The bond that couldn’t be broken
Donna Jones was the soul of a vibrant and caring social circle, with a promising career and close ties to her family. But over the course of an abusive four-year relationship, Mark Hutt isolated her, tormented her and eventually killed her. CHLOÉ FEDIO te
Donna Jones’ personality, and life, changed when she met Mark Hutt,
Aknapsack full of heavy textbooks couldn’t keep Donna Jones from suddenly breaking into a dance while strolling across the campus of Algonquin College.
“One of us would say, ‘Jig!’ And we would suddenly start jigging,” says close friend and former classmate Kelly Irwin, recalling their student days in an interview with the Citizen. “‘Do-do-doo, do-do-doo.’ We didn’t care who saw. We did silly things. She was my ‘Let’s-embarrass-ourselves’ friend.”
Jones’s friends and family remember her as a bubbly social butterfly, the type of person who formed instant friendships thanks to her warm and welcoming nature.
“She was a bowl full of jelly,” her brother Derek Jones told a jury earlier this year. “She was always laughing. She was always interested in having a good time. She was always willing to help other people — my family, myself, her friends. Always looking on the positive, trying not to live in the negative. You know, just an all right, genuine person.”
On Dec. 6, 2009, Jones’s body was found broken, bruised and burned in the basement of her west Ottawa home. She would have turned 34 that Christmas Day.
Earlier this month a jury found Mark Hutt, Jones’s husband of two years, guilty of first-degree murder.
But even before Jones died of septic shock from the infected burn wounds that covered almost half of her body, the woman that friends and family knew and loved had already started to fade away.
During the five-week trial, friends and colleagues detailed how Jones began to withdraw after meeting Hutt in the summer of 2005. Once a rising star in the federal public service, her work hours were disrupted by frequent, often angry, calls from Hutt.
Her once-bustling social calendar was no longer filled with team sports, dance classes, movie nights and dinners with friends. She began wearing turtlenecks in the summer to hide cigarette burns, gashes and bruises. Over the course of an abusive fouryear relationship, the smile that used to reach Jones’s big blue eyes was replaced by a vacant stare.
Donna Ellen Jones was born on Dec. 25, 1975. She was the younger sister to Jennifer and would become the older sister to Derek 17 months later.
Her father James, now dead, had several different jobs — even serving one term as an alderman for Brittania Ward — but was often out of work. When his printing company failed, his wife, Irena, became the main household earner with her job at the Canadian Automobile Association.
The Jones family dynamic was “dysfunctional normal,” her brother testified.
“I’m talking about lack of communication, lots of yelling and screaming, financial frustration.”
James did most of the shouting and would belittle the rest of the family “to some degree,” but was never physically abusive.
“He was a caring, loving man, but he had an aggressive side to him,” Derek Jones testified. “His anger would build up and he would explode.”
Irena Jones was a foil to her husband — bubbly and generous, like her daughter Donna.
Donna would intervene to protect her mother from her domineering father, friends testified, and as her older sister struggled with anxiety she took on more responsibilities at home. When Derek battled addictions to alcohol and drugs in his 20s and got into trouble with the law, it was the financially secure Donna who loaned him money for a lawyer.
Jones’s social circle grew from a core group of friends that met as teenagers at Woodroffe High School and stayed close as she studied psychology at Carleton University and later human resources at Algonquin. Throughout, Jones was the event planner, the person who brought people together.
“I would say she was the leader of the group,” testified friend and former colleague Erika Penno. “She was very committed to her friends — her friends were very important to her.”
“She had this infectious laugh that you couldn’t help laughing with her,” childhood friend Krista Moulds testified. “She just made you really special about being her friend.”
With former study-buddy Irwin she took courses for fun, including massage therapy, step-dancing and kick-boxing. And though she was very close with her own mother, Jones found room in her heart for a “second mom” in her colleague Frances McManus.
“I didn’t have a daughter and Donna was a very warm, cuddly person, and she was always hugging me,” McManus testified.
McManus met Jones in 2000, working together at what was then the Canada Revenue Agency. Her younger, very competent colleague took McManus “under her wing” and the two maintained a friendship after Jones transferred to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
“We would go out to dinner, shows, just go for a walk at Britannia Bay, go skating on the canal, just stuff like that,” McManus said.
And Jones would confide McManus about her family.
“She seemed to feel very responsible for her family, like as though she was the caretaker, that she was responsible for making sure everything was going okay at home,” McManus testified.
Jones had always lived with her parents. But in the summer of 2005 — after paying off her student loan and with savings bolstered by years of being frugal — the then-29-yearold Jones bought her own house at 1087 Barwell Avenue, not far from where her parents lived.
Around that time, she was introduced to Mark Hutt.
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Abusers “worm their way” into the lives of their victims, social worker and domestic violence expert Deborah Sinclair tells the Citizen. They can do it by preying on vulnerabilities, like physical insecurities. They can do it by exploiting qualities like a nurturing nature. They can do it by positioning themselves as victims to garner sympathy.
Though outgoing with friends, Jones was more timid when it came to romantic relationships.
“She was not a flirt,” Moulds testified. “She was actually very nervous and insecure about meeting men, especially at first.”
Jones was self-conscious about her weight and about a lazy eye. As a child, she had worn an eye-patch over her strong eye to help strengthen the weak one.
“It looked like a big Band-Aid on her eye,” her brother testified. “If I remember correctly, she did get made fun of for it.”
Though she didn’t have many boyfriends as a teen or as an adult, she shared with friends what she wanted in a partner.
“It was pretty much I guess what every girl wants, right?” testified friend and colleague Melanie Houle. “Someone who will love and respect you and support you — and cook you dinner and draw baths after a hard day. Someone that you grow old with. And, you know, you want to marry your best friend.”
It was Houle who organized a meeting between Hutt, a single teammate in a recreational baseball league, and Jones, the “funny, bright, very intelligent” friend with whom she played soccer.
Early in the relationship, Hutt told Jones of his rough childhood and confessed he was the jealous type due to a cheating ex-girlfriend. As they grew closer, she told friends he was turning his life around, but admitted he had a temper.
Jones had always been proud to show off her soccer “war wounds,” Houle recalled. But as her relationship with Hutt progressed, Jones stopped calling attention to her bumps and bruises. When probed, she would say she walked into a wall or tripped over one of Hutt’s dogs.
One by one, friends and colleagues raised concerns about abuse that was leaving marks on her body and that was obvious each time she answered the phone to a profane shouting fit so loud even those at a distance could hear Hutt’s ugly words through the receiver.
“I told her that relationships like this can escalate, usually don’t have happy endings, that usually people die,” Houle testified. “She didn’t acknowledge the abuse, so she couldn’t acknowledge the end result.”
She and Hutt were engaged in 2006. Concern among her friends only grew, and instead of a bachelorette party they staged a formal intervention three weeks before her wedding. Shaking and crying, Jones listened to their concerns but refused to go to a safe house. Her bridesmaids dropped out, but in September 2007 the wedding went ahead.
Domestic abuse isn’t the result of anger management issues, says Sinclair, who also testified at Hutt’s trial as an expert witness. It is instead about maintaining power and control.
That can mean constant surveillance, frequent phone calls under the guise of checking in. It can mean encouraging isolation from others. The abuser can take on a Jekyll and Hyde persona, switching back and forth from cruelty to kindness.
Police investigating Jones’s death found hundreds of notes in the home she shared with Hutt. In one page-long handwritten note, Hutt begged for forgiveness for unspecified behaviour, calling Jones “my angel.” In another short note, he called her a “terrible wife.”
Hutt scalded Jones with boiling water on Nov. 24, 2009. It took 11 agonizing days for her to die, and Hutt did not call 911 until Jones was stiff and dead.
She had spoken to a handful of people on the phone after the scalding, including her mother, but not once did she ask for help.
Her supervisor at work filed a third-party complaint to police on November 25 after Jones called in sick with the sniffles. Sullivan told police she was concerned about Jones’ growing number of increasingly serious injuries. When Sullivan again spoke with her on the phone on Dec. 3, Jones sounded garbled, “like she had had dental work.” Jones said nothing about her injuries.
Sullivan planned an intervention with police for the day Jones would return to the office, an opportunity to talk to her while she was away from Hutt. She never got the chance. As Sullivan told a jury three-anda-half years later, “Donna never came back to work.”