Possessed (27 page)

On the 9-1-1 tape, Ana claimed Stefan was alive when she called, and, after talking to Grossberg, Carroll decided that might have been true. Yet there was no evidence that the first responders made any effort to restart Stefan's heart or to give him CPR. Plus, in Carroll's view, the dispatcher took too long on the phone before sending EMTs to the scene.

Thinking through the possibilities, Carroll developed a theory in direct contrast to the prosecutors'. In his view, it wasn't Ana's fault that Stefan died. Instead, she struck in self-defense,
then the medical personnel hadn't rendered proper aid. “If 9-1-1 had done their job and the EMTs had performed CPR, Stefan Andersson might still be alive.”

Along with forming his argument for the trial, Carroll prepared his witnesses. As they worked on the case, Ana told her story many times, and he continued to believe she was justified the night she killed Stefan. As he saw it, the jury would believe her as well, and he had a chance at a not-guilty verdict. “I thought I had a good case,” he said.

During their meetings, what the defense attorney saw in his client wasn't the troubled woman others described but a strong woman with a history of being abused. “She got around these alcoholic weaklings. She's kind of macho,” he said. “They'd get a belly full of booze and push her a few times, and you're going to get it, that's when storm clouds would gather.”

In his own dealings with Trujillo, Carroll saw those clouds gathering. When he disagreed with Ana, although completely sober, her eyes flashed, and her mood changed. “You just don't do that with her. I saw that. Tried to boss her around a couple of times, and it didn't work with her . . . put her heels in . . . she's a little aggressive.”

Carroll, who'd been raised by a working mom, a strong woman who'd moved him to a rough part of Miami, where he constantly had to defend himself, saw Ana as like women he'd known as a boy. “She was a woman who liked to drink with the boys, got drunk, and acted out,” he said. “Maybe she could have walked away, but she didn't. I didn't when I was a kid in Miami.”

Yet the defense attorney worried how a jury would see his client. Carroll found that Ana had a difficult time focusing. As she had during her police interview, in their discussions Ana segued from one relationship to another, unable to concentrate on Carroll's questions, her train of thought habitually running off track.

Understanding her limitations, Carroll worried about Ana testifying. Yet in a self-defense case, that seemed
mandatory. To find her not guilty, jurors would want to hear Ana describe why she took Stefan's life. His saving grace, Carroll thought, would be if the prosecutors played his client's police interview for the jury. If that happened, the jurors would hear Ana tell her story without having to put her on the stand.

“I was hoping,” said Carroll. “But I didn't know what they would do.”

S
tefan Andersson would have enjoyed the bright spring sunshine on the morning of March 31, 2014. After rising early and gazing out over the golf course through his apartment's vast windows, showered and shaved, he might have walked in the door at the Hermann Park Grill and ordered his favorite veggie omelet. His laptop open on the table before him, the morning would have dissolved away as he researched pertinent studies for an upcoming court case, one where he'd been hired to testify as an expert witness. As afternoon approached, however, the laptop powered down, Stefan, a glass of wine in hand, could have claimed a black wrought-iron chair on the grill's patio. For the remainder of that day like so many others, he could have happily basked in the bright Texas sun.

Instead, at 9
A.M.
on that date, Stefan's cremated remains were encased in a canister beside his photo on Annika Lindqvist's Dallas living-room table, and Ana Trujillo, her thick black hair pulled back and anchored by no-nonsense clips, sans makeup, wearing a business suit with a red blouse, sat nervously next to Jack Carroll, waiting to begin the first day of her trial. On the fifteenth floor of the Harris County Criminal Courthouse at 1201 Franklin Street, in the 338th District Court, on what was undoubtedly one of the most important days of her life, Trujillo bore scant resemblance to the ebullient Latina in flashy tight clothes and sexy stiletto heels Stefan had known and once loved. “Ana's mother told
her to look as plain as possible,” said a family member. “I thought it was a mistake, not to be herself. But Trina thought Ana shouldn't look like what the prosecutor said she was, a woman who lived off of men.”

Ana Trujillo in the courtroom next to her lawyers

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

At about nine twenty that morning, Judge Brock Thomas, a matter-of-fact former prosecutor and criminal-defense attorney who'd first been appointed to the bench, then elected in 2012, called the trial to order, instructing Trujillo to rise to hear the indictment. Representing the state of Texas, John Jordan solemnly read the charges: “Ana Trujillo, aka Ana Fox, hereinafter styled the defendant . . . on or about June 9, 2013, did then and there unlawfully intend to cause serious bodily injury to Stefan Andersson . . . and did cause the death of the complainant by intentionally and knowingly committing an act clearly dangerous to human life, namely, by striking the complainant with a high-heel shoe.” Because of the bruising discovered during the autopsy,
Jordan continued on, reading the alternative possibilities for cause of death, first that Ana had suffocated Stefan by impeding his breathing by “applying pressure to the torso of the complainant.” Secondly: that she'd murdered Andersson by strangulation, tightening her grasp around his neck.

As the courtroom fell silent, the crowd in the gallery stirred. In the second row on the right sat Annika with Stefan's two sisters, Anneli and Marie, and one of his nieces. Nervous, Annika hadn't slept particularly well in the nights leading up to the trial, the stress wearing on her. Meanwhile, Ana's family watched from the benches on the left, Gene and Trina Tharp, and one of Trina's sisters, who'd traveled from Mexico to support her niece. The Ana she'd known had been a kind young girl, one much removed from the woman on trial.

Around the families bunched a crowd of spectators sandwiched into every available seat. Some were simply curious about the sensational case and wanted to see it play out in the courtroom. The trial had also attracted a mob of media, making up three rows of reporters from local, national, and international outlets, print and broadcast, including a
Good Morning America
producer.

The reading of the indictment concluded, Sarah Mickelson stood to address the jury.

As they'd prepared for trial, Jordan and Mickelson had discussed whether or not to do an opening statement. Jordan was ambivalent, while Mickelson believed jurors needed a road map of their case. Because she'd argued so passionately in favor of an opening, Jordan decided Mickelson was the best one to initially address the jurors. Now that moment had come, and Mickelson quietly began: “On June 9, 2013, a 9-1-1 call went out for an assault in progress. That's unusual for this part of town, Hermann Park, the Museum District.”

From the 9-1-1 call, Mickelson painted the picture of that morning in The Parklane's 18B, describing the first glimpse of Stefan's bloodied body in the hallway. “It looked like something out of a horror movie,” she said. But the story
had begun months before, when Trujillo and Andersson first met. From the beginning, the couple “was not a good match.” Stefan was habitually mild-mannered, while Ana had an explosive temper. And early on there were reports of her odd behavior. “You're going to learn that as their relationship progressed, it also deteriorated.”

Sarah Mickelson addressing the jury

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

Always, Mickelson was mindful of the hurdle before the prosecution, the presumption that when violence enters a romantic relationship, the woman is the victim. That night, as Stefan walked through the lobby, after the squabble in the cab, Mickelson contended that he had finally lost all patience with Ana, realizing that “she was more trouble than she was worth.”

Not even fifteen minutes later, the sound of an argument and a shaking wall signaled a quarrel, then more than an hour of silence in 18B before Ana Trujillo called for help. What did she do all that time, with Stefan bleeding on the hallway floor?

Mickelson suggested that in this case forensics told the
story, most importantly the blood evidence on the floor, the walls, on Trujillo. Then there were the defendant's strange practices, evidenced in writings she left behind, ones that talked “about forgiveness and higher forces, along with her purse and a tarot-card book. Coincidentally, it's opened to the death card.”

Such an odd case, with so much strange evidence. Would Mickelson and Jordan be able to draw jurors a convincing map?

J
ack Carroll had a lot riding on the trial; he'd invested time and money. And now, after months of preparation, it began. The lanky lawyer with the slight swagger in his walk unfolded from the chair and sauntered toward the jury box. In contrast to Mickelson's depiction of the evidence, Carroll proposed his theory: “You're going to learn, and the evidence is going to show, a sordid and tragic tale of two very lonely people who were progressively going downhill. You're going to learn that there's alcoholism involved with this, that there's spousal abuse.”

In the gallery, Annika bristled, as Carroll branded Stefan an out-of-control alcoholic. “You're going to hear a normal day for Mr. Andersson was a full-tilt boogie, drinking,” the attorney said. Stefan's addiction, Carroll maintained, set the stage for his death by leading him to be domineering and abusive toward the woman in his life, a woman Carroll described as Stefan's fiancée, Ana Trujillo.

From drinking in the early-morning hours to getting the shakes if he didn't have a beer or glass of wine by noon, in Carroll's opening statement Stefan's life revolved around his thirst for alcohol. “He would drink, and he'd drink, and he'd drink.” And when he drank, Carroll insisted, Stefan Andersson became abusive.

When jurors listened to the 9-1-1 call, Carroll contended, they would hear a woman desperate to save the life of the man she loved. For at that point, Stefan wasn't yet dead. In
fact in Carroll's view, Stefan's death wasn't caused by his injuries but by emergency personnel who took too long to arrive and didn't begin lifesaving measures. “I submit to you that they didn't even check him,” said Carroll. “There was a lot of blood, and they declared him dead.”

Once Andersson was declared deceased, Carroll said, all eyes turned on Ana Trujillo. “They decided like that, that she was guilty of murder,” he said, snapping his fingers.

There was evidence, he said, to back up his theories. Where Mickelson said Trujillo had no injuries, the defense attorney insisted that wasn't true. “I want you to look. I want you to see her face, where you can see a black eye forming. When they take her clothes off, there's a photographer there . . . he wants to get her hands, because she said she was bitten. They want to do their investigation to back up their theory of murder.”

Would the jurors agree?

Time and again, Carroll returned to the subject of domestic violence. All Ana Trujillo wanted to do that fateful night was leave, to go to Waco to see her family, but a drunk and angry Stefan Andersson attacked her. It followed a pattern familiar to domestic-violence experts, he said, and that further proved his view of the case. “You're going to hear that when the woman decides to leave, that's the most dangerous time.”

Before the jury, Carroll alluded to the eggshell theory John Jordan worried the defense would concentrate on, that damaged by prior abuse from others, Trujillo misjudged and overreacted. Carroll, however, didn't dwell on this aspect of the case, sure that self-defense made his best argument, concluding: “The evidence is going to show that Ana Trujillo did the only thing that she could do to get away from Mr. Andersson.”

O
pening arguments ended, and on the stand was the prosecution's first witness, Annika Lindqvist, whose usual broad smile appeared tight and tired. Stefan had been one of her
great friends for many years, and she now understood where the defense was going, that his character would be assailed.

“Who is this?” John Jordan asked as he showed her a photo of Stefan in his laboratory at the University of Houston.

“It's Stefan,” Annika replied. The photo was then shown to the jurors, who saw for the first time the face of the man at the center of the trial. In response to questions, Annika explained Stefan's education and his specialization in reproductive science. They'd worked closely, and for a brief time their relationship became romantic. Recounting why it ended, she cited her love of nature and his fascination with the bustle of a busy city. “We just didn't have that much in common.”

In his opening, Carroll had focused on Andersson's drinking. Now Jordan asked Lindqvist: “Was Stefan someone who liked to drink?”

Yes, he did, she said, but she added not to the extent that it had become a problem for him at work or socially. She also said that Stefan had never been a mean drunk, and, in fact, would become even more polite and mild-mannered.

The Stefan she knew was once an athletic man, but in his advancing years, never used the gym membership she teased him about owning. Although single, he was far from a solitary figure, constantly in touch with friends and family in Texas and around the world. Annika's Stefan was a man who surrounded himself with friends, one who enjoyed life.

“Was his drinking one of the reasons you broke up?” Carroll prodded, as his opportunity to question Lindqvist began. She denied that it was or that Stefan's drinking affected his job. That was something Carroll had prepared for. He had a motion pending before the judge, one to introduce Stefan's personnel files from UH into evidence. In it was information regarding the dead man's stint in rehab. The judge had ruled that the defense attorney couldn't bring the information in unless a witness personally knew about
Stefan's stay at the PaRC rehab hospital. “Did you know if the University of Houston ever sent him to a drug rehabilitation program?” Carroll asked.

“Yes, they did,” she answered. With that, Jack Carroll had what he needed to ask more questions about Stefan's stay in the twelve-step program. At the time, Stefan had been off center, Annika explained, under stress in a new city. He'd been drinking more than usual, throwing his electrolytes out of balance, and he'd collapsed.

Running with the opportunity, Carroll asked what effects alcohol can have, and Annika, from her expertise in biology, listed the possibilities from physical illnesses such as liver disease to emotional and psychological effects, resulting in irrational behavior. But that wasn't the Stefan she knew. “He wasn't drunk drunk. He drank, but he wasn't a drunk,” she explained.