by Joanna Jolly
* * *
—
With his prime suspect on the way to the Public Safety Building, O’Donovan considered his next move. From the moment he had heard DeWolfe’s story, the detective knew he needed to interview everyone who’d been identified as spending time at 22 Carmen. His initial objective had been to build up a comprehensive picture of what had happened at the house before bringing Cormier in. But as Cormier had run from his officers, he felt it was the right decision to arrest him. He hoped the outstanding warrants would be enough to keep him while they built up their case.
O’Donovan began to map out his new strategy. He gave orders for Holland, DeWolfe, and Morrison to be questioned that afternoon. The witnesses were to be separated and kept out of sight of each other to make sure they couldn’t confer. The detective planned to watch their testimonies in the video monitoring room and decide how to confront Cormier when he had heard what they had to say. Until then, his prime suspect was to be detained in Interview Room 1. It was the closest secure room to his office, and O’Donovan felt comfortable knowing that Cormier would be sweating it out barely thirty metres away.
Farther along the corridor, in Interview Room 7, Ernest DeWolfe was already being interviewed by Stalker and Riddell, who were attempting to establish how well the group knew each other. The convict relayed how he had become involved with Morrison and Holland after meeting Morrison buying crack cocaine. He said he had become fond of the couple, especially Holland, whom he felt both protective of and attracted to, even though he was living with his girlfriend at the time. By day, he had worked on a construction site, but at night he would head to their place to spend time listening to music and getting high.
Cormier had been introduced into this friendship after DeWolfe had bumped into him and invited him over. The older man had been a reliable source of drugs, and they’d got used to having him around. Early one morning in July, DeWolfe related, he arrived at the house to find two Indigenous teenagers waking up on the futon in the living room. It was where Cormier often slept, using his own bedding, which he would store away in backpacks. DeWolfe had never seen the kids before and thought the girl looked very young, maybe thirteen or fourteen.
“Cormier told me he’d slept with her,” DeWolfe told the detectives. Cormier had confided this to him a few hours after the teenagers left.
DeWolfe was shocked. “I was like, ‘Isn’t she a bit young?’ ” he said.
Cormier replied that Tina was actually eighteen. DeWolfe didn’t believe him, and the conversation had stuck in his mind.
A few weeks later, Holland and Morrison told him about an explosive fight Cormier had had with Tina, which led to her storming out of the house. It had something to do with a truck, which DeWolfe remembered seeing, a dark Ford F-150, which had been parked at the back of the house for several days. The next time DeWolfe saw him, Cormier admitted stealing it and said that was why Tina had been shouting. But the argument had also been about something else.
“Cormier told me that she’d run out of the house because he was creeping her out. He was coming on to her,” DeWolfe told the detectives. “He’d followed her out of the back door and she’d run away down an alley, shouting she was going to call the cops and rat him out.”
When Cormier told him this story, DeWolfe had become worried. With the amount of drugs being used at the house, he didn’t want the cops anywhere near. Cormier reassured him that it was okay. He had taken care of the problem and sold the truck.
“He’d said he’d talked to Tina and taken care of her as well, just the day before,” DeWolfe said. Knowing what had happened to the teenager, he now believed Cormier was admitting to having killed her.
“What date did you have this conversation?” Stalker asked.
DeWolfe hesitated. The days of getting high at 22 Carmen had run into each other that summer. But there were a few dates that stuck in his mind. One was his birthday, on August 19. A few days before, on August 16, he and Sarah Holland had left to party in a cheap hotel. Cormier had initially gone with them but had got into an argument with the taxi driver, accusing him of taking a roundabout route, and had suddenly jumped out of the car. DeWolfe remembered that the conversation about Tina having been “taken care of” happened just before they had left for the hotel, on Friday, August 15.
If this was true, the detectives noted, it meant that Cormier had talked to Tina on August 14—days after the last sighting of her outside the Millennium Library on August 9. It was also days after O’Donovan believed her body had been driven to the Alexander Docks and dumped in the river.
“Could you be mistaken?” they asked DeWolfe.
He replied that he was pretty sure he was right, though admitted that drugs had affected his memory.
* * *
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While DeWolfe was being questioned in one room, Sarah Holland was being led into another by Detective Sergeants Cory Francis and Marc Philippot, who had experience working with vulnerable women. In the harsh light of the interview room, Holland appeared much older than her thirty-two years. From the moment she began to speak, in a gentle but articulate voice, the detectives placed her as someone who had had a good upbringing. Holland was from Winnipeg’s Métis population. She had attended college and flitted between jobs before claiming disability benefits because of fibromyalgia. By the time she met Tina, she had two young kids who were living with their father. The detectives noted she had a conviction for assault, but otherwise her record was clean.
Holland said she had met Tyrell Morrison in 2013, when she was living in the North End, close to where her children were going to school. Morrison was a little younger than her, Indigenous, and strikingly good-looking, with an angular, handsome face. From the moment they got together, the couple had been heavily into partying with alcohol and drugs. In June 2014 they had become engaged and taken a lease on the house at 22 Carmen. By then DeWolfe was becoming a regular part of their circle and came over most nights to smoke crack. But Holland’s relationship with Morrison was beginning to unravel. Her fibromyalgia had flared up, and she would often spend all day upstairs in her bedroom, too ill to get dressed. Morrison was becoming abusive and would sometimes hit her. She said it was good that DeWolfe had been there to defuse the tension.
She remembered it was July when DeWolfe introduced his old friend Raymond Cormier—“Frenchie,” as he liked to be known—into this mix. As far as Holland knew, he was living in a tent by the river and making his money by rifling through dumpsters for anything he could sell.
“Frenchie was as normal as you can be when you’re on drugs,” she told the detectives.
At first, Cormier had seemed like a nice guy who was down on his luck, constantly on the move and looking for ways to make money, carrying his belongings around in backpacks. Holland remembered seeing that he had blankets and a duvet cover with flowers on it, a radio, and a bag full of drug paraphernalia that he would sometimes leave out on the floor. She told him she didn’t mind if he stayed from time to time, and he would sleep on the futon in the downstairs room. But within a few weeks, Cormier had become a constant presence and was beginning to irritate her. He used to let himself in by a broken window, coming and going from the house as he pleased. Holland said it had been on her mind to fix it.
It was Cormier, she said, who’d introduced them to “banging,” or injecting, crystal meth. “He showed us how you didn’t need to heat it up, because you could dissolve the crystals in water,” she told the detectives. “He showed us how to fill the syringe, find a vein, stick the needle in, and pull the plunger out a little so some blood came back into the needle. That meant you had the right spot.”
Holland explained that sometimes finding a vein took several goes. And the needle could get clogged, so you needed to flush it out. Cormier had demonstrated how to do this, by drawing water into the needle, then pointing it upwards and quickly forcing the plunger back in. You knew it was clear when the water sprayed out over the walls and ceiling, leav
ing behind a satisfying arc of tiny droplets that would glisten pink with blood before fading away.
Although Cormier had established himself as the procurer of drugs for 22 Carmen, his friendship with Holland blew hot and cold. Holland felt an ambivalence towards the older man. On the one hand, Cormier was resourceful and could be fun to hang out with. On the other, he annoyed her by making lewd comments when Morrison wasn’t around. A few times, he let her know he wanted to have sex with her. One afternoon he stumbled in on Morrison trying to rape her in her bedroom. Cormier reacted by smacking her boyfriend on the leg with a metal pipe and holding a screwdriver to his throat. She was grateful he had stepped in but was shocked by the violence of his temper.
“Tell us about the first time you met Tina Fontaine,” prompted Philippot, gently steering her towards the subject of the teenager.
“I didn’t know her as Tina,” said Holland. “She said her name was Nicole.”
Holland described how Cormier had brought a young Indigenous couple around one evening, possibly in late July, but she wasn’t sure. Tina had introduced herself as eighteen-year-old Nicole and her boyfriend as nineteen-year-old Cody. Holland didn’t believe her.
“I wasn’t born yesterday,” she told the detectives. “She looked younger, and I assumed she was a runaway, but I’d rather she was in my home than out on the streets.”
Holland said she offered the kids a beer but was adamant that she and Morrison had not offered them drugs, because it was clear they were underage. She said it had been a relaxing evening. The group chatted for a while until Holland went upstairs to bed. As far as she knew, the others had left around the same time.
“Did you see Tina again?” asked Philippot.
Holland said yes, and this time she could remember the exact date. It was August 6, her son’s birthday. Her ex-partner had refused to let her see him, and this left her feeling “broken.” Around lunchtime, Tina appeared at the house on her bicycle. It was Cormier who opened the door to her.
“She was really upset and crying and wanted to see her mom,” said Holland. “Her boyfriend had left and had gone back to his reserve, so I told her if she kept out of my way, she could stay.”
Morrison and Cormier chatted to Tina downstairs, but Holland, still upset, retreated to her bedroom. For a while, Tina stayed with the men. But then she knocked on Holland’s door and asked to come in.
“She told me Frenchie was creeping her out—grabbing at her, groping her, and making inappropriate comments,” said Holland.
Holland told Tina she could stay with her as long as she was quiet. The day was hot and muggy, and the house had no air-conditioning so Holland had opened the bedroom window to let in a breeze. She lay on her bed, thumbing through magazines, while Tina settled into a comfortable old chair in a corner of the room. It had been a pleasant way to spend the afternoon, until Morrison and Cormier suddenly barged in and demanded that the women talk to them. Holland said Morrison seemed drunk. She thought Cormier was being predatory.
“He tried to make it sound like a joke,” she said, “but I saw him try to go for Tina’s boobs and say, ‘Just do me.’ Tina moved out of his way, shouting, ‘Fuck off, you know I’m sixteen.’ But he just laughed. We all said, ‘Hey, she’s just a baby, leave her alone!’ ”
When she first told the story to the detectives, Holland said she recalled the atmosphere that afternoon as being fairly lighthearted. Later, after she had time to think about the exchange, she changed her statement to say the mood had been hostile and aggressive. She said that Tina accused Cormier of being a “skinner,” the street word for a sexual predator, commonly used for convicted pedophiles and rapists. After the women shouted at him, Cormier retreated downstairs.
Holland said she and Tina remained in the bedroom, reading and drinking beer into the early evening. Then Morrison came running up the stairs shouting for her to come to the kitchen. Once there, Holland found that every surface had been covered with greasy power tools and gardening equipment. Cormier was bringing more stuff in from outside, and Holland assumed it was all stolen. She yelled at Cormier to get it out of her house.
A while later, Tina told her she was going downstairs for a glass of water. Within minutes, Holland heard the sound of screaming coming in through her open window. Morrison ran upstairs to tell her that Cormier and Tina were getting into a big fight in the back alley. He went into another bedroom to get a better view.
“I heard Tina yelling she would be calling the cops right away,” said Holland. “I didn’t really hear what Frenchie said—only the word river.”
The screaming lasted several minutes until it seemed Tina had run away. It was, Holland told the detectives, the last time she saw or heard from the teenager. After the fight was over, Cormier came back into the house looking angry and asked if Holland thought the teenager would really call the police.
“I said no. It’s my house, not yours, and I don’t think she wants to get me into trouble,” said Holland.
Later that evening, the argument forgotten, Cormier went out to buy drugs and they all got high.
“At any point, did you see a truck parked near 22 Carmen?” asked Philippot.
Holland said no, she did not remember actually seeing a truck, only the tools that Cormier had brought into the kitchen.
“When did you realize the girl in your house was Tina Fontaine?” Philippot asked.
It was a while afterwards, Holland told him. She confirmed DeWolfe’s account of how they had caught a taxi to a hotel and Cormier had jumped out on the way. Holland and DeWolfe continued on and stayed in the hotel until DeWolfe’s birthday, on August 19. That morning he gave her some money to buy food, and she was on her way out when she caught sight of a newspaper lying in the lobby. On the front page was a story about how two bodies had been pulled from the Red River on the same day: the homeless hero and Tina Fontaine. She looked at the picture but did not recognize the girl. Hours later she saw another newspaper, and this time recognized the picture. It was the girl she knew as Nicole, and she was wearing exactly the same clothes she’d been wearing when Holland first met her.
Holland and DeWolfe returned to 22 Carmen, arriving to find Morrison, his cousin, and Cormier at the house. Holland said she waved the paper in front of the group, wanting to gauge their reactions, especially Cormier’s.
“I asked Frenchie if he did it,” she told Philippot.
He told her no. “He said the girl was exploited, murdered, and thrown in the river, and that was sad because she was just a kid,” she said.
“Did he seem surprised?” asked Philippot.
Initially Holland said yes, though later she said he didn’t seem too concerned. They didn’t spend much time talking about the subject, as someone had brought meth and they wanted to get high. It was the last time the whole group was together at 22 Carmen. Two days later Morrison assaulted her again, this time injuring her badly enough to send her to hospital. He was arrested, released on bail, and moved back in with his mother while he waited for his trial. A week later, DeWolfe was arrested for stealing. By October 1, only Holland and Cormier were left in the house.
* * *
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The detectives asked Holland to sign her statement and arranged for a car to take her back to 22 Carmen. They told her that a forensic team would be over in the next few hours, so she should keep everything as she had left it that morning. As Holland was preparing to leave, her now ex-boyfriend, Tyrell Morrison, was being settled into another interview room farther down the corridor. Earlier that day, Detective Sergeants Tracy Oliver and Doug Bailey had arrived at Morrison’s mother’s house unannounced and asked the twenty-six-year-old to accompany them back to the station to answer questions about Tina Fontaine. Morrison had been cooperative.
In a matter-of-fact manner, Morrison corroborated Holland and DeWolfe’s version of what had happened that summer. When Oliver asked when he’d first met Tina, Morrison told him he had seen the teenager only twice. The first ti
me was when Tina and Cody arrived at 22 Carmen one evening in July. He took a liking to the young girl, who had seemed spirited and talkative, while her boyfriend remained silently by her side. They drank beer and chatted, and Morrison was adamant that he and Holland hadn’t given Tina anything stronger than that.
“We were kind of greedy with our drugs, so we didn’t share,” he explained. “But I did see Frenchie giving her a crack pipe to smoke.”
The detectives found Morrison’s next statement shocking.
“I remember she said it was better than the stuff her mom had given her,” he said.
The last time Morrison saw Tina was on August 6, without Cody, when she knocked on the front door and walked into the house, crying, holding on to her bike. He recounted how Tina asked to stay and cleaned up the kitchen as a goodwill gesture. In return, he offered to make her lunch. At some point she went into the main room where Cormier was staying, and a while later Morrison walked in to see her sitting on the couch with Cormier’s head in her lap. When Cormier spotted Morrison, he sat up quickly.
“What happened next?” asked Oliver.
Morrison said he had been taking so many drugs at the time that he struggled to remember. But Cormier must have left the house, because the next time he saw him was a few hours later, when he pulled up in a dark four-by-four and started unloading gardening equipment. After Holland got angry, Cormier sped out of the house on Tina’s bike. While he was away, Morrison told Tina to throw the truck keys into the garden in case the cops came. When Cormier returned a short while later, he demanded that Tina find them, yelling at her that she was a bitch.
O’Donovan, watching the interview from the monitoring room, suddenly thought of a question that none of the witnesses had answered. If Tina had arrived on her bike, why didn’t she also leave on it? Something had clearly happened, because two days later she told her CFS worker she no longer had a bike but that her meth-user friend Sebastian was going to get her a new one.
