To Die For (33 page)

Tom and Dana vacillated for months. Their financial situation went from precarious to dire, and they missed mortgage payments. Dana was still bringing home most of the income and she resented having to deplete her paycheck for the mortgage, leaving little to spend on herself. They continued to miss mortgage and loan payments on the second trust deed.

At the start of 1993, around the time she decided to move in with Jim for good, Dana's abuse of alcohol increased. She kept the prescription for Paxil and sought out another psychiatrist who prescribed different medication. In April, she started stealing painkillers from work and tried to hide the drug use by reporting that glass vials containing medication had broken. Controlled substances at a hospital are strictly inventoried and accounted for when they are administered to a patient or wasted, which usually has to be witnessed by another employee and documented. Dana tried to hide the thefts of medication by reporting that she had dropped and destroyed glass vials or had administered it to a patient via verbal order from a doctor, though that medication had not been prescribed. Every time Dana stole painkillers or other medication, her nursing supervisor was making a note of it. Dana had barely avoided getting fired months earlier because she was unable to get along with other nurses in the obstetrics department, but she had been transferred to post-op recovery and seemed much happier. She had been talking about leaving nursing to go into silk-screening full-time.

The summer of 1993 was a difficult one for Dana. Her drug and alcohol use intensified and in June she filed for divorce from Tom. In August, Tom moved out of the Canyon Lake home and back to his parents' house in Covina, and Dana moved the rest of her things to Jim's house in Lake Elsinore. To stave off foreclosure proceedings on the Canyon Lake house, Dana and Tom filed for bankruptcy in September. They owed $177,400 on a house that, at that time, was worth $125,000. They also listed their parents as creditors for their loans of $2,200 and $3,000. Dana was netting $2,500 a month and Tom was clearing about $600 a month. They claimed their musical instruments as assets worth $3,500, but Dana didn't claim her silk-screening equipment.

In September and October, Dana was stealing drugs from the hospital regularly, sometimes twice or three times a week. She took a four-day trip to New Orleans in October for a silk-screening convention at the Hilton in the French Quarter using Jim's credit cards. Dana said she attended the conference during the day and partied up and down Bourbon Street at night. Jim was now paying for most of her bills, and helping her settle some debts and pay back her parents.

On November 18, Dana was called into a meeting with the hospital supervisors and confronted with details of four separate incidents in which wasted medication was improperly documented or medication not prescribed was recorded as being administered to a patient. The missing medications were Demerol, Sublimaze and Astramorph, all opiate-derivative painkillers that are administered intravenously. Dana stated that she could not remember certain incidents and in other instances, explained that the doctors had asked for the additional medication. The doctors recalled differently. At the end of the meeting, the supervisors decided to suspend Dana for three days.

Dana was called into another meeting on November 24 and given another opportunity to respond to the same allegations as well as a string of 34 additional incidents. Some of the amounts she claimed to have administered were so high that if she had given the patient that much, it might have been fatal. Dana referred to nurses or doctors who witnessed her wasting medication or who had verbally ordered a change in medication. Each of those nurses and doctors said they hadn't spoken with her. When asked if she had anything else to say, Dana said she was upset that everyone knew about her suspension. Dana's supervisor reminded her that she herself had announced her suspension at a staff meeting. At the end of the meeting, she was fired.

Dana sank into a deeper depression, but brushed off the loss of her job to friends and family as “incomplete documentation.” She never acknowledged pilfering drugs, but said she was the victim of backstabbing and made a scapegoat because she had the “biggest mouth.” To quell her feelings, Jim took Dana away for Thanksgiving, to the family cabin in Mammoth Mountain, an upscale ski resort in Northern California. Although there was some snow on the ground, they spent their days fishing and biking around the lakes. Dana cooked a turkey and the fish they caught for an intimate Thanksgiving dinner.

In December, Dana plunged into decorating the house for the holidays and put her energy into her silk-screening business, exercise and trying to find another job. She made Christmas stockings for Jim and Jason. On her birthday, December 6, they all went to Disneyland, where Jason went wild. She applied for unemployment. Because she was not working, she tried to establish a schedule for herself. She picked out a $1,000 Trek mountain bike and put it on layaway. She would take Jason to daycare and go for a bike ride or do some other kind of exercise in the mornings, scan the classifieds, make phone calls and go on job interviews. Dana told her manicurist that she was putting a woman's touch on Jim and Jason's bachelor pad. She scrubbed the place from top to bottom, lined all the cupboards, bought new curtains, got Jason a computer and a new monitor for his games, went through Jason's closet and got rid of old clothes, bought him new ones, replaced the headboard on his bed, bought curtains and bed and kitchen linens. She pulled Jason out of daycare and put him in a private preschool. Dana spent a lot of time with the boy and took him to the beach a couple of times, on the warmer winter days, to teach him how to swim. They would take their bikes and run by the lake with the dogs. She seemed determined to give him what his biological mother, whom Jim characterized as a drug user, could not. She talked about Jason incessantly and her friends and family began to wonder whether it was Jason, not Jim, that she had fallen in love with. Even Jim seemed a little jealous that Dana had so much time with Jason and was bonding with him. Jeri warned Dana not to get too close to Jason, just in case the relationship with Jim didn't work out.

Jeri and Russell saw Dana infrequently—they didn't have a close relationship with her. They weren't invited to her parties, and she didn't introduce them to her friends, but she would drop in on occasion, or all three would come by for a visit.

On Thanksgiving and Christmas, like each year before, Dana was invited but did not go to Russ and Jeri's house. For Christmas, Jim paid the balance on the mountain bike so she would have it for Christmas. On New Year's Day 1994, she and Jim took Jason to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena.

On Jan. 2, 1994, Dana received another long letter from Rick, who had not communicated with her since his last letter in 1991. He called Tom and Dana “spoiled little brats” for acting irresponsibly during the break-up of their marriage and demanded the return of his belongings. He included copies of Dana's previous notes thanking him for the loan, so she could not later claim they were gifts. Now living on food stamps and Medi-Cal, Rick said he was about to undergo major surgery after breaking his back in an accident on Memorial Day that had left him completely disabled. Rick was angry that Dana hadn't returned his phone calls. When he did get her on the phone, she was angry with him because he wanted his microwave back, “and that's fucked!” Rick railed at Dana for that remark because he never mentioned his microwave, but Dana was compelled to assume what he was thinking, making herself a victim again. Rick's reply seemed to cut to the heart of one of Dana's most troubling personality traits, that of perceived slights by others and her desire for revenge. “I never had the intention to play nasty tricks on you the way you seem to need to do to others … I have seen you in action and have heard you tell me in conversations how you planned to get even with various people for supposed indiscretions that you assume have been perpetrated against you.”

Rick also cut to the heart of Dana's empty soul that seemed never to be filled. “Anything you personally have done for me I feel has been done with a selfish motive beneath it. You think because you have done someone a kindness they must tell you how much they love you, and love you, and love you …

“Eventually, whether you want to or not, you will have to face the truth of your life, even if it's with the last breath you take…”

Rick called Dana again on Sunday, January 30, two weeks after his back surgery, and said he would “come unglued” if she didn't return his call. She called a couple of hours later, saying, “Do us both a favor, fuck off and die.” Rick said he just wanted his stuff back and Dana hung up on him. She called him several times that day, letting the phone ring 10 or 15 times, knowing that it would take him that long to get to the phone because of his back surgery, and hung up once he answered the phone. She called one last time and shouted, “Are you so pissed off you could stroke out and die? I hope so!”

Rick had had enough. He called his local police department in Alhambra to report a threatening phone call. The detective got ahold of Dana the next day and she agreed never again to call and harass him. Dana later said, “Yeah, I was a bitch. He deserved it.”

Dana had the post-holiday blues and sank into another round of depression and vodka-drinking. She tried a couple of part-time jobs, but found them demeaning. She tried to put time into silk-screening, but was restless and bored. Things weren't working out with Jim. If she was going to move out, she'd need a place to live. She went over and asked her parents about moving in with them. They said it would be OK, but they were already starved for closet space. It would be tight.

Jeri had another suggestion.

“Why don't you move in with Norma? The condo has tons of room.”

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 1994, 9:30 A.M.

Tom had a funny feeling. Dana had called his parents' house and asked to meet with him. He didn't want Dana to have his phone number or know where he was living. If she needed to reach him, she called his parents' house. He agreed but, at the last minute, got a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was unmistakable. He hadn't felt that way since their honeymoon.

Tom didn't call to cancel, he just didn't show up.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 1994, 3:30 P.M.

“How are you doing today?”

“Well, I've been vomiting all day, but other than that, fine,” Dana told the counselor. Clad in a medium blue jail jumpsuit, Dana's collar-length reddish hair was fluffy and soft. A white plastic wristband indicated her housing status in the mental health observation unit.

“I can't eat the food in here. The only thing I've been able to keep down is an orange and some Kool-Aid. I
really
need a vegetarian diet.”

Her daily mental health follow-up had taken on a familiar quality. Every day since her arrival at county jail, she had been pulled out of her cell by a sheriff's deputy and escorted to an hour-long interview with a psychological counselor. Except for the first day, she denied having any suicidal thoughts. She said she had been depressed and suicidal before she was arrested, but didn't have those feelings anymore. She replayed the events of the past year, her crummy marriage, the loss of her job, foreclosure, bankruptcy and alcohol abuse, and she recounted the death of her mother when she was a young teenager. When asked about her primary fear, she said she hated being alone. The boilerplate interview for a new inmate included questions about her support structure upon being incarcerated. Dana said that she'd been in regular contact with her father since her arrest. After declaring herself suicidal, she was placed alone in an observation cell with twenty-four-hour video monitoring. Every half hour, a deputy strolled by and wrote down what she was doing. Food trays get shoved through the slot in the cell and she got an hour or so a day in the communal day room where she had contact with other female inmates. Dana didn't like this arrangement anymore, didn't want to be interviewed by a counselor every day and didn't want to take any medication.

“I need to get out of this cell with the camera on you the whole time,” Dana said. “I need to get out more—how can I get more time in the day room?”

Dana sat quietly and cooperated as the counselor asked the standard questions about her family, her marriage, her job. She complained about her poor appetite and said she was using sleep as an escape mechanism and trying to make friends with the trustees. Dana answered all of the questions in great detail and in a loud voice, complete with exaggerated hand gestures. When talking about her parents, she was reduced to tears, but the tears disappeared when a “superficial” subject was raised, the counselor noted. The counselor wrote that Dana's mood was “anxious, labile, histrionic and hyperverbal. Main energy is devoted to learning about her environment and how she can get her needs met. Urgent to learn jail system.” She also noted that Dana was very observant, noticing that Dana scanned her hand to see if she was wearing any rings.

The deputy who had escorted Dana, standing watch nearby, mentioned that there was some discussion of her case in the day room because there was a newspaper article about it.

“There was an article about me?” she asked excitedly.

The deputy said the article had created quite a stir in the day room and that the other inmates and some of the sheriffs were talking about it.

Dana nodded her head and proceeded to quiz the guard about the vegetarian diet, changing her housing status, and getting more day room time.

MONDAY, MARCH 21, 1994, 12:57 P.M.

“What can you tell me about Dora's social life? Did she have a lot of friends, or…?”

Helen Carlson paused for a bit. It had been just a few days since her friend of twenty-one years had died. She wiped away a tear and spoke slowly.