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You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker DTK every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening. The officer responding to a nine to one one call at one of Houston's hippiest high rises expected the worst. After all, domestic violent situations can be unpredictable, but nothing could have prepared him for what he found. A beautiful woman drenched in blood, an older man lying dead on the floor, and a cobalt blue swayed stiletto with tufts of white hair stuck to its five and
a half inch heel. With her stunning looks, magnetic personality and erratic behavior, Anna Trigillo had a notorious reputation on the downtown Houston scene. He spoke often of occult powers, though few knew how deeply she believed such boasts. Stephan Anderson was a gentle soul, a sweetish transplant with a good career and trusted friends who was desperate to find
someone special. Theirs is a story of obsession, madness, and tragedy because once Stefan fell hard, head over heels for Anna, he was under her control and he didn't have a chance in hell. The book they were featuring this seven is Possessed, the infamous text Stiletto Murder. With my special guest, journalist and author Katherine Casey. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Catherine Casey, thank.
You for inviting me. Dan happy to be here.
Thank you very much. You've uncovered another wild, wild tale. I'm sure the audience will appreciate this incredible story and a very very colorful killer to say the least. Now, what brought you to write about this case in particular? How did you come to be this story to be important to you and to write Possessed? Tell us a little bit about that.
Well, you know, I covered Texas quite a bit and this is in my hometown. It's in Houston, and I was actually in London when the story broke, but it was all over the international media. The BBC latched onto it. It's just such a bizarre tale. I mean, it's something we see in movies, you know, a man being beaten to death by a woman with stiletto heel, but not in real life. Stiletto's are kind of like the ultimate symbol of female sexuality. So it just seems such an
odd thing to have happened. And I was attracted by the story of the victim. He was a brilliant man, a scientist, and he seemed a very unlikely person who've gotten into this situation.
Now, let's talk about this character, Stefan Anderson. You say he was born in Vostoris, a city of one hundred and ten thousand in Sweden, and Sweden being a small country of about ten million. Tell us a little bit about Now you talk about his parents, Irene and Harry,
and his siblings Marie and Ellie. Tell us a little bit about Stefan Anderson and the environment that he grew up in with his parents in Sweden, before we talk about his big transition to America and everything that happened as a result.
Well, actually, Stefan was imprinted as a boy. He grew up in a household where there was domestic violence. He often talked to his friends about his parents and talked about feeling just unable to protect his mother when his father would get angry, and about the effect that it had on him. So he grew up not wanting to not be his father. It was very important to him that he wasn't that man, and he always talked about how he would never be able to hit a woman.
Now this right away, he's recognized as a very bright child. And tell us what you say that his father worked for the railroad, but Stefan experienced this bullying in his childhood. So tell us a little bit more about his experience with his father and that relationship and what Stefan came to remember as terms of his behavior from his father.
Well, Steffan was awfully disappointed at times that his father wasn't proud of him. It was kind of a recurring theme throughout Stefan's life. Steffan was, as you mentioned, very very bright, and as a young man he was recognized as so by his teachers and then by others, and
he did things. He actually developed a camouflage pattern and set it in to the Swedish Army and suggested that it could be a good one, and a high ranking officer wrote back and was very laudatory about how wonderful this was, and you know what a wonderful young man he was. And when he showed it to his father, his father was angry that he had gotten attention. His parents wanted him to just blend in and to live as they lived. They were quite upset when he went
to the university. Or not his mother, but his father was. It wasn't something that they saw for him. They thought that he was supposed to live the life that his dad thought that he was supposed to live the life that he had lived.
Now, also, what you talk about is for our audience, not everybody knows about Sweden, but sort of the effect of the weather, the long winters and not very well of short summers, but sort of the attitude in Sweden. And he is this person in nineteen seventy nine, as you read, he registers at Uppsala University Pharmacy school. So he's taking that natural intelligence and putting it towards which seems like his love of chemistry, and moving towards pharmacy.
Tell us a little bit about Sweden itself and what he experienced there before we talk about again why he would have moved to America, away from his family, away from that life. Tell us a little bit about what you write in the book about Sweden.
Well, Sweden is a beautiful country, lots of green, lots of hills, it has the lakes. It's a beautiful place. But it's dark much of the winter. There are periods during the winter when the daylight is only a couple of hours, two or three hours, and that bothered Stefawn. It depressed him. He really found that he loved the sunshine and that would become kind of a theme throughout his life that he wanted to be in warm places with bright sun.
No, he's gotten a lot of offers after he earns his master's degree in pharmacy, as you mentioned this, inventions or innovations, but he also had a paper published, he achieved recognition, was granted patents on we talked about the discoveries, and again his father was not proud of his accomplishments, and so he had been offered positions from research facilities
around the world. So tell us about how he decided and when he decided, or how about how he decided to make this big dramatic move and where did he move to?
Well, because of his love of the sunshine, Stefan decided he really wanted to be in a climate with that type of atmosphere. And there was a Swedish man who was heading up a department in Dallas at one of the big research centers there, and he made Steffan an offer, and Stefan went to Dallas, looked it over and decided to move. Texas has bright sunshine, has a lot of warmth.
Those were things he appreciated. Andy was moving into an atmosphere where he had someone from his country to work for, so it was actually kind of a perfect fit for him. He loved Dallas. He moved into an apartment there and he was often spent a lot of time at the pool. He'd sit there and read newspapers and magazines and to soak up the Texas sun.
No, he is a complete person in terms of his business. He's very, very successful, but he lacks in certain areas and he's meeting people. But what is it about? How would you describe as character for the again a brilliant a brilliant scientist and a brilliant mind. Socially, what would you categorize how would you characterize him as he moves there, and tell us a little bit about his character, because I think it's important to know what and who Ana meets much later on.
Well, he really had a lot of friends, and they would go out in the evenings and they would circulate between the bars and the restaurants. But at the same time, Steffan was very lonely. He always wanted that special person in his life. He often talked about having a family. At one point in Dallas, he married and they moved to New York together and it was exciting and wonderful, but it didn't work out, and he was very disappointed, and I don't think he ever really understood why it
didn't work out. It was one of those marriages where they had just rather drifted apart. They were doing other things. So he returned to Dallas and to Southwest Medical Center where he was working as a research scientist. When he came back, he was working on steroids and hormones and how they affect women's bodies during pregnancy. It with important work. He was looking at how to prevent premature birth.
No, you say he has relationships one with Jackie for four years but they drift apart. He all at that time he had wanted a family, and he'd wanted children, and it seemed after that you write that this divorce really devastated him. So then he he would return to Sweden every year, visiting his families and friends. In mid nineties, he became a US citizen, and then in nineteen ninety seven, a woman from Sweden, Anika Lindquist, who had been influenced
to move to the US, began working for him. Now, tell us a little bit about this relationship because it's important because he is still in contact with her later when he when he meets Anna, So tell us a little bit about this relationship and what it means for Stefan.
Stefan and Anaka became very close. They became they were good co workers together. She kind of filled him out. Steffan was great with big ideas and coming up with different avenues they could look into, and Anika was born nuts and bolts, so she kind of carried it through. They really got along very well and we're really good friends. And Anka started going out with Steffan's friends in the evenings,
going to the restaurants and having fun. For a short time, a period of months they had a romantic relationship, but it didn't work out. Anaka is very outdoorsy. She she liked camping and she liked doing She didn't care if it was a ninety five degrees, she'd go for a hike. And Steffan was the kind of guy who wanted to go to the local restaurant on a Sunday afternoon for brunch.
Their you know, their likes just didn't match, and they kind of drifted into the relationship and then drifted out out of it, but they remained very, very good friends.
Now you talk about the series of events we talk about, you talk about in two thousand and five, this stormy relationship between Stefan and his father. His father dies, and again it was evident to people that knew him that his father never told him he loved him, respected what he had done. And yet Stefan still in certain parts of his life, is maintaining He's maintaining his work. He's doing really good work and love of the science, not about ego and not about money. He has good friends.
And what they did notice at that time, though, is that again foreboding of the future. Is Stefan really liked high heels and his friends almost and A commented that he had a shoe fetish. So tell us a little bit about how he got in a position in terms of meeting Anna through jillill Well.
He moved to Houston when his grant ran out in Dallas and he was hired here at the University of Houston to do his research, continue research and also to lecture the medical students at the University of Houston. And he was doing very well with that. You're right, he
did love a beautiful woman in high heels. On his fiftieth birthday before he moved to Houston, Anka made a kind of a poster for him with a lot of pictures and there were a lot of pictures of friends, and there were pictures of high heel shoes and it said shoe fetish in the center of it. This was something that appealed to him. So in Houston he moved into a building downtown. It's near Herman Park. It's called the Park Lane. It's a beautiful condominium, its apartment complex.
It's a high rise and he got for Stefan. It was the ultimate apartment. It had views of the city on two sides. It was a small but it had huge windows. He had a view of downtown Houston, and the sun poured in every morning. He got up and he waited for sunrise. It was just a remarkable place for him. He really fell in love with his apartment and with Houston.
Now you talk about him being a full professor, he's making a little bit less money again, he's doing everything for his career. But he said to his friend Stand at his stand Rich's wedding, he said, I'm really looking for my match. He had taken dancing lessons. He's fell in love with salsa dancing, and he had said to Stand that he wanted to look for a a Latino woman to slso dance with him and to teach them Spanish.
Now you talk about the park lane, and let's talk about Anna Turgillo and how she comes to be anywhere near a place like this. Tell us a little bit about We'll have to go back to who Anna Turgillo is. So tell us about Anna Trugillo in her early life, how she grew up.
Well, Anna came in with an immigrant family. Her parents brought her over. They were living in the States in Arizona before she was born. She was actually born in Mexico, but they quickly brought her back over the border, and her family didn't have a lot of money. She was raised for quite a while by a single mom. She had three other siblings. Her mom married a man with four other children, and Anna spent much of her childhood helping to care for her siblings. She was a very
responsible young girl, very fashionable young girl. She was well liked. She was always very pretty. And she moved to Houston, to well to Waco actually outside Dallas, with her parents, and there got married. She had a couple of daughters, and that marriage didn't last and she ended up married to another man and he moved her to Houston and they were living in a beautiful white brick house in a very very nice subdivision about thirty minutes outside of Houston.
And Anna decided she'd had a really good job working for Coca Cola. I had done very very well with it, and she quit and she decided she wanted to open up her own business and become a messuse. Her husband supported that opened a studio for did Allie could to get her going. But quickly after Anna opened a studio in downtown Houston, she started changing and she would become she was drinking more, she was partying at night, and
that marriage fell apart. She left her daughters, who took off to stay with their grandparents, and she ended up living for a while off what she got from that second divorce in Houston, and she also became very interested in the occult. She was living in an apartment for a while in the Rice Hotel here in Houston, which is always on the list of haunted places here in the city. And Anna started using her Ouiji board in the Rice Hotel late at night, and her life kind
of spiraled out of control. Dan, It's one of those sad instances where someone over a short period of time really kind of loses their life. And she started drinking heavily. She was smoking this herbal pot. She got some dwiyes, things that had never happened to her in her previous life. I mean, here she was. She was in her forties, and she had gone from being a suburban mom and wife and a successful businesswoman to be forced to fond
met her. She was going from man to man who was supporting her, and at different times she was actually homeless and would just show up at a friend's house looking for a bed for the night. In the fall of twenty twelve, she was living in the Park Lane. She had met a man and he was on one of the high floors and she had moved in and that relationship had gone on for a few months, and he was entertaining her as all the men did, taking her different places at night and in the lobby. One
day her path crossed with Stefan's. They talked, and after that they decided to go out for lunch and then dinner, and within a very short period of time, I believe it was a matter of a week or two, she had moved into his apartment.
Now he knew a certain amount from just initially because she was living with someone else in that building. So as friends asked his rationalization was what what was his normalization of this in terms of going from one man to another in the building? What did he have to say?
Well, you know, he said that some of his friends were very concerned about Anna. They you know, they said, well, who is this Ana Truio woman, and why, you know, why why did it break up with the man she was living with in the building, And he said, well, it was an amicable thing. They just they decided to part ways. He didn't seem concerned about that. And Anna can be very, very charming. People were really bowled over by her. She'd made a lot of friends in her
short time in Houston, and she attracted men. She was very sexual. In the clubs downtown, she would dance and hand out flowers to the men. She would give them roses. There was just something very compelling about her. So I'm sure that Stefan saw this beautiful woman, this beautiful latina, dressed, you know, very sexily and wearing those stiletto heels, that she loved that he and I'm sure he was just entranced by her in the beginning.
Now, what we didn't talk about a little bit, and we just want to go backwards just a bit, is because there's a few things in Anna's background that would have scarred her in terms of the rape, In terms of seeing someone hang them or helping stop someone from committing suicide and then that person's sexually assaulting them. This
must have made a big impression and affected her. Just tell us a little bit about some of the things that she experienced when she was younger that would factor in much later.
Well, She'd had some rough experiences with her first husband. When that marriage broke up, she claimed that at one point he had sexually assaulted her. Somebody in her family told me that they had talked her out of pressing charges against him at the time. I really think that Dan, that's true. I think that did impact the way she saw men in the future. And then she also had an altercation with a man who was living in the Rice Hotel at one point, and they told the story
very differently. She claimed that he had hit her in the head with a candlestick. He claimed that she had hit him, and that when he woke up after he'd been knocked out, she was sitting in the hallway staring at him, and she just walked over him and walked out of the apartment. She was doing unusual things at the Rice Hotel. And yes, some of it I do
believe probably did stem from her childhood. I think a lot of her moving to downtown Houston and becoming very entranced in the whole bar club scene down there came from feeling as if she'd been deprived of her childhood because she had spent so much of her time taking care of her siblings when she was young.
And yes, And you talk about too that at some point she says, I just want to have fun. I don't want to be a wife a mother anymore. And that's what she did. She abandoned her children, like you said, just like her father did.
It's very true. She took off and left them and they ended up. The younger one I ended up in Waco with the grandparents. The older one was graduating from high school at that time. So it's just really a story about someone who tried to reclaim what they'd lost as a child, and it had turned out to be a very bad decision.
Now you talk about the faithful meeting of these two and immediately, because of the circumstances of his life, have failed relationships. He still wants to get married. He quits drinking for a while, he tries to improve himself. Other times he's doesn't seem to know that you have to have other things together. He's kind of cheap in certain areas, and again, all of these things change. He tries to adapt to still to fulfill his dream. He's in America.
He loves that he's got friends. He wants to have this life that he came to America for, and he sees that in this vivacious what he sees is an upbeat and gorgeous, sexy woman in high heels. So tell us how their early relationship progresses, and what does, if anything, Stephan Anderson see about Anna Turgillo that might make him weary.
Well, in the beginning, they were really happy. I believe that he very much loved her. Actually, I think he loved her pretty much throughout the relationship. But in the beginning it was this really exciting, wonderful relationship with a younger, vivacious, beautiful woman. And he began telling his friends all about her and about how exciting she was and what they were doing. And his friends were happy for him. They
were concerned that they were happy for him. That they'd call up and he'd say, oh, Anna and I did this, and Ana and I did that, And they were out most nights of the week. Steffon did have a drinking problem. He'd had one for quite a while. He'd gone into rehab at one point and for a while, as you said,
didn't drink, but then started drinking again. So they ended up in the bars, in the restaurants, and he ended up taking her to his favorite place, which was a during the day, which was a little clubhouse restaurant near Herman Park golf course. Here in Houston is a very pretty setting, and people started noticing that there were odd things happening. The first real sign was that he called down to the desk at the Park Lane one night and said that his house, his apartment, was flooding and
he couldn't turn the water off. When they got upstairs. When the handyman got upstairs to help him, it turned out that Anna had cut the line going into the ice maker, and she sat and laughed while they tried to turn it off, and she said she had cut it because it was talking to her, that there was some kind of an entity or something in it. And then things started to happen at the golf course and in the bars. Before Steffan had met her, she had
acted out in the bars in Houston. She did things like she slapped a busboy one night when he tried to tell her that she had left something on the table. And there were just different instances where she had acted out with different people, but it started happening with Steffan. One day she yelled at a group of men who were playing cards and at the golf course restaurant, and she took their cards and shoved them off the table
and they scattered all over the floor. On another occasion, she was in there with Steffan and he was very embarrassed. There was a man waiting for Anna at the door, and she started shouting at him and saying, he'll give me what you can't, and she walked out and left. It became clear I think that Steffan was in love with Anna, and Anna wanted somebody to take care of her and support her and pay for her lifestyle.
Yes, you talk about you have access to This incredible friend is Teresa Monteya. And Teresa Montee observes things and does get caught up in her charms as well, in that even despite the warnings and the red flags from her behavior wise, he still remains her friend and puts herself out there for her friend. So we will talk about Teresa Montea and we're just going to stop for a second to talk about our sponsor for tonight. It's a new year, which means a fresh start for your business,
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ZipRecruiter slash dot com slash murder. One more time to try it for free, go to ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder. When last left off, Catherine, we're talking about Teresa Monteya, a close friend. I mean you talked about her in the clubs and her behavior, but also the most bizarre behavior out of this is this voodoo doll that she has and often is in the clubs with this voodoo doll.
So tell us a little bit more about Teresa Monteya, their relationship and what Teresa Monteya knew from being a close friend of anatridial.
Well, Teresa Monteya is actually not this woman's real name, but she kind of hooked up with Anna when Anna first got to Houston, to downtown Houston, and they started partying together, and she was there dancing with Anna on at the clubs when Anna was handing out the roses, and she started seeing unusual things. Anna would put curses on people. She would walk up to people in the bars and take a little bit of their hair if she was angry with them, to bring home to put
a curse on. And yes, she had a voodoo doll. She carried it with her. She had a tucked inside of her broad times, usually inside of her brawl once while in her purse, and in the clubs when she got angry with someone, she'd walk up and she would start rubbing it on them. It was just such an odd thing. She showed up in Waco with that doll, and her relatives up there became very, very concerned about
what was going on. She one night or one afternoon was that with Theresa Monteo, and they were downtown at one of the parking lots and there was a Hispanic man manning the booth and her car got towed. Onna's car was towed. When she came out and her car was gone, she grabbed him, pulled him by the hair and started cursing him and cursing his family, and he
ran and got the car back for her. She got picked up for drunk driving one night and was in the back of the squad car and started cursing at the officer, a man who had tried to help her earlier in the evening by getting her a cab so that he wouldn't have to arrest her for public intoxication, and she started yelling at him and cursing his family.
So she started doing odd things. Dan It was remember at the end of twenty twelve when everybody was talking about the Mayan calendar and how it could be the end of the world, while Anna was convinced it was going to be the end of the world and she was going to end up living in down in Mexico like her relatives had out in the rural areas, and she started drawing in books and was she called it her art, and she was making swirly pictures and she'd write little snatches of words, and some of it was
very strange, very strange.
Now right away, this relationship between Stefan and Anna, he is progressing very very quickly, despite some of his friends saying, hey, slow down, it's interesting too, you write. One day he bought her a couple purses and spent some money on her, lavishing her with gifts, about a fifteen hundred there's so much he liked stilettos and her as well, a fifteen hundred dollars pair of Christian level team hills. Again I'll probably mangle that, but again very expensive high heels. They
were very serious about high heels. I think when you talk to spending fifteen hundred dollars for a pair.
Of shoes, now they're Christian Lubitans. There are those fancy shoes with the red soles that do you see the celebrities wearing. And he did. But he was really spoiling her in a lot of ways. And this was something that I think he probably did want to buy for her. She said later that she made him return them because it was too much money, and I think he probably did. They probably, you know, they probably thought it over. But he was very much in love with her in the beginning,
and then things just started to happen. And there was one night Anna Anaka. He emailed Anaka at like two in the morning. She was unusual for Stefan because, as I said, he usually went to bed and wanted to get up early to see the sunrise because he loved the sunrises so much. And Anaka emailed back and said, what are you doing up at two am? And he emailed back and said voodoo. And she thought that he
was kidding, but probably not. Anna did rituals where she would draw pentagrams on the floor and put candles on the corners, and she would sit her in chance. So that may have been going on at two o'clock that morning.
Now you also talk about the idea of she He sends her to Mexico to visit her family in Guadalajara, and meanwhile, while she's gone, the manager at the park Lane says, I'd like to speak with you, and so what do they talk about in terms of Anna's behavior?
This was really Mexico. This was really the first time anyone talked this way to Stefan, but it would not be the last. The manager at the park Lane talked to him about the incidents that they were having with Anna in the building, things like making strange comments to a young boy in the elevator and flirting with some of the men who worked on the grounds and just things like that. And then what had happened with the refrigerator. This is after she cut the water line into the icemaker.
And the manager said, well, I'm taking my manager off hat off and putting my friend had on, and I think you need to get away from this woman as fast as you can. And Stefan said, but she doesn't have any place to go. And the woman warned him again, and he said, I'll try to kind of separate, but she doesn't have any place to go. Steffan had a
very big heart and he did care about Anna. And as many times as people would say to him, Steffan, this is not a good relationsship for you, he just couldn't seem to separate himself.
What were the things other than people giving him the device? But what was the What were the first things that he saw in terms of this the voodoo or the spells or the we'll just chuck it up to mental illness. What are the Some of the first things that he saw that even he couldn't deny that were awry.
Well, he started seeing her having arguments with people, and she would say strange things to people, things that were socially unacceptable. Like one of the friends, this couple they were together, the husband and wife, and while they were sitting there on us said oh, you could do better than her to the husband with his wife sitting right
next to him. And there were just odd things like that, and there were arguments, and then he mentioned to one of his friends that she liked to get rough, and the friend thought that he meant that it was during sex, and that maybe Stefan found it exciting. But then Stefan started talking about her coming up behind him and putting her hands around his neck and things like that. She
started and then he talked about her being so strong. Now, Steffan liked athletic people, so in the beginning that probably appealed him, but at a certain point he started to get afraid.
You talk about him seeing this mounting evidence that this woman was not the person that he would have liked her to begin to become, but not so many months later he does ask Anna to leave his apartment. And you say he had an order rescinding his permission to allow her to enter. Well, tell us Despite that, what Stephan and Anna continued to do.
Well. He kept trying to get her out of the apartment. It was within I think a month or so after she moved in once the first time, he actually filed multiple orders to get to keep her from getting in, but she always seemed to find a way in. And then when he did get her out, she would follow him. She began following him to different bars and things. And Stefan was a creature of habit. He had a group of friends. They went to certain places. Anna started chewing
up at those places. I think it was March or so of twenty thirteen. He was in a restaurant called Bodega's and he was there with another U of H professor, and they were at a table having lunch and Anna walked in looking happy to see him walked over at the time he had kicked her out of the apartment. She walked over and went and leaned in toward him as if she were going to give him a kiss on the cheek, but she bit him and when she pulled away, he was bleeding and he started to scream,
and she just smiled and walked out. At that day, Stefan sat with his friend, and his friend said, you have to get away from this woman. And Stefan said, I know, I do, I know I do, but I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to get away. She just keeps showing up. At times, she would show up at the restaurants and his friends. Would you know, he'd ask his friends to hide him, to not tell Anna that he was there. He was afraid of her.
So how does the progress her into twenty and thirteen? This is sort of a back and forth. She moves out, but they're seeing each other. She convinces him that she'd be back together. So there's quite a bit of a back and forth despite what he believes he should do, doesn't he well.
There is, I mean, it got to the point where he told one friend that she had put a knife up to his throat. Finally, after what you've described is back and forth, he finally does kick her out and in May of twenty thirteen. She's living with another man and a woman in an apartment not too far away. But she's still showing up and he's still buying her drinks, but he's not letting her in the apartment. One night, it was his birthday actually, I think his fifty ninth birthday.
That with Anna and one of Hona's friends, and they were at a bar called fifty to fifteen in Houston, and Anna was up flirting with other men and Stefan was sitting back, not at all upset about it. I think he had just come to it, except that this was Anna. And he told the other woman Anna's friend. He said, I love Anna, he said, but I can't have her with me. I'm afraid of her.
Now. Tell us about the events that lead up to and her behavior up to the faithful event itself. How do things progress with this back and forth? He seems to obviously know that this is wrong. It's not going to work out. He's tried it, He's heard from everybody their input on how we should stay away from her, and why he's noticing these things that can only be chalked up to mental illness, even despite she thinks she
has these powers. So tell us about the further move towards what eventually happens.
Well, in May of twenty thirteen, she's living with James Wells and another woman that he lives with, and they're allowing James is allowing her to stay there out of friendship, basically in their apartment, and then Anna starts doing strange things there. She's holding her ritual, she's running out during the day in the hot Houston sun and doing sun worshiping, and she shows up. She's over at Herman Park. She's shown up at Herman Park when Stafon's here one afternoon.
This is around Memorial Day in twenty thirteen, and she stays there with him for the afternoon and he buys her some wine. Well, he won't take her home with him, so James Wells comes to get her and he brings her back to the apartment and he's sitting in the chair and she's been acting up a little bit, but he's kind of been ignoring it, and she walks over and she bites James in the head and he starts to They have an argument. He leaves, and the other woman and Anna get into a fight, and Anna is
very badly beaten up with a stick. As the woman is trying to keep Anna from hitting her. James Wells comes back and tells Anna that she has to leave. Anna called all of her friends. She called around trying to find a place to stay. No one would take her in. She showed up over at the park Lane and Stefan saw all of the bruises. She had horrible bruises on her body, on her face. She was just
very badly beaten, and he hakes her in. He took her to the emergency room the next day and they looked rover and gave her some painkillers and did some things for her, and he lets her stay in the house for in his apartment again, with the understanding it'll be a short period of time and she'll have to move back to Waco, so she stays there. Things seem
to be all right, she starts to get better. They go back to the apartment James Wells's apartment to pick up an as things, and while Anna is there, she puts some coins in James's hand and says, put it on in your cabinet or something very bad is going to happen, and he looks at her like, well, sure you know, and he doesn't do it, He just throws the coins on the counter when he comes in. She goes back to the park Lane and gets cleaned up,
and that night is supposed to be leaving. Someone's supposed to be picking her up to take her to Waco, but a call comes in and they say they can't fit her in the car, so somebody else is supposed to pick her up the next morning. So Steffan has one last night with Ana Trujio before she's supposed to move out.
The next thing anyone knows, there's a phone call to police. Tell us what that phone call contained. Who is it from?
That phone call was from Anna and they had been out to a bar that night, and she was very drunk and she was sobbing into the phone so bad that the nine to one one operator couldn't understand her. And she said that she needed help, that she'd been attacked, and she said that Stefan had attacked her, and then in the next bra she said, he's dying. He's dying.
Send someone to help. He's dying. And the nine one one operator didn't quite understand because Anna had gone from saying that she was the victim to saying that there was somebody there who was dying. They sent over the police and they ordered an you know, they ordered an ambulance over to the park lane. So it was shortly after two o'clock in the morning, well, no, three thirty in the morning that the paramedics showed up at the park Lane.
Now what's her condition, and of course what is Stefan's condition? What do they find? And of course the smoking gun as it were, the shoe tell us about what they find.
Well, the police officer shows up at the door and knocks on the door. Hear her sobbing inside, and she opens the door and she is covered in blood. It's on her face or arms or hands, her neck. She's wearing a black top, but I'm sure it was on the top. She had on jeans and the jeans are saturated with blood. So his immediate assumption is that she's been hurt, and he asks her, are you okay? And she says yes, and then she lets him inside and he looks down the hallway and there's Stefan lying on
his back, his body on his back. There's a pool of drying, coagulated blood near his head, and all three of the walls surrounding him are spattered with blood.
And what about the shoe?
The shoe was just above Steffan's head, lying on the carpet, and there were tufts of his white hair on the heel, and it had blood all over it too. The officer said, how did this happen? What did you use? You know? And she pointed at the shoe.
In questioning what was her What did she say were the turn of events that led to this? What was her version of the story.
She claimed that he had become angry with her because somebody at the bar that night, a man had shown an interest in her and bought her a drink, and that they argued when that chefan was angry at back in the apartment because she was leaving for Waco the next day, that he didn't want her to go, and that he became abusive and attacked her. The problem was that there were no signs that he had attained at her. She he had just a couple of strands of her dark hair in his hand, but there were tufts of
his white hair on the couch there. You know it was it was It was an extremely bloody scene.
Now what behavior do the police notice and be besides somebody that they believe is the you know, the main suspect in this murder. But do they notice or see any odd behavior over and beyond someone just trying to avoid capture.
Well, she's she still is, you know, quite intoxicated. At that point, they bring her downtown to Houston p D headquarters and they put her in an interview room, and then they two of the detectives came in to try to interview her. She spent I honestly forget how many hours talking, none of it about Stefan. She told him that at the scene that he was her fiance and that she loved him, but during that interview she barely
mentioned his name. She started talking about all the men in her life who she blamed for different things, from her father to her first husband to the man she'd had the altercation within the Rice Hotel. She just couldn't seem to focus, and she talked about having powers. She talked about how she could heal people and all of these amazing things she could do. They asked her at one point, have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness?
And she said no, And they asked her if she was on any type of medication for anything, and she said no, which she wasn't. It was just this really bizarre conversation and she kept talking. When she did get around talking to talking about Stefan, she repeated what she had on the scene, which was that this is this had happened when she tried to defend herself, and she said that he was the abusive one.
Now, despite what she says, and they experienced homicide people, what forensically could they determine despite her you know, far fat story, what forensically could they conclude?
Well, in this case, Dan, the most telling thing was the blood spatter. It started out. They thought the fight started out on the couch in the living room, and that was because there they found toughts of Stefan's hair. She grabbed his hair, pulled it out, and it was
it was on this black leather cut. Then there was another spot of blood that was a round spot, so it had fallen while he was still standing, and that was on the way to the hall, so it appeared he was trying to run away from her while at that point he's bleeding, so she's already hitting him, and
then the blood spatter goes down. It started about there's a smudge, and it started about four feet up and it just it starts to come down farther and farther and farther, until the majority of the blood spatter was
actually between two and three feet from the floor. So the blood spatter expert looked at it and the only conclusion he could draw was that she was probably straddling Stefan's chest keeping him from getting up while she was hitting him with the heel while he was on the floor, and that's why the blood spatter was so low to the ground. So low to the floor.
So how do police progress? You write about the questioning? Of course, now she has to get someone to defend her. What does she how is she represented and how does she react to that representation.
Well, her story made such international headlines and it was huge news throughout Texas. I know, it made all the New York and California newspapers. I mean, it really got a lot of as they say in the business play. So one of the attorneys here in town, Jim Carroll, took it on. I'm sorry, Jack Carroll, and he did it pro bono. The other thing is Jack believed Anna. He believed her story that Stefan had been the aggressive
one and she was simply defending herself. He thought in the beginning that the domestic violence activists here in the city would back him and that there would be a lot of sympathy for her. The story came out and as they learned more about on a truio, that didn't happen. So he ended up putting a lot of time and a lot of effort into this case, basically out of
his own pocket. He got her out of He convinced her family to pull together money for bail, and she was released and her mother got an apartment here in Houston so she could work with Carol on the defense. And he said at times she would if he crossed her. He could see how angry she would become.
Right, And you just mentioned you talk about this captivation, that this story captivated the media and captivated obviously the readers. What was one of the biggest things that happened at trial itself?
Oh, well, there were some amazing things that happened in that trial. One of them was when they pulled out the stiletto heel and showed it to the jurors and you could still see Steffans there on it. There was
just kind of a gasp in the courtroom. Another thing was that John Jordan, the prosecutor, at one point brought in a dummy I think was actually a CPR dummy that they laid on a table to represent Staffawn, and the blood spatter expert placed Jordan in the position that on a tree heel must have been in when she was hitting him, and then he showed how over and
over and over again she must have hit him. As I remember, there were twenty five to thirty different strikes and more because some of them were right on top of each other. The pictures, the autopsy pictures, I mean, Stefan was really bludgeoned, you know, with that heel, and there were a lot of big and then there was the fight. At one point Jack Carroll stood in for Steffan and had Anna show how Steffan had gone after her to play it out for the jurors, and she
became quite animated. And then when the prosecutors got up and Sarah Michelson was the other second chair on the case, and they showed that what Anna had depicted couldn't have happened because she had said that Stefan had her arms down, that she was being pinned down. Well, if that were true, she wouldn't have been able to hit him with the shoe.
What was her behavior? What would you categorize her behavior throughout the trail?
You know, Jack Carroll told me that he had told Anna that he expected to win the case. And she appeared really fairly kind of unconcerned throughout most of the trial. And at one point they were showing the bar that they were in the last night was fifty to fifteen,
the same bar where they'd had his birthday celebration. And at one point they played the video from fifty to fifteen, and you can see you could see Stefan coming and trying to get Anna to leave the bar, and she's in a stewel at the bar, talking to a man and dancing and having a grand time. Well, when I looked over at Anna in the courtroom, she was jumping kind of dancing around in her chair, and she had a big smile on her face, and it was as if she was enjoying seeing herself on the video.
How did the defense and the prosecution use this voodoo and her art box and all of these things that she believed were giving her powers or enabled her to have powers. How did they use that in the trial?
And it didn't come in that much. The prosecutor decided to keep most of it out there. There were just a few things that came in. On the night that Stefan was murdered. When they opened up Anna's purse, they found a tarot book in there with explanations of tarot cards, and the page that that book was open to was the death card that got into the trial. They brought that in. It was just such a strange thing. And then there were these letters and notes and poems and things.
She called them her art. She had done what she called an art installation on Stefan's glass coffee table, and that consisted of twigs and things that she had brought in from the outside along with her notes. Those notes I had described earlier, with the concentric circles and the little snatches of writing, and some of those were just, you know, you go back, it's hard to you look
at them. It's hard not to think that there was something going on in her mind when she wrote them, which was the morning before he died, you know, twenty four hours earlier. There were things like, you know, when you can't see anymore. I don't have them right in front of me, so I can't exactly remember, but just these strange, really odd notes. And when I look through them, I got some others from someone. It was as if she was trying to conjure up the spirits. She was asking spirits to appear.
What you do, including your book is, which is rare these days, is all of these photos from the trial itself. All the people that were on the stand were part of this trial, which was extensive too. It really was a big trial, wasn't it.
It was an amazing trial. And you know, the cameras were in there during opening and closing arguments and then they were allowed to take pictures through the door. And the Houston Chronicle was the pool photographer. So the photos from the trial are the pool photos that the Houston Chronicle took, and the photographer did just an amazing job on them. They're really great photos. There are some in there of Ana when she's on the stand that are
just amazing. The photographer's name is Brett Kuhmer with the Houston Chronicle.
Now, again very unusual for for a defense team to put their client up on the stand. Some people have described it's this last desperate move of a desperate defense, but sometimes it's effective. We have seen some cases in the past. So what was it like, what was she how did she testify? What tell us about that?
It was a lot like the interview with the police. It started out of Chris with her own attorney, asking questions, and he had worked with her to try to get her to focus, but she kept going back to all these previous relationships, and she kept wandering and she couldn't
keep a train of thought going very well. And then, as I said, there was this kind of pantomime fight where this demonstration where they were trying to show what the argument, the escalation of the argument and the fight with Stefani been like that night when the prosecutors took over, it was just really this amazing, you know, discourse where they would go back and forth and and you know, she would say these things that there was just no there was no foundation for you know, she kept trying
to pin it on Steffan, and you know, Dan, in some cases, there's always the there's always kind of the feeling that when the woman strikes out like that that the man has done something that brought this on. But Steffan was truly this gentle soul, and when they autopsied them, they didn't find a single aggressive wound on his on his body or any sign of aggression. She had no open wounds from him going after or she had no
signs that he had he had attacked her. And one of the biggest problems is that she was saying this about a man who had no documented history of violence, so it was just totally out of character. They were kind of I think, I say this in the book like a perfect storm, because there's this woman who had become progressively more violence and acted out more, and there was this man who really could not defend himself. He
just did not have it in him. After growing up in a household where his mother had been abused, he just didn't have it in him to strike back at a woman. So he died without ever trying to defend himself.
You're right too that the tragic part of this too is the accusations. Again, luckily they weren't successful in rendering on innocent, but the accusations were made. The statements to categorize Stefan, this gentleman, as anything other than that really upset his friend Anika and other people in that were
observant in this. So that was the kind of thing that was part of the sad part of this is that some of this stuff sort of seemed to stick and the media enjoyed at least exploring it despite having any base to it.
Well, you know, it was almost as if she had murdered him and then she had tried to destroy his reputation afterward. You know, it's like a second attack. And yes, his friends were very upset about it. After Stefan died after the murder, within a couple of days, it had hit the Houston papers and a lot of the papers throughout the country that she called nine one one and said that, you know, there was domestic violence going on
and that she'd been attacked by Stefan. So when his friends aw that, a lot of them reached out to the prosecutor's office here in Houston and explained to them that that was not Stefan and he never would have done that. And then, of course, as I mentioned, when I got the autopsy results that confirmed it, because there was just no sign.
Yeah, it's incredible, the story where she's charming or trying to be charming, right, to the very end despite this these delusions that she has, and again, very interesting that this lawyer would take on this case believing she was innocent. I find that hard to believe because you would have to ignore all this other evidence. But it seemed that though the charms that this woman was capable of, she was using that right to this very end in this trial.
Even well, you know, I think on a true here, I had grown up believing that she could get away with pretty much anything, you know that, And I don't know that there was any mental illness. There might have been. I think the alcohol. I think there's there have been a lot of studies now on that herbal marijuana. I think in the UK they call it spice. Here down here they were calling it cush. I don't know what
it's called throughout the country. I don't know if that's but there have been a lot of studies on that, and now they've exchanged very drastically over a short period of time, became a different person. And a lot of these studies are finding that it causes paranoia and that people become very aggressive with it. So I think a
lot of things kind of played into this. I'm more inclined to think that actually it was the drugs and the alcohol than any actual mental illness on honest part, because when she was sober, which in the end wasn't as often, she still could be the old Anna at times. And once she got into the jail and dried out, her friend Teresa Montoya went over there to talk to her and she said it was like the old Anna was back.
Wow. Yeah, she really you talk about in a short period of time, in less than three years, she goes from this vivacious, ambitious massuse with a thriving business to homeless in two and a half years. So something did
dramatically happen. You can't just chalk it up to the culmination of all the past and then suddenly but a very very interesting woman and that you very vividly described in this with the voodoo and the going out with the black guys, young guys, but and just blatantly realizing or telling people that the white guys, the older white guy is going to pay. And so it's a fascinating tale. And I want to thank you very much Katherine for coming on and talking about Possessed, your latest Thank you
very much. It's been fascinating for those people that might want to look up your other work. Do you have a Facebook page? Do you do the tell us how people might contact you or find out more about your work?
Oh? Well, I'm really easy to find. My website is Katherine Kasey dot com. It's k A t h r y n c A s e Y. I am on Facebook. I'm easy to find there. Unfortunately I'm all filled up with friends, but they can follow me. We have some pretty interesting discussions on there about cases in the news, and I put up pictures in my dog Nelson, which is always fun. So I'm always happy to meet new people. But I appreciate it Dan very much. Thank you for inviting me to be on the program.
Well, it's always my pleasure, Catherine. Then, thank you very much, and I know I will be talking to you soon because you're a busy and prolific writer, and we'll be talking to you again with your next great work. Thank you very much for this, Catherine, and that you have a great.
Evening YouTube, Dan, Thank you, Bye.
Good night.
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