Possessed (10 page)

Whatever happened with Brian Goodney, Ana's friends noticed that she'd changed. What backed up Goodney's version was that by then Ana had financial problems. In June, a month later, a legal complaint was filed against her for a seventy-six-dollar bounced check.

From the night of the altercation with Goodney on, Montoya thought she saw physical changes in her friend. “Ana said she heard ringing and that she had headaches. She held her head and rocked and said it hurt,” recounted Montoya. “And she was upset because she said that he got the better of her. She became angry.”

The new Ana Trujillo Fox's outrage along with a sense of entitlement seemed to be percolating just under the surface, readying her to pounce at any provocation. One evening with Montoya, Ana pulled into a space in a downtown garage. Montoya pointed out a no parking sign, but Ana waved it off and kept walking away from the car. Fifteen minutes or so later, the women emerged to find the 4Runner gone. Montoya wanted to call the towing company's number on the sign, but Ana said, “I know how to handle people like this.”

Moments later, Ana confronted the attendant, a small, aging Hispanic man, screaming at him. She grabbed him and pulled his hair, yanking at it. In Spanish, she shouted, “You get my car right now, or I will put a curse on you and your entire family!”

Terrified, the elderly man sobbed and hurried away, quickly returning with the SUV.

“Get in the car,” Ana told Montoya.

“No, you're crazy,” she replied, walking to the curb, where she hailed a cab.

Yet despite Ana's bizarre behavior, Montoya had to admit that it appeared that her friend's anger and sex worked to her advantage. That day, Ana got her car back without paying the tow fee, and Montoya watched as the men Ana flirted with gave her whatever she wanted.

Still, the new Ana frightened Montoya, backed up by what she'd heard from her family and friends. “Your friend Ana gets unpredictable after a few drinks,” a restaurateur friend told Montoya one day. “With her, you never know what will happen.”

B
eginning in 2010, it would be obvious to many around her that Ana Trujillo Fox had entered a downward spiral.

Early that year at the Rice, Ana, who'd let her apartment go and routinely slept in her studio, returned drunk late one night and spray painted the walls and hardwood floors. When her landlords saw the damage, the couple ordered her to leave. Her few possessions, including her massage table, were moved to the lobby, and she was told to arrange to have them picked up. Her couch went into Montoya's salon, along with her massage table. Despite so many who'd told her to rid herself of Ana, Montoya helped her paint a back room at the salon to use as her new studio.

Yet Ana rarely came into work, the massage table empty. “She'd end up leaving with a man,” said Montoya. “I wouldn't see her until the end of the day, when she'd want to go out for a drink.”

During those evenings, Ana was full of plans. She proposed collaborating on an image company with Montoya, one to advise men on how to dress, on grooming, on how to improve their self-images and become more confident. At the same time she talked of helping men become more successful, Ana was technically unemployed and homeless, her children scattered, her younger daughter, Arin, living with her father in Waco and Ana's older daughter, Siana, out of school, working, and living on her own. Meanwhile, Ana circulated from man to man, living with one then
another. At times, she confessed to strange sexual encounters, including one with a wealthy middle-aged man whom she said choked her during sex. “I don't like to do it,” Ana said. “It scares me.”

“Don't see him,” Montoya urged her. “You're going to end up dead. You're playing with your life now.”

After months passed, Ana said she had ended the relationship. By then she lived with another man, one she said took care of her. While in his home, Ana began studying how to heal her body, to rid herself of headaches she claimed plagued her since the night with Brian Goodney. For therapy, she turned to her art, building what she referred to as installations, combining found objects like sticks and rocks with paper and paint. “I would create displays,” she said later. “And I worked on developing hydrotherapies for my body, to use water and salt to bring out the pain and bruising.”

While Teresa Montoya doubted that Ana had any spiritual powers, Christi Suarez, the TV producer, came to another conclusion. When they talked, Ana interpreted Suarez's dreams. A Pisces who read her horoscope religiously, Ana expressed a fascination with such visions.

When sober, Ana talked to Suarez, too, about companies they could start, including one to recycle computers. When Suarez mentioned that such companies already existed, Ana quickly moved on to the next idea, or pronounced that it didn't matter because her company would be better or different. Meanwhile in the bars at night, Suarez sometimes saw Ana pull the raggedy voodoo doll out of her bra and play with it, rubbing it on others. People became angry, telling her to put it away, but Ana just laughed or stood in a corner holding the doll, closed her eyes, and whispered, as if cursing the person.

More and more, Ana Trujillo Fox appeared immersed in another world. Increasingly, she drove to one or another of the yerberias, eclectic stores scattered throughout Houston, a city with the second largest Latino population in the U.S. next to Los Angeles. Once inside, she bought oils and
herbs the purveyors claimed had the power to make a man fall in love or a woman more sensual, others that could cure diseases of the heart, liver, or kidneys, or some rumored to bring fame. Displayed on shelves, candles bore depictions of saints that legend said had the power to grant favors. Amulets and incense could be used in rituals to curse enemies. A mélange of Christianity, paganism, and folklore, the stores blended cultures and beliefs.

Inside a yerberia

One afternoon, Ana bought oil to burn that the proprietor said brought money, and another that would make her a better lover. And she drank, each night, in downtown restaurants and bars. Alcohol appeared to be taking over Ana's life. “She was out of control,” said Montoya.

On April 19 of that year, 2010, Ana was found slumped backward with her eyes closed in her car parked in a lot near Interstate 59, Houston's Southwest Freeway. A tow-truck driver followed her after he saw her run a red light, stop for a green one, and jump a curb. She smelled of alcohol, and the police officer who responded called in the code of a “person down” when he failed to awaken her. When she did come to, she was uncooperative but talkative. She failed the sobriety test and was eventually fined $200 and sentenced to one year's probation.

Inside a yerberia

As part of Ana's probation, she had to submit
to random drug tests. After she once tested positive for pot, she was jailed and spent twenty days behind bars. From that point forward, Ana smoked a concoction stocked in some yerberias and smoke shops, a so-called synthetic pot consisting of herbs and plants sprayed with chemicals that didn't show up during routine tests. Sold as potpourri, packages warned against human consumption, but the ten-dollar bags were known to give a substantial high.

Ana Trujillo Fox's 2010 booking photo

That year, Montoya worried about her friend's odd behavior. They argued about religion and Ana's beliefs whenever Ana brought up her powers. “If you're going to be doing black magic, I can't have anything to do with you,” Montoya said one day. That year, she pressured Ana into going to a service at a Lutheran church, but afterward her friend struck out in anger.

“Don't preach to me about religion and the Bible. I know more than you do,” Ana snapped, quoting scripture. “My parents pushed religion on me my whole life. And I've pulled away from it.”

By then, Ana kept a distance from her family. When Trina Tharp called and asked Ana why she rarely visited or kept in touch, she said, “Mom, I want to tell you things that are constructive. I want to make you proud. When I'm not proud, I can't call you.”

Just three years earlier, Ana Trujillo Fox had a good job. Two years earlier, up until the divorce in 2008, she lived in
an impressive, well-furnished suburban home with a husband who loved her and supported her and her two daughters. But by the summer of 2010, she was homeless, without a car after she totaled her 4Runner on a freeway ramp. Over the months, Ana circulated in and out of different homes, mostly owned by men, some just friends, others brief sexual liaisons, spending a few nights, taking her suitcase, and moving on. One evening, she dropped in at a party at Raul Rodriguez's house and stayed for three days.

Eager to return to downtown Houston, in August 2010, for $600 a month, Ana rented a second-floor room in the Londale Hotel on the corner of Prairie and San Jacinto, a short walk from the Rice Lofts. The rooms were small but serviceable and shared community bathrooms off a hallway. When she registered, Ana told the manager, Jim Carroll, that she was a masseuse and a legal assistant. A bargain in downtown Houston where a single night in a hotel routinely costs hundreds of dollars, the three-story Londale was the oldest hotel on the same site in the city. Built in 1905, at its opening, its first street-level tenant had been Houston's original Ford Motor Company showroom.

A quaint, squat, neoclassic building with a colorful past that included rather seedy intervals during which it was rumored to have drug-dealer and prostitute tenants, the hotel catered to those who needed downtown lodging on a strict budget. At the time Ana moved in, the building was newly renovated, and the owners were bringing in a more respectable clientele. The first floor housed a bail bondsman and a restaurant, with the hotel rooms on the second and third floors.

In room 202, Ana Trujillo lived simply out of a few suitcases. One of the larger rooms in the hotel, Ana's had a sink, a television, and the linens were changed daily. To Montoya, the Londale represented a shabby lifestyle, and it seemed sad that her friend had fallen so far. Each morning, she picked Ana up, and the two women drove to have breakfast with Montoya's father. In ill health, he was considering moving
into a nursing home, and Montoya suggested that there was another alternative. “Ana could move in the house with you. She could watch over you.”

The Londale

“I don't trust that woman,” her father said. “I don't want her anywhere around me.”

Even with that scathing assessment, Montoya continued to go out with Ana, circulating between the restaurants and bars, taking a toll on her business.

Meanwhile at the Londale, when not with other friends, Ana went out evenings with Carroll, a wiry grey-haired man with a slight paunch and round wire glasses. Carroll liked Ana, who laughed often and seemed always ready to party.

At the Londale, Ana's days fell into a pattern.

In the mornings, she slept in, then popped her door open and trudged down the hall to the bathroom, eventually making her way to Jim Carroll's room, behind the small office in the building's corner, the only room with a balcony and its own bathroom. Carroll let her use the bathtub in
his room. While she bathed, unconcerned, he sat on the bed and they talked. At times, he washed her back when she asked. Or they sat on his balcony and smoked and talked. Carroll was white, and Ana explained that many of her boyfriends since the divorce had been African-American. “She told me she liked to have sex with young black guys, but that the older white guys paid her bills,” said Carroll. “I told her she had more game than the Parker brothers, and she laughed.” Carroll wasn't surprised then when Ana showed up on rent-due days with a white man on her arm, usually middle-aged or older, yet the men he saw her partying with at night were young, tall, well built, and African-American.