Michael Winter - The Death of Donna Whalen

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

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2010

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

Copyright Michael Winter, 2010

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

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 itit 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 trialSt Johns 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 Capotes 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 someones 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 mewho needed that? So I put the manuscript away. I gave up on it and wrote other things. But then some afternoons Id find the boxes of transcripts on the top shelf of my cupboard and be drawn to them. Id 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 professionalpolice, lawyers, forensic experts, medical doctors and the trial judgeand these voices reminded me of Edgar Lee Masterss 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 Faulkners 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 eventI 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 victims 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.

Ill take it in the house and spin it out, Ruth said.