For the past four and a half years, Vanessa Higgins has slept fitfully on the sofa in her living room, next to a shrine to her murdered daughter.
“In the winter, I put a scarf around her to keep her warm,” Higgins says of a black square urn where she keeps most of Samantha’s ashes.
She also carries some of Sam’s ashes in a cremation necklace she always wears.
“Her ashes are in here and she goes where I go, so she is always with me,” she said.
Samantha Higgins, a 22-year-old mother of two was last seen walking home from a friend’s house in LaSalle on July 7, 2015. Farmers found her dismembered body three days later in a bag under a bridge in Hinchinbrooke, roughly 75 kilometres southwest of Montreal.
Her fiancé, Nick Fontanelli pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Oct. 8.
On Tuesday, he was sentenced to life in prison without a chance of parole for 17 years in connection with Samantha’s death.
Since the murder, Higgins has suffered from severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. She hasn’t worked in several years, has trouble sleeping, suffers panic attacks and rarely leaves her house.
“I have to learn how to feel joy again. I don’t know how to feel happy anymore, so that has to come back in,” Higgins said.
So many memories of her daughter’s violent death continue haunting her. She’s especially distraught she couldn’t cradle Samantha’s body after it had been found. Fontanelli had dismembered the body, and Higgins could only say goodbye to her daughter behind a glass partition.
“I put my head down on the glass as close as I could go,” she said, starting to cry. “I told her she was beautiful and I loved her. But I still wish I could have kissed her and held her and that was taken away from me.”
Higgins and her family aren’t ready to forgive Fontanelli for taking Samantha from them and shattering so many lives. Higgins’ father says the whole family has suffered since the murder.
“He is in his prison and we are in ours and that is the way I look at it,” said James Higgins, Samantha’s grandfather. “We will have that for the rest of our lives.”
The couple had two children, who are now without parents. They are now living with Higgins’ brother, who is raising them. Higgins says they are adjusting as well as they can.
Higgins says she would like to move forward and continue living her life. The night Fontanelli pleaded guilty to his crime, Higgins felt something she hadn’t felt in years — relief.
“Afterwards, the sun set, that night the sky was out of this world. It was pink and orange and purple, and I knew that night Samantha got her wings, because he finally pleaded guilty. I finally believe she’s at rest now,” Higgins said.
While Higgins is relieved to avoid a trial, she doesn’t understand why a guilty plea took so long. And she still doesn’t understand what happened.
“We have no idea, we have no idea what led to him snapping like this, we don’t know,” she said.
With Fontanelli serving a 17-year sentence, Higgins says now, she can start to heal.
“I need to keep her in my heart and my head and I need to find a way to carry on,” she said.
She believes Samantha is now at peace. She’s hoping one day, she will get there too.
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