Possessed (6 page)

On his evening forays, Stefan encountered others out dining, including Todd Griggs, a chief technology officer at a consulting firm, and his girlfriend, Bessie Garland, a petite nurse with chin-length dark hair. Before long, Stefan, Griggs, tall and good-looking, with dark hair and an Ivy-League manner, Garland and others formed a network not dissimilar to the one Stefan had enjoyed in Dallas, an eclectic group that included an engineer and a stockbroker, financial consultants and sales reps. In the evenings, they congregated at their favorite haunts, texting or calling to determine where dinner and drinks would be. They talked of their days, compared views on politics and current affairs, and enjoyed the company. For Stefan, a social creature who lived alone, the companionship raised his spirits.

As always, Stefan walked to the meeting places. His route
usually took him past Hermann Park, where, in the early mornings, when the golfers hadn't yet taken over the course, the homeless gathered. Before long, he routinely stopped at a nearby convenience store, buying the group donuts for breakfast and sometimes a six-pack of beer and sandwiches to distribute for lunch. Although he'd always acted disinterested in nature to Annika, she judged Stefan had settled in the day he started talking about a squirrel he'd befriended while sitting on a bench behind the apartments. “I don't know what to do. There's a squirrel that keeps coming up to me,” he said one day. “What do I give it?”

Stefan with Bessie Garland on St. Patrick's Day

(Courtesy of Todd Griggs)

“Peanuts,” she advised him.

Before long, he confided about how he spent mornings sitting on the bench, reading his newspapers and feeding the squirrel. “People will think I'm some strange old man who talks to squirrels!” he said with a chuckle.

On one particular morning, Stefan, his voice filled with excitement, called Annika to tell her that a bald eagle flew past his window. “It was probably a turkey vulture,” she said, dubious. Later, she'd learn there were nesting eagles in the park, and it was likely that Stefan had been right.

In the spring of 2011, as he did every year, Stefan returned to Sweden for his annual bike tour with his friends and to visit with family. Back in Houston that summer, a Boston law firm contacted him, and he began working part-time as an expert witness, reviewing documents from a lawsuit involving a large pharmaceutical company. At $450 an hour, the opportunity made for a lucrative side job. Then in the fall, Stefan's newest study came out in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, on estrogen receptors and prostate cancer.

As busy as he was, Stefan still made time for friends. When Ran Holcomb was again diagnosed with cancer and returned to Houston to be treated at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Stefan walked through Ran's door daily to keep him company. The two men talked about Ran's treatments, Stefan researching alternatives to advise his friend,
and they laughed and reminisced about old times, when they were neighbors in Dallas.

Christmas Eve 2011 marked Stefan's one-year anniversary at The Parklane, and he took his car to Dallas to attend Annika's traditional Swedish holiday gathering. When Stefan and his old friend Mark Bouril arrived too early, Annika shushed them out the door, saying they were distracting her from her cooking. The men drove around Stefan's old neighborhood and talked until he spotted a homeless man on the street, alone on the holiday. Stefan lowered his window and called out to the man by name. The rest of that afternoon, the three men sat together in a Starbucks, where Stefan bought the bedraggled man coffee and sandwiches and talked to him as if they were old friends.

A
fter his chilly beginning in Houston, life again appeared to be opening up for Stefan Andersson. As much as he'd bemoaned the change, the move had been a good one for him. On their frequent calls, Annika heard joy and excitement in her friend's familiar voice.

Everything would have undoubtedly ended differently for Stefan if in August 2012 he hadn't walked into The Parklane's lobby and happened upon a woman named Ana Lilia Trujillo. At the time, it seemed a lucky meeting. On the surface, Ana appeared everything Stefan told friends he'd fantasized about in a partner. Beautiful and lithe, with long, dark hair, a warm manner, a ready smile, and expressive brown eyes, she was the embodiment of the “hot Latina” who could salsa dance and teach him Spanish.

“I've got a real tiger by the tail,” he told a friend a month or two later. “And I'm having fun.”

Of course, there was no way for Stefan Andersson to truly comprehend who Ana Trujillo was on the day they met, or perhaps even in those first weeks of their relationship. When he ultimately did understand, the revelation would be terrifying.

I
f Stefan Andersson carried the scars of his father's ill temper, Ana Trujillo's experiences, some dating as far back as childhood, molded her as well. Later many would be perplexed by their romance, two people from such disparate worlds. But who can explain the human heart? And were they truly so different? In social position and education, but examining their pasts and their personalities, their liaison wasn't as shocking as some would have thought. In each the other saw something appealing, perhaps the embodiment of what they most lacked. In each, the other initially found a savior of sorts. Only later would it all turn out to all be misimpression and camouflage.

The first and perhaps most obvious similarity between Stefan and Ana was that they were both immigrants who came to the U.S. and ultimately settled in Houston for opportunity. Both fell in love with the city, a blend of Cowtown and oil town, a pin-striped business center, a highly diverse milieu that thrives on the edge, applauding risk takers.

That first day in The Parklane lobby, chance brought Stefan and Ana together. Afterward, it would seem the proverbial perfect storm, two temperaments so diametrically opposed as to render one helpless and embolden the other to pure evil.

A
s a child, Ana's mother, Maria “Trina” Godinez, migrated with her family from Atotonilco El Alto, east of
Guadalajara, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, to Arizona. Life is hard for those who arrive from across the border with little money, and by eight Trina worked chopping cotton. The family settled in Gila Bend, bordering the Sonoran Desert, south of Phoenix and near the Indian reservation, an hour-and-a-half drive north on Highway 85 from the Mexican border.

Married at sixteen, Trina returned to Mexico in early 1969 to give birth to her first child. The Vietnam War raging, her husband feared that a son born in the U.S. might one day be drafted into the armed services. That child was, however, a girl, Ana Lilia Trujillo, by all reports a bright-eyed, golden-skinned child whom her parents transported back to Arizona when she was four months old.

In the years that followed, Trina had three more children, but the marriage wasn't fated to last. Later, Ana would say that when she was eight, her father left the family to start a new one, and Trina became a single mother. Ana took what she saw as her father's desertion particularly hard. “I admired my father and felt abandoned by him,” she said. “It was devastating. I couldn't understand why he didn't want to be our father anymore.”

At times, Trina, a tall, broad-shouldered woman, worked two jobs to support her brood. Out of necessity, from a young age Ana took on much of her mother's responsibility with the three younger children. Trina had to earn money to pay for rent, food and clothing, and that meant that there were long hours when she was absent from the family. When Ana went to school, she dropped the youngest children off with an aunt, only to pick them up again in the afternoons. Those who knew her would later say that at the time Ana rarely complained. In the summers, Trina sent all four children south to Mexico, to live with family.

From early on, Ana had a flair about her, a wide smile and an almost contagious enthusiasm, along with an artistic bent, drawing, coloring, painting, picking and arranging wildflowers. “She always had a project working, and she
loved beautiful things,” said one relative. “That was just Ana, a sweet girl.”

The family began as Catholics, but over the years Trina converted to Jehovah's Witness, a devout religion that takes exception to mainstream practices, including blood transfusions for the sick or injured and celebrating holidays such as birthdays, Easter, and Christmas, arguing that they have pagan roots. Particularly known for their dedication to active evangelism, members circulate through neighborhoods, house to house, ringing doorbells to hand out literature and share their faith.

Over those early years, Trina began as a hotel cleaning lady, eventually earning a management slot at a Travelodge. Later, she held a series of positions at the Wally Door factory, progressing from stacking wood to running a finger joiner machine that processed twelve pieces a minute. Ultimately, her industriousness led to the title of quality-control manager.

At the door factory, Trina met the foreman, Russell Gene Tharp, an ex–navy man who'd gone to Chico State College in California and once worked as an installing engineer for Georgia Pacific. Also a Jehovah's Witness, Gene, too, was raising four children. In Trina, he found a good match. An upright woman who made a good impression, she shared his faith and his family values. He admired that despite their modest means, Trina and her children were clean and well dressed, the house orderly.

Gene and Trina married when Ana was eleven, and from that point on she, along with Gene's oldest, cared for the six younger children. “There were four brown kids and four white kids,” said a family friend. “Gene and Trina worked, and Ana was like a little mother, watching over them. Very loving. They all called her ‘Sissy.'”

Even then, as a child growing up in a recently blended family, one where the parents had to work long hours to support their young, Ana seemed somehow to be looking for more in life. From the beginning, friends would
remember how she loved expensive things. “Ana wanted what she couldn't afford,” said a relative. “Even when she had no money, Ana found a way to dress well. And in that small town, she took risks, wearing things the other girls wouldn't.” On the playground, Ana stopped and polished her patent leather shoes or fixed her hair bow, not wanting to have anything out of place. Far from a tomboy, yet strongly built, she disdained being dirty.

After their marriage, Trina's children all called Gene, “Dad.” Their own father absent in their lives, they took to their stepfather. It might have helped that their mother was the disciplinarian and Gene the parent who more often agreed to their requests. In many ways, Ana was a good daughter, but despite her parents' devotion to their faith, Ana rejected their beliefs. “Even as a child, she didn't want to go to church,” said a relative. “She refused, and she resented her parents' religious practices.”

By middle school, Ana was an outgoing young girl, one who exuded energy and, despite her trials, happiness. With her bright smile, she was beautiful. In high school, she was voted best dressed and most popular. There was something else about Ana that would resonate decades later. From childhood on, Ana showed an intense interest in a world she couldn't see. As a child, she played with a Ouija board in the house, despite her mother's objections. Ana appeared fascinated by the possibility that there was a way to communicate with spirits.

Yet day to day, it was the physical world, occasionally unfair and too often painful, that surrounded her. Over the years, the Tharps moved their family to Cleveland, Texas, and to Orange County, California. While in California, Ana would later say she felt the sting of prejudice. In response, Trina sent Ana back to the Phoenix area to finish high school.

As she moved into adulthood, Ana was not just a pretty girl; she appeared to have something about her that naturally drew people. When she went to garage sales with family
members, strangers approached them and wanted to touch Ana. She played with babies and fawned over small children. Habitually arriving at family events late, she hugged family members, focusing intently and asking about each person's welfare.

By the late eighties, Trina and Gene had moved the family to Waco, Texas, where they worked at a small furniture-manufacturing company. After high school, Ana joined them, stacking wood part-time, while she attended a paraprofessional education program at nearby McLennan Community College, wanting to be a teacher's aide. There, a friend introduced her to John Marcus Leos. In December 1990, when Ana was twenty-two, they married. Four months later, Ana was pregnant, and in 1992, their first daughter, Siana, was born. From the beginning, the marriage was volatile.

“I don't think Marcus was ready to settle down and have a family,” Ana would later say. His relatives admitted the same. Leos, a stocky man with a round face, worked for a mobile-home builder. When he hurt his back, his employer moved him into a desk job, which he eventually lost. “Marcus didn't like to work,” said a relative. “He went from one job to the next and couldn't hold them. . . . Ana supported him and the girls.”

While Trina had become a U.S. citizen years earlier, Ana hadn't wanted to do that, preferring to remain in the country under permanent resident status, often referred to as having a Green Card. A practical person, from youth on, with the example of her mother to draw from, Ana understood hard work. During those early years of her marriage, she had a position as a teaching assistant for emotionally disturbed children at a small private school. The school sent her for an in-service class in Austin, where she went out to bars in the evenings with friends, drank socially, and laughed. Among her acquaintances, Ana was popular, a lively and warm, caring personality.

As the main breadwinner in the family, Ana carried the
bulk of the responsibility outside the home, but family members said that she had little help from Leos with their daughter or their small house. Years later, Ana described her first husband as “clinically depressed,” perhaps explaining his behavior. One of his aunts stepped in, Margie Sowell, who cared for Siana in her own home, weeks at a time, treating her as if she were her daughter. The marriage was troubled, and one late afternoon, Sowell walked to the front door to drop off Siana and heard Ana inside yelling at Leos. “I work all day, and what do you do? You're just getting up?”

Sowell turned around and walked away, only returning later. “I didn't want Siana to hear that,” she said.

Despite the trouble in the marriage, in 1997, when Siana was five, Ana and Marcus's second child, Arin, was born.

To better her lot in life, Ana looked for opportunities. A cousin who worked for the local Coca-Cola distributor told her about a job opening, a delivery slot, and Ana applied and was hired. At Coke, she drove a truck, unloaded deliveries and built displays, working on placement in stores. The pay was good. Meanwhile, her marriage to Leos continued to falter. Later she'd say that he stayed out partying with friends, and that at night she'd often wake up to find him gone. “I told him I couldn't live like this anymore,” she said, explaining why she filed for a divorce.

Around that time, Ana's family suffered a devastating tragedy. One of her brothers, Sergio, had an ongoing drug problem, and the family grieved the day he was found dead from an overdose. Ana, a friend would say, seemed to take it particularly hard. She'd been more mother than sister to Sergio, and the loss weighed heavily on her.

Around the time of the funeral, Leos temporarily moved back into the house to help with the girls. Later, Ana said that while he was there, he called her and threatened to kill himself. When she arrived home, she found him trying to hang himself from a bedpost. She cut him down with a knife, then called his parents. After his release from the hospital, she claimed that he broke into her house and held her
hostage for six hours. “He moved me to the bedroom, and he raped me,” she said. Initially, she pressed charges.

“We all convinced her to drop them,” said Sowell. “We didn't want to see Marcus in prison. Ana agreed. I thought later that changed her, and we shouldn't have asked her to do that.”

Describing how Ana contended with the alleged rape, Sowell said that Ana had a way of blocking from her mind what she didn't want to acknowledge. “If Ana could push it down, she didn't have to deal with it,” she said. “If she didn't feel it, it was like it didn't happen.”

Despite the chaos in her personal life, Ana thrived at work.

At Coke, she entered contests and won special-edition Coke memorabilia and trips. She moved up the job ladder, from delivery to a merchandizing slot, where she was given a route handling larger stores and worked developing new business by helping to place Coke machines in office buildings and stores. As part of her new position, Ana drove a company car that came with a gas card to keep its tank full. Many of her coworkers had college degrees, and she was proud. Later, she'd describe it as “very tough” being both Hispanic and female in what was for the most part a male world. “I did very well,” she said with a smile.

The court thought so, too, and when the divorce from Leos finalized in May 2000, the judge gave Ana custody of Siana and Arin.

A single mother with young children, much as her own mother had once been, Ana moved to a one-story house that backed up to a grove of trees in nearby Bryan. She dropped Marcus Leos's last name and went back to her maiden name, Ana Trujillo. Despite her claims that Leos had attacked her, she continued to drive the girls to Waco to see their father, and would later say she believed he was basically a good man.

That same year, 2000, Jim Fox, a pharmaceutical rep who called on neurologists, walked through a hospital in Temple,
another of the small cities not far from Waco, and saw Ana wearing little makeup, her Coke T-shirt, and slacks, her long, thick, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Can you help me?” he asked, saying he had to find a particular doctor's office. “I'm lost.”

“Sure,” she said. They walked together, and before they reached the doctor's office, he'd invited her out to lunch.

They dated for a year. Later, Fox, a quiet, tall, slender man with brown hair who at thirty-three was a year older than Ana, would describe her as working hard to care for her family. Yet perhaps there were signs from the beginning that it wouldn't be a lasting match. Jim Fox liked things orderly. When he picked Ana up at her house for dates, Siana and Arin ate Cheerios on the floor and dishes were stacked high in the sink. “But Ana was so kind,” said Fox, divorced with a son who lived with his mother in Houston. “She loved her kids. Ana was a great mom, and in the beginning, she made a great wife.”