Possessed (36 page)

“That's not what happened,” Ana objected. “He did attack me, and all I was doing was trying to get away.”

“. . . If this jury believes you're lying to them, a life sentence very well may be warranted. You would agree to that, wouldn't you?”

“I'm not lying, but I understand what you're saying,” she said.

“Because you killed a human being, didn't you?”

Again, Ana didn't answer. “Pass the witness, Judge,” Jordan said.

On redirect, Jack Carroll asked Ana if she intended to kill Stefan, and she said that she didn't. “I never wanted to hurt him. I loved him, and protected him. And took care of him . . .”

“But you smacked him twenty-five times with that shoe.”

“Yes, I did. But it didn't seem that I was hitting him that hard or that many times,” she said. “I kept begging him to please, just let me go.”

At that, Ana Trujillo walked from the witness stand.

E
arlier, Stefan's family and friends had talked about their loss. Closing up this final phase of the trial, Ana's then took the stand. Her aunt described the kind, obedient young girl Ana had once been, and how she'd seen her try to help the homeless and poor. “Is she the kind of person that would give a person in need the shirt off her back?” Carroll asked, and the woman said Ana was. “Were you surprised that Ana was charged with murder?”

“A lot,” she said. “Her behavior before wasn't like this.”

Ana's children had been absent throughout the trial, but during the sentencing, they sat in the audience. And her older
daughter, Siana, by then a twenty-two-year-old bank teller, testified on her mother's behalf. She'd also noticed changes in Ana, a transformation from the hardworking mother and suburban wife to a more “spiritual” woman but also a more withdrawn one. At times, “She would just disappear . . . not have contact with anyone.”

“Did you see your mother drink more?”

“Yes,” Siana answered. With her dark hair, a beautiful young woman, she looked much like her mother had before the wear of the years of alcohol and life on the street took their toll. The mother she knew, Siana said, was so nonviolent, she never spanked them as children. “I've never seen her aggressive towards anyone.”

“I'm sorry that she had to become the caretaker for the other three children at eight or nine,” Trina Tharp said on the stand, tracing her own history from picking cotton in Arizona to working in hotels and factories, with Ana as the oldest taking care of the younger children.

Suggesting that Ana would not be a problem again in the U.S., should the jury decide to probate her sentence, Jack Carroll asked if Ana had family to live with in Mexico if she was deported after the trial. Trina said that Ana's father's family remained there, and that they would take her in. “Are you all generally nice people?” Carroll asked about the Tharp brood.

“I'd like to think so,” Ana's mother answered.

T
he following morning was the ninth day of the trial, and all that remained were closing arguments from both sides for sentencing. The jurors sat quietly in their chairs, watching as Sarah Mickelson stood before them for the final time.

“We now know that's not just what Ana Trujillo did on June 9, 2013. We now know that that's who Ana Trujillo is because for the last two weeks, we've gotten a brief glimpse into the world of Ana Trujillo,” she said. “We brought you witnesses from all walks of life. They all came down here, and they all showed us the same thing: that Ana Trujillo
cannot control her drinking. And worse, when Ana Trujillo drinks, she becomes violent. For Stefan Andersson, he had the tragic misfortune of being the last in a long line of Ms. Trujillo's victims . . . We are going to ask you for a life sentence.”

Based on the violence of the murder, all of the circumstances surrounding it, including that Stefan never fought back, any other decision on the part of the jury, Mickelson branded as unacceptable. What made Ana so lethal was that she beat Stefan to death for no reason. Even the defense expert placed that high on a list of indicators that an offender could strike out yet again.

Ana Trujillo was a contradiction in so many ways. Mickelson admitted as much when she talked about how the defense expert was right in using male pronouns when she spoke of abusive partners. So rarely were women the aggressors, that in her years as a prosecutor, Mickelson had seen few such cases. Was it fair to judge Ana differently because she was a woman? The prosecutor argued that it wasn't.

“If a man was charged with murder in this case . . . no one would bat an eyelash at sending him to prison for the rest of his life if he brutally forced his partner down on the ground and beat her to death with his hand by punching her in the face twenty-five times while she lay on the floor helpless. Juries in Harris County do that every day. And, yet, they want to ask you for sympathy because she is a woman.

“. . . the way that we take equality back in this courtroom is that you give her the exact same sentence, the exact same verdict that would be just for a man is just for her. And that is life in prison.”

“. . . There is no question that in Ana's world, she thinks everyone loves her. And there is no question that in Ana's world, she thinks that she's the queen holding court. Today is the day that we take the power back from Ana Trujillo and that we take the sting out of the way that she finds, even in death, to humiliate a very private, quiet man who led a simple life with people who loved him.”

Still struggling with the jury's guilty verdict, Jack Carroll stood before them, deciding what to say. He began by responding to Mickelson's suggestion that during the trial, Stefan's character had been impugned. “The prosecutor tells you that we tried to tear down Dr. Andersson's character about this. There was no way I could put this whole thing into context without the alcoholism. I don't take any great joy in tearing down someone in front of their family, but we did what we had to do to show that she was in an abusive relationship. Although he was a pretty nice guy, we don't know what happened when they got back home.”

Rather than wanting to attack Stefan's character, Carroll said he had no choice if he was to illustrate the position Ana was in that last night. As he continued, Carroll seemed unable to get past the first part of the trial, guilt or innocence, repeatedly asking what he had done wrong that caused them to find his client guilty. “I was walking around so damn cocksure that we had won this case,” he said. “When you came back with a guilty after two hours . . . I was a little bit speechless.”

As he sauntered back and forth, he held his notes, his arms reaching out to his sides as if pleading, his body language confirming that he felt off base, as if still trying to adapt to a reality he'd thought impossible. Instead of immediately turning his attention to the sentencing, Carroll again argued the case, beginning with Officer Bowie's arrival at The Parklane, replaying the first part of the trial. “What made the difference?” he asked. But the jurors simply watched and stared.

As he paced, the defense attorney talked of the cab driver and her husband, and so many others, asking questions, searching for answers, looking for a breakthrough that would explain how, in his opinion, the verdict had gone so terribly wrong. “It's hard for me to look at y'all the last couple of days because I was walking around here like I had the thing in the bag. I thought I did. It's kind of embarrassing to have to sit across from you and look at you and
think: Hey, we've got this thing done. I believe something—because you were out less than two hours.

“So, what was it that I missed? Was it the twenty-five times that she struck him in the head? Was it the demonstration to try to show you all how it started and how it ended? Trying to show you all why she hit him, the testimony about striking him in the arms first. ‘Stefan, let me go.' Striking him in the head when he's about to rip her leg in half. What would you all do?”

As he continued, Carroll wound back to parts of the case, what the blood-spatter expert had said, what his own experts testified to, recalling the demonstration he'd done with his martial arts expert.

So many decisions go into trial strategy, and Carroll recalled his internal debate when trying to decide whether or not to put Ana on the stand, then when to do it, in what part of the trial. Early on when the prosecutors played the interview tape, he'd decided that he didn't need her, but now he wondered about that decision in the wake of the guilty verdict. If nothing else, the jury had a man before them who clearly believed in his client and what she told him. He'd worked hard for Ana Trujillo, done his best, and he appeared to be battling the guilt of not succeeding in keeping a woman he viewed as innocent out of prison.

Be that as it may, the only important thing was what the jurors thought not about Carroll but Ana Trujillo. Had seeing her defense attorney's determination changed their minds?

The woman the jurors knew, unemployed and flitting from man to man, who drank too much then struck out in violence, wasn't the only Ana Trujillo, Carroll argued. There was the other Ana, the hardworking wife and mother with the suburban home. “When you go back to deliberate, don't feel guilty about the conviction because you did what you had to do,” Carroll said in his final moments. “. . . I don't fault you for that. Who knows? If I was sitting right where you were, maybe I would have done the same thing.”

Yet Carroll asked them to look past their verdict and to
focus on the circumstances as he saw them, that Ana had acted believing she had to, because Stefan Andersson was hurting her and threatening her life.

At the defense table, Ana Trujillo cried.

“Show mercy on Ms. Trujillo,” he pleaded. “Come back with a minimum sentence . . . so she can get back to Mexico after they deport her.”

Finally, John Jordan talked to the jurors, again in a calm quiet voice, at times sitting on a table across from the jury box, as if he were in their living rooms. He didn't fault Jack Carroll for his fervor but described the defense attorney as important to the system. “We're supposed to have a defense attorney who's aggressive and passionate, who believes in his client,” he said.

Ana Trujillo seated next to her attorney, Jack Carroll

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

“You know, finally, finally after two weeks of trial and ten months, we finally see real tears on Ana Trujillo,” he said, gesturing toward her. “For the first time in ten months,
she's actually crying, and she's crying because she's crying for herself. She's crying because she understands that this is judgment day. She's crying because she knows twelve citizens of Harris County are finally, finally going to hold her accountable.”

Throughout, there'd been no clear motive for the killing, and Jordan addressed that, wondering out loud if it could have been because of the debt, the tarot card in her purse, discovering that Stefan was interested in another woman and had brunch plans for the next day, anger because he hadn't stood up for her in the cab, or perhaps that was the night, after the confrontation in the cab, that Stefan raised his voice to her for the first time and said he'd simply had enough. It was over. He was done with Ana and all the pain, worry, and drama she brought into his life. Maybe he finally realized she wasn't the victim, and he couldn't save her. “The one thing we know about Ana Trujillo is she's not mentally unstable,” said Jordan. “She's crazy, but scary crazy.”

As evidence, he pointed back at all the testimony from those she'd attacked without reason or warning.

To show that it wasn't a case of a woman without advantages, Jordan gestured toward Ana's parents and relatives in the gallery and said that she grew up in a good family with people who loved her, parents who worked hard to support her. The defense attorney had talked at length about Ana's family, as if suggesting she should be spared to spare them. “This isn't about them,” Jordan said. “It makes it worse that she had that kind of background and support of these beautiful people. They try to use family for mercy, but we know that she basically abandoned her ten-year-old child to come to a party lifestyle here in Houston.”

In many ways, the case had international overtones. Stefan Andersson had become a U.S. citizen, but was born Swedish. Ana Trujillo's life began in Mexico, but she'd lived in Arizona, California, and Texas. Newspapers and television outlets across the world had followed the case. The jury had members of every socioeconomic background. They
were white, black, Latin- and Asian-American, from their twenties to their sixties, a wide cross section of a multicultural city. They represented Houston well, one of the most diverse cities in the world. And now, Jordan said, they were charged with speaking for their community.

Stefan Andersson wasn't a perfect person. He drank too much. But “we're all flawed,” Jordan said. “I was always told by my mom, ‘We're all human.'”