Inmate ‘struggled in her own skin’

Aweek before Terry Baker was found on the floor of her cell at Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution this week, she had tied a ligature around her neck and had to be revived by correctional officers.

That and a recent slashing of her throat, something Baker had never done before, were part of the reason prison guards believed she had recently upped the ante and become much more serious about killing herself.

National Post sources say that after the June 27 incident, Baker was placed on suicide watch, which means, depending on how seriously her risk was rated, she either would have been monitored on video by an officer watching a screen at a control desk or by a guard sitting directly outside her cell.

It worked, in that it kept her alive.

And push come to shove, with chronic self-harmers such as Baker and the late Ashley Smith — the 19-yearold who asphyxiated in her isolation cell at the same prison in 2007 and who was on the same range as Baker for a time — that is the first job of a prison.

But when over the recent holiday weekend Baker didn’t engage in any further self-harm, prison psychologists and management decided to end the suicide watch.

At virtually the first opportunity she had, Baker waited until guards did their regular hourly checks and then, knowing she had 60 minutes before she would be checked again, tied a ligature around her neck and lay on the cell floor.

By the time she was found on the next check, she was brain-dead, and though guards performed CPR for about 30 minutes, she was pronounced dead some short time later in hospital.

Convicted in 2006 in the horrific 2002 slaying of a 16-year-old boy named Robbie McLennan, Baker epitomized the dilemma of the person who commits a dreadful crime and has no way to redeem herself.

“If she hated herself before,” her former lawyer Owen Wigderson said Thursday, remembering her absolute insistence on pleading guilty to first-degree murder, “now (after the killing) she really hated herself.”

From the moment she was in custody — she was just 16 herself when, with her boyfriend Bronson Penasse and another teenager, they tortured, sexually assaulted, burned and stoned McLennan in a remote field in Orangeville, about 80 kilometres northwest of Toronto — Baker was self-destructive and “wanted to plead” guilty, Wigderson said.

He ruminated on the difference between how Baker was seen by the victim’s family and the wider public — as one-dimensionally evil — and how a lawyer like him may come to know her.

“I spent a lot of time with her,” he said. “You see they (offenders) have some redeeming features.”

After Baker’s guilty plea to first-degree murder in 2006, Wigderson said, “I encouraged her to call me … these people have no hope and nothing to dream about, not that I’m anything to dream about. But she liked the connection to the outside.”

And for many years — Baker received the automatic life sentence, with no parole eligibility for 10 years — he heard from her three or four times a year. “But I hadn’t heard from her in a while,” he said, “and now I guess I know why.”

At the time of her plea, Wigderson said, “she wrote a lovely letter” for court and McLennan’s family, but Baker “couldn’t read it” herself when the moment came, so he read it for her.

Stories from that time say that she wrote, in part, “I want to give my life up for taking Robbie’s,” and that even back then, her arms were covered with scars from repeated slashing.

In the agreed statement of facts, she admitted stomping on McLennan’s face, so hard it left a visible shoe impression on his forehead, egging Penasse and the other teenager to “Kill him, just kill him and get it over with” by crushing him with nine-kilogram rocks, and that she extinguished a burning cigarette on McLennan’s body to see if he was dead yet.

Baker was one of eight women whose cases were examined by federal correctional investigator Howard Sapers in a 2013 report on chronic self-injury among federal female offenders.

Another was Kinew James, a 35-year-old aboriginal woman who died of an apparent heart attack just months after she was interviewed as part of that probe.

Sapers later found that critical among a series of miscues that may have played a part in James’s death was that a nurse at the Regional Psychiatric Centre (RPC) in Saskatoon, which houses a 20-bed unit for women, took too long to call a Code Blue.

Baker had just returned to Grand Valley from RPC in December, said Kim Pate, the executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies who recently spent a year at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

She saw Baker several times there, Pate said Thursday in a phone interview. Baker was part of a pet therapy program at the institution, and “Terry loved it. That was the happiest I had ever seen her.”

But of course, in the rigid way of the federal prison system, Baker’s chronic selfharming would see her contact with the dog she loved withdrawn.

“Every time she selfharmed,” Pate said, “and she would hold off as long as she could, she wouldn’t get to see the dog.”

Since returning to Grand Valley, Baker had been both in the institution’s mental health unit, and in and out of segregation.

“She should have been in a mental health institution,” Pate said. “She didn’t need anything more to hold her accountable … She took more responsibility (for her crime) than anyone I’ve seen, she wanted to die. She had just incredible remorse.”

As someone else said of her, and this may be the saddest epitaph, “She struggled to live in her own skin.”