A trial opened here the other day for three people charged with murdering four other people. If you only read or heard that much…you might think this was a biker gang shoot out or a bad Saturday night in China-town. You could reasonably conclude that drugs or money were involved. You’d be wrong. On trial were a husband, a wife (the second) and a son. The victims were three daughters of this family and the first wife…who may or may not have had the momentary joy of divorce. If there is a heaven for those who have been so violated…she may have the eternal joy of never seeing this family again. This was a so-called “honour killing” although one could be forgiven for seeing it as an “honour slaughter”. The women were found in a car submerged in a lock on the Rideau Canal near Kingston, drowned. It happened during the night. According to the father/husband they were asleep at a motel…the women in a separate room…and as far as he knew the former wife decided at 2:00 A.M. to have driving lesson …so she “took” the keys to one of two vehicles and loaded up the three teenaged daughters and eventually drove them all into the lock . End of story? Not quite. Somebody witnessed a second vehicle driving away at speed… It was an S.U.V. and it appeared to have pushed the other car into the lock. Of course the witness didn’t appear until later. Meanwhile no one…not even the cops could imagine that this was anything but a tragic accident…although it would have taken some seriously tricky driving skills for a beginner to run into the canal at precisely this spot in the middle of the night in a strange town. Pity they didn’t look at the front end of daddy’s S.U.V.
O.K. so the not very apparently bereaved family heads off home to Montreal and the polis proceed to investigate. A surprising and alarming number of small ahahs appear in the situation. The rear bumper of the car in the canal is dented…at least three of the victims (the daughters) appeared to have made no attempt to escape from the submerged car although there was one window through which they might have. So, were they dozing off at the time or drugged? The former wife seemed to have been moving after the car sank. Back in Montreal the good son smacks the S.U.V. into a post and heads off to the body shop for explainable repairs to the front end. Everything goes quiet around the miserable household and the mystery in Kingston begins to grind its gears toward the unthinkable conclusion. Questioning of the family reveals a few details.
The family had gone to Niagara Falls to celebrate the nuptials of one of the late daughters, hmmm, minus the daughter’s husband or husband to be or husband recently annulled (these things suffer from translation don’t they?)…They decided they didn’t like the place so they left Niagara Falls for the long drive back to Montreal in two vehicles…the car and the S.U.V. . Dad was driving the S.U.V. and the good son was driving the car…not clear how the passengers were distributed through the vehicles. They got tired of driving and stopped beside the highway to talk it over…the son was dispatched to find a motel. They were right beside Kingston. So far so good. They check in. The next morning they find the girls and the former wife missing with the car. Oh dear! When the Polis got around to sharing the bad news…the words “canal? what canal?” glowed unconvincingly in dull grey neon across the foreheads of father and son. Mom’s mind was visiting outer space one presumably and no neon appeared on her forehead. At this point the input from the surviving family members got extremely limited and no amount of translation from native tongue would help. Eventually interviews of other family members…neighbours, friends of the dead girls began to surface. The family was relatively well off, The father had bought a small strip mall in Montreal for $2 million. This greatly facilitated and fast tracked his immigration. It was a strict home…father was very upset about the daughters transition to loose north american culture. One dared to marry without dad’s blessing…rage was called in to sort things out. The former wife was part of the household although it’s not clear what part exactly…Dad thought she was encouraging the daughters to bring shame upon his noble head. Rage left town and something cold and dark arrived.
What was once unthinkable back in Kingston was suddenly very thinkable….and once thought there was only one ultimate conclusion. From that moment…a trial was merely a formality whose purpose was to decide whether all three of the remaining family were in on it. For the legally minded the question is whether the prosecution can prove who did what…and how. For most people on the street that question is trivial.
It isn’t amazing at all that our minds have learned to leap beyond the hideous details of this case to assume that this was an honour killing. Forty or fifty years ago…maybe even thirty years ago virtually no one in North America would recognize the term or what it meant. Now we’ve been exposed to a culture clash that makes the term all too recognizeable. This isn’t the first case to happen in Canada and it won’t be the last. It is by far the worst and it’s likely to remain the worst. In the court of public opinion the family and by extension their culture have already been convicted. One of the dismal consequences of this business is the fact that people are condemning the culture; are less tolerant of people who come from other cultures.
Our culture has lost its frame of reference for this outrage but it wasn’t so very long ago that families here in North America were ostracizing daughters who got pregnant out of wed-lock…who went off with the “wrong” boy. We saw young men disinherited for “bringing shame to the family name”. Along with these things there were young women locked up by their families, brutalities and beatings, forced abortions and a whole slew of greater and lesser evils. Is it possible a hundred a fifty years ago our culture had “honour killings”? Sure it is. Our culture was still lynching people less than fifty years ago.
Knowing any or all of that does nothing to make what happened in Kingston anything less than monstrous and a ghastly perversion of any notion of humanity. I don’t know what sort of justice will emerge from this trial…maybe none. but if there is any justice at all it should include an unmistakable message to any who are here, who come from here or who come from elsewhere that women are not chattel…that there is no honour in this…that this behaviour goes so far beyond dishonour that it needs to be extirpated from all societies like the cancer it is.
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