To Die For (37 page)

A mere mention of selling a pair of Dana's earrings provoked an angry outburst: “As for my ‘things' I want JIM to sell them! I don't want either of you involved other than my wedding ring … You know the way everyone's so anxious to cash me out makes me feel like I'm already dead! IT FUCKING INSULTS AND HURTS ME! So please honor my wishes till further notice…”

Dana was unconcerned about hiding her hatred for Norma in response to Jeri's remarks about the inherent difficulty of selling the condo, saying that the “years with Norma Armbrust were a living hell … I am very sensitive however, as I'm sure you can see.”

*   *   *

On April 14, Dana wrote to Jim about getting tossed into lockdown with a twenty-four-hour camera “in the worst cell. No desk or shelves, just a toilet and bed. It's back to meals through a doggie door. ½ hour a day for dayroom time, no rec room. Dayroom time is early, too early to call people.

“I feel so isolated. Not seeing you is hard enough, but not talking to you is a killer. I need you babe in the worst way.
I need to see you more now than ever.
” Out of desperation, Dana called Jim at work, because it was the only time she has access to a phone. In one letter, she wrote, in the early morning, at 1:45 p.m., 3 p.m., & 6 p.m. “Oh great, they just shut my doggie door. Why don't they just shoot me and get it over with?”

Dana said she was placed in lockdown “for my own protection” but added that she didn't believe that explanation and floated a couple of theories. She blamed another inmate who was jealous, but didn't describe the source of the jealousy, and wondered if Bentley arranged it to “make me break down.” She enlisted the assistance of another inmate to call her parents so they could call the sergeant who placed her in lockdown. Dana even included a scrap of a note in her letter to Jim with scribbles from her and another inmate commiserating about being in jail and joking about whether the guards got extra pay if they were to attempt suicide.

It is interesting that in her letters, Dana seemed to empty her heart and soul on paper, revealing her inner thoughts and feelings during these difficult weeks of isolation and self-reflection. She appeared completely open but she never came clean to Jim, her friends or family. In reality, Dana's tours of duty in lockdown resulted from standard rules violations and getting into verbal and physical confrontations with guards and other inmates. Dana had often clamped down hard on spin control when it came to her image—as she had when her friends discussed why she was dismissed from the hospital—and no doubt wanted to do the same here. Rather than having her friends and family visualize a raging, combative inmate housed in isolation for fighting, she preferred the forlorn image of herself as a victim of a power-hungry DA and a helpless pawn of media.

Dana partially disclosed why she was placed in lockdown more than a year later, in July 1995, when a psychologist came to evaluate her:

“I was very sick when I first got here—it would be straight line from the bed to use the bathroom. I could drink, but I was very sick when I first got here. I perked up after about two weeks and could look at my dinner tray. Then they put me in PC (protective custody) upstairs. I was aggressive and hostile because people got in my face right off the bat. I was not allowed to mingle and check out what was going on. There was one girl in particular, they slammed me back in lockdown after that. A week after that, I ended up in complete isolation on the 7th floor for five weeks, with a room with a shower, TV.” When asked whether that was triggered by any particular incident, Dana answered generally: “I had a real hard time adjusting and didn't understand that I could not talk to them like how I can talk to you. It was a definite role I needed to play and it was hard for me to remember I am in a blue jumpsuit. I was not real cooperative. If I had an opinion, I told them. I don't know if they did it to put me in my place, but I appreciated the time by myself.”

In lockdown, confined to her cell 23½ hours a day, Dana wrote letter after letter to stave off loneliness and boredom. Still trying to get support from friends, she penned a second letter to Dave, her realtor friend, complaining about news stories that “twist the truth for a buck,” and continued her hobby of smearing Tom, which included “hearing” that he's taken “a big cocaine dive.” “That bastard is now trying to get a hold of everything I own for himself.” Even after barely a month in custody, Dana's letters started taking on an inevitable institutional hue, in which her status was measured in the number of visits, calls and letters. In this letter, after painting Tom in the worst possible light, Dana colored herself the winner in the support department, receiving more visits, letters and phone calls from friends, co-workers and parents.

One of the more disturbing of Dana's drawings to Jim was christened “Lockdown Monster,” perhaps a pun on “Loch Ness Monster,” and is a dark, brooding blob with an immense mouth and jagged teeth. Dana attempted to put the best face on her situation by describing an interview with a defense investigator as a cathartic exercise. “It was a relief to unload mental baggage … It feels free … My life is an open book.” She was unnerved by her father's most recent visit, in which they were both sobbing with hands on the glass between them, and she said she felt “like shit” as she tried to soothe her. She asked Jim to be “extra gentle” with her father, saying she feared for his health.

Dana included what was becoming a pro forma attack on Rich Bentley “using the media for his advantage. Know in your heart it's the little prick's only chance. Like a little prick syndrome—all show and no go. It's all ego for the DA, and at my expense…”

The longer she was in custody, the more she realized she no longer had control over her former life—“What are you going to do with the stuff Dad can't store?”—and the indignities of being on-camera and incarcerated: “I'm calm considering I just spent 35 mins buck naked on my period … in a scratchy wool blanket sitting on the cold cement floor…”

Just as Dana felt attacked by people on the outside, she reported that she was becoming a target of “Snakewoman,” a nickname for another inmate. Dana claimed to ignore her. “I just clam up and let her make an ass out of herself.”

Dana's letters to her father and Jeri reiterated her caring for them, recounted the humiliation of jail life and listed batches of errands. More and more of her news to them and to Jim included snapshots of what her life was like in lockdown.

Like being hauled in front of the sergeant at 4:00 a.m. to plead her case over being in lockdown and vivid descriptions of the chaos and raw emotions that erupt when strangers are thrown together, living day and night in cramped, concrete quarters, peppering her play-by-by accounts with the patois of jail. In one incident an inmate initiated a fist-fight with a trustee, then tried to intimidate a pregnant inmate who was ready to deliver.

“The pregnant woman chased Sophia up the stairs screaming at her … As far as I know, she didn't even get a marker and here I sit in lock-down because of that bitch!”

Dana wrote three letters to Jim on April 21 and drew him a tearful half of a clown face. She was melancholy about getting pictures of her growing Queensland Healer puppy, Penny, from Lisa Sloan, tossed around the idea of illustrating a book of poetry from an inmate titled
Lockdown
and struck a combative stance with Tom. “I want transport to divorce court so I can face and fight Tom myself.”

She tried to control Jim and wanted her father and Jeri to circle the wagons so he and Jason didn't escape.

She just told Jim that she continued to talk about their relationship with her father, who she said was frustrated because Jim hadn't visited her. “Honey, they want to help us both—you are family to me and that's all that matters.” While holding open the loving arms of family life, Dana couldn't help but needle him, charging that Jim simply chose not to accept. Then she went after Jason, who could use some mothering. “Can you let Jeri help fill that void?”

Toward the end of the month, Dana chronicled Jim's conflict: he truly loved Dana, but had been so irreparably hurt that a break-up appeared inevitable. Dana pleaded with Jim to salvage their relationship, even if it was only a friendship, and told him she wouldn't give up on him.

Her days in lockdown consisted of sleeping until noon and peeling the sticky strips from her tea bags to tape up pictures of her dog, Penny. Distraught, she contemplated taking psychotropic medication to cope with the isolation. Finally, on April 24, Jim told her in their nightly phone call that their relationship was over, leaving Dana “absolutely crushed … I'm so numb and stunned right now I can't even think.”

Even as she tried to salvage crumbs from her relationship with Jim, Dana was cultivating the first of what would eventually become a steady string of jailhouse suitors. She'd penned a letter to Jim expressing emotional anguish on Saturday, but, on the same day, dashed off a cheerful letter to Robert Martinez, “Indio,” complete with a questionnaire about his personal history and asking him to detail why he was writing to her.

At the same time, Dana begged Carrie Ann, who visited her in jail, to talk with Jim after revealing that she “got dumped on the phone.” Dana complained that she was hurting, but decried Jim's inability to decipher how she was feeling, emotionally and mentally. “I wasn't me! Can't he see that?”

The same theme was repeated in a letter to another longtime friend: “I feel like I slipped through the cracks and nobody noticed. Please notice now.” She went a step further in a letter to Russell and Jeri in which she appeared to attribute her criminal conduct to her bad luck with partners.

Dana cast herself as a tragic figure in a relationship with Jim, dramatically questioning why he didn't stop her from “slipping through the cracks,” and, in essence, save her from herself. Nobody noticed … “Did I make myself yet another bad choice [sic] in men?” Dana, in a letter to another nursing friend, didn't mention Jim's conduct, but instead engaged in another profane rant about Tom obtaining a temporary restraining order against her, which appeared to grind her nose in the fact that she was behind bars and he was not. She seethed over the restraining order: “Does he think I can get out of here soon?” Dana asked if they would pass a message to Tom: “FUCK OFF TOM!!! Leave me alone forever, O.K.?” At the end of the letter, Dana jotted down that she had been reading and painting, and was feeling “a little down” and apologized for “going off on you.”

Dana continued to correspond with Jim and Indio, accentuating the transition between her old life and her new life. To Jim, she vacillated between romancing him back into the fold and vilifying him for dropping her at the most vulnerable time in her life. “…You certainly made my day by dumping me over the phone. It's not like I'm totally stressing over very much right now. What's one more crisis? Well I hope you don't close the door all the way…” To Indio, Dana was animated and flirtatious, and pumped her letters full of jailhouse lingo.

On Wednesday, April 27, Dana was moved to a hospital isolation cell on the seventh floor. Dana now had her own TV, her own shower, a window, a desk and increased phone access—but no contact with inmates other than the trustees who delivered her food trays. She also had rec time in an exercise room but was still alone there. Dana was reduced to asking the guards if they wanted to play Ping-Pong. They declined.

Dana wrote to three other inmates she'd made friends with in protective custody, Linda, Betty and Susan, let them know where she was and offered words of support to them. In contrast to her constant barrage about the poor diet to her father, Jeri, Don, Lisa, Joanie, her personal doctor, and everyone else on the outside, she had a different kind of complaint to her inmate pals: “Their commisary up here is different and doesn't have any women's products or chips & candy! EEK! So I requested the 6th floor comm slips, what will I do without my Fritos and pretzels? And no M & M's? Aren't I a whiner?”

Dana gloated over having her own shower—“No waiting!”—which was modified for handicapped people, allowing her to sit while she shaved her legs, but she was clearly stung from being isolated: “There's a notice on my door that I'm not to have any inmate contact. Makes me feel like I have cooties.” If moving to lockdown offered Dana an opportunity to reflect on her actions, the object lesson was lost on her as she busied herself with learning to make jailhouse foundation make-up using talcum powder and hounded the watch sergeant for a mirror because her cell had none.

“[The sergeant] said to me, ‘This isn't a hotel!' I know that, but basics are basics and a mirror is a basic. I'd like to be able to put make-up on right and pluck my eyebrows. I made some face base like Sheree' but made it too dark so I'll have to wait till Mon commissary to get more lotion to thin it out…”

Pounding out letters to pass the time, Dana wrote to Indio and Jim, her day room buddies and friends on the outside. To childhood friend Carrie Ann, Dana finger-pointed at both Tom and Jim for ignoring her downward spiral and pleaded with her to act as her ambassador to Jim to convince him to come back to her.

“I have faith in you … I know you'll touch his heart somehow. You'll find a way though his ice-maze. I'm preparing myself too for our truthfulness and your saying to forget him …

“I have a real talent for choosing men that use me.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 1994, 10 A.M

The gardeners were on lunch break, sprawled on a grassy area in the condo complex.

“Excuse me.”

Greco had been hoping they'd be there. He walked over to where they lay on the grass with sack lunches and a couple of small coolers between them. They were within eyesight of Norma's condo on Continental Way, in the picnic area next to the guest parking. He couldn't have asked for better timing. He was doing door-knocks in the neighborhood to see if he could find anyone who'd been around and might have seen something on Monday, the day Norma was killed. Greco had wanted to talk to the gardeners who were working in the neighborhood that day. He remembered seeing them curiously looking over at the condo when he got there Wednesday morning, the day the body was discovered.