Possessed (32 page)

Under Carroll's questioning, Grossberg explained how patients who'd received EKGs and other medical interventions arrived at the morgue with defibrillator patches attached. None of that had been on Stefan's body, and there was no mention of lifesaving measures included in what she described as a skeletal EMS report.

“Do you happen to know if Dr. Andersson was dead when EMS arrived?” Carroll asked.

“I don't know,” Grossberg responded. Contending that it was possible the scientist was still alive, she then agreed with Carroll's description of the injuries on the body as superficial. “There were no fractures to any of his bones. There was no internal bleeding. No damage to any of his vital organs.”

As she explained, Grossberg said that while she agreed the cause of death was the injuries to the head and face, the true mechanism might have been an underlying medical condition, such as a heart attack. Yet that was something Dr. Ross, who'd done the autopsy, had also mentioned, so it wasn't anything the jury hadn't heard before. Where Grossberg's analysis differed was that she theorized Stefan could have been alive on the scene when first responders arrived. And if he was, and the cause was a heart attack, there was the possibility that he could have been treated and lived.

There'd also been a mention of the possibility of strangulation in the autopsy. When it came to the bruising and scraping around Stefan's neck and the contusions on his
chest, Grossberg argued that those could have occurred in a physical fight.

Despite these points brought up during her direct testimony, when Sarah Mickelson cross-examined Grossberg, the physician said she had no problem with Dr. Ross's autopsy of Stefan and also agreed on the manner of death, homicide. While Grossberg said other factors might have entered in, such as a heart attack, “It cannot be called a natural death.”

Without the blunt-force trauma to the head the heart attack—if Stefan had suffered one—would not have occurred. So in the end, Grossberg conceded that it didn't matter what actually killed Andersson. Whether it had been a heart attack or blood loss, he'd died as a result of the beating.

From that point on, Mickelson brought Grossberg back to the autopsy photos, showing the injuries, the contusions, the blood, and the scrapes on Andersson's body, asking her how they could have occurred. The depiction the prosecutor put before the jury was of Stefan on his back on the floor—as the blood expert, Duncan, had described—while Ana brought the heel of the shoe in her hand down over and again. Stefan turned his head to the right, and put up his arms, explaining why he suffered the majority of wounds to the left side of his face and head and the defensive wounds to his arms. So much blood and gore.

For the most part, Grossberg agreed that theory was possible, but at times she pointedly said the wounds could have happened in other ways. She didn't fully endorse the prosecutors' theories; nor did she dismiss them. “This is a dynamic occurrence. . . . There are just so many different scenarios,” Grossberg demurred.

In yet another demonstration, in the front of the courtroom, Jordan assumed the position Ana said Stefan was in that night, holding his cocounsel, Mickelson, in a bear hug. What the two prosecutors then demonstrated was how difficult it would have been for Ana, her arms restricted, to inflict the
injuries found on Stefan. In fact, when Mickelson described the injuries to Stefan's hands, the pathologist granted that they could have happened as the prosecution suggested.

As for the wounds on Stefan's back, Grossberg acknowledged that they didn't match Ana's description of what transpired that night, of flailing at Stefan with the shoe as he held her and refused to let her go. “Can't it be consistent if someone was running away or walking away, and I were to strike them with the shoe, and it were to travel down?”

“It could be,” Grossberg said.

Although the defense attorney repeatedly suggested that Stefan had taken ecstasy, Grossberg agreed with the previous physicians, saying there was none found in the body and that the drugs that were present were prescription drugs, all within a therapeutic range.

Yet again, the testimony moved in another direction—the back-and-forth of a hotly contested trial—when Jack Carroll asked the “but for” question: “But for the lack of medical care, is it possible that Dr. Andersson could have survived?”

“We will never know,” Grossberg responded.

Finally, Mickelson relayed the EMS testimony to Grossberg, repeating how all the officers on the scene said Stefan had been checked for a pulse, breathing, any signs of life, and none were found. In fact, the first officer on the scene said that the blood pool next to the body was already drying, and the blood was coagulating. The body felt cool to the touch. Grossberg agreed that if Stefan was pulseless and hadn't been breathing for ten minutes or more, he could not have been resuscitated, but she also held firm, saying that without an EKG she couldn't know if he was still alive when EMS arrived.

With that, Jack Carroll announced that the defense rested. The question hanging in the air: What would the jurors believe?

A
lthough the defense had finished putting on its case, the guilt-or-innocence phase of the trial didn't end. Instead,
another impassioned argument unfolded at the judge's bench, Mickelson and Jordan contending that Carroll, by claiming Ana's injuries were from a fight with Stefan, had opened the door to put on rebuttal witnesses. Usually, testimony of extraneous offenses, other actions by an accused that puts him or her in a bad light, isn't permitted unless there's a conviction and a trial moves into the punishment phase, during sentencing. But after arguments from both sides, Judge Thomas ruled that prosecutors would be allowed to put on James Wells and Chanda Ellison, to testify about where Ana's bruises might have come from and her propensity to violence.

On the stand, James Wells spoke quietly, appearing ill at ease. Under Jordan's questioning, Ana's friend told jurors about his relationships with both women, that he considered Chanda and Ana good friends, that they lived together, and that he had sexual relationships with both.

“I guess the young people call it friends with benefits?” Jordan asked. Wells confirmed that, and said that Chanda didn't object to his being with other women, including Ana.

At the witness table, Ana watched Wells intently. She nodded at times, as if agreeing, smiled, or scowled when he said something damaging to her, shaking her head as if it were too much to believe. What she didn't know was that Wells didn't want to be there, either. He'd had a long struggle, trying to decide whether or not to take the stand. “I still cared about Ana,” he said. “I didn't want to see her in prison.”

To the jury, Wells laid out the events of Memorial Day weekend 2013, the day he met Ana at the Hermann Park Grill. He brought her home to the apartment. “She looked normal,” Wells said. “She actually had her lips puckered up like she was going to kiss me.” Instead, she leaned toward him and bit him on the head.

“Ow!” he screamed. He pushed her back and said she looked at him angrily, and warned, “Oh, ho, ho, ho! You're a dead man!”

James Wells on the stand

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

From there, Wells detailed the rest of the day, leaving to take a call and returning to find Ana bruised from her fight with Chanda, the drive around during which Ana cried, eventually saying she planned to return to her family in Waco, and the next day, when she filed a report, and police showed up at his apartment. “I could hear the officer close his book. I heard him say, ‘You know what? I believe y'all. I kind of knew there was more to the story than she was telling me.'”

After that, nothing happened. “You were never charged with anything?” Jordan asked.

“No,” Wells answered.

Jack Carroll wanted to know if it wasn't a rather impossible situation to live with two women and have sexual relations with both. “Not if you're honest about it,” Wells answered.

“Is Chanda a jealous person?” Carroll asked.

“No,” Wells answered.

T
he next witness Jordan called was Chanda Ellison, to fill in the blanks in Wells's account of the Memorial-Day-weekend biting incident.

Yet first, Jordan set the stage, asking what his witness observed on the occasions she spent time with Stefan and Ana. In response, the woman on the stand said she saw no hint of anger in the dead man. To the contrary, she described Andersson as loving toward Ana. “Whatever Ana asked for, Stefan gave her.”

From there, Jordan asked questions to elicit her account of the bite incident. What she said closely matched Wells's testimony. But there'd been that gap when he wasn't there, when he left the two women alone that Jordan needed Ellison to fill in, and she detailed the all-out fight that erupted, Chanda wielding the stick, and Ana repeatedly attacking her, screaming “no one tells me what to do!”

Chanda Ellison testifying

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

They fought and wrestled, Ellison inflicting bruises with the stick, and Ana not backing off, not giving up, until Wells
returned to the apartment and told Ana that she was going to have to leave.

“You hit Ana with a stick?” Carroll prodded, sounding aghast.

“I sure did,” Ellison answered, staring him down as he sat at the defense table. “. . . To defend myself against her, yes I did.”

“Did she break the skin?” Carroll asked about the bite to Wells's head. When Chanda said that it left indentations, Carroll bit his own finger, and asked, “Do you think if I bit myself, it would cause indentations?”

Carroll continued to push, asking if she and Wells faced any charges for assaulting Ana, especially Chanda, since she used the stick, which he labeled a potentially deadly weapon. Recounting how the officer came to the door and questioned her, Chanda said she wasn't worried, that she and Wells had been cleared.

“Is that what you did to her?” Carroll asked, holding up a picture of Ana's horribly bruised chin.

“Yes.” When he held up a photo of Ana's black-and-blue back, Chanda said, “I did whatever I could to get her off me.”

Moments later, Carroll passed the witness, and both sides rested. All that remained were closing arguments, then the jurors would have to decide who told the truth.

“F
or the last week, all we've heard the defense sell is self-defense. Self-defense sounds sexy. Self-defense sells newspapers. But we've met Ana Trujillo. We've seen her talk on this video, and we have now seen all the evidence in this case. We know what happened on June 9, 2013, was not self-defense,” Sarah Mickelson said, standing before the jury to begin closing arguments. “The defense is going to ask you to sign off on the way in which Ana Trujillo ended the life of Stefan Andersson. They're going to ask you to sign on that dotted line and put your stamp of approval on twenty-five
blows with the heel of a shoe to a man's forehead that was less than two feet off the ground.”

To believe that Ana acted in self-defense, Mickelson said, jurors had to judge that the woman on trial feared losing her life. “What evidence did we see of that?” From the moment of the 9-1-1 call, in which Ana seemed uncertain what type of event she wanted to report, to the arrival of Officer Bowie on the scene, through the interview with the detectives in homicide, Ana never uttered an explanation for why she felt in fear of her life.

Over and again, the prosecutor brought up examples of how unconcerned Ana was for the man she said she loved, the one she described as her fiancé, including during the interview, when she didn't mention him for more than an hour. In the interview tape, when detectives asked Ana if Stefan was ever physically abusive to her, at first she paused, as if trying to think of an instance, then she instead described the abuse as mental. “Doesn't say he hit her,” Mickelson said. “Doesn't say he pushed her. Didn't punch her. Didn't throw her.”