Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

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  For the final day of the trial, the courtroom’s public gallery was once again packed. Not only was Thelma present with her family and friends, but Valentina Duck had also returned to take her seat at the back. When everyone was present, Jim Ross stood up to give the Crown’s closing argument to the jury. “This is a real whodunit,” he said.

  The Crown believed that Tina had either been smothered or drowned and that Cormier’s own words had identified him as the killer. Ross argued that the intercept in which Cormier had spoken about being right on the shore and throwing a woman in was enough on its own to convict him. Cormier had a clear motive for killing the fifteen-year-old, who had threatened to go to the police over the stolen truck. With the truck, he also had the means to transport her body to the river.

  Ross continued by summarizing the circumstantial evidence. As he repeated Ernest DeWolfe’s testimony about Cormier’s sexual interest in Tina, Valentina Duck shouted out “Sick bastard!” from the public gallery. Chief Justice Joyal reacted sternly, calling for a break and warning Duck that she would have to leave if she couldn’t control herself.

  “William Shakespeare said in his play Macbeth, ‘Murder will out,’ ” said Ross, wrapping up his long and detailed address. “Mr. Cormier, obsessed with and haunted by what he did, and not knowing a recording device was in his apartment—he has revealed himself to you. Believe what he says, and convict him for what he did.”

  When it was his turn to speak, Tony Kavanagh picked up on Ross’s literary reference. The defence lawyer had noticed during the trial that several jury members liked to read in the lunch break, which had given him the idea to describe his closing argument in terms of a book.

  “We don’t convict on a mystery or a whodunit,” he said. “This is not an Agatha Christie mystery.” He reminded the jury members that they needed to be convinced of Cormier’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

  Kavanagh argued that the intercepts from Styx were not as damning as they first appeared. Cormier spoke fast and tended to mix up the tenses and meanings of his words. When Cormier said he was not going to “bang her no more,” Kavanagh argued, what he really meant was that he had changed his mind about wanting to sleep with Tina after finding out her real age. When Cormier said he had “finished the job,” he was actually talking about finishing the job of trying to find her killer.

  “It is undisputed that Tina Fontaine had a tragic life,” Kavanagh concluded. “It is not justice for Tina Fontaine to convict the wrong man.”

  After each side had summed up its case, Chief Justice Joyal spent four hours instructing the jury members on how to apply the rule of law before they began their deliberations. They were told that they needed to answer two questions in order: Was Tina Fontaine’s death caused by an unlawful act, and if so, did Raymond Cormier commit it?

  While they waited for a verdict, the Crown and defence teams had dinner together, something that may have surprised the courtroom onlookers.

  “Trials are conducted in the wrong way if they are personal and the lawyers aren’t speaking to each other,” said Ross, after spending the evening with his opponents discussing the minutiae of the proceedings and speculating about the jury’s decision.

  The lawyers did not have to wait long for an answer. The following afternoon, shortly after lunch, the court clerk sent out a text message announcing that a verdict had been reached. It would be given in the same imposing surroundings of the green and grey marble courtroom where the trial had opened three weeks earlier. As news filtered through the press corps and to Tina’s family and supporters, seats started to fill up. An informal, self-imposed order separated those present: Tina’s family and Indigenous dignitaries, each wearing their hand-beaded medallions of office, sat on one side of the room; journalists and reporters settled into the other. At the back, beside a marble column, Detective Sergeants Wade McDonald and Scott Taylor tried to look inconspicuous in their grey work suits. In the front row, Thelma cried as, one by one, friends and well-wishers walked up to greet her. She appeared exhausted and nervous, clutching the hand of her foster daughter as she waited.

  After half an hour of waiting, Cormier was led into the courtroom. His legs and arms were in shackles, his face grey and haunted-looking in the pale glow that filtered in through the courtroom skylights.

  The court was ordered to stand for the arrival of Chief Justice Joyal and then the jury. As the jury forewoman informed the judge that they had reached a verdict, several jury members bowed their heads, clearly in tears. Joyal was handed a folded piece of paper on which they had written their decision. As he read the words, an almost imperceptible shadow of concern flitted across his face.

  “How do you find the defendant?” Joyal asked the jury forewoman.

  “Not guilty,” she replied.

  Her voice was low and thick with emotion, so it took a second before the room registered what she had said. Suddenly there were loud gasps, and then the wrenching sound of Thelma’s sobbing. Joyal gave instructions for Cormier to be discharged. As he was led out, a shout was heard from the back of the room.

  “Fuck you! You think you can get away with it!” yelled Valentina Duck, storming past the public gallery and heading for the door.

  In the front row, Thelma was calling out “My baby!” over and over.

  “I hope you rot in hell,” she cried, before crumpling with grief as friends formed a tight, protective circle around her. Someone began to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

  For a moment, both the Crown and defence teams appeared stunned. Jim Ross and Breta Passler quickly left the room. Tony Kavanagh stared at his feet and Andrew Synyshyn grabbed the side of a marble desk as if he were about to keel over.

  Slowly, Tina’s family and the Indigenous leaders moved out into the corridor. For a while the group stood in silence, still absorbing the verdict, under the portraits of white men who had founded the city’s legal system. In whispered conversations, they discussed what to do next. Then someone brought a wheelchair to take Thelma back to her hotel, and the chiefs signalled that they would make a public statement outside on the steps of the court.

  In the fading light of the winter afternoon, Keewatinowi Okimakanak Grand Chief Sheila North eloquently summed up how her community felt.

  “This is not the outcome anyone wanted,” she said solemnly. “The systems—everything that was involved in Tina’s life—have failed her. We’ve all failed her.” If Raymond Cormier had not killed Tina, she continued, then someone else had taken her life, and the city needed to find out who was responsible. “This is not the Canada I want to be part of,” she concluded.

  Sergeant John O’Donovan had made the decision not to be present in the courtroom. In all his years as a homicide detective, he had attended only one verdict, and even though it had gone his way, he didn’t think he could stomach the nervous anticipation again. Earlier that afternoon, when he heard that a verdict was imminent, he had left work to be at home with his wife. It was Detective Sergeant Taylor who broke the news, texting the words “not guilty” to O’Donovan’s phone.

  “I called out to my wife, who put her arms around me and said she couldn’t believe it,” he later said, describing the emotional moment when he realized his work had been in vain. “I told her I could.”

  When the Colten Boushie not guilty verdict had been delivered two weeks earlier, it had prompted mass protest rallies across the country. But that evening, after Cormier was acquitted and set free, Winnipeg remained quiet. In their speeches outside the courtroom, the Indigenous leaders had called for calm and understanding. They spoke out about the Third World conditions they endured and the disproportionate number of Indigenous children in care. But they also stressed how much they wanted to honour Tina and her family by focusing on healing and justice.

  The next morning, the freezing weather that had held the city in a stranglehold since the beginning of the trial broke to reveal a sunny, clear blue sky. Hundreds of mos
tly Indigenous Winnipeggers gathered outside the courthouse to begin marching in honour of Tina’s memory. To shouts of “We want justice!” their orderly procession weaved its way through the city, under the rail tracks and past the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. For an hour they walked, carrying placards with slogans of support. “Lady Justice is murdered and missing,” read one. “Love for Tina,” read another. Finally they came to a stop at the Forks, at the sacred site of the Oodena Celebration Circle at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Here, the marchers observed a minute of silence. There was anger at the child welfare system, at the police who had failed to identify Tina as a missing person, and at all the professionals who had let Tina down and were continuing to let down so many other Indigenous women and girls.

  But there was also a sense of celebration and love.

  “My heart is just overflowing with love and gratitude for each and every one of you,” said Thelma, who was greeted with rapturous applause when she stood to speak.

  For a while, the group lingered in the bright sunshine, listening to speeches, praying and sharing their grief. Whereas the focus of the past few weeks had been the trial, it now shifted to the future. Many spoke of Tina’s legacy as a turning point. They acknowledged the changes that would need to come—from the country as a whole, as well as from within their own community. They looked forward to a time when their daughters could live free from the shadow of violence.

  A few feet away, the polished granite of the monument to missing and murdered Indigenous women reflected the white of the snow. To the north, almost within sight, ice engulfed the spot where Tina’s body had been found. Between the two points, the wide, frozen snake of the Red River curved through the city’s landscape, a timeless witness to all that had gone before and all that would ever come.

  EPILOGUE

  On the evening that Raymond Cormier received his not guilty verdict, the Winnipeg Police Service released a statement saying that they understood that it was a difficult time for Tina’s family and all those affected by her loss, and that they would be examining the court proceedings to determine whether an appeal was possible. In reality, the decision whether or not to pursue an appeal lay with the Manitoba Prosecution Service. Three weeks later, it released a statement saying that, after a critical review, it had determined that “there are no grounds to base a successful appeal.”

  The Crown counsel, James Ross, says he was satisfied that the trial was fair and that the jury “did what we asked them to do.” Cormier’s trial was the last major court appearance for Ross, who retired shortly thereafter.

  Following the verdict, Raymond Cormier travelled east to be reunited with his sister Gabrielle, with whom he had not been in contact for twenty years. The two spent several months together until they fell out and Cormier returned to his childhood home of New Brunswick. In 2019, he gave a television interview in which he admitted to giving Tina weed, but not hard drugs, and once again insisted on his innocence. Cormier says he has made a promise to Tina to find out who killed her, and is hoping to bring a case against the Winnipeg Police Service and the Manitoba Prosecution Service for wrongful imprisonment and malicious prosecution.

  Among the Winnipeg Police Service, the reaction to the not guilty verdict was one of sadness, frustration, deflation, and anger. The Homicide Unit firmly believed Cormier was guilty, and that they did everything they possibly could to bring him to justice. The case has had a profound effect on those involved, especially the undercover officers who spent months building relationships with Cormier. A year after Project Styx concluded, Jenna gave birth to a baby girl whom she named after her undercover character, saying “To me, this project was that important.”

  Tina’s case was one of the last for Sergeant John O’Donovan, who left the Homicide Unit a month after the verdict. (He was replaced by Detective Sergeant Wade McDonald.) At the end of 2018, O’Donovan retired from the Winnipeg Police after nearly twenty-five years of service. He is now working for Manitoba Justice as a team commander of one of their investigative units. In his spare time he is writing a memoir of his years as a homicide detective, a process he describes as “great therapy.”

  While deeply disappointed in the outcome of the trial, O’Donovan understands why the prosecutors did not present all the evidence he collected. In 2018, together with the now Police Chief, Danny Smyth, he travelled to Sagkeeng to brief the band council and community on the investigation. The men took the opportunity to visit Tina’s grave and O’Donovan noted she was buried next to her cousin, Jeneanne Fontaine, whose killing he had also investigated. “I was blown away,” he says of the emotions he felt standing there. “I spoke to both girls, but especially to Tina. I told her ‘I did the best I could.’ ” He says the police are not looking for anyone else for Tina’s killing. Of Cormier, he says, “He has to live with his demons.”

  Tina’s killing has had a significant impact on the policy and practice surrounding Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous peoples. Her case was instrumental in the establishment of a National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls which, in June 2019, found that the country was complicit in a “race-based genocide” against Indigenous women. Blaming the crisis on deep-rooted colonialism and state inaction, the inquiry put forward more than two hundred “calls for justice” to the police, government, and Canadian public as a whole. It urged immediate action, saying those who had opened up and told their story feared the report would “gather dust on a shelf” and that the recommendations would be left unanswered.

  A few months earlier, a long-awaited report by the Manitoba Child Advocate found that Tina was repeatedly failed by the systems meant to protect her, including Child and Family Services. The report listed five recommendations: improving victim-support services for children; developing safe, secure, home-like treatment facilities where children and youth could be placed involuntarily if needed; improving the care of sexually exploited children and youth; improving mental health support; and conducting a review on how school absenteeism is dealt with. Following Tina’s death, the Manitoba government began the process of shifting control of child welfare services to Indigenous bodies, in an effort to reduce the number of Indigenous children in care. In 2019, it announced proposed changes in the way Child and Family Services is funded to move away from the practice of paying per child towards block funding. It is hoped the move will encourage a stronger focus on prevention and early intervention.

  On the streets of Winnipeg, grassroots organizations are already working to make a difference following Tina’s death. There have been several initiatives to protect Indigenous youth in the North End, including the community-based patrol, the Bear Clan. Its executive director, James Favel, says that volunteers walk the streets each evening to prevent women and children from becoming sexually exploited and to restore a sense of safety to the community.

  For Tina’s family, the pain of losing the teenager persists. Tina’s biological mother, Valentina Duck, says that her daughter’s death continues to hurt, telling journalists that she wished Tina was “still with me, right here.” Coming to terms with Tina’s fate has been a particular struggle for her younger sister Sarah, who was thirteen when Tina died. In the following years, Sarah gave birth to a daughter whom she named Victoria Tina after her sister.

  Thelma says that the family hopes to press charges against Raymond Cormier for supplying Tina with drugs. She wants his name placed on a child abuse registry to protect “all other children from him.” Thelma and other family members have been involved in fundraising to turn the Ndinawe shelter, where Tina spent a few nights before disappearing, into a round-the-clock safe space for youth in Winnipeg. “It was Tina’s dream to work with children, and that’s why we decided a safe haven would be good in her honour,” Thelma said at the opening ceremony of the Tina Safe Haven in November 2018.

  Thelma says that her family has been deeply moved by the love and support they have received since Tina’s death. In 2018
Tina’s school unveiled a mural of the teenager painted on a wall close to where the school’s graduation pictures are displayed. For Thelma it was a bittersweet experience to see the painting, knowing that Tina’s picture would never be among the graduation photographs. She says she feels that part of the family will always be missing, but that she hopes to do as much as she can to help other children in need.

  “I don’t want to hear any more stories about kids being found murdered like that anymore,” she says. “I want all kids to be safe.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  RED RIVER GIRL OWES A DEBT OF GRATITUDE TO MANY who opened their lives, work and emotions to me. In Sagkeeng, I am thankful for the warm welcome and cooperation of Thelma and Joe Favel, their family and foster children. I’m also grateful for the knowledge shared by Liliane Cook, Marilyn Courchene and Cindy Guimond and residents of the reserve. In Winnipeg, Nahanni Fontaine and Bernadette Smith helped guide me through the issue of violence against Indigenous women with passion and eloquence. James Favel and the Bear Clan showed me the strength and compassion within the North End community. Samantha Lynn Chief, Jennifer Roulette and Candace Neal inspired me with their resilience and forgiveness.

  John O’Donovan was my main source for police information and I’m hugely grateful for his patience, openness and sense of humour. When I arrived into a freezing winter, his wife, Mary, made sure I had thick enough gloves and was always a kindly presence. I would like to thank the entire O’Donovan family for allowing me to dominate so much of John’s time over the past few years. I’m also grateful to a number of Winnipeg Police Service officers, especially Mo, Candace and Jenna who provided a fascinating insight into the world of undercover policing. Danny Smyth, Wade McDonald, Esther Schmieder, Tracy Oliver, Kevin Pawl provided vital details, as did forensic pathologist, Dr Dennis Rhee.