Possessed (14 page)

Ana in the September 27 iPhone photo

So much in Ana's mind focused on her sexuality, the pull she had on men. Years earlier, she'd been a working mother, a wife, but now all that was gone, and she'd become a woman who relied on her body for survival. She so identified herself through her sexuality that during her time with Stefan, Ana would become the star of her own scrapbook, having him frequently snap photos with his iPhone of her in provocative poses. One was taken on September 27, of Ana in
Stefan's black-leather chair, wearing a bustier, a jeweled mask, and black stilettos with a row of nails on the heels, her head thrown back.

Who could fault Stefan for being attracted? Friends had noticed years earlier how Ana changed based on the person she was with, how she found a way to transform herself in a bid to seduce men who could be useful. At that juncture in Ana's life, Stefan supplied what she most needed, a place to stay. Perhaps he didn't mind. He'd helped others before, without ever looking for anything in return. Yet Ana wanted more than shelter; she'd gone through everything she had, and she needed money. On October 8 of that year, 2012, at 7:17
P.M.
, nearly two weeks after the cell-phone photo, Ana and Stefan signed a handwritten contract she wrote that read: “We are entering together in an agreement. I, Ana, will return $7,000.00 to Stefan on 7/7/2013.”

Both signed the agreement, and Stefan gave her the money.

Whatever the money was intended for, perhaps as a loan to finance the many projects she bandied about, at The Parklane, little seemed to change. Days still drifted past with Ana experimenting with her own image and Stefan acting as her chronicler, manning his iPhone as he took photos of his lover in various costumes, including one where she dressed like a Muslim woman covered head to ankle, including a scarf drawn over her face. In another, she wrapped the scarves like a sash and halter top. Without crisp resolution, Stefan's photos were moody and cool.

As intense as their relationship had been at the inception, before long, Ana's constant presence must have grated on Stefan. Or it was possible that he simply found her needs exhausting. For not long after, Annika asked about his live-in lover. “How's it going?”

“Well, she's not really . . . she doesn't leave me alone because she doesn't have a job right now.”

Ana in two of Stefan's iPhone photos

When Annika asked about the jobs Ana said she had, including hosting at an art gallery, Stefan said, “She had a hard time keeping the hours.”

Yet if Stefan found being with Ana distracting, he must not have minded enough to cause any second-guessing when he assessed the viability of the relationship. Late in October, Stefan called Stan Rich in Dallas, and asked, “Do you know where I can get a prenup?” When Rich asked why, Stefan said that he'd met a woman. “I'm in love with her, and I want to marry her. I just need a prenup.”

Concerned, Rich told Stefan it was too early to consider marriage, only knowing Ana for a few months. “I've been alone for seventeen years. I don't want to be alone anymore,” Stefan answered, when Rich advised him not to rush.

“Wait until you have everything in order. In the meantime, live together,” Rich suggested. “You won't be alone.” Afterward, Rich believed that he'd calmed Stefan down and that his friend wouldn't move ahead without giving marriage more thought.

With others, Stefan talked about buying a house in suburban Houston with Ana, moving outside the city, something his friends had never thought he'd consider. And he mused about the possibility of becoming a father. At forty-three, Ana claimed that she'd been pregnant the year before and lost the baby in an ectopic pregnancy, suggesting she could conceive. With the help of modern fertility treatments, something Stefan understood well, he must have envisioned that there was the very real possibility to finally have the family he'd always wanted. “I want one while I'm still young enough to enjoy the child,” he told a friend.

A
t first, Ana blended into Stefan's life. She entertained herself while he went off to work at the university lab in the morning. The apartment's staff grew used to seeing her walk out to the golf course and the trees surrounding the high-rise. Hours later, she returned carrying sticks and leaves she described as materials for her art installations. “I'm going to have a show in a gallery,” she told one woman who worked at the condo.

In the evenings, Stefan and Ana circulated between his favorite restaurants. They both enjoyed going out for cocktails, and it wasn't unusual to see them seated at the bar in Bodegas drinking tequila, wine over dinner at Lucille's or one of Stefan's other haunts. At times, they joined the tight circle of Stefan's friends.

On some of those nights, Stefan's friends left wondering what he saw in his new woman. Todd Griggs and his fiancée, Bessie Garland, first met Ana when Stefan brought her to a party in The Parklane hosted by mutual friends. That evening, Ana monopolized the conversation, talking about herself, her spiritual beliefs, and at one point wanting to read Bessie's palm. Uncomfortable, Bessie pulled her hand away. Off and on, Todd saw Ana flirt with the host, in front of the man's wife. “We'd all just met her, and it seemed strange,” said Todd.

Fairly early, Stefan made an excuse to leave, but Ana wanted to stay. The others were so uncomfortable with her presence that they coaxed her out the door with Stefan.

Just as rocky was their second encounter with Stefan's new woman. On that night, Stefan brought her to meet his friends at Lucille's. As on so many other nights, they sat at the bar. Todd talked to Stefan about the stock market, as Ana zeroed in on the other men, flirting. When she came up to Stefan to say she wanted another drink, he didn't instantly respond, and she became furious and loud. “Quiet down, please,” he asked, but Ana only yelled louder.

Upset, Stefan guided her outside. Through the window, his friends watched Stefan talk quietly to Ana, as she continued to scream. When she finally calmed, they walked back into the restaurant to rejoin the group.

Yet nothing major happened until a Saturday night in late October, when Stefan found water pouring onto his kitchen floor. At just after ten, he took the elevator to the concierge and reported that Ana had cut the line going to the refrigerator's icemaker. A maintenance man was dispatched, who had a difficult time shutting off the valve. When Stefan attempted to help him, Ana laughed, ordering him to let the man do it. “He can just deal with it. It's his job!”

The water finally off, the maintenance man and Stefan mopped up the kitchen floor with towels. When asked why she did it, an intoxicated Ana mumbled about hearing the refrigerator making a sound and interpreting it as “an entity” talking to her.

Days earlier, Stefan had spent $665 to buy Ana a ticket to visit her family in Mexico, flying into Guadalajara, telling friends he needed her out of the apartment so he could work. She left soon after the refrigerator incident. While she was gone, The Parklane manager, Lil Brown, invited Stefan to her office. “If you have a few moments, I'd like to visit with you,” she said.

A matter-of-fact woman, Brown, who'd been at The Parklane for nearly three decades, brought up the
refrigerator incident and two other matters involving Stefan's live-in guest, the first that a maintenance supervisor on the property described Ana as flirting with men working on the property, and the second a complaint filed two weeks earlier, in which a resident said Ana approached his son in the elevator. The father, who was with the toddler at the time, told the concierge that Ana had been overly friendly, frightening the child by saying things like, “Oh, you're so cute. I'm going to take you away from your daddy.”

Terrified, the boy, maybe three or four, hid behind his father, crying.

At the meeting with the building manager, Stefan defended Ana. The instances with the men on the site and the child, he explained, were simply examples of her friendliness. Yet he did admit that something needed to be done. “I will talk to her,” he said.

Later, when describing that meeting, Lil Brown would say that after the official part of the meeting, she took a more personal stance. With the door closed, she pantomimed taking off one hat and putting on another. “Now I'm going to take off my manager hat and put on my friend hat,” she said, to a man she'd known in passing for a couple of years.

While in the beginning of the conversation she'd told Stefan she wouldn't advise him on his personal life, she now felt obligated to clearly lay out the situation, to make sure he understood. “Mr. Andersson, I'm going to talk to you as a friend,” Brown said. “If I were you, I would take the incident with the refrigerator seriously or the situation could escalate into something major down the road.”

When she stopped talking, Stefan sat quietly, and The Parklane manager thought he'd paused to consider what she'd said. When he spoke again, Stefan explained, “I worry about her. I don't think she has anywhere to go. What should I do?”

“If it was me, I would do everything I could possibly do to distance myself from that young lady,” Brown said, her voice sober.

A few days later, Brown asked Stefan for further clarification of Ana's status at The Parklane, to which he responded that she was there temporarily, while he tried to help her. On her report, Brown wrote: “Management to monitor activity of this young lady on property.”

For the two weeks Ana was in Mexico, Stefan worked and perhaps thought about what Lil Brown had told him. While Ana wasn't here to distract him, he tried to get caught up in the lab and on his research for the upcoming legal testimony.

Three months after they'd met, Stefan had received his first warning about Ana Trujillo and was apparently feeling at least somewhat suffocated by having her hover over him in the apartment. And there was something else, although not exactly troubling, that might have raised Stefan's concerns.

“Ana gets rough,” he told his accountant friend, Ran Holcomb. “She gets a little rough sometimes.”

Assuming Stefan referred to during sex, Holcomb thought that his friend sounded excited by being with a strong, younger woman. He never considered that his good friend could have been in danger.

I
n November of that year, 2012, an artist she met at Christi Suarez's art happenings saw Ana at an event in downtown Houston. At first, he didn't recognize her. She looked different, rougher than he'd remembered. As they talked, he thought she seemed odd, sounding at the same time anxious and almost in a dreamlike state. “She was really intense and strange,” he said. “She kept talking about media reports on the end of the Mayan calendar that December 21, and how some said it could be the end of the world. Rather than ending, Ana thought that the world would have a new beginning. If that happened, she said she wanted to go into the Mexican wilderness to live simply, like her ancestors.”

In her purse that day, Ana had a notebook, one she told him held ideas for her future. When she opened it to show him, he saw scribbles, concentric circles and spirals with a smattering of words. “It's a blueprint for all things,” Ana said, as if voicing some profound truth. She then brought up Native American shamans and seeing the spirit world.

“I thought she was searching for something,” the artist said. “And I sensed there were a lot of things changing inside her.”

“H
ow's Ana?” Annika asked Stefan that month.

“She gets disruptive when she drinks,” Stefan told her. From there, Stefan recounted Ana's behavior in the weeks since she'd returned from Mexico. In addition to the
problems at The Parklane, some of Stefan's friends complained about Ana. At dinner one night, Ana looked at one of Stefan's friends, and told him, “You could do a lot better than her.” The “her” she referred to was the man's wife, who at that moment was seated beside him. Afterward, the woman wanted nothing to do with Ana.

“It's not going well,” Stefan admitted.

As the year drew to a close, the tension between Ana and Stefan mounted, perhaps not in evidence anywhere as much as at the Hermann Park Grill, where Stefan had been a regular for more than a year before he brought Ana with him. In the casual restaurant on the edge of the golf course, they sat together, the Golf Channel on the overhead screens, Ana playing on her laptop, while Stefan reviewed reports or read articles, or talked to the golfers coming in after their rounds, asking about their games. When they inquired if he played, Stefan said he didn't, but he was curious about the game. Initially, Ana and Stefan seemed happy together. He ordered his veggie omelets with mushrooms in the morning, and they both enjoyed the catfish buffet on Fridays. About noon on the days he didn't go to the lab, he ordered his first five-dollar glass of merlot, while Ana drank chardonnay.

On temperate days, they preferred the outside, where Stefan sat in a chair with Ana nearby on the grass, her legs crossed and tucked yoga style, her arms extended, soaking up the sun. One day, she bought a bucket of balls on the driving range and entertained herself by swinging at them with a borrowed club, missing much of the time. When the golf pro explained that to go out on the range she had to pay, Ana did. He later found her sitting beside a pond on the course, chanting.

At first Erika Elizondo, who worked in the grill, thought that the woman in Dr. Andersson's life could be good for him. Elizondo had always worried that her regular customer seemed a bit lonely. But then things started to happen. The first was late that fall when Stefan and Ana occupied an
inside table. That day, Ana flirted with younger men in the grill, golfers, and Stefan appeared embarrassed. When he whispered something to her, Ana became angry, and Stefan looked even more distressed but said nothing.

The Hermann Park Golf Course with The Parklane in the background

One afternoon during a lull in their work, Elizondo and a coworker watched golfers hitting balls outside the grill, wondering if one of them could smack it into the window and break it. Just then she heard Ana shout: “You are not going to fuck me the way he's going to fuck me!”

As on so many other days, Ana and Stefan were at a table together. Her hands on the edge as she shouted at him, Ana jerked backward, stood up, and stalked toward the door, where a younger man waited for her. They left together. After Ana's dramatic departure, Stefan sat quietly at the table, head bowed. He waited awhile, then left.

Another day at the grill, when the golfers circulated in and out picking up lunch, Ana shouted, “I'm not going to do that! I'm going to do what I want!” Elizondo didn't know
what she was referring to other than just moments earlier Stefan had been talking quietly to her.

Perhaps the incident that caused the biggest stir in the grill happened on a day Elizondo wasn't there to witness it, an afternoon when Ana and Stefan talked together at a table. For some reason, Ana became upset and began arguing with him although no one but Stefan could hear what she said. Abruptly she walked to a table where three African-American men, regulars in the grill, played cards. In a swoop, Ana bent over the table and swooshed her hands over the top, scattering their cards onto the floor. One of the men jumped up, and shouted, “What is your problem?”

“Just leave me alone,” she said, seething. “You're all just niggers.”

“You need to get that woman out of here,” one of the men, understandably upset, told the clerk in the pro shop. “She's a woman, and I won't put my hands on her, but if she were a man . . .”

The next day, when Elizondo came in and heard about the incident, the man who described it to her said, “What a shame. Ana is a beautiful woman, but she's going to be the death of Dr. Andersson.”

T
he evidence mounting that the new woman in his life wasn't as he'd pictured her, instances of her bad behavior becoming too numerous to ignore, in mid-November Stefan apparently asked Ana to leave his apartment, for at that time he signed an order rescinding his permission to allow her to enter. Yet that didn't mean that they stopped seeing each other. In fact, that Thanksgiving Stefan and Ana drove to Waco to spend the holiday with her family.

Whatever happened on the trip, Ana must have been convincing, perhaps promising to change, to not act out in public. Once back in Houston, Stefan gave the relationship another chance. For when they returned home, he told a friend that she had moved back into The Parklane with him.
This time, however, he wasn't as patient. “I need her to move out,” he said just days later.

In December, Stefan traveled to the East Coast to consult with lawyers involved in the trial for which he'd prepared. Despite his declarations to friends that he'd asked her to find somewhere else to live, Ana remained in his apartment. When he departed for the airport that morning, she promised to leave in a few hours and lock the door behind her. Apparently accepting that she'd do as she promised, perhaps because she didn't have a key, Stefan agreed.

Later he must have thought better of the situation, for Stefan called a friend in the building and asked him to make sure Ana had left and locked the door. When the friend reached 18B, he found the door closed but the latch taped, so that it wouldn't lock. When he nudged the door open, the apartment smelled of pot.

Just weeks later, it was proving more difficult than might have been expected for Stefan to get Ana Trujillo out of his life. Although he'd banned her from his apartment when he returned from his trip, just before the New Year, on December 29 at seven thirty in the morning, Ana walked into The Parklane yet again, this time not with Stefan but with another man who had an apartment in the building.

It would seem later that the man served a purpose, to get her inside the building so that she could get to Stefan. At one o'clock that same day, the man stopped at the front desk, confused, asking if he'd arrived with someone when he'd returned that morning. Apparently he'd been drinking, brought Ana home with him, then fallen asleep, and when he woke up, Ana was gone. “Yes, Ms. Fox,” the concierge confirmed.

“Where is she?” the man asked, perplexed.

The concierge said that she didn't know. “She came in with you.”

The man walked off, and the following morning he wasn't the one who logged out when leaving the apartments with Ana. It was Stefan Andersson.

T
hat year, 2012, drew to a close, and despite the fears surrounding the end of the Mayan calendar, the world didn't end, didn't change, but continued on. Something else, however, was ending—Stefan's grant money. It dwindled down in the fall until in January he had only enough remaining for a few months. As he had in the past, Stefan wrote letters and applied for grants, but he was distracted, still complaining that at UH he wasn't given time to do his own work, instead helping with other research.

Unlike late 2009, when he'd left Dallas, however, this time Stefan didn't panic. In January, he traveled back to the East Coast to give a deposition, which went well. Not long after another law firm, one representing a Canadian pharmaceutical company, contacted him offering similar work. At $450 an hour, the potential earnings from serving as an expert witness offered an exciting opportunity. After more than twenty-five years chasing research grants, Stefan appeared excited about the change. Although he'd reached another fork in his career's path, this time he saw the future opening up clearly in front of him.

The only troubling development was that Ana Trujillo refused to vacate Stefan Andersson's life. Yet there seemed little doubt that he wanted her out.

On December 30, not long after Ana was seen with him walking from the building, Stefan again dropped a note off at the concierge desk, explaining that he wanted Ana barred from entering his apartment. An incident report was typed up, and the staff was notified.

Somehow, however, she must have convinced him to let her back in. For five days later, on January 4, Ana took a cell-phone photo of her feet wearing blue-suede stilettos, shoes that would soon become infamous across the world, propped up on Stefan's glass coffee table, a television playing in the background, with two crystal champagne glasses and a shot glass containing a small amount of an amber-colored liquid beside her.

The January 4, 2013 iPhone photo

A
s 2013 began, Stefan, perhaps spurred on by the changes in his employment, considered his future. When he thought about where he wanted to live, he contemplated moving to France, and he reapplied for his Swedish citizenship, hoping to have dual standing with the U.S. “I think I'll walk around with a baguette under my arm,” he told a friend. “I can drink wine in the cafes and meet beautiful women.”

As Stefan pictured a departure to live in a small village in France, Ana saw no such parting in their future. “He's in love with me, and he wants to marry me,” she told Teresa Montoya, who was happy for her friend. “I'm not attracted to him. I hate it when he touches me. But I'm trying to make it work.”

On January 12, it appeared that she'd convinced him either that they still belonged together and that she deserved another chance or that she needed help and had nowhere else to go, for on that day Stefan signed another consent form
allowing her into The Parklane and his apartment. Again, the arrangement would prove a brief one.

Weeks later, Stefan walked downstairs to the complex's garage and found his beloved Mercedes dented on all four sides, the paint scratched, the bumper crooked. Ana had taken the car for a joyride one night while he slept and gotten into an accident, deploying the air bags and scraping and bashing the car. When he confronted her, however, she later laughed repeating to a friend what she had told him. “I didn't drive it. That was you!” she said. “You were drinking, Stefan. Don't you remember having the accident?”

Perhaps she shouldn't have laughed and been so bold with her answer, for Stefan didn't believe her. The car repairs cost $6,000, without doing all of the cosmetic work. From that night on, he hid his car key and wallet, afraid to leave them out where she might find them.

“You really need to get rid of her,” Bessie told Stefan one night at a restaurant. The nurse was there with her fiancé, Todd, who'd been telling Stefan the same thing about Ana for months. “No one likes being around her,” said Bessie, who found the way Ana told Stefan what to do offensive, ordering him around like a child. “We're worried for you.”