It would be nice to get a blow job from her was the thought in the back of my head. You know. It’s the way it is. The truth.”
McDonald asked if Tina had ever shown him any affection in return.
“Not sexual affection, if that’s what you mean, no,” said Cormier, though he added that when Tina had knocked on the door of 22 Carmen, alone and in tears, he wondered what he would get out of it. “When a woman is crying, you know how they…I don’t know, hug you or…” he said, hinting that Tina may have wanted something more than just fatherly reassurance.