anybody.” “Ramona Hawkes was no paralyzed victim.” “She got caught up in a spiralling escalation of paraphilia that ended with her murdering her husband.” I shrank at the term “sexually assault.” Its invasiveness and its stigma. I didn’t see how I’d ever get used to it.
Laurie’s instructions to the jury struck hardest: “Look past the gender of the accused and examine the evidence. Ask yourself, who was in control? Who had the power? Ramona Hawkes wanted to commit crimes with her husband. When she found out he had fallen for someone else, she grew jealous and killed him. This woman before you did not murder out of a subjugated wife’s fear for her life. Rather she acted from a calculating killer’s need to eliminate a threat.”
I scoured the papers but couldn’t find the name of the woman who’d come between Ramona and James. It occurred to me that James, not the other woman, had provoked Ramona’s jealousy, that Ramona did have feelings for her friends. We’d mattered.
Well, one of us had.
By day ten I was tuning in to the morning news as soon as Alex’s tires squelched out of the driveway.
Tad Stiles came on: “Record lows in Alberta. Two home invasions at separate ends of Toronto overnight — and new details about Molly Sumner, today’s sensational witness at the Ramona Hawkes trial. Next on Good Morning Today!”
After the commercials, a shot of Ramona, slate-eyed with a white-blond fringe. I forgot to blink. GMT! liked this photo of her posing in a merry widow for her husband, the victim.
Then Tad Stiles: “The trial of Ramona Hawkes continues today with the first of her teenage friends appearing before Justice Walter Larraby. The Crown lobbied unsuccessfully for her to use a pseudonym. Though she was under eighteen when she knew the Hawkeses, nobody sexually assaulted Molly Sumner.”
Flash on the merry widow, then on GMT!’s favourite. Ramona stands by an unlit campfire, one foot on a log, one fist balled into her hip. The other hand, raised, grips the feet of a jackrabbit carcass. Its ears flop like hair.
“Strange to imagine someone so beautiful as evil,” Tad Stiles blurted.
Beautifulevil. Once again, they hadn’t shown the scar photo. Last week, after the defence introduced it into evidence during his cross-examination of Identification Officer Leif Peterson, the Toronto Telstar ran it and American Murderer showed it as part of a ten-minute spot, but I hadn’t seen it since. Probably because the photograph of Ramona’s scars was not alluring, nor even sad. It was cold, and it was grim. It promoted extremes. In it, Ramona lifts a hospital gown to expose a jagged welt across each thigh. She’s tucked her hair under a cap and wears no makeup. Her dark eyes stare past the camera. She has no other visible marks. At the trial, it had come out that doctors found nothing else, no bites, scratches, or welts.
The defence must have thought people would feel sorry for Ramona. People did. Nobody wanted to imagine a man hurting a woman like that. Though some, like Cynthia Fist, a columnist in the Telstar, agreed with the Crown. Cynthia Fist allowed that James Hawkes had likely caused the wounds. Yet there were intersecting marks, she noted, the sort of tentative test cuts a person might make before harming herself. She brought up Munchausen Syndrome, where a person self-inflicts injuries or presents symptoms in a quest for attention. She referred to Diane Downs, who shot herself in the arm after shooting her children. When the Crown suggested Ramona could have inflicted the wounds herself, Cynthia Fist agreed.
Ramona could have used a riding crop, Fist proposed, or a rope to scar her thighs. I figured knife, if she’d done it, the same knife she’d used on James. Why not? She probably got the idea right after she killed him. If she killed him. Cynthia Fist said the wounds looked fresher than Ramona claimed. Nobody had an answer. She could have done it, but that didn’t mean she had.
I skipped breakfast and headed for the Lucky Dollar. It was too soon for reports of Molly Sumner’s testimony, but the papers would tease out more details.
I saved Cynthia Fist’s column for last. Whenever the trial bored her, she shifted focus to the periphery. A seasoned trial watcher, she believed the friends and relatives of the accused could erupt at any time in court.
“Darling little sociopath” has parents, too By Cynthia Fist Toronto Telstar
Toronto – The parents of accused murderess and sex offender Ramona Hawkes are a constant presence at her trial.
During a murder trial, the media will often assign blame to the parents for psychologically damaging their darling little sociopath. Good, honest people like Ivan and Petra Ksolva get lambasted for the slightest difference in their child-rearing practices.
Balderdash! What happened to personal responsibility? Ivan and Petra are as much victims of the crimes of their spawn as the parents of James Hawkes and the parents of any of the young women being exhibited at the trial. In fact, we should commend Ivan and Petra. They have fully (if misguidedly, in this reporter’s opinion) supported their daughter throughout her arrest and pre-trial incarceration. And now here they are at the trial.
What parents! Above and beyond most.
Not everyone liked Cynthia Fist, but they read her. I did, too, because she said what she thought. I took courage from her.
I placed the folded paper on the fridge. The past few Christmases Alex and I had spent at his family cottage on Georgian Bay. I hadn’t called my dad since convocation. He didn’t match up well to Ramona’s steadfast parents.
Reporters had revealed one new fact about Molly Sumner. She was fourteen when she first met Ramona Hawkes, who was fifteen. She was twenty-eight now, four years older than I was. Ramona wouldn’t consider either of us for friendship today.
On Heidi Roth-Lopez, a panel discussed murderers. Dr. Sheldon Highman, a British specialist in North American crime, claimed murderers didn’t “get caught.” Rather they “self-revealed.”
“Murderers decide on a subconscious level when they are ready to be found,” said Dr. Highman.
Two men who’d served on juries at high-profile murder trials and a woman engaged to a serial killer on death row in Florida had said their pieces. Highman had the floor.
“Their crimes saturate them to the point where their secret leaks out,” he said, “noticeable at first only to those who are looking. Some leave clues, a signature, so to speak, maybe an item abandoned at the scene of the crime, or a totem stolen. Often they engage in a relationship with the society out of which they have cast themselves, taunting it. They want their evil discovered so they can assume their rightful position as pariah, outcast, whipping post.”
Heidi offered a moue to the audience then asked, “How does this theory apply to any of our current murderers?”
The audience pumped their arms in the air. Heidi squinted at Dr. Highman, his words a parade of barbed, distracting flowers. The other guests sat mute, hands in their laps.
“There is Ramona Hawkes,” he said. The reason I was watching. “Ramona is a prime example,” said Highman. “An outcast who could no longer contain her secret and thus signalled her desire to come into society, if only to assume her role as fallen woman. Killing her husband was the signal, not in and of itself, although the spouse in such a case is always the first suspect.”
“You’re saying she wanted to get caught? So she killed her husband?” Heidi’s voice lilted up an octave at the end of each sentence.
“The defence would have us believe she was an abused wife,” said Highman. “Though you’ll notice no mention of this history was made until after she was charged with murder. A more distinct possibility is that the salacious rumours are true. Ramona and James did lure girls into sexual slavery, or some semblance thereof. As the Crown has suggested, one likely got too close to her husband for comfort and our Ramona took matters into her own hands.”
Dr. Highman’s lips and forehead glistened.
“For Ramona to kill James signalled that she’d had enough