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  • Established Fiction
  • Jenny Kerber (bio)

At the midpoint of Michael Winter’s The Death of Donna Whalen, the St. John’s forensic pathologist Philip Abery observes, ‘Death is not an [End Page 529] event. It’s a process.’ Abery’s comments serve as a fitting summary for what Winter strives to accomplish in this text, which is to take one particular murder case in St. John’s, wherein the title character was stabbed thirty-one times in her apartment while her two children slept in an adjacent room, and to show how its subsequent investigation and prosecution unravels into a long and tangled series of stories. From the first pages of the book onward, the reader hears voice after voice of different individuals connected to the crime – the list includes neighbours, rivals, investigators, lawyers, and a bevy of other characters whose own motivations are exposed as increasingly unreliable as the story progresses. The result of these interwoven stories is a book that tells us as much about fear, fallibility, and the costs of desire for a neat ending in the Canadian justice system as it does about the death of Donna Whalen. Winter remarks that as he delved further into researching the case, what accumulated was ‘a wedge into the human condition that was truer and more vivid than what I could fabricate.’ There is a deep paradox at the heart of this book that Winter captures well, for by the text’s midpoint, readers find their way into that truthful wedge even as the entire notion of ‘what the facts are’ is steadily eroded by the winds and waves of contradiction and outright lies.

Winter admits that the question of whether or not to spin a book out of such personal suffering haunted him for some time before he decided to complete the project. What drew him back to the material, besides the fact that the crime took place in his hometown and highlighted a dark underbelly of St. John’s society never shown in Newfoundland tourism ads of colourful houses and laundry flapping in the Atlantic breeze, was the literary and ethical potential he heard in the voices of those involved in the investigation, trial, and conviction of the victim’s boyfriend, Sheldon Troke. In form, the book (which Winter terms a work of ‘documentary fiction’) makes plain its debt to predecessors such as Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. After reading numerous witness statements, wiretap transcripts, doctors’ notes, letters, and newspaper reports aloud, Winter says he decided he ‘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.’

Yet as readers soon discover, the ‘sheer naked truth’ is a moving target, receding ever further behind veils of narrative and counter-narrative such that it becomes almost unreachable. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the film which the father of the accused reportedly watches on television the night of Whalen’s murder is Oliver Stone’s JFK, an elaborate study of killing and cover-up that casts doubt on who killed Kennedy in 1963. Indeed, even Winter’s own claims as a truth-teller [End Page 530] are drawn into question by a work that must necessarily omit a great deal of the more than 10,000 pages of documents associated with the case in order to produce a manageable volume of 270 pages. What confessions, subtleties, and narrative wrinkles lie in those remaining, absent words? The text refuses to answer this question – indeed, we are never even told in what year the murder of Donna Whalen took place – yet I would suggest that the story’s richness also lies in that very gesture of refusal. Indeed, the distilled text shows that more words are unlikely to bring us much closer to the truth of who Donna Whalen really was or why she died.

St. John’s is not a very large place, and as the reader moves from one character’s observations to another’s, the extent to which the...

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