Possessed (33 page)

There were things the jurors would never know, like precisely what was said in that apartment that night. But there were other things they did know: that Stefan walked to the elevator that evening appearing dejected, mortified after seeing Ana act out yet again; less than fifteen minutes later, the next-door neighbor heard banging and angry voices, then Karlye Jones heard a man's voice shouting in 18B. “She never heard the defendant cry out for help,” said Mickelson. “At 2:13
A.M.
, Stefan Andersson is yelling. Then it's quiet. We heard from Captain Riojas of the Houston Fire Department that he believed Stefan had been dead for at least thirty to forty-five minutes when he arrived.”

Stefan's body was cold and pulseless, Mickelson said, and there was nothing the first responders could have done—despite Carroll's suggestions otherwise—to revive the scientist. Whether jurors believed Stefan had died of
strangulation, a heart attack, or blood loss from the wounds to his face and scalp, all that blood pooling on the carpet and splattered against the wall, all were products of Ana's attack, and all were murder.

One of the most important parts of the interview video, Mickelson said, was when Ana finally brought the discussion around to Stefan Andersson, a man she said she loved, and was told that he died. “She doesn't shed a tear,” the prosecutor pointed out. “Doesn't really flinch . . . The only person Ana Trujillo cries for is herself. I would submit to you that when you find her guilty of murder, you're not telling her anything she doesn't already know.”

“D
ecide for yourself what the evidence is!” Jack Carroll ordered as he took the floor. The jurors hadn't heard Ana on the stand because he'd advised her not to testify, but they had the 9-1-1 tape and the exhaustive interrogation video. “I want you to ask yourself, is that woman acting? I want you to think: Well, if she's acting, would she qualify for a nomination for an Academy Award?”

Bristling at Mickelson's characterization of his pathologist's testimony, Carroll insisted it was indeed possible that Stefan was alive when EMS arrived, and if he was, “It's not murder!”

Walking back and forth in front of the jury, Carroll picked up evidence photos, throwing them back down. “Somebody screwed up here! That's without question,” he charged. “To me, it sounds like she's desperate, like she's trying to perform CPR, not trying to murder somebody.”

Contending that prosecutors didn't produce a reason for the killing, Carroll then said, “How can you prove someone murdered someone if they don't have a motive?

“This was a domestic-violence call . . . The most dangerous time in domestic violence is when the woman is leaving,” he said. “So, I'm not saying that Dr. Andersson was murdered by EMS or Officer Bowie, but I'm saying he might
have still been alive when they arrived. They didn't do anything. They just said, ‘He's dead.'”

To those in the audience, it appeared that Carroll felt confident of his case and his client: “How many times did you hear me object? What evidence did I try to keep out? I wanted all of it to come in. When I first got this case, it took me a little while, but I realized that I've got an innocent woman!”

At times, Carroll pointed at Trujillo, uttering the word Reagan Cannon said he'd used when he talked to her, “slut.” It was as if he wanted the jurors to see her as he saw her, a tough but a good woman who was being unfairly branded. In the interview, he said, detectives weren't listening to Ana's account but building their case because they prejudged her and ignored the evidence.

His hoarse voice booming in the courtroom, Carroll described his version of the events of that night, as his client tried to flee. How she grabbed her shoe, the only weapon available, to fend Stefan off, and how she later fought to save his life, giving him CPR. “That's where all the blood came from on her mouth.”

The wounds on Stefan's arms, Carroll stressed, might be defensive wounds, but that didn't exclude him as the one who struck first, who went after Trujillo, who then responded by hitting him with the shoe.

As his allotted forty-five minutes drew to a close, Jack Carroll said: “Defensive wounds? Strikes? What would you do if someone gets you in a hold and was grabbing your foot, and they're going to tear the ligaments and tendons in your knee, causing you pain? What would you do if you know that the threat of serious bodily injury was there, and you thought you could die?”

Carroll paused before answering his own question. “You would defend yourself.”

As to the bloody killing, the twenty-five or more strikes to Stefan's head and face, Carroll said the number wasn't
to be considered because if Ana was in fear of her life and justified to strike him once, then she was justified to strike him twenty-five times.

One strike or twenty-five, it was still self-defense.

W
here Carroll had appeared flushed with emotion, John Jordan coolly walked before the jury and smiled slightly. “Defense counsel said, ‘I'm going to leave it up to your imagination.' You heard him say that several times right? Which is exactly what the defense is. But don't blame Mr. Carroll for what he just said to you . . . It's not his fault . . . The problem is that he's stuck with the words and acts of Ana Trujillo.”

Then Jordan frowned, his voice quiet: “Welcome to Ana's world,” he said. “Whatever the scenario, she's the victim.”

Again the focus returned to Ana's day-of-the-killing interview with homicide detectives, when they inquired about Stefan, and she instead rehashed every failed relationship she'd ever had with a man, how they'd all loved her, then turned against her and misused her.

The truth, Jordan said, was very different, epitomized by the Bar 5015 surveillance tape: Ana said she'd been trying to convince Stefan to leave for hours, but what was seen on the tape was the opposite: a tired Stefan trying to coax a still-partying Ana out the door and into the cab. “In Ana's world, Officer Bowie, responding to the accident, pulled a gun on her . . . Again a victim. In Ana's world, it's not her fault. It's EMS's fault . . . that's what they want you to believe.”

Grabbing on to the threads of what little remained of the unraveled Ana Trujillo, Jordan wove a picture of a woman divorced from reality, one so narcissistic that she had to constantly be the center of attention, who described herself as the most desirable of all women, sought after by man after man. “In Ana's world, it has nothing to do with the fact that you hit somebody twenty-five times about the face that caused the death,” he said, talking quietly to the jurors. “Because in her world, it's always someone else's fault.”

That world, however, didn't exist. “We're not in Ana's world. We're in the state of Texas. We hold murderers accountable, and that's what we're asking you to do today.”

What could be more fitting than for Stefan, a scientist, to speak through the scientific evidence left at the scene? Retracing the prosecution's theory of how the attack unfolded, Jordan detailed the forensic findings, principally the hair and blood evidence. Then he took a seat in the witness chair and addressed the jurors from the place where the testimony first came, while he narrated what so many, from the staff at The Parklane and Hermann Park, to Stefan's friend Annika Lindqvist, and Rosemary Gomez, the cab driver, had testified to, explaining how it all fit together to paint a portrait of a gruesome murder.

John Jordan during closing arguments

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

In Ana's world, she wanted jurors to believe that when Cannon called at 3:37, her fight with Stefan had just ended. But in the real world, Jordan said, the fight took place nearly an hour and a half earlier, at 2:13, when Stefan's neighbor heard the altercation. The captain had testified that Stefan was dead at least half an hour when police arrived. “That fits the time line, doesn't it?” Jordan said. “Argument happens at 2:13. He's dead by three o'clock.”

What did Ana Trujillo do for that hour and a half, as
Stefan Andersson lay dying then dead on the hallway floor? What she didn't do was call for help. Bringing the jurors to those moments while Stefan was being attacked, the prosecutor asked them to imagine the horrible pain of the assault. “To suggest that this is anything close to self-defense is offensive, and we all know that,” he concluded. “As you know from the testimony, this defendant has been called ‘the stiletto stabber.' It won't be until your just verdict that she ceases to be the stiletto stabber. And she will then forever be Ana Trujillo, murderer.”

At that, the jury left the room to deliberate the case. The gallery had been full throughout closing arguments, but now the spectators filed out as well. In the hallway, Ana Trujillo could be seen walking with her family, smiling slightly, appearing confident. Perhaps she believed Jack Carroll, who told her that he felt confident that they would triumph, and that this day would mark her return to the outside world, acquitted of murder.

Ana surrounded by supporters

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

That remained Carroll's opinion, as he nervously waited for the jury to return. During the trial, Carroll told John Jordan that he believed the jury would weigh the evidence and come in with a verdict in Ana's favor, and he'd seen nothing to change his mind. All the money and time he invested in the case seemed worth it to free a woman he believed unjustly accused. In addition, a win would bring him the attention he'd taken the sensational case to garner.

Meanwhile, Sarah Mickelson and John Jordan felt just as confident. They judged they had the science behind them, evidence that they trusted jurors wouldn't ignore, showing that Stefan wasn't the aggressor but a victim.

It's not uncommon for many to judge how a jury is swaying by the length of time they remain in deliberation. All of the attorneys involved circulated back to their offices to wait it out. No one expected the decision to come down so quickly, but just under two hours later, the jury-room buzzer sounded twice.

Minutes later, the attorneys and spectators filed back into the courtroom, and Ana took her place beside Jack Carroll. Judge Thomas cautioned the gallery to remain silent as the verdict was read. The tension in the room made it all feel as if it were unwinding in slow motion, as the jurors walked in and took their chairs.

In the otherwise silent courtroom, the judge read the words that Annika, Stefan's family and friends had been hoping to hear: “We the jury find the defendant, Ana Trujillo, also known as Ana Fox, guilty of murder.”

T
he jury had made its decision, rebuffing self-defense as justification and branding Ana Trujillo's killing of Stefan Andersson a murder. That question was answered. In the courtroom the following morning, as he prepared for the punishment phase of the trial, Jack Carroll reeled from what he saw as his failure. Not only had jurors come back with a guilty, but they'd done it in a remarkably short period of time.

Meanwhile, despite the exhaustive testimony, few understood the real Ana Trujillo, who she had been and who she became as her life took a spiral that brought her from working suburban wife and mother to a homeless woman who used her body to convince men to take care of her and in return hated them for doing it. The jurors didn't yet know that Ana sought out and embraced a troubling underworld, a dark, mysterious place that many found terrifying.

Yet even then, with the guilty verdict in, the defense had hope.

In Texas, unless a defendant chooses otherwise and entrusts her fate to a judge, juries first decide guilt or innocence. Then they have a second task: sentencing. For the newly convicted, the punishment phase of a trial offers a second opportunity to use everything at their disposal to raise questions in jurors' minds, hoping doubts might fight their way to the surface and result in lesser sentences.

In the Ana Trujillo case, as is often the circumstance,
the jury had a wide range of possible sentences to consider, from probation to life. And word around the courthouse was that many of the lawyers—prosecutors and defense attorneys alike—thought that here Jack Carroll held a firm upper hand. In their views, Jordan and Mickelson overreached by going for a life sentence. “Few thought that jurors would come down hard on a woman,” said Jordan, who understood that the consensus was based on a long history of women getting lighter sentences than men. But considering the brutality of the murder, the prosecutors felt justified in pushing for the maximum. “We hoped that in this case, we had an exception.”

W
hile they opted to do opening statements for the trial, both sides agreed to forgo exercising that right in the punishment phase and proceed directly to presenting witnesses. At this point, now that Ana had been found guilty, prosecutors had greater latitude in the evidence they put before the jury, its goal to convince the jurors that Ana was a habitually violent woman, one who needed to spend her life behind bars.

Toward that end, the initial witnesses Jordan called to the stand were the police officers who arrested Ana in 2008 and 2010 on DWIs. The first officer described the dangerous episode when Ana drove the wrong way on one of Houston's largest freeways. Both emphasized how contentious she became with them, cursing while flagrantly drunk.

On the stand, James Jimenez cut an impressive figure, at six-foot-two and 280 pounds, as he described how the much-smaller Trujillo jumped him, pulled his hair, and took him down to the sidewalk outside Teresa Montoya's office building in 2011, her eyes burning angrily at him, after he ordered Ana from the beauty salon where she'd been entertaining a man. “What did it feel like when she pulled your hair?” Jordan asked him.

“It hurt real bad,” Jimenez said. Only by sitting on her did he hold her until police arrived. Under questioning by Jack
Carroll, the former security guard said that he'd initially thought of Ana as a friend. “She was . . . charming.”

Anuj Goel, the software engineer who lived in the Rice Lofts, saw Ana from the beginning as someone he wanted to keep out of his life. She was loud, drank too much, and he heard stories of her acting out. Like Stefan, Goel lived in a building with tight security, but Ana managed to get in, and one evening he came home and found her inside his apartment. “I felt violated,” he said. “It was a really scary situation.”

Through the testimony, Mickelson and Jordon developed a profile of Ana's violent and unpredictable mood swings. Examples lined up, accounts of her bad acts, especially when drinking. The Waco restaurant manager offered to call her a cab, and an intoxicated Trujillo shouted to take his hands off her. Moments earlier, she'd been petting a young boy on the head in a high chair, to the dismay of his concerned parents.

At that point in the trial, Brian Goodney took the stand and recounted the evening Ana Trujillo hit him with the candlestick. “Did you see this coming?” Jordan asked.

Brian Goodney acting out the night Ana Trujillo hit him

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

“Absolutely not,” Goodney answered.

“Now, had y'all been in an argument at all that evening?” Jordan asked.

“We never argued,” Goodney said. “I don't ever remember us ever having any real disagreement. We were not lovers . . . We were just friends.”

That night, Ana hadn't appeared angry at Goodney, but when he turned his back to open the door, she clubbed him. The chilling image jurors were left with was of Goodney waking up and seeing Ana sitting on the hallway floor staring at him. She simply stood, calmly stepped over him, opened the door, and walked out.

Throughout the trial, Jack Carroll painted Stefan Andersson as an out-of-control drunk, but in the punishment phase it became ever clearer that the one with the more dangerous addiction was actually Carroll's client. On the stand, the manager from Sambuca described Ana as one of the top three customers in his fifteen-year career he watched out for, because they acted out when intoxicated. Then one of his employees, a bar-back who took out garbage, washed dishes, and helped stock the bar, described how an agitated Trujillo slapped him twice after he'd picked up a bracelet left on a table and asked if it was hers.

Despite all the testimony about Ana's bizarre behavior, the depth of her foray into darkness, however, didn't enter the courtroom until Officer Brian Shepherd described the night he had her handcuffed in the backseat of his squad car after arresting her for public intoxication. Ana fumed at him, and he heard her curse him and his family. “
La familia
” and “
muerto
,” she muttered, sounding as if she talked to an invisible entity. Shaken, Shepherd turned up the radio so he wouldn't have to listen while he drove her to jail.

“I called you,” said Christi Suarez, when asked how she'd gotten in touch with prosecutors. For nearly a year, Suarez was haunted by her last talk with the dead man. She'd stayed in the background, not wanting to get involved. It wasn't until three days into the trial that she picked up the
telephone, called the DA's Office, and told Sarah Mickelson what she knew about Ana Trujillo and Stefan Andersson. But then, Suarez refused to return phone calls from Jordan, and he'd sent an investigator to track her down. “I was afraid to do it,” Suarez admitted. “I was subpoenaed to be here.”

On the stand, Suarez wasn't allowed to tell jurors everything Stefan said to her just two weeks before his murder, that Ana once tried to choke him. But the TV producer did testify that Stefan feared Ana and that he'd asked her to leave his apartment. “I think although she seemed to be a very nice, humble person who liked to help people, I think she did have another side to her. I think that she was very manipulative as far as, she always felt that she had a lot of power, and I think when she didn't get what she wanted or the person didn't agree with her, then she turned to be violent.”

“When you say she felt like she had a lot of power, what do you mean by that?” Jordan asked.

Suarez took a deep breath and looked steadily at Jordan, keeping her eyes far from the woman who'd once been her friend. “Ana claimed to be very spiritual; but she actually practiced, like, Wicca. I don't know what you would call it. So, she actually at some point thought she had some sort of powers.”

At the defense table, Jack Carroll shouted out an objection. The result was that when the testimony started again, moments later, the judge had ruled that he wanted no more talk about Ana Trujillo's spirituality. But John Jordan did get in why he'd had to subpoena Suarez to get her on the witness stand. “Why didn't you come forward before last week?” he asked.

“It's a little strange to hear, but I think that I had been getting spiritually attacked. I was having nightmares. I couldn't sleep. My fiancé would stay up with me all night, praying,” she said, quietly, as if straining to be understood. “After the incident happened, you know, because I knew what Stefan
had told me . . . it was very troubling to me. Like I said, I was having a lot of issues with that, and I was very fearful of that.”

“And you were reluctant to come forward,” Jordan said.

“Yes, I was scared,” Suarez answered. “You don't want to be against someone that could possibly cause you harm, even without being around you as a person.”

Jack Carroll had objected to Suarez's testimony about his client's spiritual beliefs, but then asked about them himself, prompting Suarez to explain what she meant when she said Ana spiritually attacked her. By then, Suarez's hands shook on the witness stand as she felt Ana's eyes on her.

“What would happen is that Ana would come into my dreams and then all of a sudden, she would appear somewhere randomly in Houston, and she would find me again. After this incident occurred, I continued to see her in my dreams, and Stefan. It sounds crazy, but I had two mediums come forward and tell me they had a message from him, that he needed my help. Of course, I met him a couple of times. I was not a very good friend. I didn't know him that long . . . It's hard to be going through that when you can't sleep at night and you stay up for hours upon hours having people . . . pray for you and bless your house.”

Suarez had been talking fast, trying to get it all out, hoping those in the courtroom would understand. She took a breath, and continued, “That's what I mean by being spiritually attacked. It's almost like you're being haunted by a ghost. That's why I'm here shaking today because . . .” At that, she stopped talking, looking around the courtroom, as if needing help to go on.

“You think that you're doing the right thing against a person that was a friend of yours . . . ?” Carroll prodded. “You just out of the blue contacted the assistant district attorney assigned with this case?”

“Yes, sir,” Suarez answered. “She brutally murders a
man that did nothing but help her, and I know of her violent-drunk history. Yes.”

“. . . Do you think that after you get through testifying the spiritual attacks will stop?” Carroll asked.

Jordan objected, and the judge sustained, so Suarez wasn't supposed to have answered, but she did, “These are people that I knew, and it's going to be there forever.”

T
he first part of Jordan and Mickelson's punishment strategy was to show the jurors who Ana Trujillo had become, a violent, dangerous woman. That accomplished, they began demonstrating to the jury that this was not a victimless crime, that Stefan Andersson mattered. Not the lonely drunk depicted by the defense, the dead man had family and friends. He was loved. On the stand, Stefan's ex-wife, Jackie, wept softly as she talked about the kind and generous man she had once loved, one who'd been so close to her father that their relationship survived the divorce. Although she hadn't kept in touch with Stefan, she said, “I knew if I
ever needed him, I could call him . . . I never had that opportunity.”

Jackie Swift on the stand

(
Pool photo, Brett Coomer/
Houston Chronicle)

A college student, one of Stefan's nieces, Ylva Olofsson, told the jurors that Stefan had always been close to her, helping when she'd moved to California two years earlier, to study psychology. Good news or bad, Stefan was the first one she called. “He was more like my brother,” she said in her lyrical Swedish accent. “Even if he didn't know how to help me, he found out how to help me . . . I think of him every day. I've lost my best friend . . . It's just so unfair . . . No one is ever going to forgive what happened.”