GIST: "Tammy Marquardt was pregnant and 23 years old when she was admitted into the Kingston Prison for Women. A guard quickly offered her some advice.
He told her to lie to other inmates and say that she murdered her husband.
That way, Tammy would have some status in prison and the child inside her might be safer.
“I was all by myself,” she recalled. “I had the baby inside me. That was all of my support.”
The truth was that Marquardt was sentenced to life in prison in 1995 after she was wrongly convicted of first-degree murder in the death of her 2 ½ year old son, Kenneth.
Marquardt had rejected a prosecution offer of five years in prison in exchange for a manslaughter plea. It would be another 15 years before a court finally acknowledged she was victim of miscarriage of justice.
By then, her other sons had grown up without her.
Sometimes, Marquardt, 49, marvels that she’s still alive to tell her story.
“How in the hell did I survive?” Marquardt said in a recent, rare interview. “What was so special about me that I was able to survive this?”
Her son Eric was taken from her immediately after she gave birth, while she was starting her prison term. He was made a Crown ward, just like her other son Keith had been two years earlier.
Tammy was now truly alone. She kept maintaining that she didn’t kill Kenneth but plenty of other inmates believed she was a baby killer.
Even at its best, the now-closed Prison for Women was a harsh place. Nine separate commissions recommended it be closed and a 1977 government report called it “unfit for bears, much less women.”
For Tammy, prison life meant the daily craziness of taunting, name calling, and death threats. There were deep bouts of depression, anger and bitterness. “I went to bed each night wondering whether my sons were in good and loving homes,” she later said. “Were they healthy, happy and doing well in school? I starved for news of them. But none came.”
Tammy, who’s a little over five-foot-one and slender, was placed in protective custody for her own safety.
At one point, Tammy tried to kill herself with pills.
She gravitated toward Native healing circles in custody.
Her background’s Oji-Cree, as well as Scottish, Irish and English.
She traces one of her grandmothers to the Manitoulin Island area but grew up in the GTA, raised by a single mother. Her homes included a Metro Toronto housing complex on Lawrence Avenue East and then shelters and friends’ homes after sexual advances from a male in her mother’s home.
In prison, she found herself feeling more at home with Indigenous inmates.
“Throughout childhood, I was forced against my native heritage,” she said. “I always wanted to know … I was forced to deny it.”
“It was like the Native community was more caring, more embracing, more compassionate. The other people were more strict, more judgmental ... Let’s be honest. Nobody likes to feel judged.”
Over time, the truth started to seep out, as Dr. Charles Smith, the key Crown witness against her, was repudiated in a series of cases and a commission.
Bad science put her in prison.
Good science eventually got her freed.
There was also plenty of help from lawyer James Lockyer and the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted (now Innocence Canada), which challenged Smith with reports from six internationally recognized forensic experts. They said there was no murder and that Kenneth died of natural causes.
Eventually, complaints about Smith’s work brought about a public inquiry. At its conclusion in 2008, Justice Stephen Goudge declared that Smith had “actively misled” the courts and his superiors.
In 2011, the College of Physicians and Surgeons cancelled Smith’s licence and publicly rebuked him for a series of botched investigations into the deaths of children.
That year, the Court of Appeal set aside Tammy’s murder conviction and ordered a new trial, but the Crown withdrew charges against her.
Smith could not be reached for comment despite approaches by the Star to lawyers who have represented him, a friend, and a missionary group to which he has been connected.
For Tammy, freedom is far better than prison but her boys had grown up apart from her.
The world was also a different place. She recalled asking someone a question shortly after her release from prison and being told, “Just Google it.”
“What’s a Google?” she asked.
“I got laughed at so hard,” she said. “It’s totally foreign to me. When I went in we didn’t have no internet … It’s very overwhelming at times.”
She turned to drugs, including cocaine, for a time.
“I did go down a very dark road for a very long time after I got out,” she said.
She moved far from the city and what she called “a lot of the nonsense of the concrete world.”
She sometimes wrote poetry.
One of her works is called “Darkest of Times,” which she started writing when she was pregnant with Kenneth. It reads:
“Feelings are too high to get over
Too deep to get under
Too big to go around
But most of all, feelings are too hard to go through alone
So the best thing to do is to bring a friend along to lend a helping hand.”
She received counselling, and speaks highly of the help given by 2-Spirited People of the 1st Nations. It helped her work through major bouts of depression and nightmares.
Sometimes, she felt like her life was flashing before her eyes in slow motion as she struggled to understand things she couldn’t control.
“It’s OK to have these feelings,” she said. “It’s the way we react to them.
“It’s like ... sometimes you have to be hard like ice and sometimes you have to flow with the stream. You’re never just locked in one box.”
“You can’t control a flashback,” she said. “You can’t control a body memory.”
Sometimes, she thought back to Smith and how his testimony crashed into her life.“It didn’t help that people treated him like a God,” she said, adding: “I do not blame just Smith.”
“He had help … I want him to sit down and truly think in the deepest recesses of his soul, ‘Why?’ That’s it.”
Sometimes she just cried.
She got off medication, except for medical marijuana, saying she had been “basically a medicating zombie.”
“This is as clean as my brain has ever been in my entire life.”
She got a dog she named Chewbacca who’s the ginger-haired runt of the litter of a bullmastiff and lab.
Chewbacca accompanies her during long walks in the woods and just stares when she does the occasional primal scream.
“I highly recommend to anyone with PTSD — get a dog,” she said.
Sometimes, Chewbacca watches as Tammy takes off her shoes in the woods.
“I love dancing in the rain. I love walking barefoot in the woods. There’s a lot to learn when you embrace nature.”
She limits her contact with people and considers Chewbacca a usually solid judge of human character.
Sometimes, she works part-time serving ice cream.
Other times, she works in a laundry, which she prefers. It’s less “peopley.”
The end of the pandemic promises her more freedom.
Recently, she bought a pickup truck and she’s now trying to get a test for her driver’s license.
Pandemic restrictions have made examination appointments harder to book but she says she’s determined.
“I don’t want to be at the mercy of other people anymore. I want my independence.""
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