Red River Girl Read online

  In the early hours of August 17, Captain Cunningham had used those same powerful propellers in reverse to slow his boat down so he could swing it into position at the Alexander Docks. Hours later, as he watched the action on the river unfold from his boat deck, the secret his engines had inadvertently dislodged had already floated north in the current.

  Among the onlookers and Sunday walkers who were watching the search for Faron Hall was Dwayne Oliver and his ten-year-old son. They had woken up early and parked near the Alexander Docks to visit the nearby Manitoba Museum. But discovering it wasn’t yet open, they had headed to the riverbank to find a good place to fish later in the day. The pair had stood for a while staring out over the water, following the police boat and divers a few hundred metres away. As they began to walk north from the dock towards a point where long reeds and scrubby trees marked a bend in the river, they chatted about the person the divers were searching for. The boy found a discarded life preserver and picked it up, telling his father it could have been used to help. It was here, about four and a half metres from the shore, that Oliver saw something unusual half-submerged in the shallows. He told his son to hang back as he inched closer to what appeared to be the back of a human body slouched over on its knees and wrapped up in a tan-coloured blanket. His suspicion that he’d stumbled across something sinister was confirmed by the caustic smell of rotting flesh and a black cloud of flies.

  Oliver and his son headed back to the dock, calling 911 as they ran. It was only a few minutes before they heard sirens and saw the flashing lights of a fire truck carrying a specialized rescue dinghy, which was quickly launched onto the river by a crew clad in wetsuits. The boat sped north to where the tourists pointed, closely followed by the police dive crews, who by now had abandoned their search for Faron Hall. The teams could easily spot the suspicious object: a large bundle, stained brown with river mud, that had become lodged in the long reeds. As they drew up alongside it, one crew member reached over and pulled the saturated mass towards them. It was a struggle to haul it on board, and only when it was safely secured could they see they were dealing with a human body. It was too small to be Faron Hall. The material the body was wrapped in had been knotted at the top, but a mottled, bruised-looking arm had worked its way out of the opening to hang exposed in the water. The recovery crews motored back towards the Alexander Docks, where police officers helped to bring the grim parcel ashore. At 1:50 P.M., faced with a potential crime, the officers alerted the head of the Winnipeg Police Homicide Unit, Sergeant John O’Donovan.

  * * *

  —

  Across town, in the quiet residential neighbourhood of Charleswood, fifty-three-year-old O’Donovan had been enjoying a Sunday at home with his wife, Mary. The couple, originally from the west of Ireland, had just finished lunch, and O’Donovan was getting his two rescue greyhounds ready for a walk when his phone began to vibrate. As officers described their discovery to him, the detective was struck by the detail of the knots tied at the top of the bundle. This was no suicide or accidental drowning. Hastily apologizing to his wife, O’Donovan grabbed his jacket and headed out to his car, already mentally setting up the process of initiating a murder investigation.

  During his thirty-minute drive to the Winnipeg Police headquarters, O’Donovan coordinated his investigation on speaker phone. First, he called the forensic supervisor to find out the sex, age, and condition of the body. Could she tell him how long it had been in the water? He phoned the street supervisor to ask about the exact location where the body had been found. Had any security cameras caught anything? Who might have seen something significant? And he spoke to the sergeant in charge of the district to find out what resources were available to seal off the area and interview possible witnesses. It was the height of the summer holidays, and his team was having difficulty finding enough officers to deploy to the scene. As O’Donovan reached Portage Avenue, in the city’s downtown, he made a strategic stop at a Tim Hortons, figuring caffeine would help him concentrate after his heavy lunch. A few minutes later he parked his car behind Red River College and headed across the street into the 1960s purpose-built home of the Winnipeg Police Service, a vast concrete bunker known as the Public Safety Building.

  Once at his desk, the detective began entering what he knew into a newly created computer file. He worked methodically, despite feeling pressure from the operation under way on the riverbank. O’Donovan enjoyed the work. The process of meticulously unravelling the tiniest details of a homicide still fascinated him, even after more than a decade investigating murders.

  At the Alexander Docks, Constable Susan Roy-Hageman was the forensic supervisor O’Donovan had called for basic information. She had arrived not long after the rescue crew had secured the recovered bundle on the dock and covered it with a black tarpaulin. After years spent processing crime scenes and identifying bodies, Roy-Hageman knew her first task would be to remove the tarpaulin and take photographs. The bundle was holding too much water to handle easily, so she decided to make two small incisions into the fabric to drain some of it away. This was a gamble, as vital evidence could be lost as the water ran out. But she was confident that if she monitored the flow carefully, nothing significant would disappear. The next step was to take prints from the body’s exposed fingers, which she emailed to her technicians to process. The result came back quickly: there was no match in the system. Realizing she could get nothing more on the dock, Roy-Hageman gave the order for the entire bundle to be placed in a zippered bag and moved to St-Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg’s French-speaking district for a more thorough examination.

  O’Donovan had already dispatched two investigators to the hospital’s autopsy suite to take notes and send back photos. The forensic pathologist on duty that day was Dr. Dennis Rhee, who had only recently moved to Winnipeg from California, where he had completed his training and residency. Over the past decade Rhee had dealt with more than a hundred homicide victims, some of whom had been concealed in a similar way to the body now before him. The pathologist began his investigation by photographing the knots that held everything together at the top of the bundle, recording that there were two sets, each consisting of several simple knots tied on top of each other. As he removed the material around the body, he saw that it had been packed with several rocks, large and small, weighing 11.5 kilograms in total. Everything inside was coated with a layer of dark green river mud, so it was only after close inspection that Rhee was able to see that the material was double thickness. On one side it was embroidered with a leaf pattern, and he could see buttons and eyelets running along the bottom edge. The doctor recognized it as a duvet cover and handed it over to the police forensic team for further investigation.

  Turning his attention to the body, Rhee saw that the victim was small, young, and female. He measured her height as 160 centimetres (5 feet 3 inches) and her weight as 33 kilograms (73 pounds) and concluded that he was probably looking at a very young teenager. She was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt with the words “Born To Rock” printed across the front, a bra, a short skirt that looked like it had once been white, underwear, pink Adidas high-top sneakers, and short socks. From his experience, he noted the body’s state of decomposition as “moderate.” Because there was some bloating in her abdomen and limbs, the pathologist estimated that the girl had been in the water for more than a few days but not longer than a few weeks. His observation was confirmed by the marbled red-and-green hue of her skin, under which her blood vessels had broken down and become visible, like branches of a tree. On parts of her body her skin had sloughed off entirely and was lying detached in paper-thin sheets, another indication of a prolonged period of submersion.

  Rhee tried to form a picture of what the girl had looked like. He could see that her hair was black and straight and of medium length, with the exception of the right side of her head, which was shaved very short. But he struggled to make out her facial features. The skin on her nose and cheeks had mostly slid away, and although the globes of
her eyes were still present, they were unrecognizable in what had become a mask of red and pink. The pathologist knew it would be impossible to match the victim’s face to a photograph. But he could see another way to identify her. She had a tattoo on her back, high up between her shoulder blades, that was still distinct despite the decomposition. It was a name, “Eugene Fontaine,” and had two dates written beneath it: “01-03-1970 – 30-10-2011.” On either side of the tattoo the pathologist could make out the delicately inked outline of angel wings.

  In the autopsy room gallery, the police investigators emailed a picture of the tattoo to O’Donovan, who immediately contacted the city’s Missing Persons Unit. In their files was the name of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Tina Fontaine, who had run away from home in early July and had been listed as missing several times. She was described as being Aboriginal, five foot four (163 centimetres), and weighing one hundred pounds (45.4 kilograms). A recent photograph showed that her hair was black and shaved short on one side. The report also noted that she was the daughter of Eugene Fontaine, who had been killed in 2011. At first, O’Donovan could not believe that the bloated body from the autopsy pictures belonged to the slim young girl in the missing persons photograph. But the tattoo was a definite confirmation of her identity.

  O’Donovan needed to know if Rhee could identify any obvious injuries that had led to Tina’s death. A full-body X-ray had already revealed that she had no broken bones. The pathologist had observed several shallow depressions on the skin of her face—on her right cheek and right forehead—and two more on her scalp. Some of the underlying nose cartilage was also missing, and he found more indentations on the back of her right thigh and the front of her left knee. But without conducting a full post-mortem, he could not say whether these marks were caused by injuries or decomposition. One thing was clear, though, O’Donovan thought as he read over Rhee’s notes: Tina had not put herself in the river.

  The detective’s next task was to notify Tina’s family and officially confirm her identity. After some deliberation, he asked his investigators to crop the autopsy photos so that only Tina’s tattoo was visible. The pictures were some of the most distressing he had seen in his career, and he was loath to show them to Tina’s family. His team felt the same. It was the first time many of them had seen the damage that warm, polluted river water could do to a body. It was especially difficult to see this happen to someone so young.

  * * *

  —

  Later that Sunday evening, eight kilometres to the north of where Tina had been found, police divers finally recovered the remains of Faron Hall. They announced their discovery to the press, adding that they weren’t treating his death as suspicious. The coincidence of finding two bodies in the river on the same day was already making headlines, and O’Donovan’s boss, Danny Smyth, the superintendent of crime investigations, announced he would schedule a news conference for the following morning.

  O’Donovan, who did not leave his desk until 10 P.M. that Sunday, was already back at work the following day when Smyth caught up with him. The detective had been in the office since 7 A.M., when he led the morning briefing to determine what was known about Tina’s movements. Working with him was the team he had assembled: six pairs of detectives assigned to focus primarily on this case. After discussing their strategy to collect information, O’Donovan had just enough time to put on a jacket and make an attempt at straightening his tie before being brought out before the media to conduct his briefing.

  At the front of the room, balanced on a wooden plinth the police press team had placed a poster of the most up-to-date picture of Tina they could find. It was a close-up portrait of the schoolgirl looking straight into the camera. She was wearing large gold hoop earrings, and her shoulders were tanned and bare apart from the flimsy straps of a summer top. Her black hair was short and swept across her forehead, showing clearly that it had been shaved on one side, and she was smiling. O’Donovan thought how young and fresh-faced she looked. She could easily have been mistaken for eleven or twelve rather than fifteen. As he placed his prepared list of case notes on the table and looked out over the packed room, the gulf between the image beside him and the autopsy photos provoked an unexpected wave of anger. The detective had been planning to present the facts calmly, point by point, but now he just wanted to speak.

  “This is a child that’s been murdered,” he began, his Irish accent clearly detectable. “I think society would be horrified if we found a litter of kittens or pups in the river in this condition.”

  O’Donovan paused for a moment as the video cameras trained their lights on his face and the reporters digested what he was saying. A buzz had begun to ripple around the room. The Winnipeg press corps was used to announcements about dead Indigenous youth, especially after hot summer weekends when people had been out drinking and having fun on the river. But hearing a detective speak with such passion about an Indigenous victim was unusual. The journalists put up their hands to ask questions. Did O’Donovan know how Tina had died? The detective hesitated before answering. It was normal in investigations to keep those details quiet, he said, because revealing them could identify the person who had killed her.

  “This is a child, so, I mean, society should be horrified,” he continued. He sensed he was acting emotionally, but wanted to make his point again. Tina, he told his audience, had been tiny. He wanted to stress her vulnerability.

  “She was barely in the city, for a little over a month,” he said, his voice breaking slightly. “She’s definitely been exploited, taken advantage of and murdered, and put into the river in this condition.”

  His colleagues, more used to O’Donovan’s stoic leadership, absorbed his unusual display with quiet nods of support.

  After the press conference, O’Donovan’s administration clerk took him to one side to say she was proud of the way he had spoken up for the victim. There was, among his team and throughout the building, a collective revulsion at the thought of a child-killer lurking somewhere in their community.

  * * *

  —

  More than two thousand kilometres to the east, in the town of Belleville, Ontario, Indigenous activist Nahanni Fontaine was enjoying a holiday visiting friends. She’d been sitting on their sofa, drinking coffee in her pyjamas, when the Winnipeg press conference came on TV. Fontaine, who had grown up on the same Manitoba reserve as Tina and was distantly related to the teenager, watched O’Donovan speak with a heavy sense of resignation. The forty-three-year-old had spent years advocating for the family and friends of other Indigenous women who had gone missing or been found dead, and her first instinct was to grab her phone to start calling them. The girl in the river wasn’t their relative, but they would still need help with processing the death. As the broadcast continued, however, Fontaine’s sadness turned to astonishment. She had witnessed plenty of press conferences concerning the death of Indigenous women, but she had never seen anything like the one being given by O’Donovan. The typical explanation offered by authorities was that runaway girls like Tina were dying because they had chosen to follow a “high-risk lifestyle.” But here was a police officer speaking about Tina with compassion and empathy, as if she were a true victim—as if she mattered. For once, somebody seemed to care.

  Fontaine knew this wasn’t always the case. She could cite numerous examples of official indifference to girls like Tina stretching back years. Most notorious was the case of the teenager found dead on frozen, snow-covered ground in 1971 on the outskirts of the remote Manitoban town of The Pas. Nineteen-year-old Helen Betty Osborne was originally from the Indigenous community of Norway House Cree Nation, but because her reserve didn’t have a secondary school, she had moved to The Pas to continue her education. Her family said she had hoped to become a teacher. Late one night, while walking home, she was picked up by four young white men who had been cruising the streets looking for an “Indian girl” to have sex with. Osborne was forced into the men’s car and driven to an isolated spot where sh
e was sexually assaulted and stabbed more than fifty times with a screwdriver. She was so disfigured that police could identify her only by her fingerprints.

  It took sixteen years before three of the men were charged with Osborne’s murder, even though the identity of all four men was an open secret in The Pas. Only one of them was convicted.

  In 1988, after a Winnipeg police constable shot dead the Indigenous leader J.J. Harper in a case of mistaken identity, the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba was established to investigate this and Osborne’s killing. Commissioners spent a year visiting towns, cities, reserves, and jails to collect information on how the Indigenous community interacted with the police and judicial system. Its findings were stark. In the case of Helen Betty Osborne, it described a police culture defined by racism, sexism, and indifference, operating in a community where callous treatment of Indigenous people was the norm. The justice system as a whole, they concluded, had failed Manitoba’s Indigenous population on a massive scale.

  The commission’s final report listed examples of how the white population of The Pas had ignored and belittled their Indigenous neighbours. There were rumours of white men throwing Indigenous men off a bridge into the Saskatchewan River, allegations that were never seriously investigated by the town’s all-white police force. Officers were criticized for routinely stopping and interrogating young Indigenous men on the streets, and the report found that police had turned a blind eye when white men harassed Indigenous girls for sex. If the girls refused to cooperate, it was assumed that a bit of alcohol or violence would change their minds, and officers never thought to question whether the girls were being groomed or coerced into sexual activity. When they investigated Osborne’s murder, some officers had threatened and intimidated her Indigenous friends though police had taken care to inform the parents of their white suspects of their rights.