Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  Meanwhile, the Missing Persons Unit had passed on another lead. After Tina was reported missing on August 9, the unit had released a series of media alerts asking for information. On August 11, they received an anonymous text saying that Tina had been seen at 4 A.M. on August 9. This was followed by more texts from the same number saying that Tina had been seen with a black man. O’Donovan passed them to his team to verify.

  They discovered that the number belonged to an eighteen-year-old Indigenous girl living in the North End. “Katrina,” as she liked to be called, told detectives she often spent time on the streets. She had grown up in CFS care herself, and looking out for street girls had become her way of making a difference. It was because of this that she had encountered Tina.

  The first time they had met was on August 7, when the girls struck up a conversation on the West End corner of Langside and Ellice. Tina said she was sixteen and working the streets, a fact that alarmed the older girl. Pretending to walk away to buy cigarettes, Katrina made her way to a nearby police cruiser to tell the officers there was “a little girl out selling her body.” When she returned, Tina had disappeared. But within the hour she was back, announcing she had finished with a customer and now had cash to buy drugs.

  Tina led Katrina to a house on Furby Street and told her to wait outside while she went in. A few minutes later she appeared with a small plastic bag of marijuana, which she started to smoke, saying she thought it was laced with crack. The pair sat for a while in front of a pizza restaurant and Tina confided that she’d been taking drugs for a while, experimenting with meth, crack, and weed. She described herself as officially missing from CFS care with family living nearby. In return, Katrina shared her own CFS story, later telling a CBC reporter that she “knew the feeling of being alone both emotionally and mentally when you have nobody, and I guess that’s why we connected.”

  The girls hung out until around 2 A.M., when Katrina suggested they make their way to the Macdonald Youth Services shelter a short walk away. The plan was to use the bathroom and grab a bite to eat, but secretly Katrina wanted to force Tina to stay overnight. However, Tina was harder and more streetwise than Katrina had assumed. She checked in using a false name, Tessa Guimond, and refused to answer questions when the desk worker noticed she seemed drunk and had a swollen lip and scratches on her knees. While Tina was using the bathroom, Katrina gave the worker her real name, pleading with her to force Tina to stay. The care worker called the CFS after-hours unit, but they were unaware that the teenager was the subject of a missing persons report. Unable to stop her from walking off into the night, all the worker could do was offer Tina a sweater to keep warm.

  The girls headed back to the corner of Langside and Ellice. Tina told Katrina the drugs were kicking in and she was hallucinating, so the older girl stayed close by her side, watching over her as the sun began to lighten the horizon. Suddenly a black truck pulled over and its driver waved at Tina, prompting the teenager to walk over and get into the passenger seat. At first Katrina assumed Tina must have known the driver, but then she realized that the man was cruising the neighbourhood for sex. Panicked, she waved to another police cruiser in the distance to try to alert the officers. She saw the police car follow the truck, and she later found out that officers had arrested the man but let Tina walk away.

  When O’Donovan heard this part of Katrina’s story, he was confused. Looking back through police records, he could find no reports of an arrest after a vehicle stop on the morning of August 8. The detective sent out an internal appeal to all staff, asking if anyone had had contact that day with his homicide victim. Tina’s name and face had been widely publicized, so it would have been impossible not to know her death was under investigation. With rising frustration, the detective requested an internal investigation to check the computer database for a record of anyone running Tina’s name. After several days with no answer, he was finally contacted by two patrol officers who admitted it was they who had crossed paths with the teenager that morning.

  Constables Brock Jansen and Craig Houle told O’Donovan they had been at the end of a night shift when they started to follow the black truck Tina had got into. Jansen had been the more senior of the pair, experienced in dealing with sexually exploited women and the johns who frequented the area. By contrast, his partner, Constable Houle, was a recent graduate from the academy with only weeks of experience. They described how they became aware of the truck, not because they had seen Katrina waving, but because it had stopped near a group of people. As Jansen drove towards it, it had moved slowly southwards, taking a route that was almost a loop. Suspicious of the driver’s intentions, Jansen had turned on his blue lights and pulled him over. Houle ran the licence plate through the police computer while Jansen got out to speak to the driver. The officer found him evasive, turning his head away as if he didn’t want to be recognized before reluctantly giving his name as Richard Mohammed. Houle informed Jansen that Mohammed had been flagged for a suspended licence, so Jansen cuffed him and locked him in the back of the patrol car while he went to deal with the passenger.

  The girl in the passenger seat initially gave her name as Tessa Twohearts and her date of birth as 1994, facts Jansen relayed to Houle to check. When Houle’s computer search drew a blank, Jansen walked back to ask again. Tina gave another fake name that Houle was not able to match. In the patrol car, Mohammed was becoming violent, smashing the back seat with his head and arms and threatening to fight the officers. Once again Jansen asked for Tina’s name, and this time she gave it correctly. Houle checked Tina’s information and told Jansen there were no warrants or orders out against her.

  “Why did you lie?” Jansen asked when he was back at the passenger window. Tina replied that she thought she would be in trouble. “Not with the police,” Jansen told her, and offered to give her a ride home. Tina told him she was staying at the nearby Quest Inn and wanted to walk there herself. It was now 6 A.M. and light. Believing she was in no danger, Jansen let her go.

  Later, with the benefit of hindsight, Jansen said he should have paid more attention to Tina’s date of birth. To him, the girl had seemed to be dressed maturely and he felt she could easily have passed for eighteen. She also seemed calm and hadn’t broken any laws. For his part, Houle admitted that he had failed to notice there was a previous missing persons alert against Tina’s name, a detail he said he missed because of his inexperience.

  O’Donovan was furious. Not only had the constables withheld vital information from his investigation, their mistake had threatened to destroy the goodwill he was building with the Indigenous community. “Her name was clearly flagged and she looked like she was twelve,” he muttered with exasperation to his team. His chief of police, Devon Clunis, considered the matter so serious that he briefed the press himself, telling them the officers had been “assigned to non-operational duties” while an investigation was pending. “For anyone to see a young woman in that condition and to say, ‘We’ve seen so much of that, we’re just going to let it go,’ is not acceptable,” he later said. When journalists contacted Thelma Favel for her reaction, she told them she was still coping with being slammed with a $500 bill for Tina’s ambulance ride only days before. “I just can’t describe it, how I am still feeling, knowing that if they did their job, my baby might still be here,” she told reporters. “It’s just another Aboriginal who fell through the cracks.”

  For a brief moment, O’Donovan worried that the Winnipeg Police might be dealing with a situation similar to the one in which a US cop infamously escorted a victim back into the care of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. But his detectives were quickly able to rule Mohammed out as a suspect. The night the officers had picked him up, Mohammed was taken to the drunk tank to sober up. They had decided not to press charges and Mohammed insisted that he’d never see Tina again. O’Donovan’s team were able to confirm his alibi. It was later that morning that Tina had been found in the parking lot and taken first to hospital and then put into CFS care at the Bes
t Western hotel, so O’Donovan knew for certain that Mohammed had not been the last person to see her alive.

  The detective turned back to Katrina’s story. The eighteen-year-old told him she had seen Tina again shortly after the teenager had walked out of the Best Western on August 8. That evening, they met around 8 P.M. Tina was with a young Indigenous man and the girls quickly parted company. Around midnight, they bumped into each other on the corner of Langside and Ellice. Tina made it clear she was working, but they chatted for a while until a sex worker shouted at them to get out of her area. As the girls walked away, Tina told Katrina about the previous night, describing how the cops had let her go and she had hooked up with another customer, got drunk, passed out, and ended up in hospital. She related how CFS had checked her into a hotel and she had been allowed to leave, though she knew that if she didn’t get back soon they were going to report her missing again. “I want to go home to Sagkeeng, where I’m loved,” Tina told her new friend.

  It was now around 4 A.M. on Saturday, August 9. The girls had stopped to sit down on Ellice Avenue to share cigarettes and chat. A skinny young black man walked past, clearly on drugs, and offered twenty dollars for oral sex. Tina agreed to the transaction, telling Katrina to wait for her and she would be back in twenty minutes. Concerned for Tina’s safety, Katrina followed the pair as they walked across the street and into an alley, but she lost them in the darkness. After waiting an hour or so for Tina to return, she finally approached two sex workers and asked them to help her look for the teenager. The group searched for over an hour, but Tina did not reappear. It was two days after this that Katrina sent the anonymous text messages to the Missing Persons Unit.

  With Katrina’s statement, O’Donovan’s team now had a potential suspect. His detectives tracked down the sex workers, who confirmed the story of the search. O’Donovan presented Katrina with a photo lineup that included headshots of the Kenyan and Nigerian men from the Furby Street rooming house. When Katrina recognized one of them as the person who had walked off with Tina, O’Donovan instructed his team to put the man under surveillance. As far as he knew, he was the last person to have seen Tina alive. O’Donovan wanted to know who they were dealing with before they brought him in.

  But then more information came into the police tip line that questioned this theory. A woman reported seeing a girl fitting Tina’s description at the bus stop outside the downtown Millennium Library at lunchtime on Saturday, August 9, hours after Katrina had last seen her. She told detectives that it was the second time she’d seen the teenager. The first had been in the same place a week earlier when she had noticed the girl because she looked thin, and because her hair had been pulled back into a ponytail but was falling out because one side of her head had been shaved. The second time she saw her, the girl had approached her and asked for a cigarette. The woman told the teenager she was too young to be out on the streets, to which the girl had replied that she wanted to go home with the woman and be looked after by her. The request had seemed odd. The girl appeared fragile and vulnerable, but she was a stranger, and the woman said she couldn’t help. Instead she gave her a bus ticket, saying she hoped the girl would use it to get somewhere safe.

  Now it appeared that the black man was not the last person to have seen Tina alive. Once again O’Donovan gathered his team around him to review the timeline of her final week. They knew that Tina had stayed in the hotel near the airport with her boyfriend, Cody Mason, until the morning of Wednesday, August 6. The following day, on August 7, a witnessed had placed Tina in the Furby Street rooming house under the blanket with a flower pattern. That same evening, Katrina had met Tina for the first time and stayed with her overnight until Tina got into Mohammed’s truck and was stopped by the patrol officers. Hours after this, Tina had passed out under the building overhang in the university parking lot. She had been taken to hospital, then for a burger, and then dropped off at the Best Western Charterhouse. From there, she had gone back onto the streets, met Katrina again, and walked off with the black man. A few hours later, she had been outside the library asking for a cigarette.

  As O’Donovan’s team tried to confirm this last sighting with security camera footage, another promising call came into the police tip line. It was a message from an inmate of a halfway house located on Main Street in the North End. The man said he wanted detectives to visit him in person, as he had something important to say. O’Donovan dispatched a team to take his statement, not knowing that the information he would give would change the entire course of his investigation.

  * * *

  —

  Robert Sango was a sixty-year-old former bank robber who had been convicted of a series of offences in the 1980s. He told detectives that while on day parole at the halfway house that August he had got into the habit of sitting outside at a bus stop for one last smoke before curfew at 11 P.M.

  On the night of Wednesday, August 6, Sango had been sitting alone on the bus stop bench at around 10 P.M. when a young girl came running around the street corner and headed straight to a pay phone nearby. She made a quick call, slamming down the receiver when she was finished, then turned to walk towards him. Seeing that he was smoking, she asked if she could bum a cigarette. Sango said yes, teasing the girl for being too young to smoke. In response she started to cry, so he patted the bench beside him to indicate she should sit and tell him what was wrong.

  In between sobs, the girl began to tell her story. She said she had been hanging out with a girlfriend and her boyfriend at their house earlier that evening when the couple had gone upstairs, leaving her alone with another friend, an older man. He had started to put moves on her and became aggressive when she said she didn’t want anything to do with him. “He called her a tramp and a whore,” Sango said, and described how the girl had cried even more when she told him this. Sango had tried to cheer her up, telling her not to take the names to heart, as people often said cruel things that weren’t true. The girl nodded and told him that the older man had stolen a truck, and that she had run to the pay phone to report him to the police.

  Frightened that the man might be following her, the girl asked Sango if he knew a place where she could stay. “Why can’t you go to your mother’s or father’s?” he asked, and she admitted she was a runaway. Sango advised her not to go around telling people this, especially in the North End, where someone might take advantage of her vulnerability.

  At this point, a friend of Sango’s appeared and joined in the conversation. The men discussed giving the girl money for a bus ticket, but neither had change in their pockets. Instead, they told her they could watch over her as she walked down Main Street to make sure no one was following her. Just before leaving, the girl stood up and held out her hand for Sango to shake, saying, “You are a gentleman, thank you for being honest.” Sango remembered how tiny her hand was. She introduced herself as Tina, to which he joked “Just like Tina Turner,” but she just looked puzzled. Sango thought how young and sweet she was, but also naïve, certainly too naïve to be out on the streets. True to their promise, the men kept their eyes on her small frame as she walked away down Main Street until she was nothing more than a distant dot. Twelve days later, Sango’s friend pointed out a newspaper picture of the girl found in the Red River and asked if that was the same girl they had been speaking to. Tina’s hair was different in that photo, so he wasn’t sure. But a few hours later, he saw another picture in a different paper and recognized her immediately. That’s when he called the police.

  O’Donovan immediately deployed a team of detectives to the pay phone to find the number and relay it to the city’s emergency communications centre. He wanted to know if there had been any 911 calls made on the night of Wednesday, August 6. The centre confirmed that there had been one, logged at 22:18:41, and emailed a recording of it to him. It was the end of a busy day when the file pinged into O’Donovan’s inbox. The detective leaned out of his office to summon his colleagues inside to listen. When they’d squeezed themselves around
his desk, he clicked play, and the voice of a female dispatch worker started to speak.

  “Nine-one-one, what’s your address and emergency?”

  There was a pause, and then a thin, young female voice could be heard saying, “Hey, I’d like to report a blue truck that was stolen earlier today.”

  “Okay, and do you know who stole it?” came the question, to which the girl replied, “This guy named Sebastian.”

  “Is it your truck?”

  “No, he’s my friend and he stole it earlier today.”

  The worker read out a direct phone number for the police and explained that they were the people to deal with this sort of complaint. Then the call ended.

  There was silence for a moment as the detectives took in what they’d just heard. It was as if a ghost had come to life. The female voice was very young and high-pitched and had a faint trace of a rural accent. Later, O’Donovan’s team played the recording to Tina’s aunt Lana Fontaine, who recognized her niece immediately, adding that it sounded as if she was slightly high. But even without this confirmation, there was no question in the office that the voice they were listening to belonged to Tina.

  After the frustrations of the forensic investigation and the painstaking effort of piecing together Tina’s last movements, the team finally had the break they’d been hoping for. Here was their victim, speaking directly to them, telling them a story they needed to hear. They were back with Sebastian, the “sixty-two-year-old meth user” Tina had liked to chill with, and the man who was supposedly getting her a bike. Not only had Sebastian allegedly stolen a truck, he seemed to have had an aggressive sexual interest in the dead girl.

  “Looks like we have a new person of interest,” said O’Donovan, as a jolt of energy pulsed through the huddle of tired detectives.