A Family’s Terrible Truth That Wouldn’t Stay Buried : Crime: After 23 years, the grim mystery of a missing mother is solved. It may have been better not to know.

For a time, it looked to Anne Hallberg as if the world was no more interested now in her mother’s fate than it had been 23 years before.

When she was 9, her mother had simply vanished. One morning in February of 1968, Anne and her three siblings awoke in their Bellaire, Tex., home to find another woman sitting at the breakfast table. Despite the children’s sorrowful pleas, no adult--not her husband, not her parents, not her brother, not her cousin, not her neighbors--ever reported Marie Jeannine Paulette Boissonneault-Durand missing.

The family’s insistent, unremitting denial had continued for more than two decades. In the early years, only Anne’s older brother Denis tried to learn their mother’s fate, turning in vain to newspaper reporters and the local police in Hull, Canada, the family’s hometown near Ottawa. By 1991, Anne Hallberg--after avoiding the truth for so long--had decided she, too, must face the unknown.

But her first efforts at unraveling the family’s mystery led her nowhere. First, she took her story and her suspicions to a police lieutenant in San Jacinto, Calif., where she now lives; the policeman’s inquiries reached only dead ends. Next she and Denis wrote letters to the television show “Unsolved Mysteries,” which did not respond.

Then one day an investigator for the Riverside County district attorney’s office showed up at the San Jacinto city office where Hallberg works as an accounts clerk. Hallberg had been assigned to help him with a local investigation. Handing her his business card, Jean Nadeau said, “My name is spelled like a girl, but I’m French-Canadian.”

So am I, she told him. It felt like an intimation to Hallberg, whose family had spoken only French when they first moved from Canada in 1967. What are the odds I’d meet another French Canadian in San Jacinto? she thought.

Hallberg waited two months, through several contacts. I’ve always been confused about my mother, she finally told Nadeau on the phone one day. How hard would it be to track someone after 23 years?

Nadeau chuckled, not paying much attention. Depends on who it is, he said.

Telling Her Story

Soon after, Hallberg called Nadeau to propose lunch. On Friday, April 12, 1991, they met at the Acapulco Restaurant in San Jacinto. As she told her story, Nadeau ate and flipped through summaries written by Denis and Anne. “Uh huh,” he kept grunting. “Uh huh.”

Nadeau respected Hallberg; she was not paranoid or fanatic. But he couldn’t summon much enthusiasm for her story. He thought he knew what had happened. In his world, desperate mates not infrequently abandoned lives gone sour.

“Are you sure your mom might not have run off and gotten remarried?” he asked at the end of lunch.

When Hallberg said no, he shrugged. “Well,” he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Not until he was back in his office, rereading more carefully the memos written by Anne and Denis, did Nadeau begin to sense there was more to this matter than he’d thought.

“I’ve got this case,” he told his boss. “It’s not ours, it’s in Texas. I’ll do it on my own time, but you’ll see some long-distance calls.”

Nadeau’s boss shrugged. “Just remember you have lots of other cases,” he grunted.

*

Looking back now at Jean Nadeau’s inquiry, what is most striking is how easily and quickly he reached the answers.

On Monday, April 15, he pulled out a map of Texas, studied it, made notes, then dialed directory assistance and asked for three numbers: The police in Bellaire; the Harris County sheriff; the Texas Rangers.

Don’t hang up on me, he told those who answered his initial calls. I’m not a kook. I’m looking for something that happened 23 years ago. Was there a missing persons report filed in your office in early 1968?

No one had such a report. But Capt. Bob Prince at the Texas Rangers had a suggestion. Call Cecil Wingo, he said. Wingo’s the chief investigator for the Harris County medical examiner.

Files on Bodies

Prince’s suggestion was a good one. Wingo’s domain is not missing person’s reports; Wingo’s domain is unidentified bodies. In his office he keeps files on each one found in Harris County since 1957. There are 300 in all.

While Nadeau talked, Wingo took notes. Once off the phone, he turned to a pile of loose-leaf binders, chronologically assembled. Wingo knew he could expect to find only two or three bodies around February of 1968. As it happened, he found only one female.

It was Case 68-500, “Unknown decomposed body,” dated Feb. 12, 1968. The victim had been found by target shooters at 5:30 p.m. the day before, lying face down behind a small dump less than 10 miles from where the Durand family lived in Bellaire. The body was dressed in a green skirt and wrapped in a blue bedspread, with a rope tied around the neck and thighs.

Wingo scanned through the details: White female in her 30s, 5-feet, 7-inches, 144 pounds, brown hair and eyes, false teeth, a gold wedding band, a three-inch scar below the navel. Despite the post-mortem decomposition and animal bites, the cause of death was apparent: The victim had died of a skull fracture and subdural hematoma “due to blunt trauma to the head, homicide.”

From yellowing newspaper articles included in the file, Wingo could see that Case 68-500 had drawn a fair share of attention in its time. In the first month calls came in from all over the region. One lady in particular drove everyone crazy by insisting the body was her daughter’s. Everything had ended in dead-ends, however.

Fingerprints sent to the Harris County sheriff, the Houston police and the FBI yielded nothing. The false teeth and the gold wedding ring could not be traced. Artist’s renditions shown on TV drew no relatives or friends. After learning the victim’s green skirt was distributed only in Canada, detectives had even contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but they had no missing persons reports either.

Wingo found none of this surprising. Without full fingerprints, after all, they mainly have to rely on someone coming forward, seeking their loved one.

“Inquiries are how we solve cases,” Wingo explained later. “People call, often in response to news coverage. Those who don’t get identified are for the most part very anonymous people. Like this victim. She’d come just six months before from a small town in Canada to a city of 2 million. She didn’t have a job and didn’t speak English and didn’t know anyone. The next-door neighbor probably didn’t know she was gone.”

Positive Identification

Wingo called Nadeau back within hours of the Riverside investigator’s initial inquiry. “Listen to this,” he began. Then he started reading bits from Case No. 68-500.

Nadeau, taking notes, shivered. What little he knew fit with what Wingo was reading. The rest he would have to check on.

First he called Anne, then Denis. Between them, they confirmed that the height, weight and hair color matched. Denis could confirm the scar; he remembered his mom had surgery after his youngest sibling Martine was born “to not have more babies”--a tubal ligation.

What about the teeth? Nadeau asked. The main thing he wanted to confirm was the false teeth. If the lady had her own teeth, the whole identification was blown.

Denis remembered clearly: His mother used to take her teeth out, brush them, put them in a glass.

By Tuesday, April 16--just four days after Anne Hallberg had shared her story with Jean Nadeau--Texas authorities were able to make a presumptive identification. The positive identification came soon after, when a cousin in Canada signed a notarized statement saying that the autopsy photos in Case No. 68-500 were of Jeannine Durand.

“Denis, Jean found Mom,” Anne sobbed to her brother on the phone late that Tuesday.

Denis, his anger so long contained, refused the tears.

“Anne, don’t cry,” he replied. “It’s over.”

Not quite, of course. Authorities had found Jeannine Durand. But they had not yet found out what happened to her.

*

Harris County Sheriff Johnny Klevenhagen has a rule: If new information surfaces on an inactive case, the file goes to the original investigating officer. Which is why his chief of detectives, Major Eddie Macaluso, came by one morning in early May of 1991 and dropped a thick folder on the sheriff’s desk.

“Remember your rule?” Macaluso grunted. “Well, here’s your case.”

Klevenhagen had no trouble recollecting. As a young deputy in 1968, he had been among the first on the scene after they had found the body. Closing his eyes, he could still see the dump full of beat-up refrigerators and tires and couches, the two-tone blue bedspread, the bare feet, the rope. The Canada lady--that’s what they’d always called the victim in Case 68-500. They’d known that much about her from her skirt, but little else. Klevenhagen had always expected someone would come forward, looking for her. That had never happened--until now.

“Put a good detective on it,” Klevenhagen said. “Get Mike Talton.”

As Talton sat reviewing the file, his phone rang. A Texas Ranger named Robert Maderia was on the line. He, like Klevenhagen, had been handed a copy of the file. And he, like Klevenhagen, had memories. In 1968, as a young sheriff’s deputy from just over the line in Ft. Bend County, he had been the first law officer to reach the dump that evening.

“Looks like we need to pack our asses up and go to California,” Talton told Maderia.

Substitute Mother

When the Texas Ranger and the Harris County sheriff’s deputy arrived in Riverside on May 14, 1991, Jean Nadeau took them first to meet Anne Hallberg and her two younger siblings, Mark and Martine. Then he took them to meet the woman who had replaced their mother at the family breakfast table--Pat Holben.

For 18 years she had been a substitute mother to the Durand children and a live-in girlfriend to the children’s father, Raymond (Frenchy) Durand, who’d eventually settled his family in Riverside County. Now on her second marriage since Frenchy Durand had dropped her in 1985, Holben lived in a trailer park in Mentone, not far from Hallberg’s home.

The sudden, unannounced appearance of three men on her doorstep--one wearing the wide-brimmed hat of a Texas Ranger--must have been a considerable surprise, but she displayed no emotion. From what Dennis and Anne had told him about Holben’s drinking and abusive behavior, Nadeau had expected her to have horns, but he found her instead to be almost childlike--a simple little old woman with no argument, no questions, no edge. Holben agreed readily to join them at the station for questioning.

We’re investigating the disappearance of Jeannine Durand, the investigators began, while a video camera ran on the other side of a one-way mirror. We want to talk about Frenchy, about what happened to his wife.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Holben replied. “I don’t know any more than the children do.”

She said it without conviction, though. Not much prodding was needed, just a little business about religion and clearing things with the Lord. “Wouldn’t it be neat to confess everything and get a brand new start?” Nadeau asked.

Holben sighed, nodded, and started talking.

In January, 1968, Durand called her to his house in Bellaire, she said. Once there, she found Jeannine Durand, bags packed, ready to fly home to Canada to care for her sick mother. The couple left for an airport. She never saw Mrs. Durand again, and Frenchy didn’t return until the next afternoon.

One night a few weeks later, she and Durand were watching television when a news item came on about a woman’s body found in a dump in far west Houston. Durand had muttered, “They found her.” Who? Holben had asked. “Jeannine,” he’d answered. If you tell anybody, he’d added, “you’ll end up in the same place.”

Hours after the investigators finished questioning Holben, they let Hallberg watch a videotape of the interview. It was then Hallberg finally let go of the shield she’d clung to so long, and so ferociously.

“I faced the truth,” she recalled of that moment. “This might sound weird, but I feel Mom wanted me to be the one to find out. Because I’m the one who never wanted to know. Because I’m the one who put it behind me.”

*

In mid-June the Harris County grand jury handed up a sealed indictment charging Raymond Durand with the 23-year-old murder of his wife. A DMV check by Jean Nadeau revealed that Durand had given up his California driver’s license for one in South Carolina; authorities there located Durand in Myrtle Beach.

On June 27, Maderia and Talton rolled up to the strip shopping center that housed Frenchy’s Foreign & Domestic Auto Repair. Durand was standing out front in a blue short-sleeved golf shirt and blue shorts, applying a wrench to a Mercedes.

We’re investigating the disappearance of Jeannine Durand, the officers explained after the introductions.

“Oh yeah, we were married back in the ‘60s,” Durand said. “Had four kids.”

Durand was laboring to look composed. He had a high forehead, piercing eyes, and an indigenous snarl.

“We were living in Bellaire,” he said. “And she just left. Up and left one day. Last I heard she was living with her mom in Canada.”

Enduring the Trial

The officers showed Durand the autopsy photos of his wife’s body, and explained that it had been found in a field near his house in February of 1968.

“What does this have to do with me?” Durand asked.

Well, you’ve been indicted for murder in Houston, they explained. You’re under arrest.

With that, they produced the handcuffs. A day later, Frenchy Durand was sitting in the Harris County jail.

It is hard to say which Anne Hallberg found harder to endure, the burial of her mother in September of 1991, or the trial of her father in late August of 1992.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” Denis assured her before the funeral in their hometown of Hull. But even he cried when they wheeled out the casket. It was as if their mom had just died.

The trial aroused an even more complicated mix of emotions for Hallberg. She hated what her father did, she had to pursue this for her mom, she needed to find out the truth--but she loved her dad. When she looked into the courtroom the day before the trial was to start, she saw him. It was just his back, but she hadn’t been ready for even that.

I can’t do this, she cried to the prosecutors. I can’t do this. I want to go home.

We can subpoena you, the prosecutors warned.

On the witness stand, she looked at her father, but he didn’t look back. He appeared scared and nervous; she had never before seen him like that.

When they called her back to the witness stand a second time, she almost refused. Then, just as she took the stand, defense attorney Jack Zimmerman handed her a photo in which she was kissing Durand at his recent wedding. That pushed her over the top.

“I wanted to call out ‘Dad, I love you. What you did--supposedly did--was wrong. But that I’m up here doesn’t mean I don’t love you.’ I wanted to lie for him. Maybe I misunderstood things from the past. It was like he was calling out, ‘Help me Anne, help me.’ Watching him sink, I wanted to help. I thought: What kind of daughter are you?”

The jurors deliberated four full days before voting on Sept. 2 to convict Durand, and another day before sentencing him to 30 years. When Harris County Assistant Dist. Atty. Ted Wilson called Hallberg to report the verdict, she sounded to him more upset than jubilant. In fact, she sounded as if she wouldn’t have been crushed at all if they’d found Durand not guilty.

So Wilson chose not to tell Hallberg that her ambivalent reluctance had made her particularly believable to the jurors, and by far the prosecution’s most effective witness.

*

In the aftermath of the Durand trial, there has been much effort to understand the story it told.

Some speculate about why Frenchy Durand killed his wife. Perhaps Jeannine Durand “had something” on him back in Canada, it is said. Perhaps she was threatening to leave and take the children. Perhaps he felt trapped, unable to divorce in the French-Canadian culture of 20 years ago.

Others marvel at how Denis and Anne could endure what they did and end up as amiable and well-adjusted as they appear. “Memory of my mother,” Hallberg offers by way of explanation. “That’s why we survived.”

Above all, what most want to know is how a woman could vanish so silently, without a word from those around her. All it took in the end, after all, was someone to seek her. On this, despite the rapt conjecture, few have entirely satisfactory answers. “Why didn’t I say anything?” asks Hallberg. “Why didn’t I say anything?”

Truth and Denial

Even as she asks, though, Hallberg knows why, for she still feels the competing lures of truth and denial. There is liberation in the one but succor in the other.

“On the one hand, I’m happy that I know,” she said. “Now I know where I can go see Mom. Now I know that what I felt--that she loved me and wouldn’t have left me--was the truth. It wasn’t just a dream . . . . But every night when I go to bed, I think of my father in prison and I feel guilty. If I hadn’t said anything, he’d not be there. After the verdict, I felt like I wanted to go back to Texas and ask the judge and jurors to be lenient on him. I wanted the truth out, but I didn’t want Dad to die in prison.”

Hallberg wiped tears from her eyes. It was early fall, and she was sitting in the same San Jacinto restaurant where, the previous spring, she’d lost her father by sharing the family’s shadowy story with Jean Nadeau.

“Can he get out on appeal?” she asked. “Will he? Do people get out on appeal? This is awful, but I’m hoping he gets out. Can I help? Should I call his defense attorney?”