BRAMPTON -
One by one, autopsy photographs of Audrey Cote's bruised and swollen face appeared on the television monitor at the front of a quiet Brampton courtroom.
At the back of the room, her mom, Nancy Allard, sat motionless, quietly weeping at times at the sight of what was once her beautiful, lively little girl.
As a jury heard evidence in the trial of the 21-year-old Cote's former boyfriend, Ryan Bucknor, who admitted punching her repeatedly, Allard remained in the courtroom to hear and see all of the evidence presented.
She had been told she did not have to be there, she could excuse herself from the courtroom for the gruesome slideshow— everyone would understand.
Allard didn't want to see those pictures, she admitted afterward, but she had to.
"I'm here to write the last pages of the book and to close the book," she said in an exclusive interview with The Guardian. "I have to know why and what's happened. I think I can find it. I think that's the secret. We've never had answers."
Left with broken heart
It will not help "fix" what is broken inside of her. No amount of glue can do that, she said solemnly.
"Sometimes, outside you are smiling, but inside, you are broken. And one day, when you are tired, or someone is rude to you, it comes out," she said. "You can't imagine until it's happened to you."
When Bucknor was found not guilty of second-degree murder in March, but guilty of manslaughter, Allard was devastated.
She was too distraught to return to court Monday for Bucknor's sentencing hearing. She wrote a five-page victim impact statement instead, reflecting on her pain and loss.
"What is hard is for the people who stay behind," Allard told The Guardian during the trial. "It's hard for everyone. My daughter (Audrey's sister) doesn't enjoy life like before. You don't kill just my daughter, you don't kill us with the violence, but he killed something inside us. It's like someone cutting off your arms and your legs. You still have life, but..."
In her French-Canadian accent, she apologized as she struggled to find the English words that would describe her dead child. If it's possible to see a mother's heart breaking, it is visible on Allard's face.
She is, in her own words, "a mother broken by pain and despair."
She has had her share of hardship.
When Cote was just nine years old, her dad killed himself. Allard said it seemed, in some ways, Cote blamed her mother for his death. Allard had packed up Cote and her older sister and left her husband just one month before the suicide. Allard said her husband abused her, and she feared he would kill her one day, so she ran for her life.
But Cote adored her father, and was troubled by his death.
When she reached her teen years, she rebelled, and Allard sought help in trying to find the best way to handle a young woman not quite an adult, who would not go to school, or get a job. She was young, and wanted to party with her friends.
Cote moved out, and was making her own way in the world, moving from her hometown of Charlesbourg, Quebec, just outside of Quebec City, to Ontario.
She lived in Hamilton for a time, and had moved to Brampton about one year before her death.
Normal young woman
She was at typical 21-year-old. She was also beautiful, loving and a dreamer, living life to the fullest, her mother said.
"She was the type of girl who would like to try everything, and no matter where she was or where she went, she always wanted more."
She loved adventure, and dreamed of being rich one day, but would rather live in an empty apartment and share her money with her friends than keep it all to herself.
"She was the type of person who would always bring the outcast into her group. She never wanted to see anyone alone," Allard said.
She was smart, her mother said, and within six months of moving to Ontario, she was bilingual.
Yes, Allard said, Cote was an "exotic dancer"— a stripper-—but she wanted to be so much more. She wanted to be a pilot. Her mother found the paperwork for the course she was to start that September.
It appeared she wanted to enjoy one more carefree summer of adolescent fun before buckling down to the business of adulthood in the fall, her mother said.
Allard only found out that her daughter was working as a dancer after she died. Cote had told her she was working at a fitness club.
The mother and daughter had just re-established a relationship after her rocky teen years. In fact, just before she died, Cote had returned from a vacation with her mother visiting family in Quebec.
"We had just started to enjoy each other again... but just when I got her back, Ryan took her away from me, from us," Allard wrote in her victim impact statement. "We had just begun to be like a family again. One year before she died, she started to come back to us, we were finally becoming friends."
Allard described the phone call she got from a Peel police officer on August 1, 2005, telling her Cote was dead, and the subsequent phone conversations she had with him as she drove from her home in Quebec to Brampton where she would see for herself the terrible truth.
But it wasn't until she caught a glimpse of one of those autopsy photographs at the preliminary hearing that the truth really sunk in.
"At that moment I realized that there is no chance that she would ever come back," she wrote in her impact statement.
"That realization dropped me to the ground. After that, I went into a deep depression, my memory stopped working, I didn't know how to brush my teeth, didn't know how to drive, could not return to work. I don't remember what day it is or what I have to do. I am just floating through life."
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