Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  That summer, John and Mary packed up their belongings and took a three-day road trip with the boys through the American Midwest before heading north towards Winnipeg. O’Donovan had never experienced anywhere as empty as the great North American prairies. As he drove, he found himself looking out for grain elevators, anything to break up the monotony of farmland lying low against the massive dome of sky. A few hours out from the town of Marquette, in northern Michigan, on a long stretch of arrow-straight road, a wolf jumped out in front of the car and ran ahead of them for a hundred metres before casually hopping away over a fence. The ease with which the animal moved through its surroundings unnerved him. The countryside in Ireland had been a cozy patchwork of village, wood, hill, and pasture, where people and nature had coexisted for an eternity. Here, the low-level towns and strip malls felt like tiny afterthoughts dropped into an endless expanse of flatness. He wondered how he would ever fit into this unfamiliar landscape.

  In Winnipeg, the family drove straight to Charleswood, the neighbourhood O’Donovan had chosen as a safe place to raise children. The family rented a small home, and O’Donovan found a job selling suits in a local mall. They struck up friendships at the neighbourhood pool and noted how open and unpretentious Winnipeggers seemed. A few weeks after arriving, Mary declared it was time they ventured downtown to get a feel for their new city. They drove in past the elegant edifice of Union Station and the enormous French-château-like façade of the Fort Garry Hotel towards the intersection of Portage and Main. O’Donovan had read that this was the famous crossroads at the heart of Canada, the meeting point of roads from north, south, east, and west, notorious for being the coldest and windiest corner of the country. But the Irishman found it an underwhelming mix of concrete and traffic. The couple looked for shops and cafés but were disappointed to find only sterile-looking bank buildings and soulless office blocks. The city centre seemed past its best, worn down and broken by the passage of time. Mary noticed men panhandling on street corners and drunks arguing at bus stops. It was nothing like the cheerful downtown shopping she’d known in Toronto and Cork.

  By late October, O’Donovan was discovering why his new city was nicknamed Winterpeg. His first prairie winter squeezed the air from his lungs, and he marvelled at how it was possible to live in a place that could get colder than the North Pole. He loved that Winnipeggers embraced the weather, walking and skating to work on ice trails carved into the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. But he hated how the wind sliced his face and the freezing temperatures dragged on for months. In Ireland, if there was any snow at all, it was wet and mushy and melted quickly on the ground. Here it was fine and dry, like powdered sugar, reflecting the brightness of the strong prairie sun. As winter progressed, the snow was shovelled into huge banks stained with salt and sand that would flank every road. When spring approached, these would melt and freeze over, glazing the sidewalks with a hazardous sheen of ice. When the piles finally disappeared, they would release a gritty film of dust that settled everywhere, turning the city a dull shade of grey.

  In March 1991, after Mary had given birth to a daughter, the O’Donovans bought the house they were renting. The demands of a mortgage and the needs of four children were becoming a struggle. Mary was making a small income as a child minder, and at Christmas John had earned a little extra by hanging festive lights at the mall. But he needed something more reliable. Out of the blue, he told his wife about an advertisement he’d seen for new recruits for the Winnipeg Police Service. She was surprised. Their family was more familiar with having relatives in the outlawed Irish Republican Army than in the security forces, and Mary worried that John’s lack of a college education might hold him back. But O’Donovan was determined, believing his ability to work hard and an innate sense of right and wrong would see him through. He was thirty-two when he applied. “You’re definitely too old to get in,” Mary told him, not wanting him to be disappointed.

  She was right. O’Donovan was not accepted. But he reapplied the next year and was successful. Coming home for the first time in his new police uniform was a moment of intense pride. His starting salary wasn’t much more than he’d made selling suits, but he now had the security of a pension and benefits. Most of all, he had an identity he could be proud of and a renewed sense of purpose. The passion he had known galloping the Irish hills was coming alive again.

  * * *

  —

  The police service O’Donovan joined was a descendant of the force established in Winnipeg in the early 1870s, when the city was earning the reputation of being “the wickedest” in the newly formed Dominion of Canada. Winnipeg was the last large civilized settlement before the remote and undeveloped North West Territories, the final chance to drink, gamble, or sleep with a woman. The city was notorious for public drunkenness, barroom brawls, and kidnapping, and the arrival of the newly expanding railways only made this worse. Prostitution was a particular issue. Men outnumbered women dramatically, inspiring the government to launch a campaign in Toronto and Montreal that urged nice girls to move west with the slogan “So great is the demand that anything in skirts stands a chance.” The city’s newly formed council attempted to control the problem of prostitution by confining brothel owners to the area around the rail tracks. But there were complaints that things were getting out of hand and that the sex trade was becoming so brazen that nude women were riding bareback in the street. Winnipeg’s early police officers had not been beyond temptation. The first chief, John Ingram, was fined and suspended for being found in a state of undress in a “house of ill-fame.”

  Over time the police force grew, modernizing first with uniforms, then bicycles, and then patrol vehicles. The police department became the first in Canada to purchase radio equipment to broadcast directly to its cars and could boast that the first Canadian women to work in law enforcement had been hired as matrons to its female prisoners. In 1927, Winnipeg’s city officers grabbed the attention of North America when they captured Earle Leonard Nelson, an American serial killer who had murdered an estimated twenty-eight women, including two in Winnipeg. Nelson was tried and eventually hanged in the city, cementing the force’s reputation for daring and ingenious police work.

  By the time O’Donovan joined the police, Winnipeg was no longer referred to as the wickedest city in the country, though it had maintained its reputation for lawlessness and violence. It consistently held the record for the highest number of homicides per capita in Canada, an honour that resulted in the unhappy moniker “Murderpeg.” Just as in the 1870s, vice and crime centred around the Point Douglas area—a rectangle of blocks stretching east of Main Street between the railway tracks and the Red River—within the larger North End. It was the same area Thelma Favel moved to in the 1970s and left twenty years later as more immigrants and Indigenous people settled into its cheap housing. Over the decades, the immigrant makeup of the North End had changed, with more prosperous groups moving out to be replaced by newer arrivals. But the Indigenous population remained and continued to grow. In 2014, when Tina found herself homeless on the North End’s streets, this inner-city district boasted the highest urban population of Indigenous people in the whole of North America.

  The North End was where O’Donovan’s police career began and where he completed his training and first job placement. He was happy to be posted here, preferring the area’s grittier streets to the polite boredom of the suburbs. In the North End, he witnessed poverty, illness, despair, a chronic lack of services, and drug and alcohol abuse. The vast majority of victims and perpetrators of crime were Indigenous. To the Irishman, they reminded him of the rural people who would sometimes drift into the city back home. “They lead a simpler life, and when they come here, they’re a little shy, a little quiet,” he would say. But he could also see that their lives were plagued by drugs, sexual exploitation, and gangs. O’Donovan found the violence so disturbing that he told Mary and his children not to go anywhere near the district, certainly not at night. Mary hadn’t minded. She al
ready knew that many in the city felt the North End was a no-go area.

  O’Donovan soon learned that the relationship between the Winnipeg Police and the Indigenous community had been strained for many years. He had not yet joined the force when the Indigenous leader J.J. Harper was mistakenly shot by an officer, a case that stirred cries of racism within the Indigenous community. Manitoba’s 1988 Aboriginal Justice Inquiry had agreed with their accusation, describing the Indigenous experience of the police as a “problem of considerable magnitude” and stating that there had been systemic racism within the service for years. Officers were alleged to have used racist language and shown a disproportionate readiness to stop and search Indigenous people and were accused of an overzealous use of the drunk tank to detain anyone who displeased them. There was also talk of the police conducting “starlight tours,” a name given to the practice of picking people up and dropping them off in remote locations to find their own way home, often without appropriate clothes or shoes and often in freezing winter temperatures. By the time O’Donovan joined, the Winnipeg Police Service was running mandatory training in cultural sensitivity in response to its past failings. The new recruit heard rumours of patrolmen who’d had sex with girls they booked for prostitution and stories of how, after weekly drinking sessions, or “choir practices,” off-duty officers would look for homeless Indigenous men to beat up. But O’Donovan’s personal experience was more positive. The senior officers who mentored him appeared to be good, diligent workers who cared about their jobs and were respectful of the community. O’Donovan could see there had once been a time when becoming an officer meant falling in line with an all-male white hierarchy. He hoped those were the bad old days, long since behind them.

  * * *

  —

  In 2005, after training in forensics and intelligence, O’Donovan was promoted to the Homicide Unit as a detective constable. Here, he helped investigate the twenty to thirty murders that were committed in the city each year, many related to Winnipeg’s burgeoning gang problem. Some cases stayed with him for years, like the 2007 murder of Anthony Woodhouse. Woodhouse was a young man who had got drunk one night, come home late, and argued with his wife. Storming out of his house, he had decided to walk to his mother’s place, a few blocks away in the North End. He arrived just as dawn was breaking but found she was out, so had sat on her front porch to wait for her to return. While he was there a gang member had walked by, mistaken him for a rival, and shot him in the face. His mother arrived home half an hour later to find her son bleeding on her doorstep. An ambulance had rushed him to hospital, but he was pronounced dead shortly after arriving.

  O’Donovan, who by then had been promoted to detective sergeant, interviewed Woodhouse’s mother before she knew her son had died. She repeatedly asked the detective for an update, but O’Donovan decided to stall on telling her that Woodhouse was dead, feeling it was the best tactic to find out what she knew. It was only after the interview was over that he admitted her son hadn’t made it. When she heard the news, she had broken down with a grief so acute that O’Donovan immediately regretted holding back the information. Two years later he had solved the case with the testimony of another gang member, who helped convict eight other suspects wanted for five different murders. It was a triumph for the police, but for O’Donovan the strong sense of failing Woodhouse’s mother remained a lingering regret.

  By 2014, after being promoted to the senior rank of sergeant, O’Donovan was again working in the Homicide Unit, this time as a supervisor. It was a role he embraced with confidence. The detective had built a reputation for being a calm and generous mentor as well as an original and unorthodox investigator. The year before, while supervising the Major Crimes Unit, he had been tasked with finding a serial robber who had raided several banks in Winnipeg. The offender, who he believed had committed a string of similar crimes in Calgary, was a violent man who would chase customers and bank tellers with a knife before making off with the cash. O’Donovan gathered the surveillance footage from Calgary and Winnipeg and found that it showed the robber moving through the banks but didn’t show his face. He put forward the idea of filming their chief suspect as he walked through the police station and giving this and the bank footage to a professor of kinesiology at the University of Manitoba. The professor was an expert in assessing the gait of world-class runners and was able to prove scientifically that the man in the police station had the same distinct way of walking as the robber in the banks. Faced with this evidence, the man confessed.

  But there had also been cases where, despite his most creative efforts, O’Donovan had failed to bring his suspects to court. These were the ones where he was convinced of the identity of the offender but lacked the evidence that would convict them. They had left him feeling conflicted—not quite a failure, but not a success either. They played on his conscience, taunting him with doubts about his methods and whether he had done everything he possibly could to get his man.

  His worst regrets were reserved for the investigations where he had confidently declared to a victim’s family that he would deliver justice but failed to do so. Weighing heavily on his mind was the case of a seventeen-year-old Indigenous girl found murdered in a field outside Winnipeg in 2007. The victim had been identified as Fonessa Bruyère, a young woman who had been in and out of Child and Family Services for most of her life. Shortly before she died, Bruyère had been removed from foster care by the provincial authorities and handed over to a family member despite the authorities having information that she would be exposed to drugs and the sex trade if she was placed there. Her body was discovered soon after two other murdered women were found on the outskirts of Winnipeg, a coincidence that led Indigenous leaders, including Nahanni Fontaine, to call for a special investigation into whether a serial killer might be operating. O’Donovan had the job of liaising with Fonessa Bruyère’s father, and he promised him that the police would find his daughter’s killer. But the investigation drew a blank, and O’Donovan deeply regretted giving the father hope. He had only “added to his grief and frustration,” he said.

  Seven years later, O’Donovan was reminded of Fonessa Bruyère when he received news of the body found in the Red River. On the hot August afternoon when the Missing Persons Unit identified Tina Fontaine, he thought carefully about what he would say to her family. Patrol officers had already informed her next of kin, and O’Donovan planned to visit them in person, mentally preparing himself for the difficult conversations. He knew he couldn’t promise a result, but he would assure them that he would do the best he possibly could.

  4.

  “NOT LIKE CSI”

  In the days immediately following the discovery of Tina’s body, O’Donovan would catch himself gazing at the view from his office window over the tree-lined streets beyond City Hall. He would watch the traffic stopping and starting and let himself breathe in the ordinary rhythms of city life. If he looked the other way, out through his office door into the open-plan hub of the Homicide Unit, he could sense the energy and intensity of his team members as they attempted to pin down the basic facts of the case. The start of any investigation could feel overwhelming, but this one was proving exceptionally difficult. The only piece of definite information they had was that Tina had been officially reported missing on August 9 after running away from the care of social services the day before. Beyond this, her whereabouts in her final days remained a mystery. Detectives were used to relying on cell phone records, security camera footage, and forensics to tell them where victims were killed, how they had died, and who was responsible. Here, they were working in the dark. Tina did not own a cell phone, there were few security cameras where her body had been found, and even if there had been, detectives did not know exactly when she was put in the river. Hardest of all was that there was no crime scene to analyze. O’Donovan’s instinct told him that the only way to make progress was to slow down and take stock. If he showed confidence his team would follow, even if the odds of solving the ca
se were against them. This meant using every possible means to answer the fundamental questions: How had she died? And where had she died? O’Donovan hoped the pathologist would be able to give answers.

  After his preliminary examination of Tina’s body, Dr. Dennis Rhee returned the following day to complete his work. He had already concluded that Tina had no broken bones or obvious injuries, save the shallow depressions on her face and body that may have been caused before death. Now he turned his attention to exploring the underlying tissue of her face, nose, and forehead to look for further evidence of trauma. He began by removing layers of skin and muscle and found that the structure was mostly intact apart from the cartilage of her nose, which was missing. This was puzzling, as the skin around her nose was still in place, leading Rhee to consider a number of theories. While the irregularity was not severe enough to have been caused by a major blow, it could have been caused by a lesser attack, such as a punch or slap in the face. But the pathologist could not be sure that the cartilage had been destroyed before death. It was possible that one of the rocks placed inside the duvet cover to weigh it down had hit Tina’s face as she lay submerged. Or perhaps the Red River’s catfish population had been responsible for the damage. Either way, the injury had not been fatal. Rhee noted its presence, unsure of what it revealed.