Possessed (25 page)

In the jail that same day, Ana was housed in the hospital wing, where she complained of mounting anxiety. “Patient reports some depression. Said she's been having some flashbacks little by little and she said she has trust issues . . . said she internalizes her feelings . . . she has been meditating, praying, and speaking with other inmates for encouragement.”

T
he obituary in the
Dallas Morning News
and the
Houston Chronicle
ran with an accompanying photo, a black and
white of a dashing Stefan. The obit said only that Stefan died in his home “due to unforeseen circumstances.” It also stated that he would be remembered “for an amazing sense of humor, honesty, a brilliant mind, and above all love and generosity. He will be greatly missed by his family and many friends around the world.”

On Saturday June 29, twenty days after his death, approximately 130 friends and family, including his sisters and nieces from Sweden, met at The Wine Therapist to remember Stefan's life. On a table, Annika placed photos of Stefan beside a canister holding his ashes.

A congenial crowd, they mingled quietly. Stefan's old neighbor from his years living at The Village, Mark Bouril gave a eulogy, describing Stefan's impressive accomplishments, yet saying that he was a humble man. “He recognized that we are all flawed in some way, and he did not hold that against us,” Bouril said of his friend, whose passing left a void in his life. “. . . He understood intuitively that we are all works in progress.”

In his talk, Bouril recounted a few of the many good times they'd shared, the friends he'd made through Stefan, and told endearing and funny stories, including about the day Stefan lost a bullet in the garbage disposal and assumed Americans had a tool specially designed for just such an occurrence. At the end, the crowd raised their wineglasses and toasted their lost friend.

Off and on among the laughing, there was crying, and at times one or another of the friends talked in hushed tones about the end of Stefan's life, wondering how anyone could have brutally murdered such a gentle man. The table holding his ashes seemed to draw them, and many stood and talked to Stefan, saying good-bye.

I
n Houston one afternoon, Teresa Montoya walked the few blocks from her salon to the jail after work and asked to see Ana. They met in the visitor section behind a Plexiglas wall. Ana's face was lined, and she looked decades older than the
last time Montoya had seen her. The story Ana told that day was similar to the one she told police, that Stefan was obsessed with her, so much so that he wanted to move to Waco with her and buy a house for her and her younger daughter, Arin. But that he also had a dark side, wanting to control her. “Tell me you were on drugs or drunk out of your mind when you did this,” Montoya said, not wanting to think that her friend could have committed such carnage sober. Yet Ana denied she was at all compromised. In her account, Stefan had a drinking problem, not her.

As she had throughout, despite all the witnesses who watched her drinking escalate and those who saw her intoxicated on that fateful night, Ana claimed she'd had no more than two shots of tequila. “He'd been drinking all day,” she said of Stefan. “I was just trying to leave . . . he attacked me.”

As Montoya stood to leave, Ana sobbed, and begged, “Pray for me.”

In Waco, Margie Sowell, a longtime family friend, talked with Ana's mother, Trina. Later, Sowell would describe the conversation that took place that day. When the subject of Ana came up, Margie said that Trina told her that she worried about her daughter. As Margie would recount the call, Trina said that she wasn't sure what Ana had gotten into, but that in the months before the killing, Trina was uncomfortable being around her oldest child. “Trina said she didn't like having Ana in the house. She said Ana was doing strange things, like rituals,” said Sowell. “She said it depressed her to think about what was going on in Ana's life.”

About that same time in Houston, the university ran a tribute in memory of Stefan on its Web site. Beside his photo, it read: “A research professor and talented biochemist . . . During the course of his career, Andersson's research influenced several topics, including women's reproductive health, benign prostatic hyperplasia and prostate cancer.”

A
fter the memorial service, Annika and one of Stefan's sisters, her husband and daughter, drove to Houston, to meet with the probate attorney. On the way, they stopped at The Parklane. The first thing they did was stand at the bench where Stefan used to feed his squirrel. At the base of the tree, they scattered a handful of his ashes, and Annika pinned a photo of Stefan on the tree. For a few moments, they stood quietly in yet another remembrance.

Then they took an elevator upstairs to 18B. By then, the bloody carpet and wall boards were removed. The furniture remained pushed to the sides of the living room, and the apartment looked very different than it had when Annika was there last, when Stefan rose early to look out the windows over the park and see the sunrise. The cocktail table blocked the fireplace, covered with Ana's art project. The notes were gone, logged into evidence by police, but Annika tried to decipher the meaning of the dyed paper, the lines of salt, and Ana's bangle bracelets arranged in an arch. It all seemed very odd.

Looking through a small leather briefcase they found in the apartment, one they thought might have been Stefan's, Annika and the others discovered more of Ana's notes. On some she'd drawn spiral after spiral. They also looked over her old medical bills and the notes bearing phrases in which Ana documented her feelings. “I want to know who decides my worth,” said one. On a sheet of paper dated just weeks before Stefan's murder, Ana talked of body mutation, of melting into the body of another, of shape-changing. “If I decide to melt with me . . . I want your body. If I decide to melt all over your body . . . reshape . . . change,” read another.

The oddest perhaps was a note on pink paper dated a month before Ana bit James Wells, in which she mentioned the massive explosion that took fourteen lives and injured 160 in a fertilizer plant in the small town of West, outside of Waco. In her note, Ana wrote of a full-moon eclipse,
which astrologers judged to be a highly potent sign, which occurred on April 25, the day President Barack Obama presided over a memorial service for those who lost their lives in the explosion.

Crawling up a crease in the center of the paper was what appeared to be a plea for a spirit or a demon to appear: “I would like Lustre Ante (unreadable word) Mulato to materialize. I will reunite with you Christian Leaver. Your circle of Faith Hope Trust. I light love. Free will. For the Greater Good Wills. (sic)”

Lying on the paper was a single brown feather.

Feeling like a detective, wanting to help the prosecutors and also to understand what had unfolded in the apartment the night her good friend perished, Annika read the notes and photographed each.

Later, in the basement, as if what they'd found upstairs wasn't peculiar enough, Annika opened a wooden box with a note on one side and sticks, leaves, and finger-type bowls on the other. Perhaps the strangest item discovered that day, however, was a small, primitive tower with a broken wheel on the top, made from leaves and sticks, the type of shape sometimes seen in movies as objects used in rituals. Days later, Annika called John Jordan to report what she had found. The prosecutor listened but didn't see any of it as relevant to the case. Still, it was interesting, and undoubtedly a clue into Ana Trujillo's mind.

Annika would later estimate that on that day she and Stefan's family spent perhaps thirty to forty minutes in the apartment and the basement combined. There would be much to do later, to organize and clean out Stefan's possessions, but that would wait for another day. The appointment with the probate lawyer loomed. When they left, Stefan's sister took little by which to remember her lost brother, but it was something that embodied memories, his favorite sweater.

Saddened and still grieving, they drove from The
Parklane's lot. As they did, Annika looked back and noticed that the photo she'd posted of Stefan was gone. In front of the tree stood a homeless man, undoubtedly one of the many Stefan had befriended, clutching the photo to his chest, perhaps also remembering fondly a man he'd thought of as a friend.

I
n August, as Houston sweltered from the summer's heat, a daughter of one of the assistant district attorneys in John Jordan's office mentioned that she'd heard that Ana Trujillo had quite a reputation in the bars and restaurants clustered around the Rice Lofts.

Early on, Jordan had started talking to another of the lawyers in the DA's Office about the case, Sarah Mickelson, who worked in the domestic-violence unit. She'd been the one the morning after the murder to recommend that Jordan call in Chris Duncan, the blood expert. Mickelson had worked with Duncan on an earlier case, the stabbing of a sixty-nine-year-old man. Enthused by “the CSI stuff,” Mickelson found Duncan's specialty fascinating, and in the courtroom, so had the jury.

Slender, with long straight blond hair falling about her shoulders, Mickelson looked more like an actress than a tough prosecutor, but she'd watched
Law & Order
with her grandmother and grown up wanting to “put bad guys in jail.” Her five years in the Harris County District Attorney's Office had lived up to her expectations, as she investigated the cases, pulled the clues together, and heard the life stories of those involved. Among her other talents, Mickelson was a good listener, a thoughtful woman who worked with child abuse, sexual assault, and domestic-violence victims. “I'm there when the worst has happened,” she said. “I'm there to give them closure and at least justice. That's a good feeling.”

Sarah Mickelson

When Jordan heard about Ana's reputation in downtown Houston, he asked Mickelson to take a scouting trip with him, to go into the restaurants and ask about Trujillo. Early one evening, the two prosecutors circulated from place to place, carrying a photo of Ana with them, showing it to the managers, who put out the word that the prosecutors were there.

In between serving customers, the waiters and bartenders told their stories. Many remembered the woman with the long dark hair, the one they had to watch closely, because when she drank, she had a volatile temper. There were tales of Ana throwing drinks at waiters, shouting at patrons, acting out. Mickelson compared what she heard of Ana's angry outbursts to what she knew of the crime scene, the copious amount of blood spatter and the pool near Stefan's head, the gruesome photos of his head and face. “I thought about hitting him while he lay there, the blood spatter exploding around her and on her, and I couldn't imagine anyone continuing to strike while seeing that. The crime was pitiless.”

I
n August, a grand jury formally indicted Ana Trujillo for the murder of Stefan Andersson.

That same month, Annika returned to Houston to put Stefan's affairs in order and clean out his apartment. The experience would be an emotional one for her. At times, she felt anger toward Stefan, frustration that he didn't seek out help. She knew that he had a big heart, and that he'd never been able to turn away anyone in need, but why, she
wondered, did he keep allowing Ana Trujillo back into his life? Why couldn't he just have told her no?

As she cleaned out the kitchen cabinets, Annika disposed of the few objects Stefan kept there, mainly his unused prescription meds accumulated over the years. She smiled, remembering how she'd always thought of him as a hypochondriac, certain one day he had Lyme disease and another that he had some other malady. High on a shelf in one cabinet she discovered the keys to the Mercedes, which she'd been looking for since arriving. For a moment, she wondered why he'd stored them in such an inconvenient place. Then Annika remembered the car, still dented from Ana's accident. “Stefan must have put them there to keep her from taking the car out while he slept,” Annika said. “Stefan had been such a trusting man, and I thought about how sad it was that she'd taken even that away from him.”

Among Stefan's papers, Annika found the receipt from when Stefan paid to have the car fixed. Such a mess Ana Trujillo had made of his life. The meticulous scientist, so careful with his few possessions, and everything he left behind seemed damaged by their relationship, including the black-leather couch he'd bought when arriving in Houston, pocked with burn marks from Ana's cigarettes.

The days were long and hot since the power had been turned off in the apartment, and the bright sunshine streamed in the floor-to-ceiling windows. At night, Annika walked the apartment with a flashlight, an odd experience, thinking about the violence that had unfolded there.

Saddened, Annika continued to work her way through the apartment. As she did, she cleared the coffee table of Ana's art installation. It seemed such a paltry effort. The notes had been taken, but Annika photographed what was left before she threw away the dying bamboo stalk and cleared away the paper and salt. The bracelets she put into a growing pile. Ana's attorney had asked John Jordan for some of her things, but the list struck Annika as strange, not including anything but a bag of crystals and the small
briefcase of her paperwork and drawings that Annika found when she'd been in Stefan's apartment that June. Not limiting the pile to be turned over to the few items on the list, Annika pulled all of Ana's things together, including a small box with twigs, notes, and a bowl inside that she'd found in storage.

Carefully, Annika photographed everything inside the boxes, to document what the woman accused of murdering Stefan had with her that night. In the process, Annika also discovered Stefan's iPhone. When she looked at the photos, she found scores of selfies and videos taken by Ana. Some of the videos were of Ana in exotic poses attempting to look sensual at Stefan's apartment, and another, a half hour long, simply examined her hand. The ones Annika found the most disturbing were taken by Ana on her nights out with Stefan, including a few in Bar 5015. In them, Stefan sat alone, nursing a glass of wine at the bar, while Ana flitted from man to man, flirting.

Ana's art box

(Courtesy of Annika Lindqvist)

When Jordan and one of the detectives arrived to pick up Ana's things and talk with her, Annika felt on edge. She turned everything over to them, and they left. Looking back, she'd assess that she was still in shock from Stefan's death. “I didn't ask any direct questions about the investigation,” she said. “If I had, I assumed they wouldn't have answered.”

I
n the murder book on the Trujillo case, accounts of the investigation accumulated. When he noticed the mention of an unidentified man in the cab in an interview with the valet at The Parklane, Sergeant Triplett called Rosemary Gomez and she told him about her common-law husband, Reagan Cannon. Days later in a recorded interview, Cannon confirmed what Gomez had said about the fare that night, talking of Ana Trujillo's anger and her drunkenness as she screamed throughout the drive from Bar 5015.

Among those who were more reluctant to talk to the police was James Wells. “James, stop feeling sorry for Ana,” Chanda chided him. “It could have been you!”

Wells's attorney, Allette Williams, backed Chanda up, saying that she, too, believed that Wells as easily as Stefan could have fallen victim to Ana's inner rage. For months, Wells resisted. Then, eventually, he began to understand that the two women were right. Ana bit him without cause that afternoon, an indication of what she was capable of. “I started thinking that she could have murdered us all in our sleep,” he said.

When the police asked questions, Chanda and Wells answered as honestly as they could, describing the woman Ana Trujillo had become.

In November, after they'd heard from Stefan's friends about the incident where Ana bit Stefan at Bodegas, investigators sought out Anders Berkenstam and interviewed him at his house. On that day, Stefan's friend and fellow scientist discussed how once Ana began acting strangely, he and his wife pulled back, not wanting to be around her. “She said
strange things,” he said, describing one day when he held a glass of water and Ana asked if he had a fish in it. Stefan, on the other hand, at least at first, didn't seem concerned by what he saw as her quirkiness.

“Stefan was really nice to her,” Berkenstam said.

“See any acts of violence between the two?” Sergeant Triplett asked. “I heard about an incident at a restaurant. Can you explain that?”

Berkenstam did, saying Ana “appeared suddenly, as if out of nowhere . . . She was extremely aggressive. She approaches him and bites his cheek . . . It was quite bad . . . There was a real bite mark on the cheek.”

As she so often did to have an excuse to see someone later, Ana left behind something that day, her bag with her laptop. Determined never to see her again, Stefan refused to take it home and left it with the restaurant manager, who'd brought alcohol to clean his wound.

Later that afternoon at another restaurant, frightened and hiding from Ana, Stefan became emotional and cried. “Ana's done a lot of crazy things,” he said. Listing a few, he talked of the night she cut the refrigerator hose, the night she took his car and banged it up.

Stefan, Berkenstam said, had told him that on one occasion, “She was trying to strangle him!”

“Did he ever tell you that he loved her?” Triplett asked.

“In the beginning, definitely,” he said. “Stefan was a genuinely nice guy. I got the impression that he regarded her as his ex-girlfriend.”

“Did you ever see Mr. Andersson physically attack Ana?” Triplett asked.

“Never!” Berkenstam answered.

W
hile law enforcement investigated her case, Ana was moved into Pod 2B, the jail's mental-health unit, after she fought with another inmate. As the weeks passed, she complained of dizziness and anxiety, especially before court dates, and said she sometimes “shook all over.”
Talking to one of the mental-health professionals on the staff, she said she had flashbacks to her childhood and instances of abuse.

Attending psychoeducational group sessions at the jail, Ana chose one on building healthy relationships. “Patient reports feeling ‘peaceful,' states she thinks relationships are characterized by ‘how you're getting along with others.' She also states, ‘There are different levels of relationships' . . . Patient discussed her past relationships . . . said her most important relationships are with her children.”

In the month since he'd been hired, Jack Carroll had been trying to get Ana's bail lowered, but the judge steadfastly refused. Every time Carroll saw her, Ana begged him to do all he could, but while he wasn't charging her for the case, he wasn't eager to put up her bail, and she had no funds. Ana's mother had testified at one of the hearings that the family would watch over her if she were released, but the judge steadfastly denied Carroll's motions.

Meanwhile, one of Ana's friends continued to struggle with what to do. First Christi Suarez's ex-boyfriend told her that Stefan had contacted him, then, as the months passed, other friends said they received psychic messages from someone who needed her help. Suarez assumed it had to be Stefan. “How can I help him?” Suarez asked her friend Raul Rodriguez.

“You know her. You know he was afraid of her. You have to defend this man,” he answered.

On the news, Suarez usually heard the case mentioned in the framework of domestic violence, and that worried her. What if people believed it was true, that Stefan Andersson was the violent one? “I knew he never touched her,” said Suarez. “And I felt bad for his family, when he was just trying to help Ana.”

Yet the revelations in the media about the amount of alcohol Ana drank that night and her strange past had taken a toll on her image. When he took the case, Jack Carroll
expected an outpouring of concern in Ana's favor from the anti–domestic violence community in Houston and across the United States, backers coming forward to help fund her defense, since she described herself as a victim of intimate-partner abuse. But that hadn't happened. In fact, as more came out about Ana Trujillo, the support appeared to be evaporating.