Red River Girl

  VIKING

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Joanna Jolly

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Jolly, Joanna, author

  Red River girl : the life and death of Tina Fontaine / Joanna Jolly.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735233935 (softcover).—ISBN 9780735233942 (HTML)

  1. Fontaine, Tina, 1999-2014. 2. Murder—Manitoba—Winnipeg. 3. Murder—Investigation—Manitoba—Winnipeg. 4. Cormier, Raymond (Raymond Joseph)—Trials, litigation, etc. 5. Native women–Violence against—Canada. I. Title.

  HV6535.C33W55 2018     364.152’309712743      C2018-902411-9

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  Cover and book design by Rachel Cooper

  Cover image © Wwphoto/Dreamstime.com

  v5.3.2

  a

  To my family,

  without whose love and support

  this book would not have been possible.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  1. “The Red Is an Unforgiving River”

  2. “Tell Momma and Papa I Love Them”

  3. O’Donovan

  4. “Not Like CSI”

  5. The Low Track

  6. Tessa Twohearts

  7. Life on the Instalment Plan

  8. 22 Carmen

  9. “I Did Not Kill That Girl”

  10. The Chloe Green Duvet Cover

  11. Project Styx

  12. Jenna

  13. Whistler

  14. “Not a Case of Tunnel Vision”

  15. Justice for Tina

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  In 2016, in the early hours of a mid-September morning, a guard led me into a secure interview room inside a jail in Manitoba and handed me a red panic button to press should I need assistance. Sitting opposite from me at a table was a prisoner still in the process of finishing his breakfast cereal and toast. Raymond Cormier demanded to know which media outlet I was from. When I explained I was a BBC journalist but was there to interview him for a book, he threw his toast at my head and screamed that he was only interested in speaking to the local press. For a second, I considered pushing the panic button but instead adopted the submissive pose advised by BBC hostile environment trainers—head bowed, palms open and visible—and waited for him to calm down. After a few minutes, he did, and he instructed me to turn on my recording equipment. Over the next two hours he spoke without pause, detailing his childhood, adult life, sex life, drug addiction, and, most of all, how he had become the prime suspect in one of Canada’s most notorious murder cases. At times he was angry, at times contrite, as he remembered the person he was accused of killing: the fifteen-year-old Indigenous schoolgirl Tina Fontaine. His speech was mumbled, repetitive, and often confused, but he stayed firm on one point: “I did not kill Tina Fontaine.”

  My journey to Cormier’s prison cell had begun two years earlier. At the time, I had been working as a BBC journalist for over a decade, specializing in reporting on Asia. Exploring the continent was my passion. Asia was literally in my blood, as my father was an Indian doctor who had settled in the United Kingdom and married my English mother. I had reported from Japan to the Indian subcontinent, where I was based in Kathmandu as the BBC correspondent. Before this, I had spent three turbulent, gripping years covering Timor-Leste’s violent struggle for independence. As I travelled I found myself coming back to the same issue time and again. Violence against women was a problem in every country in which I worked. In 2013, horrified by the brutal gang rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi months before, I made a documentary on Indian attitudes towards sexual violence. I wondered whether there was any society where attacks against women weren’t seen as inevitable and accepted with complacency.

  In the summer of 2014, my career took a different tack when I became the BBC online feature writer covering the US and Canada based in Washington, DC. I arrived to find the news cycle dominated by the police killing of the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown and the beheading of the American journalist James Foley by Islamic State terrorists. In our morning editorial meetings we would pick over the previous day’s developments and try to find lesser-known stories we thought important to cover. It was at one of these meetings, in mid-August, that a Canadian colleague said the words that would eventually lead to this book. She was referring to the recent discovery of Tina Fontaine’s body in the Red River in Winnipeg, a story that had made headlines in her own country but had been barely covered elsewhere. “There’s been another murder in Canada,” she told the group of assembled journalists. “Canadians are so racist.”

  I found her remarks surprising. My personal experience of Canada was slim, but my impressions had been overwhelmingly positive. Canada seemed an enlightened country, home to an inspiringly multicultural Olympic team, a safe haven for refugees, and consistently top of the list of best places to live. It was a shock to hear that it had a problem with racism and violence against Indigenous women.

  Among the great many Canadian articles on the issue, there was one story that disturbed and puzzled me. In February 2014, Loretta Saunders, a twenty-six-year-old Inuk student, had been attending university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She had been working on a thesis on the reasons behind the disproportionately high number of missing and murdered Indigenous women when she herself was murdered. Studying photographs of Loretta’s face, I struggled to understand how this attractive, intelligent young woman had become a target. Loretta was murdered by her roommates over rent money. As I continued to read up on the subject, I began to grasp the extent of the violence and its connection to poverty, historical racism, and marginalization. I learned that over the past few decades, hundreds of Indigenous women had been murdered or gone missing and that many of their cases had not been solved.

  A few months later, in November 2014, there was more news from Winnipeg. A second Indigenous schoolgirl had been brutally attacked. This time, the girl survived, but her assault renewed calls for the federal government to do more to stem the violence. I started to plan a reporting trip to Winnipeg, feeling that the city encapsulated the issue with its large but segregated Indigenous population, its high number of missing and murdered women, and the very public failure of its police to protect Tina before her death. I began to negotiate with Winnipeg’s deputy chief of police, Danny Smyth, for access to the Homicide Unit and its detectives. It was a delicate task that took nearly three months to organize, but by the end of January 2015 my colleagues and I were on a flight to the city.

  Our report, “Red River Women,” was published in April 2015 as a multimedia article and radio documentary. The reaction from the BBC’s huge worldwide audience was one of shock and surprise, highlighting how little was known about the violence outside of Canada. The idea of writing a book about Tina Fontaine began to form in my mind, but I was conscious that without an arrest it was a story
with no conclusion. Then, in December 2015, the head of the Winnipeg Police Homicide Unit, Sergeant John O’Donovan, emailed to say that Raymond Cormier, a drifter and convicted felon, had been charged with Tina’s murder. When I asked O’Donovan how much information he was prepared to give me about his investigation, he replied cryptically that he would only speak face to face. Taking a chance, I bought a ticket to Winnipeg, hoping he would open up. I was not disappointed. Over lunch on a snowy January day, the detective detailed the extraordinary lengths to which he and his team had gone to catch the man he firmly believed was responsible for killing the Indigenous teenager. It was at this point that I resolved to write a book that would tell Tina’s story.

  Nine months later, I was interviewing Raymond Cormier in his prison cell. Afterwards outside in my car, I remained chilled despite the warm September sun. The enormity of the project ahead of me was beginning to sink in. The afternoon before, I had been in Ottawa, interviewing Carolyn Bennett, then the minister for Indigenous and Northern Affairs. She had told me that Tina Fontaine—“a real person with a real family and real experiences that we as a country need to learn from”—had given a face to the issue of missing and murdered women. Over the next year and a half, I continued to work on building up a picture of Tina’s final weeks. But it wasn’t until Raymond Cormier’s trial, in January 2018, that I fully understood many of the details. Even then, the picture was incomplete. We still don’t know how Tina Fontaine died. The case against Cormier, described to me by O’Donovan as compelling and conclusive, proved to be circumstantial and weak. When Cormier was found not guilty, I felt my work needed to explore why the police investigation had taken the path it had. I wanted to understand the pressure officers were under to find a name and face to fit this crime, when so many other killings of Indigenous women and girls had gone unsolved.

  The story in this book is based on extensive face-to-face interviews, police notes, transcripts of recordings, and trial testimonies. I interviewed Tina’s family and friends, O’Donovan and his team of detectives, undercover officers, the Crown and defence lawyers, community members from Sagkeeng First Nation, Indigenous politicians and activists, medical and legal experts, and Raymond Cormier himself. The dialogue is pieced together from recorded intercepts of conversations, trial testimonies, and interviews. In some cases, I have changed the names of those involved to protect their identity. I’ve tried to build up as accurate a picture as possible. In the few instances where I’ve been unable to locate witnesses, I’ve relied on the reporting of the Winnipeg press corps, which has been generous and supportive throughout this project.

  In particular, I want to thank two people for their invaluable help. John O’Donovan has been my main source of police information, sharing notes and information and answering endless questions about procedure and developments with unfailing patience and clarity. He has also become adept at describing his emotions, something I suspect he initially found quite difficult. When I interviewed members of his team, they unanimously told me that O’Donovan was an excellent boss, consistently supportive and understanding. Having worked closely with him for the past three years, I can easily see this to be true.

  I am also extremely grateful for the cooperation of Tina’s guardian, Thelma Favel. Thelma welcomed me into her family at a time of acute grief and when she was under pressure to speak to many journalists. She was always generous with her time, and I was moved by her courage and open-heartedness. Thelma and I shared a grim joke that whenever we were together, it was only a matter of minutes before one of us would cry. In truth, I was grateful for the chance to share her grief, as the emotional strain of researching this book took its toll. Her kindness remains with me to this day.

  Finally, I want to say a few words about the person I did not have the chance to meet: Tina Fontaine. The details of Tina’s final weeks were painful to piece together. But as I wrote this book, I developed a strong sense of Tina’s teenage character and spirit. Fierce, funny, protective, brave, risk-taking, she was a young woman trying to forge her identity and make difficult choices in what was often a dangerous world. It is a tragedy that Tina did not live to fulfill her potential, like hundreds of other Indigenous women who have met a similar fate. One small consolation is that Tina’s legacy lives on as the face of a movement for much-needed change. As her guardian, Thelma, said of her, “She carried her message strong.”

  1.

  “THE RED IS AN UNFORGIVING RIVER”

  It starts with a river. The Red River plots a wandering course north across the Canadian Prairies, snaking its way through the city of Winnipeg. It curves through the urban landscape, spawning towering glass structures and grand-pillared offices at the point where it meets its tributary, the Assiniboine. The Red is Winnipeg’s lifeblood and the reason for its existence, a highway for the European colonizers who came in search of fur and an ancient gathering place for the Indigenous peoples they traded with. In summer, it hosts fishing trips and dragon boat races. In winter, its frozen waters become skating trails and hockey rinks. Beside its banks are the rail lines that brought Winnipeg its immigrants and wealth, and the suburban gardens where its citizens now relax. But the Red has a darker, more complex role. The river is a drain, a muddy artery clogged with secrets. The homeless build shelters on its banks, waste pollutes its waters, and the desperate choose it as a place to die by suicide, surrendering their lives to its brown, silty depths.

  On the morning of August 17, 2014, the Red River was witnessing an unusual clamour of activity as police dive boats motored into position under the metal trusses of the Canadian National Railway bridge. Onlookers gathered to watch as police divers lowered themselves backwards into the water, causing ripples to glint gold in the morning sun. They weren’t looking for the fifteen-year-old Indigenous schoolgirl who had been reported missing the week before. The reality was that in Winnipeg young Indigenous women often disappeared into the underbelly of the city. It rarely warranted such a thorough river trawl. Instead, the boats were searching for the body of Faron Hall, a local hero who had, two days earlier, walked down to the river’s edge, removed all his clothes, placed them neatly in a pile, and waded into the warm, muddy water.

  Hall was a homeless alcoholic who had shot to national fame in 2009 after performing two rescues in the river. The first was of a teenage boy who had fallen from a bridge while dodging traffic on a cold May evening. Hall had dived into the icy water and pulled the boy out of the strong current, which was dragging him under. Hall didn’t see anything special in the rescue. He had learned to swim during his childhood on the Dakota Tipi First Nation reserve, and he felt it was his duty to help those who weren’t so able. A few months later, he was called on to use his swimming skills again. After a day spent drinking with friends by the river, a woman had slipped and fallen in. Her boyfriend jumped in to help, and Hall, realizing that they were both in trouble, quickly followed. He managed to save the woman but not the man, a failure that weighed heavily on his conscience. “The Red is an unforgiving river,” he later told a local reporter. “It can take your life and spit you out.”

  For his actions, Hall was rewarded with a medal and money, some of which he donated to a local homeless shelter. But fame sat uneasily on his shoulders. On one occasion, he was beaten up after being recognized as the “homeless hero.” On another, he faced public shame when the press reported how he had been arrested for drinking and begging. Like many Indigenous men, Hall encountered an excess of violence and sadness in his life. His mother died young, his sister was fatally stabbed, and Hall himself struggled with addiction. He served time for assault and eventually returned to living rough in a makeshift tent on the riverbank, within sight of the sweeping cables of the Esplanade Riel pedestrian bridge.

  On the day Hall walked into the Red, it wasn’t clear if he was trying to cool off, attempt a third rescue, or had something more melancholy on his mind. Whatever his motives, he was soon seen flailing in the strong current that swept beneath the bridge. A
water taxi sped to the rescue, and the boat pilot tried to grab on to the homeless man. But the pilot suffered a heart attack in the process and was dispatched to a nearby hospital for treatment. By Sunday morning, the dive teams knew they were looking for a body.

  At the same time that the divers were combing the riverbed, Alexander Cunningham, the captain of the pleasure cruise boat MS River Rouge, was finishing a late breakfast and returning to where he’d moored his vessel the previous night. Cunningham had taken the boat out on Saturday evening for a birthday party cruise. After motoring up and down the river, he had come to a stop at the wooden structure of the Alexander Docks, a kilometre north of where Hall was last seen. Decades before, river cruising had been a glamorous activity in Winnipeg, attracting tourists from around the province and from the US cities of Grand Forks and Fargo. The River Rouge had once been a fancy boat, its interior decorated with oil paintings, run by a man who liked to be known as the Commodore. It could even boast that Princess Margaret had been a passenger, back in the 1970s, when going on board meant formal dress for women and a jacket and tie for men. Half a dozen similar cruisers plied the river then, some with ornamental paddle wheels harking back to the glory days of the early settlers. But by 2014, only the River Rouge was left, hiring itself out for parties and private events.

  Cunningham was in his seventies and had a lifetime of sailing experience. That summer, he had returned to captain the River Rouge after a decade spent piloting boats in the Yukon. He compared coming back to the Red to reuniting with an old friend whose character he understood intimately. Cunningham knew exactly where the Red’s currents ran strongest and how, if they combined with a strong offshore wind, his boat’s five-hundred-tonne bulk would act like a sail and pull him off course. He understood how much the river could fluctuate with the seasons as it crossed the floodplain on which Winnipeg was built. The captain could calculate the precise angle and speed needed to approach each bridge, and knew exactly when to slow down where the water was shallower. He also knew the effect his boat could have on the debris that littered the riverbed. Once, years earlier, when he had turned the River Rouge around quickly at the confluence of the Assiniboine and the Red, a dead body had popped up in the water in front of him. He was pretty sure it was the sucking action of his two propellers that had pulled the corpse up from where it had been stuck on the muddy bottom.