Possessed (34 page)

Stefan's sister Marie cried, too, talking of her lost brother. When it came to Stefan's death and the horrific way he died, the investigation going on in the U.S. while the family yearned for information in Sweden, Marie said, it was “a nightmare.” As for Ana Trujillo, when it came to Stefan's family, “She destroyed our life.”

Others took the stand, including friends. One had given her baby girl the middle name Stefani in Stefan's honor. They all missed the funny, kind, gentle man, who took their concerns to heart, eager to listen to their troubles and to try to find ways to help them. Not disconnected, even after the move to Houston, many heard from him multiple times each week, eager for his phone calls, assuming he would always be there.

When it was her turn, Annika talked of Stefan's wake, to which more than a hundred people traveled from many parts of the U.S. and the world, meeting in a wine bar to toast the man they all loved. “I had friends telling me it was like an Irish wake,” Annika said. “People went up and talked about Stefan, and what a loss it was for them.”

That day, Annika recounted the pain of hearing the untrue accusations that the good man she'd known had a violent nature, and what the loss of her friend had done to her own life. “I took care of him in many ways, but he also took care of me,” she said. “Stefan was a listener . . . He was a constant in my life . . . and he's gone.”

E
ach day of the trial, Jennifer Varela, the domestic-violence expert who'd consulted with the prosecutors, sat in the second row, listening to the testimony, taking notes, and trying to make an unbearable situation as comfortable as possible for Stefan's family. She arrived with pads to soften the seats, blankets to keep them warm, and a stash of chocolates to share midafternoon, when their energy dwindled.

While she'd found many of the witnesses interesting, the one she'd most anticipated was Julia Babcock, a psychology professor at the University of Houston. Varela had read Babcock's work on domestic violence and wondered what the psychologist made of the relationship of Stefan and Ana. To Jennifer, it was obvious who the aggressor was, where the truth lay, but perhaps Babcock, hired as a defense expert, would see it differently?

“I've spent about seven, eight hours with Ana Trujillo in face-to-face contact,” Babcock told the jury. She began by answering Carroll's questions about domestic violence, including that victims are often embarrassed and unwilling to disclose their situations. When she mentioned victims, she used feminine pronouns, like “she”; for the abusers, her language assumed the identity was male, as in “he.” But then, the vast majority of victims were women and abusers men, so that wasn't inaccurate or unfair.

Much of what Babcock said fit the description Ana Trujillo had given. Yes, it was true that violence often escalated at the time a woman attempted to leave. Such assaults could include psychological abuse, which Ana claimed during her interview with police, and holding, grabbing, containing, and preventing movement was included in such assaults. Often to the outside world, abusers appeared normal. “Some people are like that, charming in public but behind closed doors can be terrors.”

The side effects of such violence could include depression and self-medicating with drugs and alcohol.

From the witness stand, Babcock repeated the litany of charges Ana made against the men in her life, beginning
with her ex-husband, who she charged had sexually assaulted her. In Ana's version, Brian Goodney hit her, knocking her unconscious. Another man, Trujillo said, stalked her. That man tried to control her mind, body and soul. “In being a spiritual, religious person, she was particularly frightened by him wanting to control her soul.”

From there, Carroll concentrated on what he characterized as Stefan's abusive behavior, from choosing the restaurants and bars he and Ana went to, to wanting her to wear stiletto heels. From the characterizations Babcock gave, it appeared Ana told the therapist that Stefan didn't want Ana to work or to have a car at her disposal.

“Have you seen abusers who are pleasant to the woman ninety, ninety-five percent of the time?” Carroll asked.

“Absolutely,” Babcock said. “Especially when alcohol is involved.”

Based on what Ana said, the psychologist testified that Stefan hadn't kicked Ana out but the opposite, that Ana left him, moving in with James Wells to escape Stefan.

Tracing Ana's history, Babcock had determined that up until 2009, her subject led a normal life, but then things changed. After the incident with Brian Goodney, Ana became depressed and anxious, she drank more. “Drinking gave her this courage,” the psychologist said. “I think it also gave her this aggressive stance: I'm not going to be a victim anymore.”

Babcock said Ana didn't look for older men to foot her bills but rather those were the men she met. And the violence in her, the anger that fueled that terrible rage that erupted in the attack that took Stefan's life, that the psychologist said built up over years of abuse at the hands of other men, who'd used and controlled Trujillo. What Julia Babcock described was the fragile-eggshell defense John Jordan had worried about, the one that said that Ana was so damaged by prior abuse at the hands of other men that she overreacted in the moments she murdered Stefan.

“I see a woman who was formerly high-functioning, who
had many bad things happen to her,” said Babcock. “She thought she could heal herself with spirituality and religion and new-age kind of healing that didn't work. She tried to self-medicate with alcohol, and that made things worse, not better.”

Restating what the psychologist had said, in cross-examination, Mickelson asked Babcock if she was saying that Ana Trujillo had been the victim in multiple abusive relationships “the last one being an abusive relationship with Dr. Andersson.”

The psychologist agreed, qualifying the statement by saying the only time Stefan had been physically abusive was on that final night.

Going over what the therapist drew on to form her opinion, Mickelson then asked what records Babcock reviewed, and the jurors learned that Babcock hadn't interviewed Ana's family or friends, or done any investigation to determine Stefan Andersson's character, instead relying on Ana's interviews.

“So would you agree with me, Doctor, that the majority of your opinion comes from information that was provided to you from Ms. Trujillo?”

“Absolutely, yes,” Babcock answered.

“Would you agree with me then that if the information that Ms. Trujillo provided you was inaccurate, that your opinion in this case could be inaccurate, right?”

Again Babcock answered, “Yes.”

“Because you agree with me that the opinion you give in this courtroom can only be as good as the information that you rely on, right?”

“That's correct,” she said.

As Mickelson asked questions, it became obvious that there were many things that Babcock didn't know. First, that rather than try to keep Ana confined to his apartment, Stefan repeatedly attempted to ban her from entering it, by giving orders that she not be allowed in the building. The
psychologist didn't know that Stefan had twice gone so far as to have his locks changed to keep Ana away.

“You would agree with me that both males and females can be the perpetrators of domestic violence?” Mickelson asked.

“Yes,” Babcock answered, acknowledging that it could be as embarrassing for a male victim as a female victim to admit being abused.

As she gave her opinion, the therapist reiterated that she believed Ana overreacted on the night of Stefan's killing, based on her description of prior abuse. “I think there was a physical altercation between the two of them. I think they were both physically aggressive. I think she used excessive force defending herself. She was defending herself, using the only object she could . . . She just wanted to get him off of her. She just wanted to leave.”

“You know this jury has actually already found Ms. Trujillo guilty of murder, right?” Mickelson asked.

“Yes,” Babcock answered.

T
he next morning on the witness stand, Ana Trujillo appeared troubled and nervous. She smiled anxiously at times, wearing a black pin-striped suit with a white blouse, perhaps left over from her time as a part-time translator for her former attorney. She wore little makeup, and her long hair fell haphazardly past her shoulders, just a bit of grey in the part; for much of her testimony, dark-rimmed glasses perched on her nose.

Finally, the woman at the center of the brutal killing told her story

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

This was what John Jordan and Sarah Mickelson were waiting for, the opportunity for the jury to personally listen to Ana Trujillo. Each of the prosecutors had pens perched over legal pads, taking notes, at times heads together conferring quietly, planning what would happen when it was Jordan's turn to ask the questions.

First, however, the witness was in Jack Carroll's hands, as he guided Ana through her history and her life. At times gripping one hand in the other, Ana glanced at the jurors, who for the most part sat back in their chairs and frowned, as if thoughtfully attempting to size up the woman they'd judged guilty of a shocking murder.

Detailing her history, Ana described growing up Mexican American in Arizona, California, and Texas. “I came from a religious family,” she said, and Carroll pointed out Ana's family in the gallery. From there, she talked of her education, her time at the Waco junior college, and her work history, starting as a teenager, babysitting, the years spent as an aide with disabled children, then her job with Coca-Cola.

In the bars she frequented in downtown Houston, Ana had described her success in the workplace in glowing terms. She did the same from the stand, claiming not to be an interpreter for Brooks Lott, but suggesting that she was a legal assistant and that she ran his law office, and that she'd set up businesses for others. At Coke, she was not only a merchandizer and sales rep, but in charge of six counties and two thousand accounts.

In surprisingly endearing terms, since she'd accused him of raping her, she talked of her marriage to Marcus Leos, the father of her two daughters. Leos wasn't in the courtroom. By then, he had his own legal troubles and was serving a long sentence for molesting a child. This brought up a touchy subject for the defense. Carroll needed to show Ana in a sympathetic light, and he knew prosecutors would ask why when she moved to Houston, she left her younger daughter in the care of such a man. “Did you think that Marcus Leos was a danger to your daughters?” Carroll asked.

“No,” she said, after Carroll pointed out that the accusations against Leos hadn't surfaced until later.

Slowly, Carroll and his client worked their way through Ana's failed relationships with men. When Brian Goodney's name was mentioned, Trujillo recounted in a long narrative her version of the events, much like she'd told the detectives in the interview. On the stand, Ana's voice grew shrill, rising and falling.

At times she sidestepped into other areas of her life, but Carroll brought her back to his original question, what had happened that night when she hit Goodney with the candlestick. Before long, it became easily apparent that her description of that altercation also fit much of what she said happened on that final night with Stefan. In her account, Goodney held her and wouldn't let her go, and like her stiletto shoe in the later attack, the candlestick was just there, handy. “When I started to move, I felt it,” she said, reaching wildly around in the witness stand, as if demonstrating how it had taken place that night.

Even the scene of the attack was eerily similar, in the entrance hall of an upscale apartment. In contrast to Goodney's account of being knocked unconscious, Trujillo said she was, and that when she awoke, she kept her eyes closed, fearing what he might do if he saw she'd awakened. “I thought he's going to come back and hurt me. He wants to kill me.”

In fact, the account of the altercation with Goodney recalled Stefan's death in such detail that Carroll asked, “Isn't this remarkably similar to what happened with Dr. Andersson?”

Trujillo nodded knowingly, and said, “Unfortunately, it is.”

As to the other incidents, including slapping bartenders and throwing drinks at waitresses, Ana simply said that all those charges were false. “Were you surprised at all these witnesses testifying against you? Many of them were saying that you were once friends and once a nice person?”

“Yes,” Ana said. “I am.”

When her attorney asked if she felt empowered when she drank, something Julia Babcock, the psychologist, had said, Ana objected to the word, instead saying she felt confident. “I am friendly to everyone. And I feel sometimes that gets misinterpreted . . . I am bubbly and social.”

When Carroll asked if she had a problem with alcohol, Ana denied that it was true. “No, I don't! I don't!” Yet on further questioning, she admitted that she drank too much, and that she became a different person when intoxicated.

The day had already been a long one with Trujillo's fractured and dramatic testimony, when Carroll finally turned the questioning to the fall of 2012, when Ana moved in with the first man who lived in The Parklane, then met Stefan Andersson. In the beginning, she said the research scientist was charming, charismatic, sweet, and respectful. “A wonderful man.” And like so many of the others, he initially seemed interested not in her, but in her theories and plans. When she talked of her work, it was in lavish terms, jumping from one philosophy to another, from her hydrotherapy and oils to music and art therapies, and healing through meditation.

On the stand, just as in her interview with police, Ana claimed that the men in her life initially displayed an interest in collaborating with her, helping her market her art and holistic-healing methods. She made the same claims about Stefan, saying she felt proud to be working with a scientist, a doctor. “We can combine our knowledge together,” she said.

Listening from the second row of the gallery, Annika Lindqvist wasn't surprised that her old friend treated his girlfriend's vague concepts with respect. She'd seen Stefan listen to people who were clearly troubled and talk to them as if they made complete sense, simply because he didn't want to hurt their feelings. That part seemed plausible.

Yet Ana said that in the final months before his death, Stefan changed, his health “physically and mentally declining rapidly.” At night, she said he fidgeted in bed, and at times she woke up to find him staring at her. She even
claimed that he awoke and rolled in a ball and acted “like a baby, calling, ‘Momma.'” She didn't initially leave him, she said, because she loved and wanted to help him. In her clipped manner and slight Latin accent, she used words she might have first heard in massage school: alternative methods of holistic healing, modalities, to explain the tack she tried to take to heal Stefan, giving him baths, taking him on walks, listening to music, and teaching him to meditate.

As they went back and forth, Carroll and his client discussed how she spent her days at the golf course with Stefan. Others had testified that Ana drank and used her laptop, sometimes sitting outside chanting in the sun. When asked what she was doing on the laptop, Ana said she researched her tarot cards. In response, Carroll pointedly asked if she was doing research on healing golfers. She said she was and that her theories involved bringing them to “peak performance through using art.”

Everything she did, she did for Stefan, she claimed.

It was true that Stefan, like many men, felt particularly drawn to women in high heels. She wore the cobalt-blue stilettos that night to please him, she said. Witnesses had described how she flirted with others in front of him, but when she danced in her chair at Bar 5015, while other men watched, she said that, too, was misunderstood. “I danced for Stefan,” she said.

As might be expected, much couldn't be proved, since only Stefan and Ana were present when the scenes unfolded, but at times Ana's testimony contradicted documents in evidence and the accounts others had given on the stand. One was Ana's explanation for why she left Stefan's apartment in January and moved in with Wells and Chanda Ellison. Ana said the decision was hers because she was unhappy with Stefan's behavior, but The Parklane documents and the accounts of the building's staff clearly proved Stefan moved Ana out and banned her from returning. That spring, he'd even boxed her belongings and left them at the concierge desk.

When it came to what Ana described as Stefan's other side,
in the gallery Annika judged those assertions impossible. Stefan had always been supportive of women in the workplace, but Ana claimed he didn't want her to work, so that she would be dependent on him. In Ana's world, as Jordan had called it, Stefan was controlling, forcing sex on her, and abusive. The trouble in the cab, Ana said, began not with her but the driver and her husband, who were irritated because they had to wait, then refused to listen to her directions.

Yet at times, it seemed as if Ana Trujillo veered closer to the truth. For instance, describing Stefan's demeanor that night as quiet and meek, Ana said it was a response to knowing that she was angry at him.

“But was he in fear for his life?” an alarmed Carroll asked.

“No,” she answered.

The cab driver's husband, she said, bullied Stefan, and she stood up for him. “I'm the one who defends Stefan all the time,” she said, talking about the man she'd killed as if he were still alive. “I want to make sure he gets home and that he doesn't overspend.”

When she got out of the cab, Stefan stayed behind talking to the driver, giving her a tip, and Ana said she was irritated with him. Yet she said that upstairs in his apartment, her mood improved, and she told him that she'd had a good evening and that she was excited about leaving for Waco in the morning. “I'm carrying on being all happy. And all of a sudden, he just turns around and changes completely.”

Everyone in the courtroom had heard Janette Jordan's testimony, when she said she and Stefan had a brunch date the following day. Others had talked about how excited he was about the new woman in his life. But on the stand, Ana claimed Stefan railed at her, upset because she was leaving for Waco, accusing her of not coming back. She threatened to leave until he calmed down. Looking for her phone, she turned her back on him. Unable to find it, she walked toward the door to leave.

The evidence suggested the fight began in the living
room, with the pulling of Stefan's hair and the first blood found near the kitchen counter, but, in an emotional voice that fluctuated from pleading to anger, Ana said Stefan waited for her in the hallway and grabbed her as she walked toward the door.

The silent courtroom listened, as Ana Trujillo's testimony built. On the stand, she acted out what she said happened, dramatically whipping her arms around, grimacing, raging as she described that night. The fight that ensued, she said, was a series of attacks by Stefan, while she tried to flee. He pushed her against walls and grabbed her from behind. He pulled her around, in what she described as “tussling,” and she grabbed him by the hair. She promised to let go if he stopped, and he agreed, but then she said he came at her again.

To illustrate, Jack Carroll walked to the center of the courtroom, in front of the jury, and had Ana join him. As everyone watched, the defense attorney and his notorious client staged a battle, seizing each other by the wrists and arms, pushing and tugging. In her depiction, Ana fell over the couch and described how Stefan threw her repeatedly against walls. She fell down and was unconscious for some unknown period of time, and said when she woke up, she couldn't breathe. Stefan sat on her chest.

There was a time problem, however.

Throughout, Ana described the heated battle as occurring as soon as they returned to the apartment, about the time Karlye Jones heard something hit the wall in 18B. A question loomed: What had Ana done for an hour or more before she called police? When Carroll asked, Ana maintained that the battle unfolded in starts and stops. At times, she said, Stefan became calm, and they talked. When Stefan finally released her, Ana said she crawled on hands and knees toward the hallway. From behind, he grabbed her hair with one hand and her neck with the other. If that were true, however, why weren't clumps of her hair found in the hallway? Anywhere in the apartment? Only a few strands were found in Stefan's hand at the morgue. And why wasn't her neck encircled with bruises?