Possessed (16 page)

“I'm going to get rid of her, Ran,” he told his friend, his voice strained yet determined. “I am going to get Ana out of my life!”

I
n early 2013, Stefan dined in one of his favorite restaurants and struck up a friendly conversation with a teenage girl at the next table. Moments later, her mother, Janette Jordan, walked in. A striking woman with shoulder-length dark hair, Jordan had emigrated to the U.S. from the United Kingdom, and still had her British accent. She worked in sales and marketing for a large restaurant corporation, and had three children, the teenager at the table, who was a student at the University of Houston, and two others in their twenties. That day, Jordan and Stefan talked, and found they had much in common, from an interest in history to their European roots. Jordan understood Stefan's penchant for spending evenings out, reminding her of Britain, where a nightly stop at a pub was customary for many.

From that point on, they began seeing each other on occasion, meeting for dinner and drinks, or a Sunday brunch. When Stefan told her he was fifty-eight, Jordan, who was more than a decade younger, was surprised. From his appearance, the white hair, his slightly hunched shoulders, his somewhat frail look, she'd assumed he was older. Yet when they talked about books or life, when he discussed his work and science, his expression brightened, and she found him charming. They took walks in the parks, and he brought her to a gathering at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts. She watched him with waiters and doormen, always kind. “He was just that guy,” she said. “A true gentleman. Good to
everyone. Stefan dressed well, and had beautiful blue eyes. And he had a real zest for life.”

At times, Stefan tried to talk to Jordan about his ex-girlfriend, Ana, but Jordan cut him off, not wanting to hear it. It seemed ill-mannered to complain to the new woman in his life about his former lover, like a man complaining about an ex-wife. When Jordan objected, Stefan dropped it. What he did tell her was that the woman was capable of showing up at any moment. “She makes things difficult,” he said. “She's kind of crazy.”

“They're all crazy,” Jordan said, making a joke of it.

“No,” Stefan said, serious. “This one truly is.”

Stefan continued to see Jordan, and talked to friends about how much he enjoyed being with a woman who wasn't “high-maintenance.” He seemed buoyed by the relationship, for the first time in months enthusiastic. Although they didn't talk about their exes, Stefan confided in her, discussing his views on life, as in March during a Sunday brunch, when he told Jordan about a funeral he'd attended for a Houston friend.

“They can take you at any time,” he said. “Who knows how much time we all have?”

“I
'm taking Janette to places Ana doesn't know,” Stefan told Annika when he explained that he'd met a new woman. “I don't want a scene. And I can never be sure what Ana might do, where she'll show up.”

That day, as he had for months, Stefan stressed that he wanted Ana gone from his life. What he didn't tell Annika was that despite everything Ana had done to him, he continued to routinely backtrack, exposing himself to danger. Rather than report the violence to police, Stefan told only a few close friends that he was being abused.

In significant-other violence, this unfortunately isn't an unusual cycle. According to U.S. government statistics, less than half of all incidents of domestic violence are reported to police. The most common reasons: fear of retaliation and
humiliation. Perhaps it was doubly hard for Stefan, a man, to admit he was being abused by a woman, partly because domestic violence is rightfully most often viewed as a crime against women committed by men. In the U.S., 85 percent of the victims are women but they are only 2 percent of the abusers.

Increasingly isolated, Stefan must have felt weak and incapable. Those who knew him best, like Annika, understood. Describing his own upbringing as abusive, Stefan had vowed never to be like his father and avoided conflict. And Stefan had a big heart, the kind that made it hard to turn his back on anyone, especially a person he'd once loved.

In early March, Stefan again walked into The Parklane with Ana. The concierge clocked them in at 11:13
A.M.
When Annika visited weeks later, on her way home from her spring bird-watching trip, Ana's possessions in bags were stacked in Stefan's apartment, which had otherwise returned to its pristine pre-Ana condition, everything in its place. “Ana won't pick them up,” he complained. “She said she doesn't want them in bags.”

Years earlier, others had noted that Ana had a habit of leaving items in friends' homes, places where she wanted to return. For months, she'd used the same tactic on Stefan. “Put it in paper boxes and leave them downstairs with the concierge,” Annika advised him. “She can pick it up there, and it's not your problem anymore.”

Stefan nodded that he would, but Annika doubted that he would follow through.

For the most part, Stefan seemed well, his life back to normal. They talked about Janette Jordan, Stefan assessing her as focused and accomplished, and “normal,” things he by then understood that Ana Trujillo was not. Everything went well throughout Annika's visit despite the shadow of his relationship with Ana, until a text message beeped on his phone.

“It's her,” he said.

“A
na and I had a fight. She doesn't live here anymore,” Stefan told Ana's friend Christi Suarez, when they talked a few weeks later. Suarez was trying to find Ana, who had promised to host an upcoming public-access TV show at a crawfish festival in Victoria, Texas, two hours south of Houston. When Ana complained that she had nothing to wear for the gig, Stefan had bought her cowboy boots and a hat.

“She tried to choke me. I had to pry her hands off my neck. And then she slapped me,” he said, sounding afraid. “I'm too old for this, and I threw her out. I'm done with her.”

As they talked, Stefan told Suarez that he cared about Ana and worried about her, but that he couldn't have her in his apartment. Instead, he tried to see her only in public places, to avoid any more violent incidents. “I've put her things in boxes, and they're at the concierge desk,” he said. “Please, come pick them up for her. I can't have her here. I'm afraid of what she might do to me. When she drinks, she gets crazy.”

Having been slapped twice by Ana herself, that was something Suarez had no problem believing.

Days later, Stefan admitted something similar to his CPA friend, Ran Holcomb, who was in Houston for another round of cancer treatments. “Ana hits me,” Stefan said, rather sheepishly.

“Make her go!” his friend responded.

“I am trying,” Stefan said, with a shrug. “She just won't leave me alone. She follows me.”

Days later, Ran called Stefan and found him at the golf course grill with Ana. “You have to be kidding me,” Ran said. “What value does she bring you?”

“None,” Stefan acknowledged. “I don't invite her, she just comes. She won't leave me alone. I have to get rid of her.”

“I
hate it when he touches me,” Ana told Suarez when they talked on the phone later that week. “He's an old man.”

Suarez had only met Stefan once but liked him. She'd
hoped that the relationship would work out and give Ana stability. Over the years they'd known each other, Suarez had witnessed Ana's life crater around her, watched her make one bad choice after another. Ana had even begun looking different, her complexion rough and her hair straggly, perhaps from all the alcohol or the herbal pot she still regularly smoked. Or maybe it was something else, the witchcraft and the communing with spirits Suarez knew Ana was involved in. After she'd met Stefan, Suarez advised Ana to stick with him, to let him help her. Now she knew that Ana was physically abusing Stefan and that he was afraid of her.

“Stefan gave me a bunch of money to marry him,” Ana said, perhaps referring to the seven-thousand-dollar loan he'd made to her the previous fall that was coming due in two months. Ana laughed, and said, “I spent it all. It's gone.”

Once she tracked down Ana, Suarez made arrangements to drive her to the crawfish-festival show. The night before the trip to Victoria for the taping, Suarez tossed and turned, nervous about seeing Ana again. In Suarez's dreams, Ana appeared as she'd been painted at the first event, as a snake.

The following day, Suarez's friend Raul Rodriguez, the host of the show Ana was appearing on, and Suarez drove to James Wells's apartment to pick up Ana, who dawdled getting dressed. Then they drove to The Parklane, picked up Ana's things from the concierge, boxes and suitcases, and put them in the back of the SUV, along with the video equipment. On the way to the festival, Rodriguez thought Ana looked out of it. He'd spent nights at restaurants with her when she was drinking, but was surprised that she was so foggy when sober.

Quietly, he said to Suarez, “You shouldn't have brought her. What if she does something crazy?”

It would turn out that he didn't have to wait long.

In Victoria, as he unloaded equipment, Rodriguez heard Ana ask for her things. With equipment to move out of the way first, he ignored her for just a minute. “I want my suitcases!” Ana shouted.

When Rodriguez turned, Ana had her hand raised and appeared ready to charge at him. “She had the most horrible look on her face,” he said. “Her eyes were just dead.”

“You'd better not do whatever you're thinking about doing,” he warned, glaring back at her. “I'm
not
going to let you beat me up.”

Instantly, Ana backed off, but Rodriguez couldn't forget what had happened, how she'd suddenly snapped. “I wondered why she was so filled with rage,” he said.

Despite her strange behavior, once cameras rolled, Ana performed well, lively and animated. After the festival, Rodriguez drove the two women back to Houston, dropping Ana and her possessions at James Wells's place.

“T
hings were getting really strange at the apartment,” Chanda Ellison later explained. “I thought Ana was jealous, that she wanted me gone. But I wasn't going anywhere. James didn't want me to leave, and I didn't want to go. But James didn't want to kick Ana out, either. With Ana, James didn't want to see it. He liked Ana.”

From early in the year, shortly after Ana moved into the modest brick apartment complex eight blocks from The Parklane, there were incidents. One was the afternoon Ana told James that her laptop was broken, and Chanda was responsible. It wasn't true. On another occasion, Ana returned to the apartment and, for no apparent reason, walked over to Chanda and grabbed her prescription sunglasses off her face. “Give those back,” she said.

Smiling, Ana twisted and broke the frames, while staring contemptuously at Chanda. “Are you talking to me?” Ana demanded, drawing out the question like an accusation. When Wells broke up the ensuing argument, Chanda retaliated, taking a box of Ana's things and abandoning it outside on the curb. Vagrants wandering the area quickly moved in and rifled through the box, claiming what they wanted. While Ana was upset, it eventually blew over.

To Chanda, it appeared that Ana Trujillo thought every
man was in love with her, coveting her body. One day, Ana called a psychologist she'd met, talking on the phone with the man. When she hung up, she said, “He has the hots for me, too.”

Some of the male adulation, Chanda had to admit, might have been more than Ana's imagination, however, as with the therapist, who sent sexually explicit texts to Ana that she showed to Chanda and Wells.

Even odder were the rituals Ana's two roommates witnessed, not knowing what they were seeing. One night, Wells walked in on Ana surrounded by burning candles, chanting, in the living room in the middle of the night. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I couldn't sleep,” she answered.

When alone in the apartment, Ana left the door open, saying she had to because the apartment was possessed. When Wells asked her to explain, she said that one night when she was alone, she heard a pop and saw a figure she described as reptilian. At first she said the figure in the vision was Wells, then a neighbor; finally, she said, “It was Stefan.”

Out at night in the clubs, Chanda saw Ana, who carried a small scissors, snip off pieces of hair from people she was angry with when they weren't looking. Later she burned the strands and chanted. And Chanda, like others, noticed something odd about Ana's eyes, that they turned yellow when she was angry.

When she heard Ana talking, Chanda often thought that their new roommate had a sense of entitlement. “She saw herself as beyond reproach,” said Chanda. “No one could tell her anything to do. No one.”

“My parents have closed minds,” Ana complained to James Wells. “They don't want to understand that I have powers.”

So many questions circulated around Ana. At times, Chanda and Wells both wondered why Ana spent the days with Stefan but never the nights. “I just thought it was odd,” he said. “I mean, Ana said he loved her.”

Although Ana lived with them for months, Chanda and Wells only met Stefan on a few occasions. Twice, Chanda went out with Ana and Stefan, including on May 11, for his fifty-ninth birthday, to a trendy club called Bar 5015, one of Ana's favorites, a low-slung building with a long bar and white tufted vinyl barstools.

That night, Chanda was surprised that he'd chosen that bar, thinking it wasn't a place “for an old white man” to be. The crowd was more young urban with an edge. But Stefan was in a good mood, ordering a bottle of champagne and buying drinks. Chanda watched as Ana flitted from one man to the other at the bar, flirting, but Stefan didn't seem disturbed. At one point, he said to Chanda, “I care about Ana. I love her. But she's a handful, and I can't deal with her.”

Frequently, Ana worked her way back to the table to ask if Stefan wanted anything, and to have him order her another glass of wine or a shot of tequila. Then, as Stefan and Chanda talked and listened to music, Ana wandered off to chat with another man.