Husband makes himself out as the hero
Wife’s actions caused her death, murder suspect tells police
OTTAWA — And so Thursday in Ontario Superior Court, before judge and jury, did the late Donna Jones join the ranks of those who carelessly caused or invited their own deaths or who are otherwise to blame. Their number is legion. To the list of saucy children who fractured their own skulls, reckless babies who threw themselves down stairs, mothers who slipped drunkenly under the water in the bath and wanton teenagers who drove their parents’ cars into canals, we can now add Jones, federal public servant.
She was reported dead on Dec. 6, 2009, in a 911 call from Mark Hutt, her husband of two years. She had suffered massive burns to almost half her body, and, as an autopsy would later reveal, a litany of other injuries as well.
Friends and colleagues were convinced she was being battered by Hutt, and had even made a third-party complaint of domestic violence to Ottawa Police. A confrontation was in the works when Jones was next at the office.
Hutt, now 36, is pleading not guilty to first-degree murder.
It was through his three-hour videotaped police interview later the same day he painted the picture of his wife as essentially responsible for her own demise and himself as the heroic figure who nobly tried to save her.
He was boiling water for the spaghetti she loved — “She loved it to death,” as he said without a lick of irony — when she came up behind him at the stove and abruptly broke it to him the relationship wasn’t working.
“I’m angry,” he said. “I’m upset. My life is over, my wife doesn’t love me anymore.”
He asked to be left alone and thought she left the room. Then, out of frustration, he just “hit that thing,” the pot of water, and too late realized she was just behind him, crouching as she looked for some Tupperware.
“It drenched her!” he told Sgt. Mike Hudson.
He was under no illusion about how serious it was.
He told her repeatedly, “Donna, you’re burned head to toe,” “it’s going to get worse” and if she didn’t get medical help, “something bad” would happen.
Hutt immediately demanded they go to hospital, he said, but Jones refused. “She didn’t want to get me in trouble,” he said.
What ensued, over the next 11 days, was a story of his magnificent sacrifice in the name of love.
He stayed up with her all night, “to make sure she was OK,” bought endless bandages and ointment at the drugstore (and, it turned out, KitKats for himself), begged her to go to hospital, threatened suicide and divorce if she didn’t and, in the latter days, even performed mouth-to-mouth when she stopped breathing.
On the first occasion, the day before she died, “She came right back to me,” he said, snapping his fingers to show Hudson how quick it had been. “She even joked about what she was going to get me for Christmas.”
He pressed the hospital issue again, and this time, “She hit me in the back of the head like you wouldn’t believe” and protested “‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.’ ”
The second time, the night before she died, she had fallen, and Hutt again swung into action, “blew in her mouth once — and she was fine.” She told him, he said, “‘You saved my life. Thank you.’ ”
None of this washed with Hudson.
It was a Sunday; the police computer system was down, so he had little information, only that Jones had been terribly hurt and that Hutt had first explained the burns by saying she had fallen, drunk, into a firepit while at a work conference in Cornwall, Ont.
But Hutt had ditched the Cornwall story as untrue and said he had panicked. He snuffled throughout the interview and appeared to be crying, but Hudson never saw a tear. Later on, Hutt appeared to be vomiting, but Hudson checked the wastebasket and saw no evidence of that, only a little spit.
Though the interview had begun with Hutt being treated as a grieving spouse, Hudson was soon formally cautioning him: He had admitted causing Jones’ burns; he conceivably could face charges; he was not under arrest but could stop the interview right now or talk to a lawyer.
“I know, I know,” Hutt said. “But it’s the right thing to do.”
On several occasions, when Hudson left the room and Hutt was alone with the camera, he engaged in melodramatic monologues.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” he wailed in the first of them.
“But I have to tell the truth. I can’t lie. Why wouldn’t you just go to the hospital? Why? Why? Why? Why wouldn’t you just go?
“I shoulda just brought her anyway … Sweetheart, why? Why wouldn’t you let me bring you to the hospital? Why wouldn’t you let me bring you there? Why? Why did you have to fight me over it? Why? Sweetheart, why, why, why?”
He had extraordinary recall about some things.
For instance, he remembered his wife wetting or soiling herself on several occasions and how, selflessly, he had cleaned her up.
Alas for him, the jurors have been told because of the severity of her burns, Jones’s kidneys and bowels would have shut down after a day or two.
But when Hudson was pressing him for more detail about the scalding, and asked if he had been burned as he sent the pot flying, Hutt replied slowly, “Nothing, not a darned thing. I wear hoodies a lot.”
“Did it (the hoodie) get wet? Hudson asked.
“I guess,” Hutt mused, then told what was, even by his standards, a stupendous nose-stretcher, “I didn’t really pay attention to myself.”
Several times, he actually said, of his newly departed wife, “She just wouldn’t listen to me,” as when he told Hudson, “I really don’t care anymore, sir … There’s really nothing left for me to live for. I never meant to hurt my wife. I begged her (to go to hospital). She just wouldn’t listen to me; I don’t know why.”
Several times, Hudson asked him “if there’s anything else” he should know about, any other injuries the autopsy would discover, if police should expect any suggestion he had hurt his wife.
Once, Hutt remembered the time Jones, who between them, he said, was after all clumsy, had fallen down and broken a wrist.
Once, he remembered elbowing her in the nose, but unintentionally in his sleep, and oh yes, he confided, as if he’d had to dredge up the memory, there was the time he was target shooting up at the cottage (it was a trailer) “without knowing my wife was out back, picking up bottles, and I shot her in the kneecap.”
Well, who doesn’t have difficulty remembering the time he shot his wife?