Possessed (19 page)

T
he dispatcher categorized the emergency as an assault in progress, and Houston Police Department Officer Ashton Bowie arrived at The Parklane at 3:48, five minutes after he was bumped on his squad radio. The information was sketchy, just that the caller was a woman, that she was crying, her words muddled, and that she'd said someone was about to die. It sounded like a domestic-violence call although nothing was certain. At the same time Bowie pulled up into the driveway, another dispatcher was assigning an EMS unit to respond, but they were ten minutes out.

Working patrol from HPD's South Central station, Bowie had moved to Houston from Louisiana. His beat was District 70, the Museum District/Texas Medical Center area, a busy but relatively calm part of the city, without a lot of violent crime. As soon as he pulled the squad over and parked it, he rushed inside.

At the concierge desk, Florence McClean saw the officer walk in. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“Eighteenth floor,” he said.

I wonder what Ana did now?
McClean thought as she buzzed the uniformed officer through to the bank of elevators. The valet on duty, Ouedraogo, hadn't even needed to hear that the officer was headed to the eighteenth floor before he assumed Ana had done something to bring the police to their door. Like McClean, he'd witnessed Stefan and Ana's arrival that night. Briefly, Ouedraogo wondered if
the cab driver or her husband had called the police, reporting the confrontation.

The elevator door opened on the eighteenth floor, and Bowie got out. It was then that he realized the error. He had an order to respond to 1801, but the apartments were differentiated by letters. Searching for the person who'd called, he circulated, wondering what door to knock on, when he heard the faint sound of a woman's sobbing behind the door to apartment 18B. He listened for a moment, then rang the doorbell. “Police.”

“They're here,” he heard from inside the apartment.

The door opened, and the apartment was dimly lit. The face of the woman who answered, slim with long black hair, was streaked with something dark. As the officer looked her over, he realized it was blood. Bowie's immediate thought was that she'd been injured.

“What's going on?” he asked.

“He was holding me, and he wouldn't let go,” she whined, as on the phone call, her words barely intelligible. She stepped back to clear the way for Bowie to enter, and he noted that her clothes, too, were covered in blood, especially the legs of her jeans. And he smelled alcohol, perhaps explaining her slurred speech.

His hand on his gun, Bowie slowly walked in, ready in case there was a suspect still on the property, someone who had hurt the woman, the reason for all the blood. Once inside, however, Bowie saw a supine man where the entranceway T'ed off at a wall. There was a dense puddle of blood near the man's head, leading Bowie to at first assume that the man must have been shot in the head.

“Is anyone else here?” he asked the woman.

“No,” she said. When asked, she also said that there weren't any guns.

Taking a few steps forward, Bowie moved closer to the white-haired man on the floor. He looked to see if his chest moved, if there were any signs of breathing. There were none. “Hello,” he said. “Police. Can you hear me?”

Nothing. No response. Stefan was pale, and there was so much blood, Bowie assumed he had to be deceased. From the look of the body and the blood drying on the carpet beside him, the officer thought the man must have been dead for some time. Inspecting a thick pattern of puncture-type marks, gashes, and bruises on Stefan's head and face, Bowie asked, “Do you have a weapon?”

“No,” the woman said.

“What did you hit him with?”

“My shoe,” she answered.

Bowie glanced about and saw on the floor near the man's head a blue-suede shoe with a long stiletto heel, stained with blood and bearing wisps of white hair.

Ana's blue-suede, stiletto-heeled shoe

On his radio, Bowie called in and was told that an ambulance was on its way. “I also need homicide,” he said. “And send someone from the ME's Office.”

“I tried to give him CPR,” the woman said. “Can you try?”

Bowie looked at the man, again judging him dead too long for lifesaving measures. Instead, he turned to the woman and told her that he was going to pat her down. When he did, he found nothing. He then instructed her to sit in the hallway. “I don't know what happened,” she said. “We were arguing.”

Off and on, the woman sobbed and wailed, but Bowie saw no tears.

At 3:55, the first paramedics ran into the apartment, before long followed by others from a second ambulance, six emergency medical personnel all converging on the scene. Glancing at Ana seated in the hallway, seeing the blood, one asked, “Are you injured?”

“No,” she said.

“Who's the patient?”

“He is,” Bowie said, indicating the man on the hallway floor.

Clustering around Stefan, one paramedic put on latex gloves, then bent and felt for breathing, finding none. On his chart he would later note that Stefan felt cool and looked pale, not surprising based on the blood pool and heavy spatter on the walls surrounding him. Reaching into Stefan's pants, the paramedic touched the crevice between Stefan's pelvis and thigh, feeling for a pulse in the femoral artery. He didn't find one. On his report the paramedic wrote that the body was apneic, pulseless, and exhibited multiple traumas to the head. The pool of red near Stefan's head, the paramedic noted, had been there so long that the blood was drying and coagulating.

“He's dead,” the paramedic told Bowie and the others. “Looks like he's been dead for a while. At least thirty minutes.”

Looking over at Ana Trujillo, they saw no cuts or bruises, just blood, streaks of blood on her face, blood covering her hands, her body, saturating her jeans. When they, too, asked if she was hurt, she claimed no injuries.

On the floor, Stefan still wore the clothes he'd had on that evening, the black shirt with Hornitos tequila advertised on it, a pair of jeans, his white hair encrusted with blood, blood surrounding him not only on the floor but all three of the nearby walls.

Ana's blood-streaked face

At 3:59
A.M.
, the paramedic in charge talked with a physician, who pronounced Stefan Andersson dead.

About that time, the second officer on the scene arrived, and Bowie asked him to take Ana to his squad and keep her quiet in the backseat, while they waited for detectives to arrive. Two minutes after paramedics pronounced Stefan dead, Florence McClean sat at her desk in the lobby and watched an officer lead Ana Trujillo through The Parklane's heavy glass doors to a waiting patrol car.

They must have had a fight
, McClean thought as she saw Ana escorted past her. When the ambulances left so quickly,
not able to imagine the horror of what had happened, the concierge assumed Stefan remained upstairs, giving the police a statement.

Ana being taken to a squad car

O
fficer T. S. Miller took the call in homicide when Officer Bowie called in for assistance. “I have a deceased male, and we've detained a woman named Ana Trujillo Fox,” Bowie explained. Before long, Miller was on his way to The Parklane. Like Bowie, Miller worked the eleven-to-seven shift. A former geologist who'd made a career switch, Miller had been with HPD for eight years. The first thing he did on the scene was talk to Bowie, who filled him in on what Ana had said and what he'd seen in 18B.

Armed with the basics, Miller took the elevator back to the lobby and walked out to the black-and-white where Ana sat guarded by police, to ask her to sign a consent-to-search form, to give them access to the apartment. She refused.

Moments later, the second homicide officer, Sgt. Troy
Triplett, arrived. Without a signed consent, he and Miller had no option other than to leave the scene, with Bowie protecting it, while they drove to the DA's office in the Harris County Criminal Courthouse to get a search warrant. Before they left, the homicide detectives instructed officers to drive Ana to HPD headquarters and secure her in a sixth-floor interview room, so that when they were ready, they would have her in place to give a statement.

An hour or so later, once they had the signed warrant, Triplett and Miller hand-carried it back to the apartment and entered for the first time. The scene was shocking, Stefan's body, his head covered in gruesome bruises and lacerations, the hardening pool of blood, the horrible look on his face, his right hand clenched, his arms flung over his head and covered with cuts, contusions, and patches of blood. And nearby lay the shoe, such an unlikely weapon.

Dividing up the work, Triplett took over witness statements and Miller was assigned to diagram the apartment and work with the crime-scene unit, which was on its way.

A
rriving at 7:20 that morning, the forensic officers on the scene were E. P. “Ernie” Aguilera and C. D. “Chris” Duncan. Unlike in the movies and on television where crime-scene operatives carry little more than a briefcase, Aguilera arrived in an Expedition filled with equipment.

Diagnosing a crime scene is a methodical task, requiring an initial organization. Those who do it regularly have a rhythm, tackling it by using a systematic approach. Before beginning, the first thing the two CSU officers needed was an assessment from those who'd already entered the apartment. That led to a conversation with Miller and Triplett, who described the body, the wounds, and what they'd taken note of inside the apartment, bits and pieces of potential evidence. Once done, the forensic officers discussed how to split up the work. In this case, it seemed obvious. As the homicide detectives described it, the death scene was covered with spatter. Since Duncan was one of HPD's top blood
men, he took responsibility for that evidence. That meant Aguilera would document the rest of the scene, including drawing a diagram and collecting evidence.

Task one: Before either man disturbed potential evidence, they needed to video the apartment to show what the scene looked like upon their arrival. Starting at the doorway, the camera running, Aguilera walked slowly down the hallway toward Stefan's body. It was such an eerie sight. Just hours earlier, Stefan had walked through the lobby. What was he thinking as he opened the door and entered his apartment? When did he realize that he'd entered a very dangerous situation? Minutes earlier, the cab driver advised him to be careful. She'd sensed something about the couple in her cab, an undercurrent of violence. So many others had warned him about Ana Trujillo.

Now Stefan lay lifeless.

The video finished, the forensic officers systematically photographed the apartment, again beginning at the doorway. As Aguilera walked toward the corpse, he took multiple images from various angles, including close-ups of Stefan's head and facial wounds and the cuts and bruises pocking his arms and hands. A group of images were also taken of the stiletto heel as they found it, near his head. Progressing through the apartment, they photographed anything considered significant, including tufts of white hair on the couch, presumably pulled from the dead man's head.