To many on the island of Oahu, Hailey Kai Dandurand is a glowering figure in baby blue jail clothes, half of a duo accused of one of the more brutal and high-profile killings in Hawaii in recent history.

The Bend native, and her ex-boyfriend Stephen Brown, are charged with killing Telma Boinville at a North Shore holiday home in late 2017. But as the trial date keeps getting pushed back, Dandurand’s defense is trying to have them tried separately, arguing she wasn’t an equal party to the killing and is in fact another victim of her co-defendant, Brown, who has a documented history of violent and coercive relationships with women.

Dandurand, 23, and Brown have been in custody at the Oahu Community Correctional Center since their arrest hours after Boinville’s body was discovered in a pool of blood by a family of Australian tourists. That didn’t stop Dandurand from seeking a restraining order against Brown last year. The order, approved by a judge in July, offers a window into a relationship said to be brief, violent and colored by extreme psychological abuse.

“I was sleeping,” Dandurand wrote in her petition. “He wanted me to wake up. So he slapped me in my face about maybe 15 times. He said there was a warrant for his arrest and he wanted me to get up and talk to him. He said if the cops come, we may have to ‘police suicide.’”

Because Brown must now stay 100 yards from his ex-girlfriend and not attempt to contact her in any way, it remains to be determined if he’ll be allowed in the same courtroom as her, even if they are tried together.

Regardless, Dandurand’s Honolulu attorney, Barry L. Sooalo, said it was important to document the nature of the couple’s relationship prior to the alleged crimes.

“Mr. Brown should be the focus of what this case is about, not Hailey Dandurand,” Sooalo told The Bulletin. “If you look at her background and the things that she’s done, there’s nothing at all to indicate that she would do anything crazy of this sort. Whereas for Mr. Brown, this is a continuation of his normal conduct.”

At the time of his arrest in Boinville’s killing, Brown had three other open criminal cases in the Hawaii justice system — two for domestic violence and one for drinking in public. He was last in jail that July. One of his ex-girlfriends told a Honolulu television station when she spoke to him that month he was unemployed, “very suicidal” and mentioned suicide by cop.

The next month — August 2017 — Brown and Dandurand met and started dating.

The daughter of an elementary school principal, Dandurand was remembered by classmates in Bend as a quiet, if unassuming, presence in a 2018 profile in The Bulletin. She left high school before graduating and moved to Hawaii, where she earned her GED and started attending community college.

“She was doing alright until she met Stephen,” Sooalo said. “She had a promising future ahead of her.”

Boinville, 42, was a teacher who occasionally helped friends maintain their rental properties. On Dec. 7, 2017, she stopped at a home on Ke Iki Road near the beach at Pupukea to put up some flowers and take a load of laundry out of the dryer. Her 8-year-old daughter stayed in the truck watching a movie on her cell phone.

Several hours later, the family that had reserved the home arrived to find Boinville’s body, a bag covering her head, next to an arsenal of bloodied weapons — mallet, knife, machete, hammer, baseball bat. Boinville’s daughter was found tied up in a room upstairs with her mouth taped shut. And Boinville’s gold Toyota Tacoma was missing from the driveway.

Honolulu Police alerted the public that Boinville’s killers had fled in her truck, and Dandurand and Brown were soon arrested at a Starbucks about a half-hour from the crime scene, dozens of irate locals surrounding them shouting insults and abuse.

Boinville’s cause of death was found to be blunt- and sharp-force injuries. The medical examiner wrote in the autopsy report it was impossible to count all the distinct wounds to Boinville’s body.

According to a 10-page indictment, the evidence against Dandurand includes the fact she was allegedly wearing a pair of Boinville’s earrings and her daughter’s backpack when taken into custody. In her pocket was Boinville’s blood-covered debit card. The prosecution further alleges blood matching Boinville’s DNA profile was found in several places on Dandurand’s body.

Brown grew up in Ohio and Florida and moved to Oahu in 2015 to be with his biological father.

According to the restraining order, Dandurand said Brown subjected her to sex abuse, physical harm and extreme psychological abuse. Over the course of their relationship, he reportedly threated to kill Dandurand or her family if he was ever confronted about stealing money and property from them.

Dandurand’s petition outlines several instances of abuse over the course of the couple’s four-month relationship.

The first alleged instance occurred Oct. 20, 2017 when Brown forced her to have sex and raped her with a vodka bottle, she wrote in her petition for a temporary restraining order.

On Nov. 17, 2017, Dandurand said he slapped, punched and shoved her.

“He picked me up and slammed me into the ground,” Dandurand wrote in her petition for a temporary restraining order. “He said that he was not going to kill me but that he was just going to hurt me real bad.”

Another alleged instance stands out for its date: Dec. 7, 2017, the day Boinville was killed. Dandurand wrote Brown hit her with balled fists, “full power punches.”

“He punched me repeatedly in the face (at least five times) and he said he wishes he had killed me,” she wrote.

This month, Dandurand’s legal defense moved to further distance her from Brown ahead of their August trial date for second-degree murder, robbery, kidnapping and other charges.

Dandurand’s trial is now set to begin Aug. 9 after being reset more than 10 times. All murder trials are now on hold as Hawaii grapples with a historic backlog caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sooalo touts two polygraph tests he says his client passed. One concerns the death of Boinville, the other, the kidnapping. Another piece of evidence Sooalo often mentions is the lack of a positive identification by Boinville’s daughter. For this reason, Sooalo says it would be unfair for jurors to see Dandurand in the same courtroom as Brown.

“There’s always a concern that Hailey gets swept up in the heat-of-the-moment passion and takes on liability for conduct of someone else,” Sooalo said.

Matthew Dvonch, special counsel for the prosecuting attorney of Oahu, declined to discuss Dandurand’s case beyond procedural matters.

Since her daughter’s arrest, Dandurand’s mother,

Sunshine, quit her job as principal at Buckingham Elementary in Bend, and she and Hailey’s father, Kaipo, now live on Oahu.

Before the killing, Kaipo Dandurand posted a note on social media in November of that year asking for help locating his daughter and suggesting her boyfriend had been controlling her and using heroin to do it.

Sooalo said of them today, “They are doing well under these very difficult circumstances.”