Possessed (21 page)

“Yeah, Stefan is dead,” Evans said.

For a moment, Ana was quiet, yet she didn't cry or show any emotion. Instead she said, as calmly as if talking about stopping at the grocery store, “I was giving him mouth-to-mouth.”

“Right, I know that was relayed on the 9-1-1,” Evans said.

Suddenly Ana, looking not sad but alarmed, said, “So, are you saying it was me?”

F
or the next half an hour, Ana Trujillo mused out loud, considering whether or not she should talk to the two detectives. They confirmed that what she told them could indeed end up being repeated in a courtroom, that she had the right to leave at any time, that if she didn't have funds for an attorney, one would be appointed to represent her, and that it was her decision whether to answer questions or walk away. She said she understood that she didn't have to talk to them, but, she wondered, wouldn't they be more likely to believe her if she cooperated?

To confirm nothing stood in the way of Ana's ability to make an informed decision, Evans explored her mental
health, asking if she'd been diagnosed with any psychiatric conditions. She said she hadn't. Again the room fell quiet. Then, for the first time perhaps, Ana considered what had transpired. Staring down at her clothes, she asked, “Is there any way I can change my pants or anything? It's making me sick looking at the blood.”

A crime-scene officer was called, and he brought a white-cotton jumpsuit to pull over her clothes. She did so, then sat and stared at the officers. When she began talking again, it was as if she'd jumped back to the prior conversation, away from the killing and into her past.

Moments earlier, she'd acted as if ready to discuss Stefan's death, but instead she rambled on about her first husband, her family, and her successful career. She talked of her years at Coca-Cola, and yet again about how she'd attempted to heal her body through her art. She'd made great strides, she said, including learning to use hydrotherapy and salts to draw out bruising. Along the way, she claimed to have developed special powers. “I have the ability to somehow, things become magnetized,” she said. “So I learned how to use that energy and transfer it to heal.”

Off and on to encourage the conversation, the investigators flattered her. “You're a very intelligent person,” Evans said at one point.

“Why do you say that?” she responded.

“Well, I can tell . . . ascertain that you're an intelligent person. You're a very articulate person as well.”

“Thank you,” she said, obviously pleased.

Minutes ticked off the wall clock, and they continued to discuss whether or not she would sign the release that would allow them to talk about the matter they were gathered to discuss, the paperwork that would permit the detectives to ask her about Stefan's death. Finally, she said she would. The reason was her fear that if she didn't tell them right then, if she waited and slept first, when she woke up she might not remember what had happened, why and how she'd killed a man. As she explained it, there'd been episodes in
her past when she awoke and realized that she'd blacked out the events of the day before.

“I don't want to block it out or anything. If I forget and then you guys can't do anything, because I forgot . . . I don't want to lose this.” She then said what the detectives were waiting to hear: “I will talk to you, and I will tell you.”

Earlier, she'd described meeting Andersson at The Parklane. Again she talked about how his intelligence drew her to him. The story she told repeated everything she'd said about the other men in her life. Initially, she saw Stefan as only a friend, someone she viewed as a potential collaborator. In her outlook, she envisioned her role as his holistic and spiritual mentor. But he fell in love with her.

A man who'd always adored children, Stefan proposed that they marry and start a family. Yet she said that she lacked any enthusiasm for their sexual liaisons, seeing him as a man with a soft, aging body. As she talked of the dead man, she stressed all she'd done for him, for which she said she'd received little appreciation. In her words, when they first met, Stefan was negative, unhappy, unhealthy, and physically undesirable. But she'd changed him. An atheist since childhood, under her tutelage she claimed he'd not only begun taking better care of himself but had a spiritual awakening.

Within a span of minutes, Ana made complete about-faces in her description of the man she'd just killed. Repeatedly she described him as a good, caring person, one who watched over her. She said that she loved him. Then, suddenly, she talked of him as if he were a dangerous, domineering, abusive man. “He'd get up like really mad,” she said. “I was afraid of him . . . He wasn't himself.”

Earlier, she'd talked about the other men, especially Goodney, as if they were controlled by evil spirits. So many had wondered what evil lurked inside Ana, but it was the men in her life she insisted who'd sold their souls. That also held true for the dead man. Stefan, she said, at times acted “as if he had two horns coming out.”

Rather than disagree with her assessment, she said Stefan admitted that at times he felt as if he had “the devil in me.” That was an affirmation she took seriously, “because that's real.”

Yet Stefan was generous. He bought her a four-thousand-dollar purse, and the man who loved seeing women in pretty shoes paid $1,500 for a pair of stilettos. Through it all, she expected him to take care of her, to keep her from having to become involved in the daily chore of making a living. For Ana, money was a concern to be handed over to others, those who facilitated her life. “It's a representation of how people buy people, and they kill and do whatever they want just to get a dollar.”

Her relationship with the scientist cooled starting the previous January or February, Ana said, as he focused on preparing to be an expert witness at a trial. From that point on, their romance crumbled. It was then that she said her relationship with Stefan became abusive. Yet at each turn when Evans or Triplett asked if the dead man mistreated her physically, Ana said no. “Not physical, uh, mentally abusive, ugly to me.”

“Just by words and how he treated you?” Evans asked.

“Yea, and the words he used. Yes.”

At times, her statements had some strings of the truth. Stefan's great flaw, she said, was his lack of strength. He wasn't the man she expected him to be. “This is supposed to be my husband,” she stressed.

When Ana talked about not being interested in money, Evans speculated that people became involved in relationships for many reasons, including companionship and sex. Referring to the cycle she'd painted in which men wanted more from her than friendship, had that “been the case with Andersson?” he asked. If so, had that made her angry and frustrated? What Evans was looking for was the psychology behind Ana's view of Stefan. “It may motivate you to act a certain way toward him,” the investigator speculated.

“No, no,” Ana said. “Not at all.”

The time wore on, and the detectives remained patient, letting the woman's story unfold. Off and on they continued to flatter her, to act as if they had no desire other than to hear her thoughts. During a rare moment of brevity, she concisely described the pattern she said her life had taken, one in which men were strongly attracted to her. They fell in love, and she rejected them. Overall, Ana talked to the two homicide investigators as she might have therapists, hired to listen to her muse about her past relationships and her life.

“I think you look at things from a compassionate . . .” Triplett said.

“Yes!” she answered, obviously pleased. “Caring. Yeah!” In her opinion, she was “hypersensitive to other people's feelings.” And she left no doubt that she believed she had something remarkable about her. Earlier she'd talked about an ability to magnetize things. In addition, she said she could “feel when somebody's temperature rises or their mental state changes.”

At one point, she asked, perhaps in a clear moment looking about the room and pondering the turn her life had taken, “So how did I become from being so accomplished, from being so amazing, you know my family and my children, and I had everything, and it was beautiful, and I worked for it and loved it. How did I come here and be here?” As she concluded the sentence, she gestured toward the table in the interrogation room.

The conversation went on, and she talked of James Wells. Although earlier she'd described him in loving terms, her tone changed, and she claimed that he, too, wanted to control her. In detail, she discussed the fight she'd had two weeks earlier with Chanda Ellison, claiming the other woman pounced on her out of jealousy. Throughout, Ana pointed out bruises on her arms and legs, on her chin, describing them as resulting from the fight in Wells's apartment.

After she'd been kicked out by Wells, Ana said she called Stefan, and he once again took her in, letting her stay at his apartment while she healed.

Their reunion, she described as a great success; Stefan was so delighted to have her back that he offered to buy her younger daughter a car. And then came the night before, when they'd gone to Bar 5015 and drank.

At the club, she said, all went well. She and Stefan talked to other patrons, laughed, and had fun. Yet for hours, she said she tried to get him to go home. It was when another man bought her a cranberry-and-vodka drink at the bar that Stefan's mood abruptly changed. “He got real possessive,” she said. From the restaurant, they took the taxi to The Parklane.

Three hours into the interrogation, Ana finally described how and why Stefan Andersson ended up bludgeoned to death. In the apartment, she tried to placate him, but Stefan became upset first about the man who bought her the drink and then that she was leaving the next day for Waco, to see her daughter. Possessive, he feared she wouldn't return.

“He starts to get out of control. He's yelling, and he's getting into a frenzy.”

Frightened, she wanted to leave, a tactic she'd used in the past to allow him time to regain his composure. But he kept her from walking out the apartment door. “Did he tell you that you couldn't leave? Did he stand in front of you and wouldn't let you go out the door? Did he push you from the door? Did he pull you away from the door?” Sergeant Triplett asked.

Ana didn't answer.

Evans, too, asked how Stefan blocked her exit, but Ana seemed unable or unwilling to focus on the question. Instead, she described going toward the door to get her packed suitcases. “He doesn't like it that I don't care, that he can't stop me,” she said. “He felt out of control. And he had to be in control at all times . . . And I was crying, because he was saying really mean things.”

What mean things did Stefan Andersson say to her? As Ana recounted it, he said that he'd never hurt her. “I'm not like your friend. I'm not going to beat you.” Rather than
being comforted by his assurances, Ana pegged his words as degrading, as if he insinuated that she was “stupid for allowing somebody to hit me.”

The argument escalated. Imitating an angry Stefan, Ana growled like a lion when she said he talked to her, and she wanted him to stop. “Please stop talking,” she said she begged him. “He wouldn't stop talking.”

In the interrogation room, Ana became progressively more enthusiastic describing how in the apartment her body trembled and her breathing became labored. “He came towards me,” she said. “He goes, ‘I'm not going to let you go anywhere. You're never going to leave me, ever!' . . . He grabbed me, and we started . . .”

As the detectives watched, Ana demonstrated a wrestling match. They were in the hallway when it began, and then she ran to the living room. Stefan jumped on top of her, and she cried, “I couldn't get out of it!”

Yet so much didn't make sense. She said Stefan held both her hands, but then that she grabbed her shoe and hit him, as he sat on top of her. “I was suffocating. I was hitting him to just get him away, right?”

When he lost his balance and fell over, she got on top of him. “It was like, ‘Stay down Stefan!' But he grabbed me . . . He wouldn't let me go . . . And I was just hitting him with the shoe. ‘Please stop. Stop! Stop!'”

When Triplett pushed for details, she said, “I hit him a couple of times and then he grabbed my hand so I lost the shoe.”

At some point in the turmoil, she heard his labored breathing, but still she didn't get off his chest. Instead, she claimed he again growled at her, and as he lay dying, she pleaded with him to stop hurting her. “I realized there was more blood on the carpet. I jumped off of him. He was still kind of, he was breathing you know . . . I started mouth-to-mouth.”

As he drifted off, she slapped him, yelling at him to stay
awake. She searched for the phone, found it, and called 9-1-1. “I am like, I felt sickened when I saw him. I would have panicked when I saw the blood, but I didn't care. Like a little blood, you know? Like the blood just started coming out.”

When Officer Bowie arrived as the first responder on the scene, it appeared to him that Stefan Andersson had been dead so long the blood pooled beside his head, on Trujillo and on Stefan's face, hands, and arms had all begun to dry. But Ana said that couldn't have been true, that Stefan was alive and still breathing when she heard Bowie knock on the door.