Possessed (15 page)

When Annika called Stefan, he sounded nervous. “Ana's here, and she'll get angry,” he told her. “She doesn't like it when I talk on the phone.”

“I thought you were through with her,” Annika said, losing patience with him. Although she understood that Stefan had a difficult time saying no to anyone, especially a friend, this Ana continually wormed her way back into his life. “Why are you with her?”

“I am trying to get rid of her, but she keeps showing up,” he said. “I go out, and she's there. She knows where I go. If I talk to someone on the phone, she makes a scene.”

In early 2013, Ana moved in and out of Stefan's life like a dark cloud that hovered over him, often spending nights in his apartment. On January 20, he took yet another photo of her, this time on his balcony, her top falling down to expose
the tops of her breasts, her hair tousled, as she wore black leggings and a black tank top, necklaces with turquoise pendants, and her Ankh ring clearly visible.

“Well, you know, Stefan and I had a fight,” Ana said the afternoon of the same day the photo on the balcony was taken when she turned up at James Wells's apartment. Christi Suarez had dropped Ana off, telling Wells that she had nowhere to go. Wells agreed to take her in, at the time thinking that Ana reminded him of a little sister who constantly needed help.

The January 20 iPhone photo

Although it had been nearly a year since she'd moved out, Ana and Wells had seen each other in passing at the clubs. In the meantime, one of Wells's old friends, Chanda Ellison, who'd relocated to Houston from Ohio, and her nine-year-old daughter had moved in the previous September. Wells was giving Ellison and the girl a place to live, and as when Ana lived there, there were mutually agreed to friends-with-benefits privileges.

That day, Wells, who by then drove a tow truck, explained the situation to Ana and introduced Ellison, who at four-foot-eleven was a short, round, strongly built woman with dark cropped hair; neither Ellison nor Wells asked what brought on the fight with Stefan. Ana appeared to dismiss
the situation as merely a temporary setback, saying he loved and wanted to marry her.

From the beginning, Chanda Ellison wasn't particularly fond of Ana Trujillo. “She was very sexual,” said Chanda. “James is pretty laid-back, the kind of guy who sees good in everyone, and pretty nonjudgmental. But I thought, nah, there's something wrong here.”

When Ellison asked Ana why she wasn't working, the response confused her: “Money isn't important to me.” Yet the new woman in the apartment bragged about her boyfriend, Stefan, who she said gave her anything she requested. When Ellison asked why she'd left such a generous man, Ana said, “I get so mad at him, and we fight.”

“I think maybe he's violent with her,” James said to Chanda, who worked out of the house screening self-pay patients for hospitals. “Maybe that's why she stayed with him.”

“I don't believe it,” Chanda said. “I think there's more to this than that.”

“If I marry Stefan, he'll buy me whatever I want, and I'll never have to work again,” Ana boasted. “But he's old, and sometimes he drinks. He promises me things, then he doesn't remember . . . It's annoying.”

Chanda Ellison

At Wells's apartment, Ana slept in mornings until nine or ten, then left for the day. Off and on, Wells saw her on the street, wandering. One of her favorite places was an art installation not far from the medical center, tucked into a pocket of land adjacent to a parking lot, across the street from a pawnshop. A semicircular structure covered in a Mayan-inspired pattern of
ceramic tiles, in the middle was a planter, where Ana sat, arms raised, worshipping the sun.

On another day, Wells saw Ana out on the street, standing on a feeder road near one of the expressways, making triangles with her hands as she stared up at the sun. “Ana!” he yelled, but she didn't answer, instead turning and running toward downtown Houston. Wells attempted to intercept her in his tow truck, but when she didn't stop, he drove home instead.

In the apartment, Ana accumulated boxes of what she referred to as her work, binders and folders of papers she'd drawn shapes on, many circles, and jotted down phrases or single words. Although the Mayan-calendar scare ended the previous December, she still talked as if the world would soon end. In the evenings, she took out her tarot cards to tell her future, one day showing Wells a card with a man holding two swords pointing down.

“That means death will be upon us,” she said. “That's what I was trying to tell you.”

D
espite Ana's assessment of their relationship, Stefan Andersson must have seen the situation very differently. For the day after he told Ana to leave, he again signed papers barring her from The Parklane, and this time he went so far as to have the locks changed on his apartment.

That didn't prevent her from trying to get inside. “Ana, Mr. Andersson's former guest, showed up, and she is not allowed to his unit per his request,” read a report filed the following day. According to The Parklane records, just after noon, Ana had walked in, and the concierge told her she had to leave.

“Stan, I think Ana has a drug problem,” Stefan told his friend one afternoon.

“If that's true, you need to get away from her. Just let her go,” he said. “Stop all contact with her, Stefan.”

Stefan sighed. “I'm trying,” he said.

Stan Rich then listened as Stefan described how hard it was for him to avoid Ana. She knew his favorite places, where he met his friends in the evening for dinner. On mornings when he went to the Hermann Park Grill, Ana showed up, spent the day eating and drinking wine, then left him to pay the check. Rich understood how Stefan hated change and relied on familiarity, going to the same places night after night, needing the relationships he'd built with friends to fight his bouts with depression.

“Get a restraining order,” Stan advised. “Get rid of her. Don't answer her phone calls or her texts.”

“I know you're right,” Stefan said, sounding heartbroken. “The problem is that I get so lonely. I have a couple of drinks, and she shows up, and I end up with her staying the night. I can't seem to help myself.”

Perhaps that was what happened, for before long Ana was again circulating in and out of Stefan's apartment. By then, Stefan's friends had tired of listening to his excuses about why he simply couldn't turn his back on Ana and allow her to fend for herself. Some stopped asking about Ana, and others, when Stefan brought up his troubles with Ana, said they didn't want to hear.

Yet Stefan kept trying. On February 20, he again signed papers barring Ana and had the locks changed for a second time. For weeks, he had avoided places he thought she might go. Then on the twentieth, he had lunch with his fellow scientist and friend Anders Berkenstam, this time at one of Stefan's regular places, Bodegas. The two men sat together at a table eating tacos when Ana walked into the restaurant. In the lively lunch crowd, it was unlikely that anyone else noticed her as she approached Stefan, smiling.

When she reached him, Ana Trujillo bent down, as if to kiss him. “Owww!” he yelled. When Stefan pushed Ana away, she had blood on her lips, and blood trickled out of a bite on his cheek.

Frightened, Stefan crouched and covered his face, as if to
prevent her from doing it again. Calmly, Ana walked out of the restaurant.

Anders ran for help, and the restaurant manager brought liquor to disinfect the wound. The embarrassment, pain, and fear must have been welling up inside Stefan. The two men left Bodegas and went to another restaurant, one where Ana wouldn't know to look, and once there, an embarrassed and frightened Stefan cried. “I'm a grown man,” he said, confiding how he'd tried to push her out of his life. “Why can't I just say no and tell her to leave me alone?”

Although he'd already signed paperwork to ban Ana from The Parklane, three days later, on the twenty-third, Stefan feared that there might still be some way for her to get inside. Frightened, he went to the concierge and asked her to check two things, first the number of passkeys issued in his name, in case Ana had managed to have one made without his consent. His second request was that they check with the man Ana lived with prior to moving in with him, to find out if he ever gave her a passkey to the building. The management said they would, and later reported that they had no record of Ana's having any passkeys.

Somehow, that didn't appear to truly protect him.

“What happened to you?” Erika Elizondo asked one day, as she served Stefan his breakfast at the Hermann Park Grill. His eye was blackened and the bruise was an angry one, difficult to miss.

“Oh, nothing,” he said with a nervous laugh.

When Stefan was at the golf club, Ana still routinely walked in, smiling, greeting him, claiming a chair at his table or one nearby, leaving him with the bill. When Annika called, he whispered, “Ana's here. I have to hang up.”

“Just tell her to leave you alone,” Annika said, like so many others frustrated with Stefan's inability to ban the woman from his life. She didn't know about the bite, or the black eye, and she understood how Stefan had always struggled with telling anyone no, but even to her it seemed that
he'd let the situation continue far too long. “Stand up to her!”

Embarrassed, Stefan didn't answer but hung up the phone, afraid of a scene.

After the incident in Bodegas, Stefan started quietly confiding in those who would listen about Ana and what happened when they were alone. Some heard stories about how she came up behind him, grabbing him by the neck, pulling him down. “I thought she'd strangle me,” he told one friend in a restaurant. Then he looked around, and said, “I need to stop talking about her. I'm afraid she'll come in and hear me.”

In restaurants, when Stefan showed up with Ana beside him, Bessie Garland mouthed, “No!” and shook her head at him. Stefan laughed nervously, but as soon as she edged him away from Ana, Garland whispered, “You have to get away from her.” Stefan looked sheepish and didn't answer.

When he arrived alone, Stefan sat off to the side and asked Garland and her fiancé, Todd Griggs, to look out for Ana and warn him if she walked in the door. “She follows me,” he said. “I can't get away from her. If you see her, please tell me, and I will hide. Don't tell her that I'm here.”

Later, Griggs wouldn't remember exactly when it happened, but one night in a restaurant, Stefan turned to him, fear clouding his eyes, and said, “Ana held a knife to my throat.”

“Stefan, you have to stay away from her,” Griggs said, not knowing what to do to help his friend. In the years he'd known Stefan, he'd always appeared happy, always had a smile, but now he looked tired and troubled. “Break it off, now.”

“I know you're right, but it's hard. She follows me. It's hard to get away,” he said. Appearing ashamed, he said, “You cannot tell anyone.”

“But you need to get away from this woman,” Griggs warned. “Please, you need to end this.”

“I know you're right,” Stefan said. “But it's not so easy.”

“I can't go out, she's there, wherever I go, she shows up,” Stefan told Annika one evening, more worried than she'd ever heard him. His job at UH was ending, and while he had the expert-witness job, for the first time he worried about money. When Ana found him, she shadowed him through the evening, drinking, leaving him with the checks. His alternative was to stay home, but that left him alone, without the companionship he so craved.

“She's taking advantage of you. Don't pay,” Annika said.

“I can't do that,” Stefan said, an answer Annika expected from Stefan, who always felt compelled to do things for others.

In April, Ran Holcomb returned to Houston for cancer treatments. “I'm going to tell Ana you're here for a couple of weeks, so she leaves me alone,” Stefan told him. Still his phone rang six to seven times a day, calls from Ana. At first, Stefan wouldn't pick up, but before long he'd give in and answer.