Killer Women (14 page)

Inside the house, Hamlin found himself facing his workmate Paul Jenkins walking down the hallway with a pistol in his hand. They said nothing. But they both knew precisely what had happened. No words were needed.

Hamlin headed straight for the main bedroom. The sight that greeted him was horrendous: Jerry O’Neill, the heavy-set sex pervert who had dominated everyone throughout his life, was now quivering in the throes of death. A huge, gaping bullet wound in his head. Blood gushing down his
face in torrents. His mouth contorted in shock and agony. His eyelids just managing to flicker during the last few moments of life.

Hamlin stared down at his boss in astonishment. His stomach lurched. One last look at the bloody mess of a man lying there right in front of him was enough. He rushed out into the hallway and started throwing up. Each time he closed his eyes in pain, he could see Jerry O’Neill there, shot to death. A bloody pulp.

‘I gotta go.’

Hamlin was terrified he might be next. His only response was to try and get out of that house of death as quickly as possible. But Paul Jenkins had other ideas.

‘You’re not goin’ nowhere. You gotta help me move him.’

The very thought of going back into that bedroom filled him with fear. The idea of seeing Jerry O’Neill lying there was an awful prospect. But Paul Jenkins was insistent. He grabbed his workmate by the arm and dragged him back into the bedroom. Together they wrapped the corpse in the very quilts that Jerry O’Neill used to collapse on when he was too drunk to even get undressed. Then, using rope to tie up each end, they carried the body out to Jerry O’Neill’s own van. Neither of them noticed the trail of blood that marked their route from the bedroom out into the yard.

‘Where the hell are we goin’ to take him?’

It was a perfectly reasonable question, considering the circumstances. Bereaved widow Maxine just did not know the answer to Paul Jenkins’s question. She had not even thought about that aspect of their crime. She had just wanted her husband dead. Who cared about where to dump his body?

But it was a crucial point. Paul Jenkins knew that the only way they stood a chance of getting away with the murder was if they found the perfect hiding place for the corpse. Then he remembered some of the creeks and canyons in Stone County, where he had been brought up as a boy. Some of those areas were so isolated that no one would ever find it.

‘I know some good places. Let’s go.’

So, together, the hired hand and his mistress set off on a wild trek upstate hundreds of miles to find the perfect spot to dump her dead husband.

They hardly spoke during the night. She kept reassuring herself that Jerry O’Neill had deserved to die. She remembered all the sexual perversion, the drunkenness, the assaults. She had to keep convincing herself she had done the right thing. As she snuggled up alongside Paul Jenkins while he drove through the driving rain, she felt relieved. At last her hellish marriage was over. She could start a new life with Paul. It had to be better than the one she had just left behind.

‘This is perfect. Let’s stop and take a look.’

Maxine O’Neill was jolted from her reassuring fantasies by Jenkins’s assertion that they might have finally found the perfect resting place for Jerry O’Neill.

At night the area looked awesome. A huge cliff dipping down into a valley that probably could have accommodated the whole of South-East England. As Paul Jenkins looked out over the cliff edge, he felt the cold breeze blowing against his face. He turned to Maxine and held her in his arms as they considered how best to hide the body.

They just stood there listening to the whistling wind for a while. Reality had taken a back seat at that moment. They were in the middle of nowhere – literally. Maxine felt more secure than she would have thought possible a few months previously.

After a while, they both snapped out of their romantic trance and decided to get on with the job in hand. By the time they pulled the duvet-covered body out of the van, blood had seeped right through in huge dark stains and the smell was very pungent. It was a sickly, sweet aroma – like a joint of meat that’s been left out in the sun for a day.

They turned away and walked back to the van the moment after they had dropped the body off the edge of the cliff. If they had waited to watch its descent, they would have seen that it only fell about
fifty feet before getting caught on a ledge that looked out on to the valley below.

On the drive back home, Maxine even announced that she thought her husband was very lucky to have found his final resting place in such a picturesque spot.

‘I would have been more than happy to end my days there. It was beautiful.’

Paul Jenkins listened intently to his new love. It seemed a very strange thing to say.

Back at the house next morning, they quickly cleaned up the mess left behind by the bloody remains of Jerry O’Neill. Maxine even managed to remove the bloodstains from the carpet.

Finally, there was one last crucial piece of evidence that had to be disposed of – the mattress on which Maxine’s husband had bled to death after being shot.

It was far too big to hide, so the couple struggled through the house with it and laid it on a bonfire in the back garden and watched it burn. Maxine realised it was the last thing around that linked them to the death of her husband.

Just to round things off, she ordered a new mattress to be delivered that very same day. By seven o’clock that evening Maxine O’Neill and Paul Jenkins had already sealed their love for one another on the same bed where Jerry O’Neill had been shot just twenty-four hours earlier.

Within days, Maxine announced to her friends and
relatives, with genuine relief, that she had given her husband $20,000 to ‘drop off the face of the earth’. She told all who asked that Jerry O’Neill was in Louisiana.

And when Sheriff David Baker of Pike County Police came knocking on her door to investigate rumours that were wildly circulating about the real fate of Jerry O’Neill, she could not have been more charming.

‘I’ll get Jerry to call you when I next hear from him.’ Sheriff Baker was not that surprised when the call from O’Neill never materialised. But he could not arrest Maxine or her farm-hand lover without evidence of a crime – and there was still no sign of Jerry O’Neill.

For five months, the finger of suspicion was frequently pointed at Maxine and both Jenkins and Hamlin. But no one could do a damn thing about it.

Even when Maxine sold the farm, the bar and all the cattle for close to $250,000, there was nothing anyone could do.

But then not many people realised that Maxine only ended up with around $50,000 in her pocket, because of the massive debts incurred by Jerry O’Neill and his businesses.

Then, two children out walking near that cliff in Stone County made a gruesome discovery – the partly decomposed body of Jerry O’Neill, still wrapped in those two duvets that came from the
farmhouse. Now, at last, Sheriff Baker had the evidence he needed. The only problem was that his two main suspects had long since disappeared.

For five months, Maxine O’Neill and Paul Jenkins eluded a massive police hunt for them. She dyed her hair peroxide blonde, lost weight and took on an entirely new identity. He grew his hair longer and added a beard to the moustache. They rapidly managed to make themselves look completely different from just a few months earlier. It proved very effective in helping them avoid arrest.

But then the inevitable happened – they started to run short of funds. The $50,000 just did not stretch far enough. Maxine was reduced to trying to persuade a relative to wire them some cash to the tiny town of Pelham, Alabama.

When the two wanted killers showed up to collect their money, they were immediately picked up by local police.

In September 1990, at the Pike County Courthouse, Maxine O’Neill admitted to the killing of her husband and was given a ten-year sentence with three years suspended and a $10,000 fine.

Paul Jenkins was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to twenty years in jail.

During her trial, Maxine told the jury she loved Jenkins and planned to marry him as soon as prison authorities allowed the ceremony to go ahead.

The deep orange, early-morning light bathed the entire San Fernando Valley in gentle warmth. Hummingbirds hovered silently as they homed in on the bird-of-paradise plants that provide them with a tasty breakfast. Overhead, the constant high-pitched tone of single-engined light aircraft sweeping through the skies was a noisy reminder of the metropolis of Los Angeles which lay just twenty
miles to the south.

12 August 1993 was a scorchingly hot day in the San Fernando Valley. As temperatures nudged into the low hundreds, a hazy film of smog hung over the vast basin that is one of the largest suburban developments in California.

Right in the centre of the valley lies the
much-varied
city of Van Nuys. Split in two by the valley’s busiest airport, Van Nuys is a mish-mash of comfortable, detached, single-storey homes in the south, and scruffy, tightly built apartment blocks in the north, some of which have become breeding grounds for many of southern California’s most notorious street gangs.

Most weeks, police find themselves examining the corpses of at least one victim of a gangland
shootout
. It is a dog-eat-dog world where life is as cheap as the fifty dollars it costs to buy a revolver. Petty crime thrives on the streets of northern Van Nuys, encouraged by the hot weather that exists most of the year and the American social divide.

Not surprisingly, the divorce rate in the area is well over fifty per cent and that means that the Van Nuys Superior Court tends to be a very busy place most days. Couples seeking to end their marriages often arrive at the yellow, Sixties-built courthouse as early as eight o’clock so as to be first in line for a hearing.

So it was on this August day when yet another divorce action was initiated at the court in Van Nuys. This time, however, rather than just breaking up a family, it was to end in even more tragic circumstances.

After fifteen years together, Pamela and Kenneth Lisi had already filed for a petition to end their marriage but they still had to decide who would get custody of their two young daughters, aged four and eleven. They had tried to do it the civilised way over the previous ten months, but it just had not worked out. Now they had to ask a judge to make the decision for them. The Lisi situation was very tragic, even when compared to the other divorce actions being heard that day.

Behind the polite façade that existed between Pam and Ken as their eyes met outside the court that morning lay a seething hatred and a whole series of very damaging allegations, plus the fact that Pam was suffering from a dreadful, debilitating illness.

There were also Pam’s relatives. They were incensed that Ken even had the nerve to try to gain sole custody of the children, considering the gravity of their mother’s illness. How could he be so cold-hearted about her circumstances? How could he deliberately set out to part a dying mother from her own children?

Pam’s mother, seventy-three-year-old Jo Lula
Haynes, knew what it was like to bring up children single-handed. She had done precisely that with Pam and her brothers and sisters and she wasn’t about to stand back and see her daughter’s children taken away from her.

Since Pam’s illness, Jo Lula had become her daughter’s steadfast support, the one she turned to for help, love and guidance. Jo Lula – who had lived with Pamela since her marriage had broken up – had become like a second mother to those little girls.

No one knows if it was in desperation to prevent Pam from losing her children or whether something really had happened, but Jo Lula and her daughter made sworn statements before the hearing, claiming that Ken Lisi had sexually abused one of their daughters.

They alleged that Lisi continually molested the four-year-old in a series of horrific attacks which had occurred during the previous few months. If true, the claims were proof enough that Lisi should never be allowed to get his hands on those children ever again.

Ken Lisi said he was outraged by the claims and insisted they were part of a campaign by Pam’s family to prevent him from getting custody of his daughters. Lisi even paid for one of the state’s top child psychologists to examine his youngest daughter to find out if there was any evidence to
support the claims. The psychologist reported to the court that day that there was absolutely no proof of sexual molestation.

Ken Lisi felt completely vindicated and he was determined to push ahead for complete custody of the children. However, he did not help things by becoming very angry in the court and showing verbal hostility towards his wife’s camp. He frequently screamed and shouted at the judge and beat his fists on the table in court. He also mocked his wife’s relatives, especially his mother-in-law Jo Lula. He believed that she had orchestrated the ‘sex slur’ campaign against him.

Jo Lula believed that Ken’s attitude was yet more evidence of his unstable character and precisely the reason why he should not be given any right of custody of the two girls. Jo Lula watched his manic behaviour from across the Van Nuys courtroom that day and convinced herself that this man was evil. She had no doubt that the sexual molestation allegations were true despite what that doctor had said.

Superior Court Judge Robert M Letteau listened to all the evidence in court that morning and was astounded by the wild accusations coming from both camps. Even he was unused to such intense hatred between two parties in a divorce action.

Letteau was even more surprised when Pam’s lawyer revealed that her client was suffering from the
seriously debilitating illness of lupus, a degenerative, ulcerating skin disease which required ‘significant medication’. Everyone in the court felt immensely sorry for Pam Lisi at that point. Her mother, Jo Lula, was so upset that she wept quietly.

When Letteau enquired as to how Pam could look after two children when suffering from such a serious illness, it was immediately pointed out that she had the back-up of her mother and a number of other relatives. The judge did not pass comment but simply noted that fact on his notepad.

Across the courtroom, Jo Lula prayed that her daughter would be granted sole custody. She had long since fallen out with Ken Lisi and could not bear the thought of ever having to meet that ‘animal’ again. She had told her daughter that she was well rid of him and she hoped this would be the last time they ever had to be in the same room together.

When the judge retired to consider his verdict on the question of custody, Pam looked to her mother for support. Jo Lula gave her a thumbs-up sign because she could not believe that any judge would refuse her daughter permission to live out the remainder of her life with her children.

A few minutes later Judge Letteau reappeared and solemnly declared that Ken Lisi should gain sole custody because he feared that Pam Lisi was relying too heavily on her relatives to look after the girls.

Pam and her relatives sat back in stunned silence. Then Jo Lula started shouting in the judge’s direction but was silenced by a clerk. Pam’s attorney shrugged his shoulders and said ‘sorry’ but there was nothing he could do about it. The judge’s decision was final.

For Jo Lula Haynes it was the worst day of her life and there is little doubt that her daughter felt just as heartbroken.

Ken Lisi’s life was, by all accounts, fairly normal, apart from the claims of child sex abuse that were made against him by Pam’s family. Following the break-up of their marriage the previous November, he had moved to the town of Lancaster, some eighty miles north east of Los Angeles, where his parents lived. Ken genuinely believed that he could make a good home there for his daughters.

Pam’s illness undoubtedly made the divorce action far more emotive than it might otherwise have been but, as Ken pointed out to his friends and family, it was not his fault that Pam had got sick and however much he felt sorry for her it would not help to mend their broken marriage.

Ken had been working for many years as a producer of music and voice casting for projects in Walt Disney theme parks across the world. His colleagues at his office just down the road from Van Nuys always found him a very polite and
mild-mannered
guy. Nothing was too much trouble for Ken. It all seemed in sharp contrast to the impression he had given to his in-laws.

The accusations of child molestation were constantly simmering in the thoughts of Pam’s mother and other relatives, causing frequent, unsavoury flare-ups between Ken Lisi and his wife’s family.

The end of October 1993 was marked by Hallowe’en, a billion-dollar-a-year business in California. Each year, on the last day of October, the entire nation becomes obsessed by dead bodies, vampires and witches. Children are swept up by the scenario and some houses are decorated like
something
out of Hansel and Gretel.

The Hallowe’en tradition had been sparked off three hundred years previously by a group of devil worshippers in Salem, Massachusetts who had decided to kill some witches.

However, back on that October evening in 1993, children done up in ghoulish fancy dress, often splattered with fake blood, were patrolling the neat and tidy streets of the suburb of Northridge, trick or treating for sweets from their neighbours.

So it was that Ken Lisi found himself driving through Northridge towards his estranged wife’s home where he intended to pick up their two daughters, following a weekend at their mother’s
house. After the acrimony at that August court hearing, Ken and Pam had somehow come to a mutual ‘understanding’ and Ken had allowed the girls to visit their mother occasionally, despite the sole-custody order imposed by the judge. After all, reasoned Ken, he could not keep them away from their mother when she was so seriously ill.

Trailing him that night were Ken’s elderly parents, Ernest Lisi and his wife, who intended to follow their son home to Lancaster following a day out in Los Angeles.

As Ken pulled up outside the house in Louise Avenue, which his wife shared with her mother Jo Lula, he wondered what kind of spirits the children would be in after spending the weekend with their sick mother. He hoped they would be in a happy mood as they had a long drive back to Lancaster that evening.

Ken rang the doorbell at 7.20 pm, waved at his father waiting across the street and wondered why it seemed so quiet in the house. Usually the girls came rushing out to greet him. He pressed the bell again. Suddenly the door was swung open by the one person Ken dreaded having to meet, his mother-
in-law
Jo Lula.

As she stood in the doorway, Ken did not notice the .38 calibre revolver in her right hand.

‘Are the kids here?’

Jo Lula said nothing at first. She had a strange, demonic look in her eyes. But Ken was more than used to his mother-in-law’s eccentric behaviour. He did not think twice about it.

‘Are they here?’

‘The kids aren’t here and nor is Pam …’ She hesitated. Ken was starting to get really pissed off.

‘What the …’

‘You’re not going to see the kids again,’ she interrupted. Then she thought to herself, This is for them. She raised the gun, pulled the trigger and shot Ken Lisi in the leg.

He fell to the ground clutching his leg. By lying there in front of her, however, he simply provided an easier target for her to aim at. Now she had his entire body clear in her sights.

Across the street, Ernest Lisi had seen his son fall with his own eyes. It had seemed almost unreal, like something out of a cops-and-robbers TV show. But it was real enough.

Ernest scrambled out of his car and headed towards the house as fast as he could but there was no stopping Jo Lula.

BANG! She thought of those child sex charges alleged against him.

BANG! She thought of her seriously ill daughter deprived of the chance to live with her children during her dying days.

BANG! She thought of the mental cruelty Ken put her daughter through before they separated.

By the time Jo Lula had finished, Ken lay writhing on the ground with numerous gaping holes in his upper chest.

At that moment, Ernest Lisi arrived with his wife and they managed to subdue and disarm
seventy-three
-year-old Jo Lula with relative ease. She was proud of her ‘achievement’ and had no need to run. She wanted the world to know what she had done for her dying daughter – Pamela and her daughters were not even at home at the time.

Lisi was rushed to the nearby Northridge Medical Center by paramedics but died a short while after the shooting.

Ernest Lisi could not quite believe what had happened. He had known that his son’s divorce battle was a bitter affair but never in his wildest dreams had he imagined it would end up like this.

‘It was very tragic,’ said a heartbroken Ernest Lisi shortly after the shooting. ‘I have no idea why it happened. I haven’t the slightest idea why she did what she did.’

Los Angeles police arrested Jo Lula Haynes and booked her for murder. She was ordered to be held without bail in Van Nuys Jail pending an arraignment.

Police homicide detective Rick Swanston, of the
Los Angeles Police Department’s West Valley section, said, ‘She just opened fire on him. In domestic matters, child-custody matters, emotions become inflamed. People do violent things.’

Shortly after the shooting, Superior Court Judge Robert M Letteau – the same official who gave Ken Lisi custody of his children – ordered police to pick up the two girls and deliver them to county social workers until a suitable family member could be found to care for them. He said it would be detrimental to the children’s welfare for them to stay in their mother’s care. He did not acknowledge that his earlier decision on their parental custody might have contributed to the tragedy.

Suzanne Harris, who represented Pamela Lisi in the divorce case, said that Jo Lula Haynes had never shown any indications of violence. ‘She is a very nice older lady; a very gentle lady. A little odd-looking with some funny mannerisms, but she’s the gentlest person I ever met …’