Possessed (12 page)

Rather than embarrassed, Ana appeared proud of her exploits. Over the months, she told Moore of other nights in bars when she lashed out at patrons or the staff, including an incident in which she was thrown out of a bar after choking a woman. “It took two men to pull me off,” Ana boasted, with a laugh. At times, she offered to curse people for Moore, which he declined.

“Is this stuff you're into Santeria?” he asked, referencing the Afro-Cuban religion practiced in parts of the Latin world.

“No, Wicca,” she said, smiling, her eyes flashing. “I'm a witch.”

Although she never attacked Moore, he grew to fear her. Ana was strong, with muscular arms, and she needed little or no provocation to turn on someone. One night in bed, he awoke and saw her sitting up next to him, on top of the blanket, her back rigid, her hands on her knees, her eyes closed, chanting in a strange language he didn't recognize. He didn't know if she was asleep, in a trance, or awake, but Moore grew frightened. He stayed quiet for more than an
hour before Ana lay down and went to sleep. “I didn't interrupt,” he said. “I didn't know what could happen.”

By spring, Moore had tired of the arrangement and made plans to move to a small town in Texas. “I had to get away from Ana, and I had to get away from the booze. With Ana, I was out every night drinking,” he said. “I told her, this is over. I said I was moving back with my family, to get straightened out. Ana said, kind of sarcastically, ‘Maybe I should do that, too, go back to Waco and get straightened out.' I told her, ‘Maybe you should.'”

Certainly, there were mounting indications that Ana needed to reevaluate her life.

Around midnight on April 29, a police officer found her nearly passed out on the sidewalk at a busy downtown intersection, in Houston's theater district, at Louisiana and Rusk Streets. She smelled of alcohol and appeared disoriented. In a kind gesture rather than arrest her, the officer signaled for a cab to transport her home. Minutes later he was bumped on his squad car radio and ordered to another location. When he arrived, his sergeant waited along with the cab driver, who complained that Ana had refused to pay the fare. This time arrested for public intoxication, Ana was put in the back of the squad car. While the officer drove her to the jail, he heard her curse his family to death in Spanish. “
La familia muerto!
” she seethed.

A religious man, he turned up the radio, not wanting to listen.

Once she was released, to move her things, Ana brought a new friend to the apartment she shared with Frank Moore. James Wells worked at a car dealership and part-time as a bodyguard for Beyoncé. Tall, bald, with a trim mustache and beard, the muscular Wells had met Ana three days earlier at Sambuca, in the Rice Lofts. Mutually attracted, they went to his apartment, and she spent the night. Ana had told him that she didn't have a stable place to live, and Wells agreed to take her in.

At the apartment she shared with Moore, Ana collected her things to put in Wells's truck. As she got ready to leave, Moore, who'd been supporting her for months, said he'd get in touch once he settled in and suggested that they could get together when he came back to Houston. Ana agreed, but when he texted her a few days later, she responded, “Fuck off.”

James Wells

“I figured she didn't need me anymore, now that I wasn't doing anything for her,” he said. “My opinion? I didn't think she really liked older white guys, just their money.”

“I
wondered why she dressed so Goth,” Wells said, remembering the first months he knew Ana, who by then was using Trujillo more than Fox. “She wore black all the time, had her nails painted black, and lots of dark eye makeup, kind of like Alice Cooper. But it was okay. She was cool. I liked Ana.”

At the apartment, a one-bedroom in a small brick complex near the Museum District, just down the street from a convenience store, Ana massaged Wells's back, nursing him after an injury to his sciatic nerve when he fell wrestling another of the bodyguards. Kneading his flesh in her strong hands, she loosened up his muscles and before long the pain disappeared.

On Wells's bedroom shelves, Ana found books on the ancient Egyptians, leading her to buy an amulet she wore on a chain, one she used to predict the future and answer questions. If the pendant swung front and back, the answer was yes. Sideways, and it signaled no. Along with the amulet, she wore bangle bracelets and a ring in the shape of an ankh, a
cross with a loop at the top, an ancient Egyptian symbol of male and female balance and eternal life.

Sporadically that year, Ana moved in and out of James Wells's apartment, an arrangement he found acceptable. A man without singular relationships, Wells had friends-with-benefits agreements with others in the past. To him, Ana was not a girlfriend but someone he cared about who he occasionally slept with and who sometimes needed a place to stay. When they went out together, Wells gradually saw that Ana had the potential to quickly transform from the warm, loving woman he knew to a violent and angry one ready to attack. One night in a club in the line to the ladies' room, he stepped in quickly when she entered into a verbal altercation with another woman. “Why are you like that?” he asked her. “Why are you always getting into it?” Ana shook her head and smiled, like it was all a joke.

Meanwhile, Ana's life spun ever deeper into an alcoholic haze, and more friends sought to distance themselves from her. After Teresa Montoya's husband complained about their partying, she stopped allowing Ana in her salon. Despite the ban that August, on a hot summer evening, Ana showed up at the office building with a man and convinced the security guard on duty to let her into the salon by saying she needed to reclaim her laptop. Around eleven that night, James Jimenez, at six-foot-two and 250 pounds, a heavyset man with long, dark hair that hung loose to his shoulders, arrived to work the night shift and heard that Ana was in Montoya's salon.

Over the years, Jimenez had crossed paths with Ana off and on, once giving her a ride. He'd grown to think of her as eccentric after seeing her body painted at one of the events and watching her raise her hands and chant, worshipping the sun one afternoon while standing in a swimming pool. There was even the day he saw her blessing the trees. A commercial artist who'd been laid off, Jimenez had taken the
security guard job for the health insurance after he needed surgery for a heart ailment.

That night, Jimenez tapped on the salon window and waited. No one came. He knocked, thinking of it as a way to give Ana a heads-up, announcing that it was time to leave. When he again got no response, he opened the door and stood inside. A light went on in the back of the salon, and Ana and the man emerged, straightening their clothes. The man rushed out past Jimenez, but Ana stayed. “Ana, you aren't supposed to be here,” he told her. “Let's wrap it up. You have to leave.”

Stone-faced, Ana sat in a chair and stared at Jimenez.

“You have to go!” he ordered.

When she still didn't comply, Jimenez called 9-1-1 on his cell phone. As he talked to the dispatcher, Ana grabbed her purse, walking angrily toward the door, the entire time cursing him in Spanish. Jimenez followed, still on the phone, locking the salon door behind him, as Ana left the building. At that point, the dispatcher asked what the intruder was wearing, and Jimenez walked outside to take a look at Ana.

“What direction is she going?” the 9-1-1 operator asked.

Jimenez began to answer, just as Ana turned and ran toward him, grabbing his hair and pulling him down. Stunned by her strength, he fell against the building and slid down, until he angled on top of her. “She's attacking me!” he told the dispatcher, who said help was on the way.

From across the street, two off-duty Houston police officers who'd seen Ana lunge at Jimenez sprinted over and offered help, pulling her off the security guard, both holding her down. When a squad car arrived, Ana was again taken to jail.

The next morning, Ana showed up at the salon. By then the building management had ordered Montoya to keep her friend off the property. “You'd better go,” Montoya said. “They don't want you here.”

“What did you tell them?” Ana demanded, staring at a woman who'd once been her closest friend.

“I didn't tell them anything,” Montoya said. “They have you on video.”

Looking at Ana, Montoya thought that her friend even looked different. She was staring at her with such anger, and her eyes glared, like cat eyes. Montoya yelled for the man who shined shoes in the salon, and he responded and ordered Ana to leave, threatening to call police. After she did, he turned to Montoya, and said, “You need to stay away from that woman. She's going to bring you down with her.”

Finally, after so many warnings, Montoya took a clear look at the friendship and walked away.

A
na's behavior became increasingly erratic, and five weeks later, another incident took place, this time in one of the Rice apartments.

Over the years, Ana had sometimes talked with Anuj Goel at resident happy hours. A software engineer, Goel become wary of the masseuse who worked in the building, the one who drank heavily and when she did, talked too much and too loud. She'd given him her phone number in case he wanted a massage appointment, but he deleted it from his phone because “she gave me a bad vibe.”

That evening, Goel and his wife returned to their apartment after dinner and walked inside. Moments later, they found someone sitting in the bathroom, on the toilet. At first, Goel didn't recognize the woman.

“You need to go,” he told her.

“I'm not done,” she said. They waited, and moments later she stood up. Again, he ordered her to leave, but the woman shrugged and appeared to be planning to stay. After he again told her to leave, she walked into the living room and collected her things, including her purse and a notebook. Something about the way she acted gave Goel the impression that the woman had been in his apartment for hours.

At the door, the woman turned to Goel's wife, and said, “You don't know how lucky you are to have this man.”

At that moment, Goel and his wife both recognized the woman as Ana, and he became even more worried; he'd heard the stories of the altercations in the area restaurants and bars. Broadening his shoulders and hardening his voice, he ordered her to leave. As soon as she did, Goel called security, who contacted police. From that moment forward, Ana was banned from entering not only the skyscraper where Montoya had her salon but the Rice Lofts.

That fall, James Wells would later say that Ana's mother, Trina, called him to thank him for taking Ana in and giving her a place to live. “She seems a little off to all of us,” Wells recalled Trina telling him. “This isn't the lifestyle we ever thought she'd be living. Ana has gone totally left field.”

As the year drew to an end, Ana traveled home to Waco for the holidays. “This is not my little girl,” Trina told a family member during the visit. “Something is wrong with her.”

When they went to garage sales together, family members saw Ana approach strangers and rub their shoulders, claiming that she saw their auras and knew the origins of their pain. With other family members, Ana complained that her mother and stepfather didn't understand her spiritual journey, and that they had closed minds, not considering all she'd learned about channeling her powers. “They aren't supporting me in my quest to move my powers to the next level,” she told one relative.

“I can fix that by laying my hands on you,” she told a family member who'd had back surgery. When the woman refused, Ana said, “Why can't you all open up your minds?”

“The Ana she'd become was the complete opposite of my daughter's best friend,” said Margie Sowell. “I barely recognized her.”

It was in Waco on December 29, in a brightly colored Mexican restaurant, after drinking a margarita and shots of Dos Equis, that the police were called yet again. Walking
from table to table, Ana talked to the guests, hanging onto the children, petting a small boy in a high chair on the head. The manager tapped her on the shoulder and offered to call her a cab, but Ana screamed at him to take his hands off her. Instead, the police were called, and days before the beginning of 2012, Ana was led off yet again in handcuffs.

Weeks later, a relative found Ana's voodoo doll at her house. Ana had returned to Houston and forgotten it. She'd shown it to her family, along with crystals she carried in her pockets that she believed had special powers. The woman brought the voodoo doll to Sowell and asked her what to do with it.

“If it was me, I'd throw it away,” she said. That was what the woman did.

I
f the previous two years had been particularly turbulent for her, by the summer of 2012, Ana appeared to be pulling herself together. She'd largely dropped the surname Fox and, except for the occasional TV appearance for Suarez, went by Ana Trujillo, and she moved into a posh apartment in The Parklane with a fifty-year-old white businessman who lived on one of the higher floors. For a time, all seemed relatively well. They went out drinking in the evenings, circulating in and out of The Parklane, back and forth to her favorite nightspots.