Kill the Ones You Love (8 page)

CHAPTER 16

Jessica was still the only one in their household making a decent living; but near the end of January, Gabe insisted that they suddenly leave his mother's house. His delusions about being poisoned were at full throttle. In the middle of the night, he convinced her that they were in danger. They packed up Kalea and went to Medford, Oregon, about 120 miles away. Neither Gabe nor Jessica told Robin or Bob that the family was going. Like so many things that Gabe was now doing, his impromptu trip didn't seem to have any plans about what they would do once they were actually there. Irrational movement was becoming just as commonplace for him as irrational thought.

Jessica recalled of this trip to Medford, “We drove to Medford because the night before I had been doing the dishes and I felt kinda sick. And I was doing the dishes and I could see them, but I couldn't see what else was around me. And Gabe looked over at me and said, ‘Do you feel sick?' And I said yes. And he said, ‘I feel it too. I think we need to leave.' And I said, ‘I totally agree.' So we jumped in the truck and took Kalea with us. And we stayed there in Medford.

“The next morning, we talked about it and we felt like Bob was trying to hurt us—to poison us with rat poison by putting it on the dishes. They ate out every day. They would come in to have toast and coffee in the morning, but then they would eat out somewhere. And they'd go out to eat every night. But we'd always fix food there at the house. And I don't know if Bob put it in the food or on the dishes. We had a feeling he was doing that. We both did.

“And Kalea was a lot more agitated than usual. And Gabe even commented that Kalea was fine all day long. But then I'd come home from work and then all of a sudden she wouldn't listen to anything. We were in Medford and we hadn't grabbed anything other than just ourselves and our clothes. And I had to sleep in my contacts because I didn't have my glasses, and that was kind of painful. I was hurting, and he knew it. He said that we needed to go back so that we could get some stuff to live on.”

The trip to Medford was just the beginning of their sojourn. They soon returned to Bob's house and quickly gathered some more belongings. Robin and Bob kept asking them what was wrong and where were they going. Neither one would say why the sudden rush or where they were going.

Jessica recalled, “We came back to the house and Gabe told me to go upstairs and start packing. And Kalea came with me, because she always comes with me when I'm around. And Gabe went to the Castle Room and started packing up his clothes and toothbrushes and that sort of stuff. And the whole time, I didn't know where we were going to go or what we were going to do.

“I knew that I had my job and they were expecting me to be there, and I would be letting Mary Ann down because tax season was coming up. And every day she had been saying, ‘You're not leaving, are you?' And every day I'd been telling her, ‘No, I'm not.' But my family's safety trumped that job.

“So we packed up as much as we could, and Robin and Bob were there and they just kept walking around and asking, ‘Why?' Bob usually doesn't talk to me except about the weather. And I didn't want to say to Robin, ‘Because I think your boyfriend's hurting us.' Because he was standing right there. So I just shrugged my shoulders and we took probably about forty-five minutes to an hour packing up.

“Robin didn't want us to go. But Gabe told me to drive, and he said, ‘Get in and don't look back.' And so we did. We didn't know where we were going or what we were going to do. But Gabe's grandmother always liked to see him and was excited about seeing Kalea. So we headed there.”

Perhaps to try and alleviate his growing paranoia and agitation, Gabe decided to visit Lynn Walsh, who resided in Silverton. Once Gabe and his family arrived, his grandmother was very distressed by his appearance and the way he acted. She said later, “My grandson was sick. He was under so much stress. There was fear and anguish in him, and there was concern for his mother. He wanted to bring her up to Silverton because he thought she was unsafe in Bandon.

“He was physically suffering from the condition he was in. He was very thin, and when I put food on his plate, he wouldn't eat it. I don't recall him eating anything the whole time he was with me. He began telling me things that weren't logical. I tried to counteract those things by telling him he wasn't making sense to me. He said he engaged in secret activities and that he had one more trip to make to China. I was very concerned for him—concerned for his mental health.

“He said his family had fragmented. He said that he had enjoyed family life when he was living with me. He thought if his mom could come up here to Silverton as well, we could all be a family again.”

Gabe also said he needed to protect his mother. He seemed to insinuate that she needed protection from Bob Kennelly. And yet, as time went on, the one person it seemed that she needed protection from was Gabe.

 

 

While in Silverton, Gabe showed up one day at the LDS church there with Jessica and Kalea. David Bastian, his old friend from missionary days in Australia, went to that church. David recalled, “It was a Sunday and Gabe came to church with his wife and daughter. There was a break between some Sunday classes and I invited him and his family over for dinner. I was excited to see a friend I hadn't seen for seven years or so.

“Everything seemed normal, although he was running a little late. When he showed up, he was wearing what he called his ‘thinking cap.' He sat down on the couch in the living room and we talked. It was soon apparent that Gabe was very different. I don't know what happened to him. It didn't feel right. He would get excited about something and his wife would reach over and kind of rub his back to calm him down.

“Then my wife and I thought it was kind of strange because he wanted to meet with me in private. I invited him into my office, and we just sat down on the floor. We talked a little bit, and at that point, Gabe started doing all the talking. He would be all excited one moment, and then angry, and then he'd have tears in his eyes.

“I looked at his face and I didn't recognize him at all when he was angry. He didn't look like the Gabe I had known. He was not consistently coherent. At one point, he looked over at some Pixar videos I had for my kids, and he said that the people who made those were prophets.

“He started telling me stories about being in black ops. He said he had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car so he could outrun the police if he had to. He wasn't very clear, but he said that he was working for some agency, but he couldn't go into detail. I took it all with a grain of salt, and just let him talk.

“He brought up about working for some company, and someone was stealing money from the agency and he had the inspiration to help the company crack the code of some numbers. It didn't make a lot of sense. He became more and more agitated while he was there, and that was about two and a half hours. He would take less and less breaks while talking.

“I didn't have much opportunity to change the direction of the conversation. I felt that he had fallen off the horse or was a couple short of a dozen. I was worried about him when he left and I had a hard time sleeping that night. I was stirring in my bed, and I told my wife, ‘Something's not right with Gabe.'”

 

 

Ray Wetzel, who knew Gabe through the LDS church in Silverton, had been an acquaintance for ten years. Wetzel later said that the Gabe he knew as a young man “was easygoing, polite and positive. He became a friend of my children and spent time at our house. He would come over for dinner and have interesting conversations. He always spoke about his mother with a lot of respect and love.”

That was not the case when Wetzel saw Gabe in 2010. Wetzel recalled, “Gabe was talking about Salt Lake City and that it was going to erupt in riots. Gabe said it was a disaster waiting to happen. You need to get your kids out of there. He based all this allegedly on his background as a police officer. I held up my hand and said, ‘Gabe, my kids are fine.' When I told him my kids were fine, he calmed down and changed the subject.”

The subject change concerned Gabe going overseas on a job. Wetzel recalled, “He said he had an opportunity to go to China and work on some virtual-reality program. I wondered why he wanted to do that. Then he started talking about his grandmother and her house. He thought it belonged to the family, but she was going to give it to someone else.

“Gabe was all over the place and very agitated. Right after he left, my wife and I turned to each other and wondered what it was all about. We wondered if he was on drugs or hallucinating. His manners were very unusual. He still had a way of expressing himself, but he'd lost a lot of weight, and his wife had lost a lot of weight also.”

 

 

After Silverton, Jessica recalled, “We started heading north on I-5 to see a friend of mine named Diane. So we drove up to Seattle to see Diane. We switched drivers several times, because I was getting so tired I would practically fall asleep at the wheel. Gabe pulled off at an exit, because Kalea would always get hungry before I did. He got off at a random exit and just started looking for a food place. And then, all of a sudden, we pulled over and he said, ‘Can you believe it!' And I'm like, ‘No, what are you talking about?' And the restaurant he stopped at was a McMenamins. And we'd just had dinner at a McMenamins restaurant the night before.”

Gabe seemed to attest showing up at this second McMenamins restaurant as his special relationship with God, and Jessica went along with this. And then Jessica really believed this when she saw a man there who had dark hair and was wearing a beret. She was sure she had seen the same man in the Portland area restaurant. It was like a sign for her.

Jessica said, “This man was in front of the restaurant smoking a cigar again. And Gabe went up and talked to him. And this man said a prayer for us and we left. We drove up to Seattle and got there during the daytime. It was near an Indian reservation or something. There was a big totem pole there.

“I knew that Diane worked, so I was going to wait until later to contact her. We walked around Pike Place and took Kalea on a boat. I think we went over to Whidbey Island. Just went on it, walked on and walked off. But Kalea was able to go on the ferry ride and thought it was really cool.

“I had served my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Seattle area, so I was semifamiliar with the area. I contacted Diane around four-ish and she was out of town. She was in Florida. She had been there for a few days and was going to be there another week and a half.

“I asked her if we could possibly stay at her apartment that night. She said she'd have to check with her roommate. So we were around there, waiting for her roommate. And we tried calling her a couple of times, but her roommate never got back to us. It was getting late, and I told Gabe I thought there were a couple of places we might stay at, up in Lynnwood. We got up there and went to a church. Guys were playing basketball there and we asked them for a directory and ended up calling some people I knew. They said we could come over and crash on the floor. They didn't have any extra beds, so we ended up staying there one night.

“We just slept in sleeping bags. They had a bunch of dogs, and Kalea ended up playing with the dogs. She was ecstatic about that. I tried calling Diane again, and asked her about wiring us some money. She said she was working and wouldn't be able to do that. So we decided to leave the area.”

 

 

It wasn't just leaving the area on a short trip. For whatever reason, Gabe now thought they should go to Southern California, where he had grown up. That was more than one thousand miles away.

Movement and traveling, for its own sake, seemed to be a part of the equation. He was seeking some kind of refuge, which did not exist. The refuge was from his personal demons, and there was no such place on earth where he could keep them quiet.

On the way to San Diego, Jessica recalled, “We stopped at a gas station and there was a mechanic shop with it. Gabe wanted to know if the guy wanted to buy the camper shell on the pickup. And the guy did and we got thirty bucks for it, and the pickup got a lot better gas mileage after that. The whole goal of the trip was to find a new place to live because of Bob. And we stayed at a place near the marina and it had two rooms. There were three beds and a fridge and a stove.”

They stayed in these motel rooms in Oceanside, near San Diego, until February 7. Apparently, Gabe was not able to raise any funds, as he'd hoped. And whatever relief Gabe got from being back in the place of his youth, it did not last very long.

While in San Diego, Gabe told Jessica that they needed to return to Bandon and have it out with Bob about trying to poison them. Later, Jessica would say it was a joint decision; but by now, she was going along with just about anything that Gabe said.

Jessica recalled later, “We woke up in the morning and Kalea was still asleep. We woke up early and Gabe said that we should go back and see Bob and Robin and talk to them. And I said, ‘Okay.' It was going to be a long drive, so we got going, got everything packed, showered and got Kalea up. We had breakfast and then got on the road.”

The long drive began once again, back north to Bandon. On the way, the pickup truck that Jessica's father had loaned them began having problems with the clutch. Up through California's Central Valley, through Sacramento, Redding and over the mountains into Oregon, they just hoped the pickup truck would last long enough to get them back to Bandon.

Despite the mechanical problems, the pickup truck made it all the way back up to Bandon on the morning of February 8. Jessica recalled, “We had missed a turn at Drain on I-5 and ended up having to go to Coos Bay. And so it took extra time and we drove through Coos Bay down to Bandon and then on 42 South. There was a little pull-off past Bob's driveway and that's where we pulled off. We got some rest there. It was just before the sun was coming up.”