Possessed (31 page)

Displaying an initial photo of Stefan on the autopsy table, Ross described what she saw, severe blunt-force trauma to
the face and head. “Anything created with an object,” Ross explained, defining blunt force. “It could be of small or large surface.”

“Would you consider the bottom of a heel to be a blunt object?” Jordan asked.

“Yes,” Ross answered, saying that the term “sharp object” was reserved for stab wounds from such items as knives or a shard of glass. The shoe's stiletto heel, she explained, had a small but a flat surface. A long list of the injuries Stefan suffered were then put before the jury, lacerations and contusions to the face, the head, the ears, the arms, the hands, and the back.

At multiple times, Carroll had characterized Stefan's injuries as superficial. Now Jordan asked the assistant M.E. if she agreed. “No,” Ross said. “They've penetrated the skin.” She'd counted twenty-five injuries, but there were undoubtedly more, because it was obvious that strikes fell on top of each other, masking the true number. In at least one region, the injuries were “all clustered,” making it impossible to count.

The photos were shocking and sad, Stefan's life ended, his remarkable intellect silenced, by a barrage of blows that left him swollen, bruised, and bleeding. L-shaped, U-shaped, and square puncture marks and lacerations resembling the shape of the stiletto heel pocking his head and face. “Some of them penetrate through the full thickness of the scalp,” Ross said. “Others aren't as deep, but they do penetrate the skin.”

A close-up of one wound on the courtroom monitors, Ross testified that these were the types of injuries she would expect from being hit with the heel of the size 9 stiletto. During the attack, the physician described the effects on Stefan's body. As his blood pressure rose, adrenaline flooded his system, and his heart raced. While one injury would have caused some bleeding, such extensive injuries caused significant blood loss. Some blows were so powerful, the lacerations exposed sections of skull.

“The most damaging injuries were to the head,” Ross
said, after Jordan asked about the wounds on Andersson's arms and hands, which she, too, characterized as defensive.

On the interior muscles of the neck, Ross found hemorrhaging. “Can you rule out with medical certainty that there was some strangulation in this case?” Jordan asked.

“No, I cannot.”

Could the abrasions on Stefan's back have been inflicted while he was attempting to flee? Yes, said the physician. And they, too, appeared to have been the result of being beaten with the stiletto heel. In addition, bruising around his right shoulder blades could have been caused by hitting the wall, perhaps as he fell.

Finally, Jordan asked what the effect might have been if Ana, as he'd portrayed, straddled Stefan, sitting on his chest. “That could make it difficult to breathe,” Ross said. Stefan could have tried to get up, while Trujillo forced him down, causing even more stress, raising his blood pressure and releasing more adrenaline. One finding seemed to corroborate that, internal bruising around Stefan's ribs. The effect could have been, according to the physician, “an arrhythmia or abnormal heart rate that could lead to sudden death.”

In the end, it appeared Jack Carroll could have been right; perhaps the wounds to the head, at least initially before Stefan bled out, while horrifying were somewhat superficial. But did that matter if the injuries pushed Stefan into some kind of catastrophic event, either massive blood loss or a heart attack, or a combination of both that ultimately caused his demise?

The horror of what Stefan Andersson endured was demonstrated by the physician as she assumed the position she believed, based on the location of his injuries, he was in during the attack, on his back, his face turned to the right, his hands in front of him in a desperate bid to fend off the blows.

Using a PowerPoint, Ross illustrated for jurors that the measurement and shape of the heel matched the wounds on Stefan's face and head. To fully explain why the injuries
were deadly, she also displayed an X-ray of the shoe, revealing the metal support that began in the arch and extended into the heel, ending in a thin five-and-a-half-inch rod.

There seemed no doubt that the shoe's heel matched the medical examiner's gruesome photos of the wounds, and from the defense table, Jack Carroll rose, and said, “Your Honor, I'll stipulate to the heel causing the wounds.”

Since Ross had a medical degree, Jordan also asked her to address issues the defense raised with Officer Miller. Showing Ross Ana's booking photo, he asked specifically about one injury Carroll said she suffered in the altercation, a black eye. “Would you expect to see some kind of visualization in this photo?”

Ross said she would expect to see swelling or discoloration of the skin, and that she saw neither. Another injury Carroll mentioned was to Trujillo's wrist. When shown a photo of that area, Ross, again, said she saw nothing more than what could have been a shadow. “But we'll agree it's not significant?” Jordan asked.

“It's a small contusion, if it's real,” the doctor answered.

Other photos produced similar responses from Ross, who said she couldn't tell from the photos if there were slight discolorations or if what the defense claimed were injuries were merely shadows. If she could have seen what Carroll talked about, Ross also said she wouldn't have been able to tell the age of the wound without examining it in person.

Certainly there were no bruises or injuries on Ana similar to the defensive wounds on Stefan's arms. At that juncture, Jordan brought home one more point, that Stefan's death wasn't mercifully quick. Based on the injuries, Dr. Ross said, “Dr. Andersson was alive for a significant portion of the incident to receive those injuries in those defensive positions.”

Showing the physician photos from Ana's hospital examination on the day after her fight with Chanda Ellison, the prosecutor displayed one of a severe bruise at the base of the chin and asked if such an injury would disappear in two
weeks. The doctor replied that discoloration could have remained. The same could have been true, Ross said, of other bruises documented in the photos from the Ellison fight, suggesting that perhaps those injuries were the ones the jail nurse saw and recorded.

Finally, Jordan turned to another matter introduced earlier, testimony about the toxicology screen on Stefan's body, asking why Ross requested more than the usual tests. She explained it was because she found it odd that there was no evidence that Stefan fought back. When she checked for the date-rape drug and others, she wanted to see if Stefan had been drugged and incapacitated. She found no such indication.

In the end, although she couldn't rule out a heart event or suffocation, what Dr. Ross said she believed was that the most likely cause of Stefan Andersson's death was blood loss from the maze of puncture wounds, abrasions, and cuts caused by blunt-force trauma to the head.

“Is the heel a blunt object capable of causing serious bodily injury or death?” Jordan asked.

“It is,” Ross answered.

Before Jack Carroll took over questioning the assistant ME, Jordan called for a bench conference to discuss the defense attorney's questioning of witnesses about Stefan's medications in which he suggested the drugs were treatments for bipolar disease and schizophrenia. “It's irrelevant,” the prosecutor told the judge. “Stefan Andersson wasn't schizophrenic. He had a mood disorder. He was depressed, and that's why he had the medication.”

Carroll objected, and the judge issued a ruling, that the defense attorney, while not being able to delve further, could ask what diseases the drugs could be used to treat.

All didn't start out well for Carroll with his questioning, however. First, he asked Dr. Ross if EMS had used an EKG on Stefan, and she said she'd seen no evidence they had. But when he inquired about the most effective way to determine if
a heart was beating, Ross didn't say an EKG but rather what the paramedics on the scene had said they'd done, checking for a pulse.

Things only got worse when Carroll asked if the wounds to Stefan's scalp could be described as superficial. “The majority of the wounds to the scalp were fatal,” the pathologist answered. “They contributed to his death.”

Renewing his self-defense argument, Carroll then asked repeatedly if the clumps of Stefan's white hair found on the couch and the floor could have been evidence of a fight in which Ana grabbed his hair to fend him off when he attacked her. “That is possible,” the doctor said, as Carroll brought home one of his primary points.

“Based on your autopsy, do you know who the first aggressor was back on June 9, 2013?” Carroll asked.

“No, I don't,” the physician answered.

“Would it be possible that Ana Trujillo was striking Dr. Andersson's arms and his head defending herself?”

“It's possible,” Ross said.

Yet when Carroll asked if it couldn't take days for a bruise to develop—suggesting that perhaps that was why his client's injuries weren't visible on the photos taken at the time of her arrest—the physician contradicted him, saying that signs of the contusion would become visible if not in minutes within hours.

The rapid-fire questioning continued, with Carroll repeating arguments he'd used on prior witnesses, including asking about ecstasy in the dead scientist's body. No, Ross said, they hadn't found any indication of the drug. The only drug had been an antidepressant, one Andersson had a prescription for, and it was within the prescribed levels.

“Was it possible Stefan Andersson was alive eighteen minutes after Ana Trujillo called 9-1-1?” Carroll asked, quoting the length of time between her initial call and EMS's arrival on the scene.

“It's possible,” she said. But then she also testified that
according to the EMS records, “When they arrived on the scene, he was pulseless, and they don't [attempt to] resuscitate a person that is pulseless.”

It had been a tense cross-examination, and when it ended, John Jordan said: “The state rests.”

Later that day, Jordan and Carroll talked for a few minutes. “I think I've got you, John,” Carroll said, smiling. “I think it's going really well for us.”

As he walked away, Jordan wondered if they were watching the same trial. He'd felt that the prosecution case was strong, and that the jury would see through the defense arguments. Could he be missing something? Something that Jack Carroll saw in the jury?

A
s he began the defense portion of the trial, Jack Carroll felt good about the way he'd handled the prosecution's witnesses. As Carroll saw it, he was putting on a multipronged attack. The first goal was to draw an opposing picture of the deceased. Instead of a respected scientist, Carroll depicted Stefan the way his client described her dead lover, as a lonely, abusive drunk.

The tall, lean Texan with the bushy mustache and the carefully cut suit introduced his first witness, Yolanda Ruiz, another of the staff at the Hermann Park Grill. “He was in there all the time,” said Ruiz, who'd worked at the golf course for more than a decade. Arriving around eleven most days, Stefan often stayed until six or so in the evening. While others said he had a glass of wine every hour or two, which totaled up to something more than a bottle a day, Ruiz estimated that he drank up to three bottles. Yet she said she'd never seen Stefan drunk.

On cross-exam, Jordan went for the core of his own case. Yes, he suggested, perhaps Stefan had a problem with alcohol, but that didn't mean that he was violent. “Was he always nice to you?” the prosecutor asked. Ruiz said the dead man was a gentleman, never a sloppy drunk or belligerent, as were some of her other customers.

Another aspect of Carroll's strategy was his theory that Stefan was too quickly declared dead. Toward that end, in quick succession, he called four EMTs who had been
on the scene. To a man, they said Stefan was dead when they entered the apartment. One, David Davila, repeated what the prosecution witness had said, that lifesaving measures weren't initiated because the first EMTs on the scene checked Stefan's carotid and femoral arteries and found no pulse. Carroll had questioned whether body temperature could be assessed by touch while wearing gloves, but Davila volunteered that it could, and that Andersson's body was already cooling, indicating he'd been dead for some time.

While those first witnesses might have been disappointing, Carroll appeared resolute, as he attempted to chip away at the prosecutors' depiction of the events surrounding Stefan's death. High on the list were assertions that he never fought back. As evidence, Jordan had presented testimony that first responders saw no wounds on Ana from the altercation.

To counter those claims, Carroll called Chidi Iwueke, a registered nurse who worked in the jail's mental health unit, where Ana was housed. When asked how Ana appeared two days after her arrest, Iwueke said she had a knot on the back of her head and bruises on her upper and lower torso, thighs, knuckles, cheeks, eyelids, chin, buttocks, hands, and legs, and a healing bite mark on her right middle finger. “I was in a fight with my fiancé,” Trujillo told her.

“Would the bruises you made note of be from a horrific fight?” Carroll asked.

“I don't know, sir,” the RN answered.

The prosecutors had been expecting this testimony, and as they had when Carroll raised the subject with prior witnesses, they were eager to offer another explanation. On cross-exam, John Jordan mentioned that Iwueke had noted in her report that Ana, who claimed an injured knee, walked with a steady gait, not limping. As to the bruises, he suggested they predated the night Stefan died. “Are you aware that Ana Trujillo was treated at Park Plaza Hospital two weeks before the killing?” he asked.

The witness said she wasn't, and Jordan handed her a
copy of Ana's hospital records, asking Iwueke to read out loud the list of injuries Ana sustained in her fight with Chanda Ellison. As Iwueke did, it quickly became clear that the locations of the contusions from that fight were similar to those seen by Iwueke in the jail. As an example, Jordan displayed a photo taken after the Ellison fight of Trujillo's horribly bruised and swollen chin. “That's pretty significant, right?” he asked.

The bruise on Trujillo's chin

“I see a bruise there,” said the RN.

“Would you agree with me that two weeks later, when in the jail, she could still have some signs of that bruise under her chin?”

Iwueke nodded. “It's possible.”

The same was plausible for the other injuries Iwueke saw on Ana, Jordan suggested. That argument seemed bolstered when it came to the contusion on the back of Trujillo's head, since a jail doctor had noted on his report that Ana told him not that it occurred in the fight with Stefan, but two weeks earlier, during the fight with Chanda Ellison and James Wells. From one point to the next, Jordan noted discrepancies in Ana's accounts. In October, three months after she'd entered the jail, for instance, she complained she had a wound in her scalp the night she was booked, and that it had been ignored. “Did you see a gash in her head?” Jordan asked

“I don't recall,” the nurse answered.

Methodically, Jordan worked his way through Ana's jail medical records, putting before the jury tidbits they might
not have known had Carroll not entered them into evidence. One piece was particularly interesting; while in jail, Ana complained that her own mother didn't trust her. Yet there were passages damaging to the prosecution, as well, including one where Trujillo described Stefan as a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

T
he trial continued, and throughout that day a debate ensued in conferences with the judge regarding a demonstration the defense had planned. At times, John Jordan threatened to object, based on its relevancy and the expertise of the witness involved, but in the end, he entered no opposition, and on the afternoon of the defense's first full day, Jack Carroll called to the stand a dark-haired, muscular, thirty-nine-year-old martial arts expert named Chris Martinez, a man Carroll knew from a downtown Houston gym.

“Are you here to demonstrate in order to assist the jury in understanding what happened to Ana Trujillo on June 9, 2013?” the defense attorney asked his witness.

“Yes,” Martinez answered.

With that, a man Carroll brought in as a stand-in for Ana, a retired HPD homicide investigator named Allen Northcutt, walked to the front. In a start-and-stop demonstration, during which Jordan entered objection after objection, Martinez and Northcutt acted out how Carroll speculated the fight unfolded. What he particularly wanted jurors to see was a wrestling hold Martinez put on Northcutt's leg, which put Martinez's body weight against Northcutt's knee.

“Is that painful?” Carroll asked Northcutt, standing in for Trujillo.

“Yes,” he answered.

The judge struck the testimony after Jordan objected, because Northcutt wasn't sworn in as a witness. But the jurors had heard it. Would they believe Stefan had Ana in such a hold, inflicting pain and giving her no option other than to fight back?

On cross-exam, Jordan had Martinez detail his
credentials, practicing in martial arts for three decades, since the age of nine. “You're not a fifty-nine-year-old college professor, are you?” Jordan asked pointedly. “. . . Would you agree with me that Stefan Andersson was not in the same physical condition as you?”

“Correct,” he said. In fact, Stefan had never taken any martial arts training. On further questioning, Martinez agreed with Jordan that the moves he'd demonstrated were complicated, and it was unlikely that most people knew them.

When Martinez said he'd only been asked to show what was possible, Jordan responded by asking, “Just because something is possible doesn't make it reasonable, right?” The martial arts expert agreed.

Then, to dissect how the demonstration differed from Ana's account of how Stefan died, Jordan played a portion of her police interrogation, stopping after Trujillo mimicked what she said Stefan told her that final evening, that he would never beat her. Jordan asked if that was a strange thing to say if Andersson did intend to be physically violent with Trujillo. “No,” Martinez said. “It doesn't seem logical, but it could be deceptive.”

Yet as they continued through Trujillo's interrogation, and she talked not of any wrestling hold but said Stefan held her in a bear hug, Martinez admitted that the description Ana gave of the fight didn't match what he demonstrated to the jury. “Very different than what y'all showed . . . ?” Jordan asked.

“Right,” Martinez confirmed.

Effectively using the defense witness as his own, Jordan turned the testimony to what Trujillo described in the interview, that she got on top of the aging professor and pounded him with her shoe. When she said Andersson growled, Martinez agreed that what Trujillo heard could have been a death rattle, stressed breathing as Stefan's body shut down and saliva accumulated in his throat and lungs. Then Jordan pointedly asked what the biggest problem was with
Martinez's demonstration, and after some prodding, he said, “The toehold.”

In her long, circuitous interview with police, Trujillo had never claimed Stefan cinched her legs into a painful hold. “That was the whole demonstration about where she possibly was in fear of serious bodily injury or death, because of having this complex leg hold on her, right?” Jordan asked. Martinez agreed, then the lead prosecutor on the case continued, “And she never mentioned anything about that on the video, right?”

“Correct,” Martinez answered.

After showing the witness photos of the clumps of Stefan Andersson's hair on the couch and floor, Jordan asked if that would have been painful, and Martinez agreed that it would. “We have where possibly the encounter begins, and the only evidence of anybody's having any pain whatsoever in this case is Stefan Andersson, right?” Jordan asked.

Martinez concurred: “By the hair-pulling. Yes.”

On point after point, Martinez agreed with Jordan. Yes, it was true that many men might find it difficult to hit a woman and rather try to contain them. And if they attempted to hold them, a woman could have access to one thing, a man's hair.

In front of the jury, Jordan homed in on Carroll's depiction of what had happened the night of the killing, principally that Stefan held Ana in a leglock. Pointing out that in the crime-scene photos, Stefan's legs are extended straight, he asked Martinez, “Wouldn't you expect that if in the moments before all this happened, like you just showed, he's in some sort of a jujitsu-championship wrestling crazy way hold . . . his legs would be somewhat to the side, or off to the side?”

Looking perplexed by the possibilities, Martinez answered, “Man, if you're getting hit in the head with something, there is no telling what could happen. How you land. How you fall. I don't know.”

Point by point, Jordan took Martinez through the prosecution's scenario of the events, based on Duncan's
assessment of the blood evidence. And more often than not, the defense witness agreed.

Perhaps the most damaging information Jordan put before the jury with Martinez on the stand was that the shoe she'd used probably wasn't an arm's length from the body, as she'd said, but on the other side of the hallway, with its partner shoe and Stefan's loafers. Why, after all, would she remove one five-and-a-half-inch heel while continuing to wear the other to walk around the apartment?

On redirect, it seemed that Jack Carroll was in the prickly position of having to repair the damage by pointing out that his witness was neither a blood nor a crime-scene expert, and that he'd spent no more than minutes preparing the demonstration. This time, rather than use Northcutt to represent Ana, Carroll stepped in to play her part, as he again put Martinez through a demonstration of his theory of how Ana, fighting back, had been forced to strike out at Stefan. The jurors were attentive, some standing up to watch. While seated at the defense table, Ana sat up pin straight and smiled, as if entertained by the spectacle in the courtroom.

As he had when he'd first taken the stand, Martinez agreed again with Carroll's points, but then sounded less certain when John Jordan questioned him. In the end, both sides pulled at the witness, suggesting scenarios, and caught in the middle on the witness stand, at times Martinez agreed with both.

A
n attractive, bright-eyed woman with long, highlighted, dark blond hair and a pleasant smile, Lee Ann Grossberg was a former Harris County assistant medical examiner who ran her own Houston consulting firm. Since 2001, she'd been a forensic pathologist for hire, one who assessed cases and delivered her opinions in court. With Martinez, Carroll had attempted to bring home his self-defense theory, although perhaps to mixed results. With Grossberg, the defense attorney had another aspect of his case to explore: the cause of Stefan Andersson's death.

While the assistant ME who'd performed the autopsy ruled the cause of death as blunt-force trauma and said that since Stefan was pulseless he couldn't be resuscitated, Carroll consistently presented a differing argument, that Andersson might have met his demise because of insufficient medical care. Dr. Grossberg agreed, saying what stood out when she read the EMS report was that, “I found it surprising that a defibrillator patch was not applied to Mr. Andersson's body to look for any electrical activity in the heart.”