by Joanna Jolly
* * *
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Just at that point, in late January, the national news magazine Maclean’s published a story under the headline “Welcome to Winnipeg: Where Canada’s Racism Problem Is at Its Worst.” The main image was of Thelma holding a picture of Tina while wiping away her tears. The writer, Nancy Macdonald, herself Winnipeg-born and raised, had been spurred to write the article because of the horror she felt at Tina’s killing and the second Indigenous schoolgirl’s attack. Macdonald described the city as having a festering race problem, one that had recently become obvious during the mayoral campaign when some candidates had made public derogatory comments about the Indigenous community. She cited studies showing that racist attitudes and a lack of inclusion were worse in Manitoba than in any other Canadian province, despite its having the highest per capita Indigenous population.
The article prompted an immediate reaction from the city’s mayor, Brian Bowman, himself Métis, who held an emotional press conference in which he tearfully admitted that it had highlighted a truth. He promised to do better. “We’re not going to end racism tomorrow, but we’re sure as hell going to try,” he said, flanked by chiefs and leaders from the Indigenous community.
It was clear that the apparent lack of progress in Tina’s case was becoming a nationwide public relations problem for Winnipeg. This was especially true for the city police, who were still reeling from Constables Houle and Jansen’s failure to protect Tina when they had stopped her on the street. Reflecting on the article, the police chief, Devon Clunis, said he wasn’t surprised by its contents and felt the city needed to have a “meaningful conversation” about racism. But, he said, it was unfair to put responsibility for eliminating the appalling chasm between Indigenous and mainstream society solely on the shoulders of his service. “Far too many social issues are left to the police to rectify,” he said, urging a more holistic approach to the problem. Meanwhile, O’Donovan was angry, feeling the article ignored the hard work being done by many officers.
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In March, when the temperatures had finally started to rise and the ice on the river was beginning to break up, Cormier was convicted on his earlier charge and given a ten-month sentence. Because of time already served, his release date was set for mid-June. In court, he told the sentencing judge that once out, his plan was to leave Winnipeg and return to Calgary, where he had lived a few years before.
With the frustrating absence of forensic evidence, O’Donovan was desperate to find ways to move Tina’s investigation forward. Officers at the Milner Ridge Correctional Centre told him that Cormier was keeping himself to himself, refusing to mingle with the other prisoners or even go out into the exercise yard. Throughout his accumulated years of jail time, Cormier had never isolated himself like this. O’Donovan saw it as a deliberate strategy to avoid being informed on, and it quashed any idea of being able to get a confession out of him through another inmate.
It was now more than six months since Tina’s body had been pulled from the Red River. On a bright, clear Sunday at the end of March, John and Mary O’Donovan treated themselves to brunch at one of the many restaurants at the Forks, at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine. Afterwards, as they strolled along the river trail, O’Donovan’s eye was drawn to a group of Indigenous teenagers dressed in hoodies, smoking cigarettes by the waterside. They were chatting and laughing, caught up in their own world and oblivious to the families and couples walking cautiously around them. O’Donovan registered their separateness, noting how they seemed to exist on the fringes of society, and was reminded of how Tina had lived in the weeks before her death.
His thoughts wandered back to another homicide earlier in his career. Like Tina, the victim had been thrown into the Red River in a brutal killing. O’Donovan had identified a prime suspect, a woman, but could find nothing more than circumstantial evidence against her. To solve the case, he had set up his first undercover operation. He had a fondness for Greek mythology and named his plan Project Echidna after a terrifying creature, half-woman, half-snake, who was said to have consumed raw flesh. His officers had done the best they could, but after months of ingratiating themselves with their target and offering her incentives to talk, they could not get a confession. Eventually, prosecutors ruled that the evidence they collected was too weak to go to court. It had been a failure. With the benefit of hindsight, O’Donovan felt Echidna had been too small to bring a prosecution. He had promised himself that if he had the chance to launch such an investigation again, he would be far more ambitious.
As he walked along the river, the detective’s gaze drifted down to the dark pools of water that were beginning to appear in the ice. A small number of geese had already returned for the spring and were squawking loudly on the bank. Turning to Mary, he began to describe how he had set up Project Echidna, suggesting that a similar operation might be the key to cracking Tina’s case. Mary listened as he ran through the idea and weighed up its chances of success. It would be a difficult feat to pull off, O’Donovan said, and Cormier had already proven himself a cunning and vigilant opponent. But with the right resources, he was confident he could make it work. And this time, he would make sure his project was too big to fail.
As the plan began to crystallize, O’Donovan realized it was possibly his only chance to bring Cormier to trial before he likely returned to his itinerant criminal existence. That was not an option the detective was willing to accept, feeling he would be letting down not only Tina and her family, but his entire profession as well. Although it had been months since he’d first seen the autopsy pictures, the images still haunted him. Every homicide was wrong, but this one felt especially cruel and O’Donovan knew he wouldn’t stop searching until he had all the answers. An undercover operation would be a high-risk strategy, but given the intense public interest in Tina’s killing, the detective felt it was more than justified.
Looking down at the Red, O’Donovan suddenly knew what he would call his operation. He would name it after another river, the one from Greek mythology that separated the living from the underworld. The final push to try to solve Tina’s case would be called Project Styx.
11.
PROJECT STYX
A week later, O’Donovan’s superior, Staff Sergeant Dale McMillan, was thumbing through the document the detective had handed him outlining an elaborate plan to determine whether Raymond Cormier was responsible for Tina Fontaine’s death.
“It’s a Mr. Big,” explained O’Donovan.
Mr. Big was the name of an undercover strategy pioneered by the RCMP in British Columbia in the early 1990s. It was a technique employed for investigations that had gone cold, or where a suspect had been identified but there was not enough evidence to convict. O’Donovan told McMillan it was the perfect tool with which to solve Tina’s killing.
All Mr. Big stings followed a similar script, he explained, and Project Styx would be no different. Cormier would be profiled to understand his habits and personality, and this information would be used to identify an undercover officer with whom he was likely to bond. A seemingly chance meeting would be engineered between them. The officer would ask Cormier for a favour—a light for a cigarette, help moving a heavy bag—and this small, ingratiating task would mark the beginning of a friendship.
Eventually, the undercover officer would confide in Cormier that he was a member of an organized criminal gang and tell him he was welcome to join. He would ensure that Cormier was well paid for carrying out small errands and made to feel included. Then, when trust had been built and Cormier was on his way to becoming a fully fledged gang member, another meeting would be arranged, this time with the gang boss, their “Mr. Big.” This boss would confront Cormier with details of Tina’s murder and tell him that if he confessed to it, the gang might be able to protect him from the police. If Cormier didn’t speak up, his status in the gang would be threatened. In this way, if Cormier was guilty, the undercover cops would get their confession.
Both O’Donovan and McMillan were well aware of the Canadian Supreme Court ruling of the previous year that had laid down guidelines for Mr. Bigs after a particularly controversial operation. The Hart ruling was named after a case in which the Crown withdrew charges against the suspect due to insufficient evidence. It stipulated that the value of any evidence collected from a Mr. Big operation had to outweigh the harm it might cause. Mr. Bigs were outlawed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, where they were viewed as coercion, and the Supreme Court wanted to make sure that if the police used them in Canada, they would be conducted fairly. Ideally, the confession they secured would be beyond doubt, containing information only the guilty would know.
O’Donovan reassured his boss that Project Styx took these guidelines into account. He wouldn’t do anything to push Cormier into a more serious criminal lifestyle than the one he was already leading or put him in harm’s way. If anything, O’Donovan said, the Supreme Court ruling had made his job easier, giving him strict parameters within which to work.
McMillan’s next question was predictable. “And the cost?”
O’Donovan’s calculations hinged on whether Cormier moved to Calgary or remained in Winnipeg. The scenarios the detective had in mind for either city were similar, but an operation in Calgary would require expensive long-distance logistics.
“I’m thinking at least $120,000 for Winnipeg and double that for Calgary,” O’Donovan said, explaining he would need a staff of at least a dozen full-time officers. The estimate did not factor in overtime costs and the thousands of dollars that might be paid directly to Cormier to entice him into the gang.
“And it’s a risk,” O’Donovan added. “We may invest a load of time and money and we’re not guaranteed a result.”
McMillan nodded in acknowledgment. The scale of O’Donovan’s plan was unprecedented and would need to be referred up the Winnipeg Police Service chain of command for approval. But they both knew that the likelihood of being granted approval was strong. The Tina Fontaine case was the most high-profile homicide any of them could remember, and there was a force-wide commitment to do whatever it took to deliver justice.
By mid-afternoon, McMillan was back in O’Donovan’s office. “You’re on,” he told him. “Do everything you can.”
* * *
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O’Donovan set about assembling his core team, drawing up a shortlist of candidates he considered experienced and enthusiastic. He wanted people who wouldn’t be afraid to voice their opinions but who also wouldn’t run away with their own ideas. He would need a coordinator, senior investigators, surveillance supervisors, and an officer dedicated to writing affidavits for the necessary court orders and warrants. Central to his operation would be the undercover officers, in particular Cormier’s main confidant. O’Donovan contacted the police psychologist to discuss what sort of person Cormier would most easily bond with. She advised him to choose a man who would not threaten Cormier’s self-image as an alpha male, someone who would appear impressed by his criminal exploits and sexual conquests.
O’Donovan’s undercover coordinator pointed him towards one of their most experienced operatives, a man in his late fifties who had immigrated to Winnipeg from the Middle East. At first, O’Donovan worried that Cormier might respond negatively to someone from a minority. But Mohammad, as the man’s character was known—or Mo—was so easygoing and affable that O’Donovan felt he would have no problem winning Cormier over.
“I’m honoured,” the officer said when O’Donovan approached him about the project. He had worked undercover for most of his twenty-year police career, masquerading variously as a drug dealer, a hit man, and a cellmate who would befriend prisoners for information. He had quickly realized he’d found his niche and loved the process of embodying the physical appearance and mindset of his characters. It gave him a rush to pretend to be someone else, and an even bigger rush to arrest and prosecute dangerous criminals.
It had taken a while, but Mo’s family had finally accepted the dangers of his work. He had a slight build, making him far smaller than many of the gang members he associated with, and his wife had been petrified when he first found himself trapped in volatile situations with knives and guns. But he had assured her that he was well protected by colleagues, who were never far away. To everyone outside his family, the operative seemed a mild-mannered, middle-aged white-collar worker who led an uneventful suburban life.
Mo’s developing friendship with Cormier would be the focal point around which Project Styx unfolded. But O’Donovan felt they needed to deploy a second character who could be physically close to Mo and act as backup if needed. Providing Mo with a part-time girlfriend would be an excellent cover, and it had the additional benefit of letting them observe how Cormier acted around women. The girlfriend would have a backstory of working as a cleaner and living in an apartment across the city with a cat that needed feeding. That would explain why she could only be with Mo some of the time.
This role was harder to cast. O’Donovan needed an experienced officer who could hold her own if threatened but who would also be seen as feminine, vulnerable, and submissive. He chose an attractive blond officer in her early forties who had worked for the Vice Unit, now named Counter Exploitation. Her undercover name was Candace.
Candace’s first taste of undercover work had been to pose as a sex worker soliciting for clients. She remembered being so nervous that she had smoked cigarette after cigarette as she stood exposed on one of Winnipeg’s well-known red-light streets. But by the time O’Donovan sounded her out, she had developed a passion for her work. Like Mo, she loved the challenge of having to think on her feet while making sure the invented scenario was played out. And, like Mo, she felt she was making a difference. One of her most successful roles had been to target a man who’d moved to Winnipeg after serving a sentence for stalking and killing a female jogger. The police found out that he was picking up sex workers, so Candace posed as one to ensnare him.
“You know you’re doing a good job especially when you can see who the next victim would have been,” the officer confided to O’Donovan when he outlined what she would be doing for Project Styx.
Happy with the casting of his two key roles, O’Donovan moved ahead with planning the details of the operation. His major concern was that Cormier would slip town and disappear back into his shadow world of sleeping rough and drifting from city to city, making it almost impossible for the police to keep track of him. To prevent this, the detective hatched a plan to keep Cormier in Winnipeg by offering him free accommodation. He sent an officer to the Manitoba office for subsidized housing, which agreed to lend the police two furnished apartments on the top floor of a small, nondescript block on a busy North End street. One of these apartments would be offered to Cormier as part of a fabricated government initiative for older recently released offenders. The other apartment would become a home for Mo.
* * *
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Cormier’s release was scheduled for Saturday, June 13, 2015. The day before, O’Donovan gathered his team together for one final briefing. Looking around the room, the detective felt a sudden rush of apprehension. He knew how hard his officers would need to work, the long hours ahead of them, and the personal sacrifices they would be making. And there was no guarantee of success.
“At seven-thirty tomorrow morning, he’ll be out,” he told the group assembled around him. “We need to take
it carefully. What we want to do at this stage is just watch and learn.”
He explained that Cormier would be put under surveillance until Monday morning, when he was scheduled to attend an appointment at the city’s Employment and Income Assistance office. The employees there had been instructed to refer him to Manitoba Housing, which would offer him the free accommodation at 400 Logan Avenue, apartment 502.
O’Donovan had already obtained a warrant to place surveillance and recording devices inside and outside the apartment on Logan Avenue. He described how a camera in the fifth-floor hallway would transmit a live feed to the intercept office at the Public Safety Building. When the civilian monitoring staff, who were based in a covert location near police headquarters, saw Cormier enter his apartment, they would turn on the audio recording devices inside the apartment. The staff would listen to the recordings live and make notes, which they would then pass to O’Donovan. The detective said he planned to listen to as many of the conversations as he could himself and would decide which ones were worth transcribing in full. They were expecting a huge volume of information, so the lead investigators volunteered to listen as well. There would also be recordings to analyze from the wires worn by each undercover officer.
As the meeting ended, O’Donovan took Mo to one side to ask him how he was planning to develop his character. Mo told him that he had been thinking through a number of cover stories but had decided to keep it simple. “I’ll just bump into him and start chatting,” he said. He would let Cormier dictate the pace of their friendship. He had been told the suspect was a narcissist, so his plan was to appear submissive and compliant around him.
