Honour Thy Mother: The Search for Jeannine Durand

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

On February 11, 1968, the badly decomposed body of a woman was found in
a Houston-area dump. It would be another 22 years before the body was
identified as that of Hull native Jeannine Durand, mother of four
children and wife of Raymond “Frenchy” Durand, who was convicted of
her murder in the fall of 1992. (The murder of this kindly, soft-spoken
woman was, it appears, motivated by nothing deeper than expediency.) In
the intervening years, Durand, a pathological liar and consummate scam
artist, did not scruple to limit his marks to outsiders. Friends,
family, and business associates alike fell victim to his charisma and
guile. Durand conned his uncle Robert out of his life’s savings,
regularly withheld paycheques from employees at the various body shops
he managed, and recruited his two younger children to assist him in his
marijuana-growing business.

Occupying the moral centre of this fast-paced tale of deception and
greed are the two eldest Durand children: Denis, whose memories of
Jeannine were the strongest, and who resisted from the beginning his
father’s claim that his missing mother was in an insane asylum; and
Anne, who—although emotionally closer to her father and thus more
torn—was instrumental in opening the investigation that culminated in
his conviction.

Rick Boychuk, who covered the trial of Raymond Durand for Saturday
Night, won the 1989 National Magazine Award for Investigative
Journalism; this lucid, compassionate, and psychologically compelling
page-turner demonstrates a comparable gift for the book-length
narrative.