Possessed (29 page)

Only then in the crowded courtroom did Ana Trujillo sob, her entire body shaking, perhaps pulled back to that moment in time.

A
t the playing of the 9-1-1 call, the focus of Ana Trujillo's trial for the murder of Stefan Andersson transitioned from their relationship to the investigation into his death. The first law-enforcement officer on the stand was also the first to respond that night, Ashton Bowie. “It was a pretty horrible scene,” he said. Stefan's “face looked swollen, and there was a large pool of blood around him. . . . I believed that his head had probably been blown out with a gun.”

What did the woman covered in blood say unfolded in 18B that night? “She said, ‘I don't know what happened. We were arguing.'”

Although Trujillo's sobs drew him to the apartment, once inside, Bowie said he judged her demeanor disingenuous. Her wails reminded him of a child's crocodile tears, put on for an audience. No tears trailed her cheeks or welled in her eyes. When she asked him to perform CPR, Bowie felt stunned. To him, the man appeared dead far too long to be resuscitated.

Instead, he called his supervisor, requesting homicide and a representative from the medical examiner's office. This wasn't a medical emergency, Bowie judged, but a potential crime scene.

“Do you recognize these?” Mickelson asked, handing Bowie a stack of photos. He did. They were taken that night of Ana in her bloody T-shirt and jeans, her face and arms smeared with blood. When the prosecutor asked where
Bowie saw the majority of blood, he pointed to the legs of Ana's jeans. “Did she require any medical attention at the apartment that night?”

“No,” Bowie said. “She did not.”

“Did Ms. Trujillo tell you that she suffered any injuries?”

“No, she did not.”

To Jack Carroll, it seemed obvious that his client was being unfairly treated. The case wasn't a murder but self-defense. To win, he had to convince the jury that in apartment 18B on that horrible night, any woman would have felt compelled to fight for her life. “Before you got there, you don't know what transpired, do you?” Carroll prodded.

“No, sir,” Bowie agreed.

“And you don't know who the aggressor is, do you?”

“No, sir.”

Repeating what his client told him, Carroll charged, “Wasn't it true that you drew your service weapon and pointed it at Ms. Trujillo?” The officer denied he'd removed the gun from its holster, only covering it with his hand. Carroll also wanted to make another point based on Ana's description of the events, her contention that Stefan was alive when Bowie arrived. “Did Ms. Trujillo ask you to give Mr. Andersson CPR?”

“Yes, she did.”

“Did you check for a heartbeat?” Carroll inquired.

“No, I did not.”

“D
o you recognize this?” John Jordan asked Ernie Aguilera, the first CSU officer on the scene. The “this” Jordan referred to was a diagram of Parklane 18B. With that, the witness used the black-and-white drawing to walk the jurors through Stefan's apartment, entering through the hallway, into the living room, kitchen, and bedroom. “We see here in the hallway you have a figure. What does that represent?”

“The dead person inside the apartment,” said Aguilera.

Explaining how he worked a crime scene, Aguilera then described marking the evidence with numbered placards,
including Ana's backpack on the black-leather couch. Once numbered, he'd taken a picture of the backpack, then removed and photographed its contents. One item found inside was the tarot book. “Was the book open to that page?” John Jordan asked, indicating a page inside the book.

“The same page,” Aguilera answered.

Although Mickelson had mentioned the death card in her opening, Jordan let the suspense build, waiting to show it to the jury. Instead, he turned his attention to Ana Trujillo's stiletto shoes, asking how many were found. “There were two?”

“Yes,” Aguilera said, as he opened a cardboard box. From it, the CSU officer pulled the alleged murder weapon.

At that point, Jordan held up to display for the jurors the cobalt-blue suede stiletto high-heeled shoe, the brand Qupid and the size a nine. A slight intake of breath ran through the courtroom, accompanied by a mild murmur as the audience reacted to the sight of the shoe's heel and sole stained with dried blood and bearing strands of Stefan Andersson's white hair.

Carrying that image with them, the jurors broke for lunch on what was the second day of the trial.

Once they cleared out of the room, the attorneys approached the bench to confer with Judge Brooks. Something was on all their minds. “We haven't decided whether we're introducing the statement or not,” said Jordan. He and Mickelson were still tossing back and forth thoughts on what might happen if they did. They wanted Ana to testify, and they worried that playing the interrogation video could convince Carroll that he didn't need her. At the same time, they saw the video as important evidence, offering insight into Trujillo's character.

Not reacting, Carroll nodded, careful not to indicate he had a preference. The defense attorney had already decided how he'd proceed based on their actions, but worried that if prosecutors suspected, they'd opt not to play the video, and that was something he dearly wanted.

“W
ere there three suitcases next to the door?” Jordan asked Officer Aguilera that afternoon. Aguilera said there were and that they were in the crime-scene photos. Along with photographing the suitcases, he'd done the same with the contents.

The morning's session had ended in high drama, the introduction of the shoe, the weapon used to kill Andersson. Now Jordan returned to a subject he'd mentioned earlier, the black backpack with the book inside, a book he described to the jury as a tarot-card book. “Who opened it to the death page?” Jordan asked.

“That's the way we found it,” Aguilera responded.

Once Jordan allowed the jury to digest that shocking fact, he asked Aguilera to read that page, including: “This card can mean that someone around you is coming to an end of their life. . . .”

The peculiarity of the book in the backpack was readily apparent to those in the courtroom. Trujillo was on trial for murder, and she carried with her a book open to a page that talked of death. At that, Jordan passed the witness.

“I have no questions, Your Honor,” Jack Carroll said, and Officer Aguilera left the courtroom.

O
n the stand, Chris Duncan described his specialty, blood-spatter analysis, for the jurors, saying, “It uses natural science to see how stains develop, their mechanisms of creation. . . . How it originated. Where did it come from? How did it get there?”

Using his findings, Duncan explained what each piece of evidence meant about the killing, starting with the tufts of Stefan Andersson's white hair on the black-leather sofa. The hair was found there, Duncan said, because the couch was where the fight began, when Ana grabbed Stefan by the hair.

The words from Trujillo's writings, found in the coffee-table installation, filled the courtroom, as Duncan read the odd phrases. Trujillo was “calling on a higher power,” “asking for justice.”

“I ask for you and your Spirit & Soul To be at Peace, Your Mind calm . . . your heart pure . . . Strength.” Dripping from a heart drawn in a corner of one note was the phrase, “Tears of blood.”

Regarding the blood evidence, Duncan pointed out areas of interest, starting with a single, round drop of blood in the living room, suggesting the dead man still stood at the time. That image was followed by state's exhibit 67, a photo of the transfer, a place where something bloody brushed against the hallway wall. The image Duncan gave the jury was of Stefan reaching out a hand, struggling to stay upright, before he fell to the carpeted floor.

In the crime-scene photos, blood sprayed all three walls surrounding the body. The brutality of the attack became even clearer when Duncan explained that he found blood on walls more than four feet from the body. Yet what struck Duncan was that the majority of the blood was less than two feet high on the wall. What did that mean? “The preponderance of blows were . . . conducted with Mr. Andersson on the floor.”

When it came to cuts and bruises on Stefan's arms and hands, Duncan assessed those as “defensive wounds. . . . He's blocking something from hitting his head. . . . He was trying to defend himself with his hands up to his face.”

As Duncan's description of the event developed in jurors' minds, Jordan unboxed Ana's jeans and held them up in front of the jury box. The dead man's blood, dried dark brown, saturated the thighs and knees. More blood seeped high up between the legs. The largest stains, Duncan said, came from direct contact with a substantial blood source, perhaps from Trujillo kneeling in the pool of blood next to Stefan's head.

Laying out a mannequin on a table to demonstrate, Duncan lined up a diagram of the blood on the wall, illustrating how the preponderance of the spatter clustered close to the body on the floor. When Jordan asked Duncan what the bloodstains on the jeans revealed about the position of Trujillo's body, the two men began a demonstration.

Ana Trujillo's bloody jeans

Climbing onto the table, Jordan asked Duncan to position him as Ana must have been that night. In response, Duncan had Jordan kneel on the table, straddling the mannequin's chest. In his hand, the prosecutor held the clean shoe, the partner to the bloody stiletto. At her station to the right of the judge, the court reporter, Jill Hamby, typed the verbal testimony, while in the courtroom a crowd of spectators stared silent and tense as the reenactment unfolded before them. Playing the killer, Jordan wielded the long, thin stiletto heel over and over again, pounding it onto the dummy's face and head.

Before releasing the witness to the defense attorney, Jordan had a housekeeping matter. On the 9-1-1 call, Trujillo said that she performed CPR on Stefan. What the prosecutor asked was if Duncan noted any evidence that Trujillo kneeled next to Stefan's body, on his side, where she most likely would have been if she'd tried to resuscitate him. “No,” Duncan said, explaining that he saw no transfers from her bloody jeans on that section of carpeting.

John Jordan's courtroom demonstration

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

“You don't see any evidence of that, do you?” Jordan asked.

“That is accurate,” Duncan verified.

“Are you testifying that this surface was causing all the blood spatter?” Jack Carroll asked, indicating the slender tip of the heel of the shoe Jordan used in his demonstration. Duncan responded that it was not only the heel but other parts of the shoe that that hit the body, based on blood found on the shoe's sole and the heel stem.

Couldn't Ana have straddled Stefan's head on her knees, leaning over him while attempting to give him CPR? While possible, Duncan shrugged and said that wasn't a position he'd ever been taught in a CPR class. Yet the officer did agree that such an arrangement would have put Trujillo's
right knee in the blood pool, explaining stains that soaked that leg of the jeans.

As the blood testimony continued, the defense attorney worked at laying the groundwork for his own theories. “If I were wrestling and put my hand on the wall, would that be a transfer?” he asked. The CSI officer said it was. Like Jordan, Carroll had a picture he wanted implanted in jurors' minds: “If I were to grab your leg, and I was holding you, let's say I was about to tear ligaments in your leg . . . would you do
anything
to get out of it, if I was causing you extreme pain?”

Jordan quickly objected, and Duncan wasn't allowed to answer, but Carroll had made the suggestion in front of the jurors. The blood-spatter expert did agree with Carroll's next question, however, an alternate theory for the wounds on the dead man's wrists and arms. Instead of defensive wounds, Duncan said they could have been caused by Trujillo's attempting to force Stefan's hands away if he attempted to strangle her. As to what position Trujillo and Andersson were in at different moments, Duncan said there were probably many: “I believe both parties were moving.”