Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  Over many more evenings, Cormier and Synyshyn’s connection deepened. The more Synyshyn listened, the more Cormier opened up. The accused drew up a grid to demonstrate how he felt about their growing relationship. On one side he listed his enemies: Sergeant O’Donovan and the Winnipeg Police Service, the prosecutor, the NDP government, Manitoba Housing, and the shadow people who dominated his nightmares. On the other side, he wrote down his own name and that of his lawyer. Throughout their conversations Cormier insisted he was innocent, and Synyshyn was impressed by his repeated denials. Over time, he began to believe in his client’s innocence. He found himself feeling sorry for him, and just before Christmas he bought him a radio so that he could feel connected to the outside world. Without sharing Cormier’s belief in a political conspiracy, Synyshyn was also beginning to feel that it was just him and his client against the world. After their long face-to-face sessions, Synyshyn would often return home and stand in his kitchen, his head buried in his hands, overwhelmed by a crushing sense of responsibility and panic at the difficult trial he knew was ahead.

  “We had this bond,” he said. “It felt that there was no one else who was going to listen to him or fight for him.”

  Because of his junior status, Synyshyn was required to pair up with a senior supervising lawyer to qualify as Cormier’s Legal Aid–appointed counsel. By the end of the summer, Anthony Kavanagh, an experienced litigator and law lecturer based in Winnipeg, was brought onto the team. Although Cormier seemed happy with his representation, he would threaten to fire his counsel whenever he felt challenged, writing them long letters detailing the ways in which they’d let him down. One point of friction was an official complaint Cormier had made against the police for issuing him with the fake ID used to travel to Vancouver. Cormier believed it had been part of a bigger plan to frame him. The complaint had been dismissed, but Cormier was appealing, despite his lawyers’ advice to drop it.

  When they first took the case, the Crown prosecutors, Jim Ross and Breta Passler, had scheduled a preliminary trial to take place in May 2017. Typically, a “prelim” was the chance to discover if there was enough evidence to proceed to a full trial and for the defence to hear the prosecution’s case. But by the fall of 2016, the Crown had decided to dispense with this stage. A number of key witnesses were vulnerable addicts, and they were concerned that they might not all live long enough to testify in both trials.

  Ross knew it would be a challenge to try the case in front of a jury, particularly in the era of TV crime shows, which tended to wrap things up neatly with forensic certainty and confessions, two elements that were lacking in this instance. But the prosecutor was confident that the evidence he did have tied together into what he called a compelling “constellation of circumstances.” “It’s a series of things that add up,” he said. “Each piece of evidence in isolation proves nothing, but together they can be very significant because of the fact pattern.”

  Ross informed the provincial attorney general that he felt he had a viable case that a jury would convict on, and the attorney general agreed. But wading through the same files that made up the disclosure, the defence strongly disagreed.

  “I had never seen so much material say so little,” said Synyshyn. He had spent hours trawling through the information, looking for scenarios of guilt into which he could inject an element of doubt. When he first found out about the Beardys’ identification of the Chloe Green duvet cover, his reaction had been, “How can this not be him?” But then he read that the witnesses were shown only one photo by Detective Sergeant Stalker and their testimony became less certain. As the lawyer continued to work through the disclosure, he had the sense that each trail of evidence would peter out inconclusively or meet a dead end. It was true that the intercepts from Project Styx revealed Cormier as an unsavoury character with a predatory sexual interest in young women. But that was far from an admission of guilt.

  Synyshyn’s senior partner, Tony Kavanagh, was equally unconvinced. “I had read, like everybody else, the executive summary produced by O’Donovan,” Kavanagh said. “He does a great job of putting together the narrative, and he threads together all the evidence of what Cormier’s done. But then I started drilling down into it, and I noticed that there were, let’s just call them errors.”

  To Kavanagh and Synyshyn, the most glaring of those errors was the isolation of Cormier as a suspect so early in the police investigation. They believed O’Donovan had excluded other important leads and felt he should have delved far deeper into Winnipeg’s drug and gang underbelly, from where much of his information emerged. Perhaps there was more to be learned from Tina’s visits to the Furby Street rooming house, her association with the Kenyan and Nigerian men, the time the police identified her as the passenger in Richard Mohammed’s truck, the sighting of her in the Windsor Hotel. Although O’Donovan had explicitly denied operating with “tunnel vision” during the press conference announcing Cormier’s arrest, this was exactly what the defence team was accusing him of doing.

  “It seemed like a ripe situation for a miscarriage of justice: a high-profile murder, the lack of a suspect, some pretty tenuous evidence, and someone who just everybody would look at and conclude he had to have done it,” said Synyshyn.

  The defence lawyers’ belief was strengthened by the sudden elimination of the Mere Hotel security camera footage as evidence. O’Donovan had considered this a central pillar of his case, believing it showed the stolen truck behaving suspiciously on the night Tina’s body was dumped in the Red River. But in 2017, the year before the trial, one of O’Donovan’s own detectives had ruled that the truck seen in the grainy footage was not the same as the one allegedly stolen by their suspect. From what the officer could make out, the headlights were different from the Ford F-150 and the colour was paler than the stolen truck’s dark blue. The Crown agreed that the footage was inconclusive. In Ross’s opinion, even if the truck was the same make and colour as the stolen one, it had been parked too far away from the river to make sense for it to have been used to dispose of a body.

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  Although the exclusion of the footage was disappointing for O’Donovan, his team had continued to search for evidence, identifying and interviewing people who spent time with Cormier at 400 Logan Avenue in case they had information that Styx may have missed. Then, in the summer and fall of 2017, the detectives were alerted to two startling testimonies that, if true, would prove Cormier’s guilt beyond a doubt. Two separate informants who had been imprisoned with Cormier in the Brandon Correctional Centre told the police that their accused had confessed to them while waiting for his trial.

  The first informant was a white man in his forties who was serving the tail end of a long sentence for the exploitation of teenage girls. In August, the Brandon Correctional Centre had intercepted a letter from him in which he had written about Cormier and Tina’s murder.

  O’Donovan sent a team of detectives to Brandon to interview the man, and they were immediately struck by how he seemed not to want any concessions for his information. For two weeks over the summer, he had been housed in the same isolation unit that contained Cormier. The prisoners were kept apart, but in the few hours they were allowed out individually in the common central area of the block, it was possible for them to chat with each other through the cell doors.

  Initially, Cormier and the man spoke about sports and other prisons they knew. Cormier told the informant he was drawing pictures for a fantasy novel and would slide these under his door to show him. After a few days, Cormier started to open up about Tina Fontaine, describing how he had met and hung out with the teenager. According to the informant, Cormier admitted to having sex with her and said they got into a fight when he found out she was only fifteen. He said she retaliated by reporting him for stealing a truck.

  When the informant asked if this meant he had killed Tina, Cormier replied yes and described how he had lost his temper in an argument. Cormier held up his hands to the glass windo
w high in the cell door to mime how he had suffocated the teenager. When the informant asked what Cormier had done with her body, he replied that he put her into a duvet cover with rocks to weigh her down but obviously had not used enough to keep her submerged.

  The second informant was identified a few months later, in November 2017. He was an Indigenous man in his thirties who had mentioned Cormier in a phone call to his sister. Prison guards eavesdropping on the call had alerted the police. This informant also said he did not want anything in return for his information. He described how, since October, he had been housed in a cell opposite Cormier and they had struck up an uneasy acquaintance.

  Cormier had a habit of using Bible references and sliding handwritten notes about his thoughts under this man’s cell door for him to read. He chatted about stealing bikes and selling crystal meth for money, and about how he would give the drug to young girls and wait until they passed out so that he could do what he wanted with their bodies. Cormier also related how he liked to choke girls from behind so that they would faint and become compliant. The informant said he was getting a weird feeling about their conversations, but Cormier wanted to keep talking, especially about Tina. Cormier said that he and Tina had injected crystal meth together. When he suddenly discovered that some of his drugs were missing, he had lost his temper and started to choke Tina in his rage. According to the informant, Cormier said he blacked out, and when he woke up he found he had put a plastic bag over Tina’s head. The informant wanted to know what had happened next, but their conversation was disturbed by a guard.

  Although the two descriptions of how Tina had been killed differed in their details, O’Donovan felt he was finally hearing the truth about what had happened to the schoolgirl. He was determined that the men’s testimonies should be used in court as evidence. But after years of hearing similar sensational revelations from other prison inmates, Crown attorney Jim Ross was wary. Ross wasn’t averse to using the testimony of jailhouse informants. Earlier in his career, he had called one to the stand in a murder trial. But in this case he was convinced that the contradictory accounts were untrue. Neither inmate had revealed information they could not have gleaned from press reports or from Cormier’s own conversations, even the detail about the duvet cover, which very few people knew. Ross was aware of the temptation to rely too heavily on informants in weak cases. They were often proven to be liars.

  “They tend to be quite manipulative people, and they often tend to be quite clever,” he explained. “They will gather what can be known about the case from the media and then present to police the answer they wanted to hear.”

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  This was another blow for O’Donovan. Without the security camera footage of the truck or the informants’ statements, the Crown’s case would have to hinge on the identification of the duvet cover and the intercepts from Project Styx. O’Donovan assigned a detective to listen once again to the often poor-quality recordings from the Logan apartment and transcribe them as accurately as he could, knowing that they would be crucial to the trial.

  In the final months of 2017, the defence counsel brought a number of motions attempting to limit what evidence could be admitted in the trial, raising the suggestion that another person might have been responsible for Tina’s death and asserting that the police investigation had been inadequate. They lost every one of them.

  As the weeks counted down to the trial’s start in January 2018, Ross and Passler continued to prepare their “tough circumstantial case,” working out the narrative they would present. The Crown attorneys believed they could convince the jury that the odds of one person both owning a Chloe Green duvet cover and having reason to argue with Tina were extremely low, and that Cormier had killed the runaway schoolgirl then panicked and ineptly disposed of her body.

  In their offices in Winnipeg and in Brandon, Kavanagh and Synyshyn were also preparing to put their interpretation of the evidence forward. They both admitted to having sleepless nights.

  “You don’t have many cases where you truly believe that a wrongful conviction would occur if you don’t do your job properly,” Kavanagh explained. Unlike Synyshyn, who, said Kavanagh, had developed a strong emotional bond with Cormier, Kavanagh believed in Cormier’s innocence from a detached, academic point of view. As the trial date drew near, the weight of his responsibility became intense.

  “I did not want a wrongful conviction on my conscience,” he said.

  15.

  JUSTICE FOR TINA

  On January 29, 2018, the trial of the Queen versus Raymond Joseph Cormier opened in central Winnipeg. Cormier was charged with the second-degree murder of Tina Fontaine. He entered a plea of not guilty.

  Earlier that brittle, freezing morning, Thelma Favel gathered with other relatives and family friends outside the Law Courts Building with red ribbons pinned to their coats in a gesture of love and remembrance. They stood with their heads bowed and faces heavy with sadness. For the duration of the trial, which was expected to take at least four weeks, Thelma had chosen to stay in the same Best Western hotel from where Tina was last reported missing. “Looking around the lobby and the parking lot, I feel closer to her,” she said. “That’s where I get my strength to go to court.”

  Inside the courthouse, Tina’s family was joined by reporters, journalism students, and a crowd of public spectators. The number was too great to fit in the allocated trial room, so proceedings were moved to the majestic surroundings of the marble-clad courtroom in the Old Law Courts Building.

  It was in this same impressive room that jury selection had taken place the week before. Potential jurors were asked to stand in front of the judge, while Crown and defence counsels were permitted to object to up to fourteen people each, without having to give a reason for their decision. In preparation, the defence team had googled every name in the jury pool, hoping to find out occupations, political views, and whether members had had any dealings with the legal system before. The team put together a spreadsheet that ranked names according to the qualities they preferred. At the top were people with analytical professions, who they felt would be curious and independent-minded. At the bottom were those from the compassionate sectors—teachers, healthcare workers, and anyone who worked for the government—who might be more predisposed to take the side of the Crown.

  Cormier had also been present for the selection. He had shaved his head and wore a black and grey sweatshirt that Andrew Synyshyn had picked out especially for the trial. Cormier had wanted to wear all black, but Synyshyn persuaded him that grey was less intimidating. As each potential juror was called, the defence counsel checked for Cormier’s reaction. In the final selection, the twelve people chosen were ethnically diverse and predominantly female: eight women and four men.

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  The same freezing morning on which Cormier’s trial opened in Winnipeg, another jury selection was taking place across the Canadian Prairies. Gerald Stanley was a fifty-six-year-old farmer accused of the second-degree murder of an Indigenous youth named Colten Boushie. Boushie was a twenty-two-year-old Cree man who, in the summer of 2016, had been shot in the head by Stanley as he sat in an SUV parked on Stanley’s Saskatchewan farm. It had been a warm day, and Boushie and four friends had been out swimming and drinking. They were driving home to the Red Pheasant First Nation reserve when one of their tires had blown out and they had driven onto Stanley’s property looking for help. While there, two of them had got out of the car and attempted to break into a truck. One of them sat on an all-terrain vehicle parked in the yard and tried to start it up. According to Stanley and his son, who was with him, they believed the young people were there to rob them, prompting Stanley to go inside and grab his semi-automatic pistol. He told police that he fired two warning shots and ran to the SUV to turn off its engine. Somehow the gun discharged, shooting Boushie at point-blank range. The young man died instantly.

  In the aftermath of the killing, the already strained relatio
ns between Saskatchewan’s Indigenous community and its predominantly white farmers flared up. On one side, Indigenous leaders accused the RCMP of issuing a statement that focused more on the fact that Boushie’s friends had been accused of theft than it did on the young man’s killing, making the shooting look as though it was somehow justified. They accused the police of failing to conduct a proper forensic investigation and of insensitive treatment of Boushie’s family. On the other side, the local white community rallied around Stanley, raising money for his defence. “His only mistake was leaving three witnesses,” wrote one rural councillor on a Facebook group page. The councillor later resigned over his comments.

  That morning, the jury selection in Battleford, Saskatchewan, concluded in just over two hours. The defence counsel used its power of veto to make sure that, out of the five men and seven women chosen, not one was Indigenous. A spokesperson for Colten Boushie’s family said it felt as if the trial had already been decided. Although there were no protests that day in the sub-zero temperatures, the hashtag #JusticeforColten began to trend on social media.

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  The coincidence of both trials being conducted at the same time had the effect of making it seem that Canada itself, and in particular its Prairie provinces, was in the dock for its treatment of Indigenous peoples. In Winnipeg, the chief justice of the Court of Queen’s Bench, Glenn Joyal, told the jury members that their job was to hear the evidence dispassionately and decide on the facts of the case. He asked them to use their common sense and life experience and to listen with an open mind without being influenced by public opinion. It was not Mr. Cormier’s responsibility to prove his innocence, he said. Instead, it was the jury’s task to decide if the Crown had proven Cormier’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.