Kill the Ones You Love (7 page)

“He talked about a pre-mortal existence and he had been a dragon rider. Whether he was fantasizing or not, I'm not sure. But he said we had been together in the pre-mortal life and I had been his queen. Together with an army of Heaven, we had expelled Satan and his hosts from Heaven.

“He then told me he had done some things in this life that he wasn't proud of. I told him we can be forgiven. Through repentance he could go forward and live a good life.

“He was very excited when he told me this. I kind of went along with him, and I asked what color dragon he rode. He said it was blue, so I asked him what color mine was, and he said he didn't know.

“He was very serious about what he said. Gabe told me that I was his queen, and he knelt before me with tears in his eyes. He said that he would do anything for me. Then he said, ‘Please, just tell me what to do.'

“Certainly, I thought that Gabe was under some kind of distress. So I reiterated that he should ask for repentance and lead a good life in the future. To this, he said that he liked coming over and talking to me. It made him feel calmer.

“He told me I needed to leave Bandon because it was going to become a dangerous place. It was an apocalyptic end-of-time kind of thing. I needed to leave the area to be out of harm's way. I thought a lot of what he was saying was gibberish. It was very random and hard to follow.

“This whole visit lasted about three hours. When he left, he seemed to be much calmer. He gave me a big hug and said good-bye. When he left, I thought he had an emotional breakdown. I was concerned for his well-being.”

Jesse McCoy saw Gabe around this time and said later, “I saw him at Mom's house and he was drinking a lot. He was more than just drinking—he was belligerent drinking. He would drink a whole bottle of hard liquor at one time and get drunk. He was also openly using marijuana, even in front of Jessica. He did not give me a reason why he was doing these things.

“He was also addicted to video games. When I left there, he would call me on the phone and say that he was spending endless hours playing them. He even called up once and said that he had special powers from God. It was very alarming to me.”

Boozing, smoking dope, addicted to video games, Gabe's tenuous grip upon reality was becoming frayed to the breaking point. He'd always had a hard time telling fantasy from reality. Now the two had blended as one in a toxic mix of anxiety, grandiosity and paranoia.

Gabe had been playing Perfect World constantly on the computer in 2009; but by that point, his real world was anything but perfect.

CHAPTER 14

To what depths Gabe had descended into paranoia can be ascertained by his remarks to his wife in January 2010. He began telling her that Bob Kennelly was trying to poison them. Gabe said that Bob was putting rat poison in their food and was also wiping it on their plates.

By this point, Gabe was so delusional that he later claimed that he absolutely knew he was being poisoned. He said he purposefully imbibed the rat poison, knowing that it would kill an ordinary person, but that he was
no ordinary person.
According to Gabe, because of his extraordinary powers granted by God, he was able to heal himself.

Around that same time, Dillon Hogan, Bob Kennelly's son-in-law, had dinner with Robert and Robin at their house. Robin told Dillon how Gabe was claiming that he could run through the trees of the forest at night, at full speed, and see God and hear His voice. Gabe claimed he never hit a tree or stump because God was guiding him. Robin was so alarmed by this that she said she thought that Gabe was psychotic now.

James Anstey was equally alarmed. He later said, “He was no longer the Gabe I knew. He thought he was some kind of superhero. He spoke of scams in Las Vegas and all kinds of crazy things. He was totally irrational. Something inside of him had broken.”

 

 

Around that same time, Gabe went to visit his old boss David Grover at his restaurant the Kozy Kitchen, in North Bend. Grover recalled, “Gabe stopped by the restaurant with his wife and daughter. In the beginning, he was very cordial, as he always had been. He was a lot thinner than I remember him being.

“As the conversation went on, he told me he knew I was a good person, and he said he knew that because of my smile. He went on to talk about some kind of mission he was on. He said that if there were any people who were giving me problems, he would help me out on that. He added that he was on some kind of military mission and there were other people in the area helping him out. It was like secret agent stuff, black ops kind of things.

“He had always been honest with me in the past, so it was hard to discount these stories, but it was all very odd. I hadn't seen him in six or seven years and I asked him what he was doing back in town. Then I said to him, ‘Oh, right. Your mom lives around here.'

“He said he wasn't seeing her or her boyfriend. ‘They're bad people! I love my mom very much, but I can't be around her.'”

 

 

In January 2010, Gabe and Judy Ward, who lived in Virginia, met each other in a Skype chat room. That was the first time she had seen his face. She recalled, “On Skype, we never talked about his real life. It was all about either the game or working on a website and getting it up and running. He just seemed like a caring person.”

Around that same time, Gabe began going over to his stepsister Isabelle's house more often. Now married, she and her husband, Robert Hayden, lived in the Bandon area. Isabelle recalled, “Gabe began stopping by once a week. I started noticing there was a big change in him. It was the way he would talk and preach to us. His conversations were more intense and his stories were more wild.

“He started talking about God giving him missions. He was preaching about a lot of things he could do. He said he was in special operations—secret agent stuff. It got progressively worse. It got to where I didn't even want to come to the door when he showed up. But I'd open the door because it was Gabe.

“He would just ramble on and on, and I couldn't follow what he was saying. I would just nod my head. I felt like he was trying to recruit us for whatever trip he was on. He acted like he was some kind of prophet. His conversations were so out there, I would just say, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh.' But I really didn't understand what he was talking about.”

Isabelle's husband, Robert, remembered, “Gabe came over to visit a lot and his demeanor had changed. When I first met him, we had all sat around a table playing cards and drank a few beers. This had been over James Anstey's house. Gabe and I sat in a hot tub for a short time, and I thought he was hip and cool.

“By late 2009, he was generally panicky and stressy. I wouldn't say ‘paranoid,' but ‘anxiety' was a big word for him. He lost a lot of weight. He started talking about religion a lot and secret odd jobs for the government black ops.

“He said he was getting phone calls all the time to do missions. I had some concerns about these stories. I didn't really understand why he was telling me these things. It was like he wanted us to join his group or something.

“With religion, he said he would wake up in the morning and receive his orders from Him. I asked him who ‘Him' was, and he pointed straight up at the sky. So I took it to mean God. A lot of the conversations were his philosophy about how the world should be. It seemed like he was trying to convert us.”

Gabe was becoming very worrisome to all of his family members. His maternal aunt, Laurel Carmack, even wrote down,
Gabe is ill and has delusions about himself. He views himself as a prophet.

And Gabe's maternal grandmother was alarmed by his long, rambling letters to her. They made no sense at all. She feared he had become a religious zealot and conspiracy kook.

Gabe also called Jesse on the phone and started saying he was a prophet of God. His half brother recounted, “He believed God had given him the power to heal and to see the future. In regard to the future, he began saying Mom was not in a good place. And he started giving off a sense of how he had been wronged in his early life by everyone around him. He still loved Mom then, but he felt like she had abandoned him with Danny when he was young.

“He talked a lot about getting her away from Bob Kennelly. He was so manic. I would listen to him talk on the phone and I couldn't get a word in. I could only follow bits and pieces of what he was saying. None of it made a whole lot of sense, but I would listen, anyway. Many of the conversations had religious overtones. In January, he said he was on a special mission to put all of our family together again.”

More than anything, Gabe seemed to be reaching out for a golden past that may never have existed in his life. It was a past where his mom, Jesse and Gabe's grandmother could all be together once again without all of the troubles of the outside world closing in. It was a world that didn't include the chaotic years of his youth, nor did it contain all of the frustrations and false starts in the plans he had dreamt of in his twenties.

 

 

A person who saw Gabe around this time was Mike Woods, the man who had trained him at the BMW dealership in Portland and had become friends with him. Woods related, “Gabe stopped in the shop one day in early 2010. He was in the area and said he had to go back down to Coquille soon. He was staying in a nice hotel I knew around here, so I went there and spent some time with him.

“He was a totally different person. He was telling stories about military black ops. He said he was in some kind of group that he would do these deeds for—some kind of group with the government. He had a bunch of marijuana with him, and he was smoking pot and drinking beer. It wasn't the Gabe I knew.”

When Woods left Gabe's presence, he said, “I was confused about this whole thing. I didn't understand how he had become that way. When he was the Gabe I knew, he was truthful and honest. I knew that he had been in ROTC, but this was like out of the movies. He still did have some positive qualities, but he seemed troubled. His speech didn't flow like it used to. It was like he was struggling.”

In fact, Gabe was struggling a lot, just to maintain even the approximation of a normal life. Whenever Robin got on the phone with Jesse, she would tell him about just how worried she was about Gabe. Gabe's stories just kept getting wilder and wilder, and he was more sullen and at odds with Bob all the time. Robin didn't know where all this was headed, but she felt that Gabe needed help.

CHAPTER 15

The local church that Gabe attended should have been a refuge for him and his family. But Gabe was making more and more outlandish comments to people there all the time. These comments would just seem to come out of left field.

Gabe's remarks to Michael Stockford, LDS branch president in Bandon, took the cake. Stockford had asked Gabe to meet with him because his recent comments were making people in the congregation very uncomfortable. While listening to this, Gabe paced up and down and rambled about things that made no sense to Stockford. Finally the LDS leader asked him to leave.

Gabe was only gone a few minutes, and then returned, claiming, “I am Jesus Christ! There is evil that needs to be taken care of! I can heal people. I can see into the future.”

Gabe was asked to leave once more, which he did.

In late January, Gabe phoned Pamela Hansen. She recalled, “He had some issues with the local leadership in the church. He said they had not handled some things in the correct way. He said I shouldn't go to church in Bandon anymore.

“When I defended our church leadership, he got very agitated. His thoughts were random and incoherent. It was very hard to follow. Then he said I might not see him for a long time. He said there were enemies looking for him and it had something to do with when he worked in Las Vegas. There was something about a ring of prostitutes. It was not clear. But he did say I would see him again.”

Also in January, Robin's old live-in boyfriend, John Lindgren, came by Bob Kennelly's property to make a bid on some work that needed to be done. Gabe had always liked John. John recalled later, “I got a call to come out to Flower Hill to make a bid on a drywall job on Bob Kennelly's house. I went out and measured it and noticed that Gabe was not the same old Gabe I had known. He was bouncing on his heels and real agitated.

“I shook his hand and gave him a hug and we talked for a little while. He asked, if I got the job, if he could help me, and I said, ‘You bet!'”

While he was there, John noticed that there was real tension between Gabe and Bob Kennelly. They didn't speak to each other at all. In fact, they were practically glaring at each other. John wasn't sure what all this was about, but he definitely felt something was wrong.

On top of his troubles with the local branch of the LDS Church, Gabe kept upsetting Isabelle and her husband, Robert. His stepsister recounted, “I hadn't talked to Robin for a while and I wanted to go over and give Robin some photos. And Gabe told me, ‘No, just leave her alone.' I didn't know why he told me that. It just sounded like she and Bob needed their space.”

Robert Hayden knew that Gabe was smoking marijuana. One day, Gabe told him a story about marijuana and Idaho. Robert recalled, “He said that when he was a sheriff's deputy, he would pull people over, jot it down that they had already been pulled over and then let them go. That way, they could transport marijuana through the state without being pulled over again. It was basically that he was helping people run dope through the state of Idaho.”

After that, Isabelle and her husband invited Gabe, Jessica and Kalea over for a spaghetti dinner at their house. It was a meal they would never forget. Isabelle recalled, “Gabe just sat there and didn't eat anything. He was a lot scruffier and a lot skinnier than he used to be. He was wearing more raggedy clothes.”

Robert remembered this visit: “The spaghetti dinner was the peak of his preaching to us. After dinner, Gabe sat on the couch with me talking about different opportunities. It was basically about opportunities in ways to make a lot of money fast, but he wasn't specific about how the money would be made.

“It was kind of scary for us. We'd ask how it was supposed to happen, but all he would answer was ‘You can have it, if you want it.' Stuff like ‘One hundred twenty thousand dollars by tomorrow morning.' He kept saying, ‘You can have it, if you want it,' and then it was very strange. Jessica said the same thing, and so did Kalea.

“While sitting on the couch, he started tearing up and said, ‘I have to stay on this path. And if I don't stay on this path, I'm gonna fuckin' break! And it will all be over!'

“And then he added, ‘Robbie, do you ever get the feeling that you could reach over and just rip somebody's throat out on the spur of the moment? Do you think you could ever lose control like that?'

“I said I didn't know. And I looked over at my wife, like
what's going on here?
”

Gabe's emotions were all over the place that evening, and so were his rants. When he and his family finally left, Robert turned to his wife and said, “He's crazy!”

 

 

As if the night of the spaghetti dinner wasn't strange enough, Gabe showed up at Robert and Isabelle's home on another night, unannounced, between eleven and midnight. Robert Hayden noted later, “It was just out of the blue. We were already in bed, and Gabe came over just to give our daughter a little green scrunchy for her hair.”

A few nights later, Gabe came over to their house very late to borrow a didgeridoo (an Australian Aboriginal musical instrument). Robert noted, “Once again, I could hardly make sense of anything that Gabe was saying. I did know that two of Bob Kennelly's wives had died, even though they were relatively young. (It may have actually been one wife, but Gabe kept saying there were two deceased ex-wives) . Gabe and I had talked about how weird that was. Among the people I knew, there was some speculation about whether those had been natural causes. I know that Gabe was worried about something bad happening to his mom. He did say that he did not approve of Bob, and he didn't think Bob was a good fit for his mom.”