If it’s a hundred inmates there, a hundred of them put towels over their door. There’s no place down there to hang a towel. You come out of the shower and you got a soaken wet towel, where do you hang it? You hang it over your door. It doesnt matter if there’s anything up to the window or not. You still knock on someone’s door. This guy, Dolly, he’s out with the RCMP he’s giving them a story of a bank robbery and then a murder. They hands him over to the constabulary and one of them says come on Leander, Sheldon wouldnt say these things to you. Oh he would, I’m his lover.
ROBERT ASH
When youre asking yourself the question in terms of who killed Donna Whalen, perhaps one way to think about it is who else other than the accused had a reason or a motive to kill her? The evidence indicates that there is no such person, that person does not exist. The evidence points to the accused, and not to some strange blond who went to Donna’s apartment out of the blue. The police were unable to find any evidence of anyone else threatening Donna other than the accused.
JIM LYTHGOE
This is unfair. This suggests an obligation on the accused to identify some other perpetrator, contrary to the presumption of innocence. You can accept this evidence, or you can accept this conspiracy theory. Throughout this so-called investigation, Sheldon Troke cooperated with the police fully and he didnt have to. He did a DNA test and a polygraph test. He was even willing to submit to hypnosis. Why? Because he did not murder Donna Whalen. The Crown’s chief witnesses are Leander Dollymont and Ruth Vivian. If you look closely at some of the things they told the police, it was just not so. Even after Leander failed the polygraph test, Inspector Hedderson said that he would be a good witness. There was but one significant thing that Leander Dollymont said: did he guess it or was it a rumour? That was whether the body was moved. Leander said that wherever he went, this was the main topic concerning Sheldon Troke.
Mabel Edicott said that Paul Troke looked similar to the person who knocked at her door that early morning. Mabel Edicott viewed a photo album. It had five pictures of Paul Troke in it. She said that the person who was at her door was not in this photo album. This was done because Paul Troke is Sheldon’s brother. She didnt identify Paul Troke.
Live probes and telephone interceptors were placed in the Vivian household. Their conversation was taped. Tom heard the door kick. They think the murder weapon was buried up in the graveyard. Pat said she was probably killed in the bedroom and brought out.
This was said two months before Leander Dollymont gave a statement to the police. This is very important evidence and the jury was not allowed to hear it. Yet the jury were told how important Leander’s evidence was because Leander said Sheldon told him that the body was moved, and the evidence shows this.
Ruth Vivian was asked by Inspector Hedderson when was the last time she heard an argument coming from Donna’s before Friday night. She said about two or three weeks ago. She didnt say Thursday night. Ruth Vivian heard the name Sheldon mentioned Thursday night and not Friday night. She said nothing of a loud argument on Thursday night because she has her days mixed up. Tom Vivian kept in close contact with Donna’s family. What was said to the Whalens by Tom Vivian about what his mother said she heard? How much of this was repeated in the presence of Sharon, and what of Sharon’s first statements? Sharon says she heard someone say be quiet, Sharon. The voice was unfamiliar. It was much later when Sharon says she heard the name Sheldon. Edie Guzzwell is asked if she told Sharon that she didnt have to worry because the person who murdered her mother was in jail. Same with Constable Louise Motty. She gave Sharon the reassurance she was obviously seeking. Sharon herself said that Constable Motty told her that Sheldon is the one that murdered her mother.
Ruth Vivian never mentioned seeing Sheldon until two months after the murder, right after the news release of Paul Troke and a car.Ruth Vivian said she never watched the news, never spoke with anyone and never gossiped about this matter because it was not her topic. The wiretaps clearly show she watched the news, talked to people and gossiped about anyone and anything.
Gary Bemister said his clean-up theory was based on Leander Dollymont’s statement, but the police had this clean-up theory on the news two months before Leander gave a statement to the police.
Sheldon has read the victim impact statements and he agrees with most of what they say. He feels for Donna’s family more than they know. He only has a faint idea of what they must have gone through. He is also a victim of a savage crime, although people dont want to believe this and, in their minds, they have justice served. Sheldon has no answers to his questions and can only perceive this case one way and he goes to bed and he wakes up: that Donna went out with Sheldon Troke and because of this there is no need for an investigation. No need for justice for Donna.
DONNA WHALEN LETTER TO SHELDON TROKE
I never wanted you like that, Sheldon. I didnt like the arguing and I didnt like the fighting and the violence and everything else, the way you used to get on with me. Jesus, I was frightened to death to say something to you and I didnt know if a table was going to tip over or what. Sheldon, I promise to love you in the good times and in bad with all I have to give and all I feel inside and the only way I know how, completely and forever. Wishing you were here, love, always.
SHELDON TROKE
Since Donna’s death Sheldon’s been left with disbelief and bewilderment. There is not a day that goes by that he doesnt think of Donna and her children. Who would have done something like this and why? Sheldon doesnt know of any enemies that Donna had. She was a wonderful person and a loving mother. There’s no words to express his sorrow and loss. There is just contemplation. He loved Donna and he still loves her and he has wonderful memories of the things they shared and he will cherish them. One day he will find out who murdered Donna and until that day he will not rest and neither will Donna. Nobody won at this trial. We all lost. Society gained, society gained a murderer. Thank you, my lord.
TRISHA HICKMAN AND PAUL TROKE WIRETAP
Trisha: I wants to confront you with something now and I wants you to tell me if you can remember it or not because I dont know if you were whacked out of it but I knows you were after having a few beer that night and the two of us were lying down in bed. We were talking and then we had sex and then we’re lying down afterwards having a cigarette and you told me something that happened a while ago and it startled me. About you and Donna. See that’s wild, you think I would have fucking known right there and then but still I never broke it off with you and if anyone would even I mean that’s like something you’d fucking hear in a horror film right. You know, you’d be on the news or something right. Burnt boy.
Paul: All I’m saying is you should not freak out and go off your head if anything ever happened to me.
I will be.
Because the chances for me.
I will go off my head and I will be hurt and I will flip out if anything ever do happen to you and dont you ever doubt it. I’ll go off my head. No matter what, I will fucking go nuts and it’s bad enough being down there and knowing the charges that youre coming up on for robbery and knowing the time that you’d be spending away. That’s all bad enough but if I ever found out that something happened to you, that’d be enough, that’d be enough for me. My heart is probably broke right now.
Paul: I can’t change your feelings or nothing but what I’m trying to say is, I dont know. Some fucking wild boy. It dont even seem like reality to me any more. This seems like a big fucking bad dream.
Trisha: I know what you mean. I can relate to that. I’m not thinking on reality yet because like when I’m talking to you and youre down there and I can see you and write you letters and I got your pictures and your cards, every night before I goes to bed. It just seems like it’ll be another few months. That’s all it seems right now but deep down I knows it’s longer but when I’m thinking about it, it’s like no way, there’s something going to happen and youre not going to do the time. Is that fucked up?
&nbs
p; No.
I dont know what to think. I dont know if that’s fucked up or not.
EPILOGUE
Robert Ash, the Crown prosecutor, had this to say about the death of Donna Whalen: there are many ways to kill a person. In this case, it is difficult to find a word that adequately describes the manner in which Donna Whalen was murdered. One can use the word brutal, one can use the word vicious. But then you consider the way she was killed, she had a pair of underwear wrapped around her throat so tightly they did not loosen during the transfer of the body from the apartment to the morgue (Dr Abery was under the impression that they had been tied there—it was only when he cut the underwear off that he realized they were twisted into place). There were a number of minor wounds—a series of pricks in the area of the chest. Sadistic is an accurate description of these wounds. The last few moments of Donna Whalen’s life must have been horrific for her, as she was stabbed repeatedly in her own house, knowing her children are in the house and are open to danger as well.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty of second-degree murder.
Before sentencing, the judge heard evidence of an incident, four years before the murder, which was inadmissible for this trial. Sheldon Troke was making fun of a man, saying that his brother Paul Troke had gone out with the man’s girlfriend. This man, lying on a loveseat, laughed back at Sheldon. That laugh appears to have been too much for Sheldon Troke to take. In his frustration and anger—no doubt liquor was a factor—he went to the kitchen, got a knife and returned to the living room. Sheldon Troke recalls stabbing the man once in the thigh, but the evidence shows there to be two stabs to the side of the chest and stabs to the thigh and the leg. There’s no doubt a knife was used, and used in a vigorous manner. The stabbing with the knife was excessive and out of all proportion to the events of that night. It was irrational and atrocious behaviour. That the man survived is pure luck.
Other factors that weighed into Judge Adams’s sentencing included Sheldon Troke’s intimidation of a key witness, Ruth Vivian, his lack of remorse and his attempt to concoct a false alibi. There was a history of violence towards the victim—this was not an isolated incident. The numerous wounds, any of which could have killed Donna Whalen, suggested an abnormal possessiveness—this was not the type of murder where someone is stabbed in the chest once and then the attacker stops. This was an overkill, a refusal to accept that Donna Whalen wanted to break up with him. There was an attempt to cover up the murder. Sheldon took steps to have his brother Paul come to the house and help move the body from the kitchen to the living room—this is not someone so intoxicated he does not know what he’s doing. There’s an awareness here of his circumstances. The body of the deceased was left in the living room with the knowledge that Sharon Whalen would find her mother dead in a pool of blood the next morning, a horrific scene for a young child.
Jim Lythgoe, for the defence, responded by discussing the prior stabbing. There was a willing and enthusiastic group looking for entertainment and action that night. A good supply of hash, lots of beer, bottles of vodka and whiskey, music and dancing. The victim’s conduct and behaviour that night was offensive, annoying to almost everyone. He pestered the women and irritated the men. He was very drunk. He propositioned certain women. He did his best to taunt and intimidate the men—he challenged them to arm wrestles. He bragged about his strength. He made himself obnoxious and, to put it mildly, was a real pain. Sheldon’s action appears to have been sudden, but he had gotten into the hard liquor and was quite drunk. If you compare these incidents, Sheldon Troke was not into drugs or alcohol on the night of Donna Whalen’s murder. While the police decided to hold him until well into the afternoon before they attempted to get any blood samples, there was no indication that he was impaired. So, it’s a different situation.
In terms of prior assault, Sheldon Troke, on the one occasion that he admitted to striking Donna Whalen, reported it to his parole officer, knowing he would be arrested. He turned himself in and spent a number of months in jail. Then he went to anger management programs.
With regards to remorse, Lythgoe said, Sheldon Troke has deep remorse for the family, but he staunchly maintains his innocence. That will never change.
The Crown suggested he intimidated Ruth Vivian. But Sheldon Troke advised her to tell what she knew to the police. All other witnesses who had dealings with Sheldon Troke said that he was polite and courteous and asked them to cooperate with the police. It was unfortunate that Ruth Vivian took Sheldon’s tone to be threatening when he meant to be encouraging.
The false alibi as an aggravating factor. It wasn’t false, it was the truth—Sheldon Troke spent that night at his mother’s house.
Sheldon did not dispute what has been said with regards to this being a vicious, senseless killing. Sheldon was sorry for this, Jim Lythgoe concluded, but he was not the one who did it.
With all this in mind, and having listened to over five months of testimony, Judge Richard Adams sentenced Sheldon Troke to life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole for fourteen years.
Sheldon Troke was an obvious “person of interest”f for the police to question after the death of Donna Whalen. He was on parole for this prior stabbing offence and had a lengthy criminal record. A few months before the murder, he’d been convicted of assaulting Donna Whalen. The neighbours and Donna’s daughter all testified to seeing or hearing arguments between Donna and Sheldon. Sheldon himself agreed that their arguments were so loud people on the street could hear them. He had once dug a knife into the kitchen table. He admitted to being at Donna’s for the last few days of her life, and testified that she drove him home only a few hours before her murder. He was one of the last people to see her alive.
Very early in the investigation the police had drawn up a theory that Sheldon, after being dropped off at his parents’ house by Donna, had found a means to return to Empire Avenue that night. He had waited for Donna to come home, knocked on her front door, been invited in and then murdered her. His brother Paul was called and he arrived at the back door, but knocked at the Edicott residence by mistake. Paul then cleaned up the murder scene and the brothers left soon after, ending up down at Cathy Furneaux’s apartment.
However, the evidence compiled was not fitting this picture. For example, both Keith Edicott and Tom Vivian heard the noise of the coffee table tipping over soon after Paul Troke knocked on the Edicotts’ back door. This was close to three oclock in the morning. This noise, which woke Sharon up, failed to coincide with the time when Ruth Vivian heard Donna screaming out “No Sheldon stop it,” which was roughly one a.m. No one, besides Ruth Vivian, heard Donna call out at that time of the night. Donna did yell out “No Sheldon stop it” the evening before (it was recorded on the audiotape hidden in her purse). Once these inconsistencies in the evidence became apparent, the police should have revisited their premise to see if it was flawed, to see if in fact Ruth Vivian might be confusing events from the two nights. No one on the police team was thinking of alternative scenarios. Instead they spent a lot of time forcing the contradictory evidence to fit, distorting it by reinterviewing witnesses and suggesting they change their story, or ignoring the evidence altogether.
The police believed that Sheldon’s parents knew their son left their residence that Friday night and were deliberately providing him with an alibi. They were arrested and charged with obstruction of justice. While Bertha and Clayton Troke were in police custody, a surveillance device was planted in their home. There was much publicity over the false alibi charge, which cast a shadow over Sheldon Troke’s defence. Even though the charges against his parents were eventually stayed, members of the jury would know that they had been arrested for lying about Sheldon’s whereabouts.
The police used wiretaps on other key witnesses, and what these wiretaps reveal is that neighbours and friends were talking to each other, following media reports and generally reframing their evidence to the wishes of police. In one case, Tom Vivian, the son of Ruth and Pat Vivian
, was arrested as a possible suspect and then, immediately after that, his parents were once again interviewed to see if they wished to add any further details to their stories. Of course they changed their stories. Ruth Vivian quickly assured officers that, after bingo, she had seen Sheldon Troke in and around Donna Whalen’s residence. That she had bumped into him and “every drop of blood in her veins froze.” Her husband, Pat Vivian, had described, early on, a car that had been parked outside Empire Avenue the night of the murder. Months later, he was watching the local television news and saw a car the police had impounded and was convinced this was the car he’d seen that night. The car was completely different from the one he’d originally described.
There were many attempts by police to gently coerce witnesses into making statements that fit the police theory of the murder. Ches Hedderson’s bullying of Sharon Whalen, suggesting she did not do enough to halt her mother’s killer, is a chilling indictment of the inspector’s methods. Sharon was removed from the custody of her maternal grandparents because the police were concerned that Agnes Whalen, who early on asserted Sheldon Troke’s innocence, might convince Sharon that Sheldon did not kill her mother. This removal and placement of a nine-year-old child into protective custody, far from the loving care of relatives, only served to punish Sharon and make her feel she wasn’t giving the police what they desired. The fact that her testimony remained largely unchanged is remarkable. The ambulance driver, Jim Pike, said that at the scene that morning, Sharon Whalen said she heard her mother calling out “No Sharon no” sometime during the night. She sat up and never heard anything else, thought she dreamed it, and went back to sleep. It was police investigator Louise Motty who suggested to her that what she heard that night was not “No Sharon no” but “No Sheldon no.” Exhausted and confused, Sharon agreed with their leading questions. And yet, later on, when she was on the courtroom stand, she still had enough doubt to say she wasn’t sure what she heard, or who said it, only it was a man’s voice, a man she wasn’t familiar with. That this voice was low and quiet, unlike Sheldon’s loud and argumentative voice, did not seem to matter to the police. Louis Motty inadvertently reinforced in Sharon the notion that Sheldon was the murderer by reassuring her that her mother’s killer could not hurt her because he was in jail. Sharon knew that Sheldon was in police custody.
The Death of Donna Whalen Page 23