Possessed (24 page)

Slowly, too, a picture in stark contrast to Ana's claims of being an abused woman showed up in Houston media. When a
Houston Chronicle
reporter visited Stefan's hangouts, he came away with an account from Lucille's of the time Stefan came in with a black eye. And when the reporter walked into Bodegas, a memorial table had been set up for Stefan, and the management was giving out free Bud Light beers and shots of Jiro tequila in his memory. “They looked like a normal couple,” the manager told a reporter, saying that the staff and patrons at the bar were angry that Ana had killed Stefan, whom he called the restaurant's “customer number one.”

One of those interviewed by media clamoring for any insight was Jim Carroll, the by then former manager of the Londale, the downtown Houston hotel where Ana lived in the fall of 2010. What Carroll recounted for the cameras was an account of two conversations he said he'd had with Ana. “She told me if anyone ever screwed with her, they were going to get this in their eye, and it was a stiletto heel,” Carroll said, holding up a hand as if mimicking holding a shoe. “She's a force to be reckoned with.”

Yet his account did little to settle the question of why it had happened. Did Ana's words suggest that Stefan was “messing” with her that night, as she claimed? “Houston stiletto-heel stabbing suspect claims self-defense,” reported
Good Morning America
. Or was Ana Trujillo primed and waiting, eager to strike out with little or no provocation?

As Christi Suarez watched the news reports, a TV reporter knocked on her door. Soon Suarez, too, granted an
interview, one where her face was concealed. Loyal to a woman who'd once been her friend, Suarez recalled a time when Ana once complained that Stefan held her arms and gave her a bruise. Was that true? Suarez didn't know, but she told the reporter that as she saw it, this was a case of two people who shouldn't have been together. In the interview, Suarez never mentioned the changes she'd witnessed in Ana, the troubled and sometimes violent woman her friend had become in recent years, the one with vacant eyes, who believed in witchcraft. “I sided with Ana,” said Suarez. After she did, she rarely slept. “My dreams got worse. I guess I had a guilty conscience.”

In Suarez's sleep, Stefan appeared, saying that the night he died wasn't as it was being portrayed by Ana, that he would never have hurt her. He wanted Suarez to tell others, to clear his name. “Please leave me alone,” she begged him. “I have to go on with my life.”

Shaken, the next day Suarez bought holy water and blessed her house, to keep away evil spirits.

H
eld on a bond of $100,000, after her court appearance Ana was transported back to the jail, where she asked to see medical personnel. On the scene the night of the killing, she denied having any injuries, but now she complained of pain. On her chart, a nurse noted “generalized bruises all over her body” and scars on Ana's forehead, thumb, knee, chin, and right middle finger. “I was fighting with my fiancée,” Ana told the woman.

When she mentioned a knot on the back of her head, however, Ana instead linked the injury to another altercation, one already documented to have resulted in bruises like the ones she showed the nurse, the fight with Chanda Ellison.

On Ana's chart, the nurse wrote: “The patient said she is shocked to hear that she is accused of hurting her boyfriend.” When it came to her drinking, Ana said that she only indulged in one or two glasses of wine approximately two times a week.

To the nurse, Ana explained that she stayed away from modern medicine, instead trying more “holistic” methods. On her notes, the nurse said that Ana complained that in prison she suffered from depression and anxiety, and that she'd been unable to properly mourn for Stefan. According to the records, Ana talked excessively during the interview but “did not appear sad.”

W
hile the case unfolded in the press, behind the scenes, investigators sought out interviews and information, trying to determine what had happened behind closed doors in apartment 18B that led to Stefan Andersson's death.

Officer Travis Miller stopped in at John Jordan's office four days after the killing and picked up a handful of subpoenas, for surveillance video from The Parklane, Bodegas, and Bar 5015, along with call records from Yellow Cab, all to pull into focus Stefan's final night. “I want to talk to the driver,” Miller said. “I'm hoping the cab has video or audio equipment.”

From the prosecutor's office, Miller went to Bodegas, where the manager divulged what he knew about Stefan and Ana, describing them as regular customers. The memorial the bar set up in Stefan's honor remained on a table near the window. Later, Miller would hear of the incident in the restaurant, the time months earlier when Ana entered and, unprovoked, bit Stefan.

From Bodegas, Miller drove the short distance to Bar 5015, where credit-card records showed Stefan and Ana spent their final night. Once he arrived, Miller handed the manager a subpoena for video from the bar's security cameras. Miller left with a copy on a DVD.

From 5015, the investigator then drove to The Parklane, where he went through a similar process with Lil Brown, producing a subpoena for all the building's surveillance video for June 8 and the early-morning hours of June 9. While they didn't collect the video that day, Brown agreed to make copies to comply.

R
osemary Gomez and Reagan Cannon saw the press coverage of the killing at The Parklane the day after their tumultuous taxi ride with Stefan and Ana from Bar 5015. They hadn't called police, however, to report what they knew. Gomez was worried. Her company frowned on ride-alongs, bringing others with her when she worked. But then,
Officer Miller called Yellow Cab, and Gomez was ordered to deliver her cab to the Houston Police Department crime lab, to be swept for evidence. Disappointing the detectives, the car lacked video and audio equipment.

Afterward, Gomez talked to HPD homicide detectives about the cab ride shortly before Stefan's death. In response to questions from the investigators, Gomez described the argument inside the cab, in which a quiet, apologetic Stefan tried unsuccessfully to mollify a belligerent Ana Trujillo.

When they questioned her, the cabbie, however, didn't tell them everything. They didn't ask if she was alone in the front seat of the cab that night, and she left out mentioning that Reagan Cannon also witnessed those final hours.

“Is this the man you picked up at 5015?” one investigator asked, showing Gomez a photo of Stefan.

“Yes,” she verified. “That's Mr. Andersson.”

The detective then pulled out a photo of Ana Trujillo, and Gomez identified her as well.

In HPD's homicide department, investigators had already begun compiling the murder books, loose-leaf, three-ring binders in which they organized interviews and evidence. Inside they were building a time line, one they hoped would eventually detail the night of the killing. Once they had the Yellow Cab records, the officers had access to the exact times the cab was called, arrived, and left Bar 5015, and drove up to The Parklane's doors.

After finishing the interview with Rosemary Gomez, Miller returned to The Parklane to interview members of the staff who worked the early hours of June 9. Explaining the scene he saw when the cab pulled up, the valet, Roland Ouedraogo, gave his account, followed by Florence McClean, the concierge, who picked up the story at the point Ana walked into the lobby, visibly angry, shouting at Stefan to come inside. After he finished asking questions, the detective asked McClean if she had anything to add to her statement. “I know people warned Mr. Andersson
to stay away from Ana Trujillo, that she was crazy,” the concierge said.

When Lil Brown arrived at HPD for her interview, she brought copies of the apartment building's reports on Ana, everything from paperwork on the night she cut the refrigerator hose to the many times Stefan signed forms to allow her into his apartment and to bar her from entering. In addition, Brown brought the subpoenaed footage from the surveillance cameras.

A murder investigation resembles piecing together a complicated puzzle, consisting of physical evidence and interviews. As they work, detectives slowly draw a picture of the dead as they talk to families and friends and learn how and where the deceased spent their time. With Stefan Andersson, perhaps, this was especially true, for in the vast city, his Houston was a small world. And at each place he frequented, there were those with remembrances of the white-haired man with the Swedish accent, the one who enjoyed striking up conversations with strangers, adopting some as friends.

Later that day, at the Hermann Park Grill, an HPD investigator listened to the memories of the staff, who detailed what they saw on the day before the killing, a lazy afternoon like so many others when Ana played on her laptop while Stefan sat outside and sunned. The detectives also asked about the couple's history at the grill, and in response they learned of the many arguments waged over the months in front of the staff and customers. One worker recounted a day Ana appeared angry, and he'd asked Stefan, “What's up with her? She's acting strange today.”

“Today?” Stefan answered, as if to imply it was more the rule than the exception.

The days wore on, and the interviews continued, as investigators followed leads, moving through Ana's and Stefan's pasts. “When Ana drank a little, she got kind of silly,” Jim Carroll told a detective as an HPD camera recorded the interview. “When she drank a lot, she got mean.”

Then the hotel manager repeated what he'd told reporters, the incidents where Ana Trujillo boasted that if any man “fucked with me” she would get him with “this,” taking off her stiletto heel and holding it like a hammer.

On June 20, Sergeant Triplett and Officer Miller drove to Park Plaza Hospital. By then, they'd done a records search on Ana Trujillo Fox and found the DWIs and the old theft-by-check charge. They'd also discovered the complaints Ana filed against Brian Goodney, the man she'd hit with the candlestick, and James Wells and Chanda Ellison for the May 26 fight, after Ana bit Wells.

Inside the hospital, the two officers handed a clerk a grand jury subpoena for Ana's records. Days later, they returned to pick up graphic photos showing Ana's bruising after the fight with Chanda Ellison.

U
naware of the progressing investigation, in the jail Ana again complained to the medical staff of what they described as generalized pain. “Patient states both knees are swollen,” the nurse wrote on her chart. Yet she also noted that Ana walked without a limp.

On June 21, an article on the case came out in
People
. Describing Ana as a former TV host on public access for her work with Christi Suarez, the magazine stated that “investigators are trying to determine if Trujillo stomped Andersson with the shoe or held it and struck him as she claims.”

In the piece, Ana's former employer, Lott Brooks, was quoted as saying that Ana suffered from battered-woman syndrome and that she was nonconfrontational and would not have started the fight.

About that time at HPD's homicide department, the investigators sat down before a computer and slipped in a thumb drive with the surveillance video from Bar 5015. In her interview, Ana had claimed that she tried to leave the bar for hours that night, and that a drunken Stefan refused to call a cab. But as detectives watched the last twenty minutes of the night's video, what they saw was a direct
contradiction of her statement. Instead, Ana sat on a barstool partying and talking to others, while Stefan attempted to lure her out the door to the waiting cab.

At the bar, the officer had also picked up a copy of Stefan's credit-card receipt. When they looked it over, they had the time the bill was paid, 1:11
A.M.
That gave them another entry to mark on the time line under construction in the growing murder book.

T
wo weeks after Stefan's death, at 6:30
A.M.
on Sunday, June 23, the prosecutor, John Jordan, met the two forensic officers on the case, Duncan and his partner, Aguilera, at the apartment. Once there, they conducted a walk-through, the officers recreating for Jordan what they believed, based on the physical evidence, happened inside 18B on the night of Stefan's death. Jordan listened and digested all he heard, picturing the scene in his mind, how the hair on the couch marked the first point of violence, then following the blood evidence as Stefan attempted to flee toward the hallway, while Ana beat him with her shoe.

“The jury will need to understand the blood evidence,” Jordan told Duncan, saying it had to be organized to be presented in the courtroom. “This is of major importance.”

Duncan agreed, and the next day HPD's blood man returned and spent four hours drawing a quadrant map to catalog the spatter, steplike boxes forming a grid of squares on the hallway walls. The one-foot-square blocks were then marked numerically, starting at the floor, and alphabetically, left to right. Inside each box, Duncan outlined the blood spatter in marker to make it stand out. When finished, he photographed and documented his work, clearly illustrating that the preponderance of the blood was low, within two feet of the floor.

Once he finished mapping the blood, Duncan used dye to enhance the transfer impressions he'd found on the wall, hoping to raise enough detail to find ridges and be able to identify fingerprints. In the end, he succeeded well enough
to confirm that the stain came from a bloody handprint but not enough to pinpoint the source.

Chris Duncan's wall diagram

While Duncan worked on the blood evidence, another officer inventoried the contents of Ana's three suitcases, still propped up against a wall in the hallway. When the list was brought to Jordan, he scanned it and thought that it probably represented nearly all of her clothing and shoes. “It looked to me like she was moving to Waco, not just going for a weekend visit, as she claimed in the interview,” said the prosecutor. “It seemed like most of what she said in the interview with police wasn't true. She wasn't going for a weekend. And Stefan wasn't expecting her to return.”

W
hile the police investigation unfolded in Houston, in Dallas, Annika Lindqvist learned that Stefan had appointed her executor to his estate. After so many years as colleagues and friends, it was a good choice, and Annika soon began
pulling together what had to be done. Friends and family called talking about Stefan, needing others close to him with whom to grieve. “We all missed him,” she said. “So I started working on the memorial service.”

In keeping with his life, mindful that he wouldn't have wanted a religious ceremony, she booked the event at The Wine Therapist, on Skillman, a small Dallas establishment that served food, with dark-wood tables and benches, its walls covered with the type of abstract modern art Stefan loved. Over the years, Stefan had been there a time or two and liked it.

To prepare, Annika drove into Houston to pick up her dead friend's ashes. Once she had, she stopped at The Parklane. The apartment still hadn't been released by HPD, so she couldn't go inside it, but even walking into the building was difficult. On that day, her intention was only to pick up Stefan's mail, but in the lobby, Lil Brown greeted her. “Oh, sweetie,” Brown said. “Are you doing okay?”

Behind her sunglasses, Annika began to cry. “I felt the presence of death,” she said.

I
n Houston, four days before Stefan's memorial, John Jordan and Officer Travis Miller drove to The Parklane and again took the elevator up to 18B for a last look at the scene before releasing it. They reviewed where everything happened, Jordan making mental notes for a time in the future when he'd describe it to a jury.