ALSO BY
MICHAEL WINTER
Creaking in Their Skins
One Last Good Look
This All Happened
The Big Why
The Architects Are Here
HAMISH HAMILTON CANADA
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a cognizant original v5 release october 26 2010
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First published 2010
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Copyright © Michael Winter, 2010
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Winter, Michael, 1965-
The death of Donna Whalen / Michael Winter.
ISBN 978-0-670-06663-6
I. Title.
PS8595.I624D43 2010 C813’.54 C2010-904056-2
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I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ,
think it possible you may be mistaken.
OLIVER CROMWELL
FOREWORD
There was a murder in the city I lived in. Donna Whalen was stabbed thirty-one times in her apartment on Empire Avenue. We all knew about it—it was in the newspapers and on the radio and television for months. I walked the same streets the victim walked, and often passed the house where the murder happened. Her boyfriend, Sheldon Troke, was charged with her murder. I looked up the newspaper reports and talked to people who worked on various aspects of the trial—St John’s is a small place. I got my hands on the court transcripts. I received print copies of the wiretaps that were referred to in the trial. It occurred to me that I could write about this murder and conviction in an updated version of Truman Capote’s method. I was excited about dramatizing a true event. I was deep into the narrative and then, during times when I was not at work on the story, a cold emotion ambushed me: I didnt like how I felt about what I was writing. The events were disturbing, and I was using someone’s tragedy for personal gain. There was a dead, innocent woman at the centre. She had been alive, really alive. The family of Donna Whalen is still around, and who was I to turn their suffering into fiction that, if lauded, was praise to me—who needed that? So I put the manuscript away. I gave up on it and wrote other things. But then some afternoons I’d find the boxes of transcripts on the top shelf of my cupboard and be drawn to them. I’d stand on my toes and flick through photocopied testimony, my face very close to the voices of those who loved Donna Whalen and those who loved Sheldon Troke. There were voices in here that were professional—police, lawyers, forensic experts, medical doctors and the trial judge—and these voices reminded me of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. There were also men and women who were intentionally deceptive, or in one case, losing her mind, and those biased or mistaken opinions put me in mind of Faulkner’s characters in As I Lay Dying. I needed these previous examples of unconventional storytelling to assure me that there was something accumulating here, a wedge into the human condition that was truer and more vivid than what I could fabricate, some modern story that, while it was in the public domain, wasnt being read by the public.
D.H. Lawrence writes that a book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction, and this suited my treatment of this event—I felt a compulsion to encourage people to read about this trial in a documentary fictional form. I got the boxes down again, and read the preliminary hearings, the voir dire evidence and witness statements, the interviews with police informants, the newspaper reports and search warrants and doctors’ notes, the diaries and press releases and private letters, the transcripts of the victim’s tape recorder, the police wiretaps and their continuation reports. I spoke pages of it out loud and decided I could not improve on the sheer naked truth of it. There is power in witness testimony, overheard dialogue and private letters, and any intrusion on my part seemed to muddy that power. So, from ten thousand pages of documents, I selected eighty thousand words. I have dramatized scenes by converting testimony into the third person. I have changed the names and locations and merged similar characters.
And so here I present, in as unvarnished a form as possible, what it feels like to have someone murdered in a community that has never known much violence, how the legal system works or doesnt work in conditions that provoke a murder, and what that murder unleashes. I am taking that on because it is important to understand what the repercussions of such an act are once the shock has worn off, as well as capturing the way people speak and the nuances of class and sexism, and how hatred and prejudice and complacency arise. Even portraying the bureaucracy of social services and hospitals and prisons and the intricacies of the law and how the law can double back and bite its own ass. What fear is. A book full of the voices of people who know something tangential to darkness, paragraphs that funnel towards the shock of realizing they are part of a murder trial and will admit to anything, as long as you dont suggest they were an accessory to murder. A succinct snapshot into the life of a neighbourhood, your neighbourhood, and how that neighbourhood can be coerced into saying things that satisfy the very forces that are in place to supposedly protect the neighbourhood.
I hope what we have here is a story that is respectful to those who recognize, or had to experience, the true events within this fiction. Readers should judge this book as a work of documentary fiction and not a recreation of fact, though I do hope this selected and rearranged narrative reveals some truths about people and their predicaments without altering the essentials of the events that led up to, and followed, the death of Donna Whalen.
FAMILY and
NEIGHBOURS
RUTH VIVIAN
Ruth was out hanging clothes and Donna come down and started hanging up clothes. They talked for a minute and Ruth said to her your clothes is awful wet and Donna said the spinner is broke.
I’ll take it in the house and spin it out, Ruth said.
No, Donna said, that’s okay.
It’s only a couple of minutes and it’s done.
It would dry quicker on the line because it was kind of late in the afternoon and they just started talking.
That was probably a year and a half before she died. Donna would tell Ruth about Sheldon Troke. A scattered time Ruth sa
w him around Donna’s apartment. He said hello, good day, very casual like, no sitting down and having a big conversation or anything.
That Friday Donna Whalen came out of the house and Ruth Vivian said hello. Donna was a bit excited, she was going to Ontario for a wedding. I bought a new dress and a pair of black shoes, she said. She was to get the purse and the slip the next day. She said, Ruth come up and I’ll show it to you. Donna went ahead and Ruth Vivian came up behind her. She seen the dress.
Later on her son, Tom, was out in the back fooling around with a car and Ruth had the door open. She was at the kitchen table. It was hot and she opened two side windows and went over to the sink then she heard the swearing. She came out the door and sung out Tom, come in out of it, because the language if you heard it. She sung out to him and he didnt come in so Ruth stood up in their landing and looked over and Sheldon Troke was on the end of the house and his hand was going—he was hitting the side of the house and he was really mad and Ruth thought he was coming towards the house. You slut, he said, you will never get to the mainland. She called Tom up again and closed the back door. She said Tom, did you hear that? Bastard and cocksuckers and stuff like this. He said Mom, what are talking about. And Ruth said come on we go out to the store. They come out the front door and walked down Empire. Mabel Edicott was on her doorstep and Ruth talked to her about going to bingo that night. Ruth never mentioned what she heard out of Sheldon Troke because she figured it was no one else’s business, like you learn to stay out of it. And that is all she thought of it. When you hear rackets in around there, you close your door and hope and pray it will go away. You dont get involved. If anybody shouts, Ruth gets nervous like she got to get away from anybody shouting. When theyre mad they dont even know, theyre just rhyming it out of them. Ruth does it when she’s mad.
She went out later to country bingo with Mabel Edicott, on the corner of Rickett’s Road and there behind Buckmaster Circle. All you got to do is go straight up over the hill and cut down Aldershot by the Salvation Army and go to the Circle.
She won the letter X. It was a hundred and fifty dollars. They came home right away because Ruth is a real gambler, if she stayed she’d be buying Nevada tickets all night so the minute they sung out the last game, she didnt even wait for them to call back, they were out through the door.
They got a taxi home. If there’s anybody going in their way they chip in on a taxi and they get home a lot quicker. It was pretty warm outside and when she opened the door, the heat was on ninety. Ruth said to her husband, Pat, the night like this and the damn heat on ninety and he made a sarcastic remark he said it won’t hurt you—this kind of way. Youre home early tonight, he said, you didnt win. Ruth said I won fifty dollars and she said to Mabel Edicott dont tell him the difference. Pat put the silly grin on his face so Ruth went down the store and bought him a few beers. She wasnt gone no more than five minutes, just across the street, pick up a half-dozen beer, but he never had the heat turned off. So they got in a few words. Ruth was just about gone with the heat. She went in the kitchen with Mabel Edicott and they sat down and had a game of queens. The clock is in the kitchen, it didnt dawn on Ruth to look at it and then she said to Mabel, it’s one oclock already—I got to get up the morning. Mabel said I wants to get out and get some air. Ruth said oh, Jesus, he got the heat on again. I’m going to kill him in the morning. She was on the pissy side. Most married couples fight over money, Ruth and Pat fight over heat like the devil.
Mabel got ready and she went off and Ruth locked the front door, she went back to her bedroom, got her nightdress out from underneath the pillow and got a wash. Pat was after being up and putting the heat on again, and she let the roar out of her. She opened the front door. She never had on her glasses. The glasses were on top of the entertainment centre in the living room. She could walk right in front of a car because to her everything is far away until she puts her glasses on and then it brings it up to normal.
She was stood up by the door and all of a sudden this voice said you must find it awful hot. It was Donna Whalen.
Ruth said, The son of a bitch got the heat on ninety again tonight.
I’m froze to death, Donna said.
I’m dead with the heat, Ruth said, but I’m starting to get the cold shivers now. And Donna said, I can’t wait to go up and put on my jammies and curl up in a blanket on the chesterfield.
Ruth started to shake. I’d better go in, she said, I’m freezing now. And Ruth closed the door and went back to the kitchen and sat down with a puzzle book and then went on to bed. She’s terrible with times, especially when she gets into a puzzle. The house could burn down when she gets into them, she dont pay no mind to time.
MABEL EDICOTT
Mabel works up to Holy Heart. She’s in the cafeteria. Back then she wasnt working at all. That night she was to her sister’s on Rankin Street and she got home around suppertime. Then she went to bingo with Ruth Vivian and played cards with her over at the Vivians’. When she got home her son Keith was there with her two nephews and they were down in the room listening to music and carrying on.
The nephews left a little after one. Mabel straightened up a bit because they had coffee and then she turned on channel 10 and the movie was on and herself and Keith sat down to watch it.
There was this knock on the back door, a soft knock. She went out to the kitchen and answered the door and it was a young fellow asked for Donna. He had blond hair, very nice looking, he was about as tall as Keith, and his hair was cut short to the sides and he was clean shaven except he had a moustache. He had on a jacket.
A soft knock. She had to move the portable dryer out of the way to open the door. That’s the only place you could put it in the kitchen. They have no laundry rooms in the apartments theyre in. He asked for Donna and she said she lives next door and she pointed to next door and then she closed the door and locked it and put the dryer back again.
She thought he knocked on the door next door, but she didnt hear any door open or close. Ten or fifteen minutes later, it sounded like if youre changing around the front room and youre moving and youre dragging a table or a heavy chair.
KIM PARROTT
Kim and Donna grew up together, they went to school together, they kind of got married together. Kim’s known Donna to take medication but only once that you could tell it had an effect, and that was on the telephone—Donna was home going to bed. She did take pills every day. At first she was telling Kim that it was for back pain and then she told her that if Sheldon was gone the pills would be gone.
That Friday Kim had to take her son, Nicholas, to the doctor. Donna came in, they were talking, and she played a tape recorder. It had one of those small tapes in it. They listened to a few parts of it. The voices on the tape were Donna and Sheldon and they were from the night before. They listened to the tape for about an hour. They werent constantly listening, it was rewinding, fast-forwarding, listening. Donna was trying to find one in particular part, where Sheldon was accusing her of going with Kim every Friday night, calling them sluts. Donna was doing her fingernails. Kim felt Donna used to go home and start something with Sheldon. Kim told her not to be so foolish and Donna said, When you gets a phone call telling you I’m dead, then you’ll believe me.
They went down to Donna’s in her car. Kim had Nicholas with her. Donna had to pick up a letter for Housing. She went in to her house and Kim stayed out in the car with Nicholas. Kim, where the sun was shining through the kitchen window, she could see Donna’s shape stood up and she was gesturing with her hands, talking to someone.
When Donna came out she was yelling and screaming that Kim had told Sheldon she was at Jacob Parrott’s going-away party. Jacob is Kim’s ex-husband. Donna threatened to haul Kim’s head off. Kim said what’s wrong with you—she didnt talk to Sheldon, and then Donna couldnt figure out how he found out about it. Sheldon had said he’d figured it out for himself.
They went to Dr Galgay’s office on Water Street. Kim brought Nicholas in to get his
eyes checked. Donna went in and got some valium. Kim saw the doctor too and got Atasol 30, for Donna. Kim went to doctors with Donna two times a month. Kim didnt use them herself. Some months she didnt go at all. She was supposed to get a special type of pills for back pain and nerves. Kim stopped doing it because she thought she was making a fool of herself going in and asking for things that she didnt need. If Kim did have to explain it, she only had to explain it once and then if you went back to the same doctor, all you got to do is ask for a refill on your pills.
Donna was getting gigantic quantities of pills. She shared them with her neighbours, Ruth and Pat and their son, Tom Vivian. She gave some to Sheldon. If someone asked her for some, she’d give it to them.
Donna dropped the letter off at Housing and then they were on their way to the supermarket. They stopped into a store and Donna got something for her father, Aubrey Whalen, and dropped it off at the graveyard on Blackmarsh Road. An apple flip and a can of Pepsi.
They went to the supermarket on Ropewalk Lane. Donna was shoplifting in there. Kim dont remember what she stole. Food. Then Delta Drugstore. They were there long enough to get the prescription filled. Then to Kim’s house. Then Donna had to go home and cook supper.
That night she came over again to do some laundry. Donna had gotten a bed that she bought off Kim’s father-in-law and Donna wanted Kim to get in touch with him. Two bureaus and the frame of the bed had been delivered. It was only the boxspring and mattress that wasnt there. Donna wanted it before she left to go to a wedding on the mainland so Sheldon could sleep in a bed instead of on the chesterfield.
This was about eight oclock. Kim had a headache so she asked Donna for an Atasol. She had nothing with her, just her purse. She had the tape recorder in her purse. On the tape Sheldon came out of the bathroom and spoke about a couple of people that Kim couldnt pick out. Then Sheldon asked who Rod’s friends were. That’s Kim’s boyfriend, Rod Tessier. Sheldon said their graves are sunk.
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