Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  Next, O’Donovan sent in Detective Sergeants Jeff Stalker and Matt Freeman in the hope that they would fare better. But again, Cormier refused to answer. It was getting late, and O’Donovan, conscious of the passing hours, called the senior prosecutor in Winnipeg to ask if he could issue the arrest warrant without a confession, explaining what Cormier had said to Jay before fleeing. The prosecutor made notes and told the detective he would get back to him as soon as he could with his decision.

  For an hour, O’Donovan and his team waited nervously, unsure of what the outcome would be. The prosecutor would need to review the entire case before he could make his decision, and it was by no means certain that he would support them. Then suddenly, the call they were hoping for came through. O’Donovan relayed the prosecutor’s instructions back to his office in Winnipeg, where a detective was waiting to expedite the paperwork. It wasn’t long before McDonald and Taylor were walking back into the interview room with a printed copy of the arrest warrant in their hands.

  “Raymond, take a seat. I have something to tell you,” said McDonald.

  Cormier sat up but stayed on the floor, the blanket still wrapped around him.

  “A senior Crown has authorized the charge of second-degree murder in the case of Tina Fontaine,” said McDonald, handing him the warrant to read.

  For the first time since leaving Whistler, Cormier looked defeated.

  14.

  “NOT A CASE OF TUNNEL VISION”

  On December 8, 2015, the same day Mo and Cormier flew to Vancouver to provide muscle for Jay’s big deal, Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, stood in front of an audience of First Nations chiefs and announced that his government would launch its much-anticipated National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

  “The victims deserve justice, their families an opportunity to heal and to be heard,” Trudeau told the special assembly in Gatineau, Quebec, who greeted his announcement with applause and a standing ovation.

  Trudeau said that those touched by this “national tragedy” had waited long enough and that his government would make the inquiry a priority. Later, his ministers explained that the first phase would be a consultation with the families of victims to find out how they wanted the inquiry to move forward. The information-gathering process would be detailed and far-reaching, and a final report was not expected for several years.

  In British Columbia, O’Donovan noted how Trudeau’s announcement coincided with the culmination of his own project to deliver justice to Tina’s family. But the detective did not share the prime minister’s sense of occasion. When Cormier’s arrest warrant had finally arrived, late at night in the Vancouver Homicide Unit, the only emotion he could feel was relief, mixed with trepidation about what would happen next. Without a confession, he knew the case against his prime suspect was still uncertain. With this in mind, early the next morning he instructed his detectives to interrogate Cormier once again in the hope that they might be able to break him.

  At around 8 A.M., Cormier was taken to an interview room in the same jail where he had been remanded the previous evening. As usual, O’Donovan positioned himself to watch the live feed as his suspect paced up and down like a caged tiger. When Detective Sergeants McDonald and Taylor walked into the room, Cormier stood within inches of their faces and yelled abuse at them. When they asked questions about the stolen truck and the last time he had seen Tina, Cormier continued to pace and shout, denying his involvement.

  After a couple of hours of listening to Cormier rant obscenities, O’Donovan replaced McDonald and Taylor with Stalker and Freeman. Rather than probe for information, this pair of detectives decided to inform Cormier about Project Styx. They told him about the mics in his apartment and the camera placed in the hallway outside. They said it wasn’t just Jay who had been an undercover cop but also Chris, Jenna, Candace, and Mo, and they had all recorded their conversations with him.

  “I hope you remember everything you said over the past six months,” Stalker said.

  “Fucking bad actors, I knew all along,” Cormier snapped back, defiant and angry. “How did prosecutors allow you to do that? Was Danielle a fake as well?” he asked, clearly unnerved by the realization that his life for the past six months had been built on a charade.

  Later, when he’d had time to absorb the full extent of Styx’s activities, Cormier said it had been obvious that Jay and his gang were a setup because of the way they had thrown their money around and inducted him so easily into their circle. He felt there had been red flags all over the place, but the crystal meth had a way of making the shadows move, and at the time he hadn’t been sure if he could trust his instincts. Now it was clear. Nobody was brought into a gang at that level without having to earn his way up there. He had always suspected that the attack on Jenna was staged. He boasted that he was a twice certified first-aider who knew the difference between real blood and the fake theatrical paint they used on her face.

  Mo’s deception was harder to accept. Cormier had regarded both him and Candace as true friends, and even months after he had been told the truth, Cormier couldn’t quite believe that their connection wasn’t real. But he directed most of his outrage at what he saw as the ultimate betrayal by the police: the violation of his privacy.

  “Everything was recorded. Every girl I got intimate with…everything,” he later protested from prison as he awaited trial.

  In the Vancouver monitoring room, listening to Cormier scream in response to the Styx revelations, O’Donovan willed him to blurt out a confession. But true to form, Cormier held himself together. By 11 A.M., the detective had run out of time. Cormier needed to be taken away to a courtroom to be formally remanded and officially turned over to the custody of the Winnipeg Police. O’Donovan’s priority became how to get him home. With Cormier’s history of aggression, he considered a commercial flight too risky. Nor did he fancy the twenty-five-hour car journey over the Rockies and across the treacherous ice-bound roads of the prairies. He relayed his concerns back to his superiors, who in turn contacted the RCMP to arrange for Cormier to be flown back on a private eight-seater twin-propeller plane.

  O’Donovan would not be on the plane with him. He was told that he needed to leave immediately, because the press conference to announce Cormier’s arrest would take place the next day.

  * * *

  —

  While O’Donovan was flying back to Winnipeg, a female police constable phoned Thelma Favel to tell her to prepare for important news. The following morning, an hour before the press conference was due to start, O’Donovan called Thelma himself to say that sixteen months after Tina’s body had been found in the Red River, the police had finally arrested a man for her murder. Thelma cried when she heard.

  “Tina didn’t suffer,” O’Donovan said, feeling that it was a comforting thing to say but wondering how anyone could know what the last minutes of her life were like. “I just want you to know that we have him, and he’s not going to hurt anyone else anymore.” Thelma struggled to thank him through her tears.

  In Winnipeg, Superintendent Danny Smyth, the deputy chief of police, joined O’Donovan to face reporters.

  “Today I’m informing the public that Raymond Joseph Cormier has been charged with second-degree murder in the death of Tina Fontaine,” said Smyth, as a drawn and tired-looking O’Donovan sat silently beside him. Smyth made a point of listing the names of the internal departments and other police forces who had helped, as if to stress the distance between this investigation and the police’s well-publicized failure to protect Tina in the days before her death.

  “We in the police community are also members of the general community,” he said. “We are just as shocked and outraged by the violence we observe directed against women in general, and the violence we observe directed at Indigenous women and children in particular.”

  Then it was O’Donovan’s turn.

  “This has been an extremely long and complex investigation. I couldn�
��t even count the number of man hours that have gone into it,” he began. He detailed how his team had been able to build its case only because of the information given to them by the public. “It’s definitely not a case of tunnel vision,” he said, addressing a common criticism of such focused investigations. His team had looked into numerous suspects, he stressed, before Cormier emerged as the most likely.

  When a reporter asked if O’Donovan believed his work countered long-standing criticism of the Winnipeg Police Service for its failure to investigate other missing and murdered Indigenous women, the detective looked pained.

  “We worked on this every day, and when I say we worked on this every day, I don’t just mean me, I mean my whole squad,” he said. “It’s not because it’s high profile—it’s because there was work to be done on it. We would do that for every single case that we have.”

  In making its announcement, the Winnipeg Police chose not to release a photo of Cormier, leaving reporters to dig up the one they had sent to the “Crime Stoppers’ Most Wanted” section of the Winnipeg Sun the year before. It was the police mug shot showing Cormier with long, unkempt hair and a zoned-out stare, a photo he himself referred to as his “Charles Manson look.” Even before the press conference was over, the picture was leading news bulletins across the nation. Two thousand kilometres away, in Ottawa, the Indigenous activists Nahanni Fontaine and Bernadette Smith were in a hotel conference room attending a pre-consultation session on the national inquiry when Fontaine received a heads-up from an official that an arrest was about to be made in the Tina Fontaine case. Minutes later, seeing Cormier’s photo on their phones, the women hugged each other and cried. Fontaine called the official back and asked him to thank O’Donovan personally for her. “Our community needed this,” she said. “Every single family deserves that same sense of justice and responsibility.”

  Thelma Favel was also deeply affected when she finally saw the face of the man allegedly responsible for killing her baby. “I’ve seen bad things my whole life, but I’ve never seen anything as evil as that man,” she said.

  Over the next few months, Thelma and her family spent hours drafting a victim impact statement, which they hoped to read during Cormier’s trial. Thelma found it an impossible task, torn between not wanting to rake over the pain of Tina’s loss and needing to let the man accused of her death know exactly how badly it had broken her family’s heart.

  “What do I say to the monster that stole my baby?” the statement began. “Abused her, then killed her and threw her away like she was garbage.”

  Thelma described how Tina had become lost and confused after her father was murdered but had always been protective of her younger sister, Sarah, and was a sweet, kind, funny girl. She demanded to know what Tina had done to deserve such a terrible fate, warning Cormier that she did not want to hear the excuse that he’d had a difficult upbringing.

  “I know hundreds of both men and women who were abused and neglected in the residential schools and now have severe addictions from drugs and alcohol. But you don’t see them here, charged with the murder of a sweet, tiny girl,” she wrote.

  In Winnipeg, the provincial corrections body decided to transfer Cormier out of the city to a smaller prison in the prairie town of Brandon, Manitoba, two and a half hours to the west. It would be easier to protect him there against possible revenge attacks by Indigenous inmates, who made up the majority of Winnipeg’s incarcerated population.

  Brandon also happened to be home to the general counsel slated to prosecute the case. James Ross was an experienced and well-regarded senior Crown who had the reputation of never losing a murder case, though he’d once had to settle for a manslaughter verdict. Ross teamed up with Winnipeg prosecutor Breta Passler and waited for O’Donovan’s Homicide Unit to provide them with the official disclosure: the dossier of evidence collected by the police that they would use to build their case. There were so many intercepts that still needed to be listened to and transcribed that the material arrived in batches, with a constant stream of questions and clarifications ensuing between the Crown and O’Donovan’s office. When all the evidence was finally gathered, Ross noted that it was enough to fill thirty-four large ring binders. The volume was so great that it took him and Passler nine months just to read it.

  * * *

  —

  For much of his time in the Brandon Correctional Centre, Cormier was placed in the Rotation Unit, where prisoners were kept in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day and, when allowed out, restricted from socializing with other inmates. Here, he struggled to cope with an overwhelming sense of paranoia and victimization as he came to terms with what lay ahead. Cormier said it was as if he’d been thrown down a rabbit hole, and the only way out was to go through the terror of facing a murder charge. The prison doctors treated his crystal meth addiction with a high dose of Seroquel, an anti-psychotic medication, and he was grateful that it kept him asleep for most of the day and slowed his racing mind.

  As the months passed, Cormier began to put on weight, replacing the gaunt, half-starved look of an addict with that of a portly middle-aged man. He spent the hours alone in his cell creating a fantasy world of medieval characters, which he drew in elaborate pencil sketches, inventing a language for them to speak. He thought back to his early life for inspiration. Growing up in New Brunswick, he was the youngest in a family of eight boys and five girls, and his childhood had been marked by violence, abuse, and family illness. He had felt closest to an older brother who had taken him under his wing, letting him play hockey with the bigger boys. But that brother had died of cancer, and the young Cormier reacted by acting out, desperate for any sort of attention. He was twice sent to the Kingsclear Youth Training Centre, a reform school that later gained national notoriety for the widespread sexual abuse of boys by its staff, including the convicted pedophile Karl Toft. By the time Cormier was a teenager, he had discovered that alcohol could boost his courage to fight back. It wasn’t long before his behaviour was gaining the attention of the police, marking the start of his long career in crime. But despite his criminal activity, Cormier had never stopped wanting to learn. His father had told him it was important to read the newspaper from front to back and his mother had inspired in him a love of crosswords. Whenever he was locked up he would read, especially the Bible and fantasy books, and his prison artwork reflected this passion. In his private world Cormier invented mythic heroes who would fight dragons and finally reveal that consciousness was nothing but an illusion. His thoughts were dark, and he told fellow inmates that if found guilty he would hang himself. The drawings and writings were an expression of his epic struggle. It was Raymond Cormier against the world.

  Cormier reserved most of his anger for what he saw as a political conspiracy to frame him. In his mind, the fact that his arrest coincided with Prime Minister Trudeau’s announcement of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was not accidental; it was a carefully orchestrated plan to present a scapegoat for the problem. In particular, Cormier blamed the New Democratic government of Manitoba, making a connection between the high number of Indigenous youths in care in the province, the failure of Child and Family Services to protect Tina, and the need to find someone to blame for her death. As he learned more about Project Styx, Cormier’s belief in an orchestrated conspiracy intensified. If Tina was the poster child for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, he was the sacrificial lamb framed as the national villain.

  “I wasn’t able to piece it all together until after I read the executive summary, then everything seemed to fit into a really good John Grisham novel,” he said with anger after he saw the prosecution’s argument for his case.

  Cormier’s paranoia meant he had difficulty trusting anyone, not least his own legal counsel. He fired the first two lawyers assigned to him by Legal Aid, suspecting them of collusion with the provincial political elite because they were based in Winnipeg. They were women, and, he believed, probably fe
minists, which would mean they would be biased against him. By June 2016 he had decided to find his own counsel locally in Brandon, where it was unlikely there would be the same political connections. After searching through the local phone book, he left a message with the assistant to a junior defence lawyer in a law firm based in town.

  At thirty-four, Andrew Synyshyn was a relatively young and inexperienced criminal defence lawyer who had defended only one jury trial, on child protection, in Brandon and had no experience in dealing with murder cases. When he first read the message left by his assistant, he was curious about why a prison inmate had called his firm directly. Later, when he googled Cormier’s name, he almost dropped his phone in surprise that such a high-profile suspect had chosen to contact him.

  The following evening, as the summer rain fell hard, Synyshyn arranged to meet Cormier at the correctional centre, hoping for two or three hours of uninterrupted time before the nighttime curfew. Cormier seemed impressed that Synyshyn had shown up so quickly and approved of the T-shirt the lawyer was wearing, which had a motif of numbers on it that he felt were auspicious. Synyshyn later said the meeting was like being drenched by a waterfall of information. Cormier spewed out everything he knew about the case: the Mr. Big operation, the apartment on Logan, his arrest, his relationship with Tina and the people who were conspiring against him. Not much of what he said made sense, and Synyshyn wondered how stable the manic, wild-eyed man sitting in front of him was. At the same time, he was conscious of the professional opportunity he was being presented with. The lawyer returned the next evening to demonstrate his consistency, this time armed with a box of Tim Hortons doughnuts to help sweeten the guards.