Possessed (23 page)

T
uesday morning, two days after Stefan's death, Ana Trujillo made her first appearance in the Harris County Courthouse, where she was formally charged with murder. Images of Ana in an orange jail jumpsuit, her long dark hair curly and loose, her wrists handcuffed, flashed across international media outlets. The story of the woman who'd killed a man with her stiletto heel had been picked up across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Many reporters noted the similarity to plots in movies where stiletto heels were used as weapons, most often 1992's
Single White Female
.

Nearly all the articles contained Ana's contention that she struck only to ward off an attack from Stefan. “Stiletto killer claims self-defense,” read some. “Woman called 9-1-1, said she was being beaten inside condo,” said another. In the courtroom that morning, Ana stood beside Lott J. Brooks III, a Houston attorney she'd once worked for as a part-time translator. She talked briefly to the judge, Brock Thomas, while she was again read her rights and registered an official plea of not guilty. “The world will be watching how this case unfolds,” said a prominent Houston TV anchor at the end of her report on the case.

After Ana was escorted out of the courtroom by a bailiff and locked inside a holding cell, Jack Carroll, a tall, lanky, deep-voiced Houston attorney, with a bushy mustache and
a slightly sideways saunter, walked through on his way to talk to a client, a habitual robbery suspect who'd threatened people with a knife.

“Hey, hey, I know you!” Ana shouted.

Looking about, he saw a woman in the cell and walked away, disinterested. He didn't realize that they had a connection; Jack Carroll had been a client of Teresa Montoya's in her hair salon for many years.

Jack Carroll in his office

Later, Montoya called the defense attorney and explained, saying that the woman who'd tried to reach out to him was her friend, and that Ana had been accused of murdering a professor by beating him with her stiletto heel. Once he hung up, Carroll Googled Ana Trujillo Fox on his computer, and a plethora of articles appeared from across the globe.

Days later, Carroll sat across from Trujillo in a jailhouse interview room. They talked, and Ana described the fight with Stefan as she had in the past, as a woman defending herself against an abusive boyfriend. Believing her, Carroll offered to act as her lawyer pro bono, without charge.

On multiple levels, Carroll seemed a good match for the case. He had a strong record, he specialized in criminal-defense work, and he enjoyed big cases. “I like the action,” said Carroll, who started out as a corporate attorney but decided to switch to a criminal practice. Unlike in the business world, as a defense attorney Carroll handpicked his cases, and he had more control over his life. “I don't like taking orders.”

A well-known Houston attorney with an office a block from the courthouse, Carroll vaguely remembered seeing the woman in the cell at Montoya's hair salon. Before he'd quit drinking and gotten married, he'd also lived downtown and had been part of the scene. When he left the jail that day, Carroll had a new and very-high-profile client.

A
t about the same time that Carroll met with Ana, the prosecutor assigned to the case, John Jordan, held a press conference in a courthouse hallway. With dark, smoky eyes under thick brows and an expressive face, Jordan worked as chief prosecutor in Thomas's 338th District Court.

Assessing the case, Jordan, who was known to be highly effective in a courtroom, had questions. The first and perhaps most important was whether or not what Ana Trujillo claimed was true. Did she kill Stefan Andersson in self-defense?

The question troubled Jordan; what if behind closed doors the scientist was a violent man? A mistake in this case could be costly on other levels. Convincing victims of domestic violence to come forward often wasn't easy. Jordan knew that most cases went unreported. What if he mistakenly prosecuted a woman for murder who truly was justly fighting back? That, he feared, could have a chilling effect on future cases, frightening victims into not coming forward because they didn't trust police and prosecutors.

In the past, Jordan, a former parole officer, had used the press to get the word out when he needed information. Now what he needed were statements from those who knew Ana Trujillo and Stefan Andersson, assessments of their characters from those closest to the killer and the dead man.

In front of a bank of TV cameras, red recording lights glowing, Jordan said, “It is our understanding that Ana Trujillo and Stefan Andersson were involved in a dating relationship, and this relationship was ongoing. If the public has any information on whether this relationship was volatile,
whether it was good, whether it was bad, we want to know everything there is to know about the relationship.”

It was pure circumstance that Jordan got the case, one that he knew would continue to draw headlines. Why? Overall, the public was fascinated by tales of women who kill, perhaps because the perception is that females so rarely do. In truth, the statistics weren't as lopsided as many believed, at least not in certain types of cases. According to the U.S. Justice Department, between 1976 and 2005, 10 percent of murders were committed by women. Yet females were involved in 35 percent of cases where the victim was an intimate partner and 30 percent of killings of a family member.

Prosecutor John Jordan

Making this particular case more press worthy, of course, was the weapon, an article of clothing many saw as a representation of ultrafeminine sexuality. Would the world press have taken notice if Ana Trujillo shot Stefan Andersson to death? Or stabbed him with a knife?

Probably not.

Sizing the situation up, Jordan also realized that if the case was in fact a murder and progressed forward, there were inherent complications. The main one: Juries were often reluctant to convict women.

What Jordan took away from his years of experience was that there was a presumption when a woman killed a man that the victim was somehow responsible. Many assumed that a woman wouldn't kill unless she was being
hurt or abused, exactly what Ana Trujillo claimed. That meant the most likely outcome would be that a jury would be inclined to believe that Trujillo told the truth, a situation Jordan would have to confront in a courtroom.

In addition, if he did get a guilty verdict, Jordan had concerns about sentencing.

P
unishment, in this particular case perhaps more than most others, was a wild card.

News of the case kept filtering out, bits and pieces making their way into the headlines. When James Wells heard what Ana was accused of, he worried that she'd end up on Texas's death row. “I didn't want someone I knew and cared about executed,” he said.

What Wells and undoubtedly the public in general didn't understand was that, despite the brutality of the killing, Ana wasn't eligible for the death penalty. Under state law, the ultimate sentence was only an option in murders with special circumstances, such as the killing of a police officer, or a killing in the commission of a second felony. The maximum penalty Ana faced, if found guilty, was still formidable, however: life behind bars in a Texas prison.

Yet a long sentence for a woman convicted of serious crime, even a shocking murder, wasn't a given either. “A life sentence for a woman is very, very rare,” said Jordan.

Years earlier, Jordan worked on the Susan Wright case, often called “The Bloody Mattress Murder.” In 2003, Wright, an attractive blond mother of two and a former topless dancer, tied her husband to the bed and stabbed him 193 times, then buried his body in the backyard. In that case, prosecutors got a conviction, but despite the gore of the killing, the jury bypassed life and gave Wright twenty years. Like Ana Trujillo, Susan Wright claimed to be a victim of domestic violence, but Jordan thought that a man convicted of the same murder would have gotten a stiffer sentence.

Looking at the Trujillo case, the prosecutor assessed that it would be a battle, but he wasn't the kind of lawyer who
walked away from a fight. “I believe I'm doing what I was meant to do,” he said about his job. “It's what I was put on this earth for.”

T
hat same morning, two days after the murder, in London, England, the
Daily Mail
carried an article with a photograph of Stefan in his lab and a wire picture of Ana at the hearing in her jail garb, while a Reuters article that proliferated across the Net focused on Stefan and Ana's last night out. “The couple had been out drinking . . . Trujillo . . . later called 9-1-1 and said she was being assaulted.” Accompanying most of the articles were photos of extreme high heels. One outlet mocked the case, calling Stefan “a fashion victim.”

“Murder by stiletto,” others wrote.

With such intense interest, a cable program enlisted the aid of an expert who taught women how to use high heels for defense. On the program, the martial arts aficionado demonstrated how she believed Ana used the shoe, first stomping Stefan on the face and head with it on, then holding the shoe in her hand and hitting him with the heel.

Meanwhile, reporters converged on The Parklane, cornering residents and asking for comments. “I think the killing was unintentional,” a woman who lived in one of the apartments told a reporter. Ana Trujillo “defended herself with the only thing she had . . . when do you break out your stiletto heel and kill somebody?”

In the midst of the flurry of public interest, there were also those who looked behind the headlines, assessing the case on a personal level, considering the people they knew and loved. In Waco, Ana Trujillo's family struggled with the charges pending against her. They'd realized that she'd changed, but was she capable of such carnage?

On the opposite side of the equation were Stefan's family and friends. In his lifetime, although he'd lived alone, the brilliant scientist had amassed a long list of friends, from Sweden to South America, to New York, Dallas, and
Houston. So many thought of the kind, gentle man they knew and wondered how he'd met such a gruesome and public end.

Others fell in the middle, including Christi Suarez. Watching the press coverage, she felt conflicted. Ana was her friend, but Suarez knew the woman charged with murder had a violent side. Within days of the killing, the television producer's psychic friend called her and said that Stefan had contacted him. “Stefan said he needs your help. He wants you to know that he didn't touch her,” the man said. “He was very afraid of her.”

“What do you mean he needs my help?” Suarez asked. The man didn't have an answer, and Suarez tried to put it out of her mind.

A
s the interest built, John Jordan, the prosecutor in charge of the case, felt certain that he had to find out more about the people involved. Only a thorough investigation into Ana and Stefan's relationship would put the rumors to rest. “In a case like this, you have to be proactive to set aside the battered-woman defense,” said Jordan. “When claims are made against a victim, it's important to either prove or disprove them. The truth is that when a man kills a woman, the question people ask is, ‘Why did he do it?' But when a woman kills a man, it tends to be, ‘What did he do to deserve it?'”

Jordan had already made his plea for information, and now he waited. Before long, his office phone rang, Stefan's friends from around the world eager to talk about the man they knew. One of the first was Annika Lindqvist. “It just made me so mad that she was saying these things. That wasn't Stefan,” she said. “And I worried that people would believe her.”

“Stefan wouldn't have done that! Never!” she told Jordan on the phone. As they talked, she explained about Stefan's parents, how he'd always described his father as abusive and how he identified with his mother, so much so he avoided conflict and abhorred violence. “He was the kindest, gentlest man. He would never, ever hit a woman.”

From that point on, Stefan's friends and colleagues called from across the world, wanting to tell the prosecutor of the man they knew, one who often backed down, walking away from an argument or a fight, even to his own detriment. The most convincing call, perhaps, was from Jackie Swift, Stefan's ex-wife, who told Jordan that one of the problems in their marriage was that Stefan wouldn't argue with her, that he never lost his temper.