After five calls to 911, Doreen Leclair and Corrine McKeown could not convince police they were in trouble until an operator called them back and their murderer answered, called himself Hank Wacko and fumbled an excuse about why his girlfriend could not come to the phone.
That's when the police car was sent. But it was too late -- the sisters were dead.
On the first day of witness testimony at the inquest into whether the city's 911 communication system failed the two Winnipeg women, the court heard tapes of those February, 2000, phone calls and a detailed chronology of police incidents involving Ms. McKeown and murderer William Dunlop, whose violent, on-again, off-again relationship started in 1992.
Mr. Dunlop was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder in the sisters' deaths and is serving a life sentence.
Standing outside the courthouse just after the tape was played, Hank Meadows, Ms. McKeown's brother-in-law struggled, his eyes red-rimmed, to keep his composure.
"It just eats at my stomach to hear it," he said.
The difficulty for Provincial Court Judge Judith Webster, who presides over the inquest, will be to sort out what irregularities, if any, were at play the night the Métis sisters made repeated calls to 911 operators, with Ms. McKeown increasingly slurring her words from intoxication and struggling to convey the danger she was in.
Norm Cuddy, the lawyer representing the sisters' family, said yesterday there were at least four people in the 911 communications centre who made recognizable mistakes -- including failing to categorize the sisters' third call to police as a high-priority call that would have resulted in the prompt dispatch of a cruiser.
Ms. McKeown and Ms. Leclair were murdered in a neighbourhood in the city's north end. The area used to be the hub of the Ukrainian and Polish community, but is now home to high levels of poverty and crime.
Over the course of the five phone calls, which started just before 10 p.m. on Feb. 15 and ended the next morning before 5 a.m., Ms. McKeown repeatedly struggled to explain that Mr. Dunlop had breached a restraining order by being at the house.
"This man is very violent," Ms. McKeown told one operator.
During the course of their relationship, Mr. Dunlop had been charged and jailed for assaults and for breaching several restraining orders involving her as well as assaults and robberies of others, according to Winnipeg Police Sergeant James McIsaac.
Police association lawyer Hymie Weinstein noted that between 1992 and 1999, there were 15 calls made to police over incidents involving the couple -- from assaults to threatened suicide -- and each time police dispatched a cruiser.