Love and the Marriage Sacrament

Wedding photo of Donna Jones, Mark Hutt taken in September 2007. Mark Hutt has been convicted of first degree murder in Donna Jones's death. He has been sentenced to life imprisonment, with no chance of parole.

 "I'm sure people are going to say 'We don't believe this, we don't believe that', but what they got to remember is, people do change. It can happen. A bad person can become a good person, just like a good person can become a bad person. I've changed for the better.
"What's done is done. You can't go back."
Mark Peter Hutt, 37, Ottawa

He has, he insists, turned his life around. He is no longer the person he was. He admits to having been guilty of criminal negligence causing death. He heeded his wife Donna's assurances that she was just fine. She just needed a little time to get better, and soon enough would. Then everything would most certainly return to 'normal'. So he listened to her, instead of doing what he said he really wanted to do: call for medical help.

His wife of just over two years died on December 6, 2009, just a few weeks shy of her 33rd birthday. She was morbidly septic as a result of infected wounds resulting from deep second- and third-degree burns covering half her body. She had two black eyes, her nose was broken. Post-death medical examination discovered twenty-nine bullets from an air gun lodged in her body. She had nine broken ribs, a fractured finger, cuts and bruises all over her body.

Her husband, however, had her calm assurance that she would be just fine. Do not, please, call a doctor, do not think of calling an ambulance, she had no wish to be professionally examined by a medical practitioner, and certainly did not want to be taken to hospital. She was kept, for eleven agonizing days, in the basement of the house she owned where she and her husband, Mark Hutt lived. A makeshift mattress-bed had been arranged for her comfort on the concrete floor.

She had possession of a cellphone and spoke on a number of occasions during that eleven-day period with her mother, with some of her friends and colleagues at work. All was fine, she assured them. She would soon return to work. And please, banish all thoughts of casually dropping by. She and Mark were simply too busy, too engaged with their recreational life, to spare time just at this particular juncture.

The thing of it was, her friends and colleagues at work saw through the smooth practised veneer of Donna Jones's assurances. They had seen the evidence of physical brutality she had been tormented with, had themselves heard her loving husband viciously berate and threaten, demean and diminish her constantly, his voice loud and shrill enough to penetrate over the phone lines. They had, in very fact, remonstrated with her for years.

Now that she is dead, and her husband held guilty for her excruciating death in which she seemed to hold him blameless -- he assures the judge and jury sitting in judgement of his loving kindnesses to his vulnerable wife caught in the unspeakable web of her fixation on his emotional needs, and his hidden but deep-seated love and concern for her -- that he is not now who he was then, when he chose not to recognize the morbidly dire straits his wife was in.

True, it was he who had, entirely by accident, thrown boiling water over most of her body, and it was he who had inflicted all those wounds on her suffering body, but he was really a nice fellow under it all. He had suffered as a child. "I had learning disorders, ADHD, I was constantly in trouble, out in the hallway doing my school work", getting picked up "regularly" by police because he broke windows, climbed on the school roof, "stupid things like that."

"I was in a special class for people who couldn't learn as fast as the others, couldn't pay attention and stuff like that." Pity the poor neglected soul. A previous girlfriend had testified of her experience with Mark Hutt, his threats and his violence. How she had left him on a few occasions, but would always return when he apologized, promised he intended to "try hard" not to repeat his offences. Donna, however, agreed to marry him, even while he tormented her pre-marriage, despite the protests of those who saw that dysfunctional relationship and were appalled.

"I wasn't really that abusive to Donna. I'd call her names and stuff like that. She'd be scared of me because when I got mad I would get loud. She would try her best to make my day, but I was just too angry at that point." But still, he said, he's not a "monster man". True, he verbally and even at times physically abused her but not like what people thought. "A lot of that [the condition of her battered body] was misinterpreted as being abuse."

But, people change, he insists, and he has most certainly changed, not the same person at all, not at all. He was baptized in October 2011. He reads his Bible daily. He sees a psychiatrist. He took part in an anger management class. And a photograph of his wife, Donna Jones, sits right beside his bed.