The twenty-seventh state to join the union, on March 3, 1845, Florida is a world away from a place like Nevada. Where the Silver State is dry and mountainous, with snow-clad peaks topping out over 13,000 feet, Florida is wet and flat—its highest point is, at 345 feet, more than a hundred feet lower than the lowest point of Nevada. And it is humid, subtropical and tropical in its weather, its forest and its bugs, the sort of place one might instantly identify with Bogart and Bacall, or with Hurt and Turner—where the steam rises and sultry passions lie mostly dormant beneath moss-laden trees and ominous, pregnant weather.

There, nestled amid a series of low limestone hills some forty-five minutes north of the Gulf Coast cities of Tampa–St. Petersburg, lies the bucolic, To Kill a Mockingbird-like town of Brooksville, seat of Hernando County. It was just outside Brooksville, surrounded by rain-dampened cedar, pine, oak and pasture, that Laren Renee Sims grew up, one of four children of Jesse and Jackie Sims.

By all accounts, little Laren was a bright, inquisitive, even precocious child. Born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, when her father was attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s, Laren as a girl was as popular as she was smart. She also had a willful streak that some thought endearing, while others predicted trouble. At one point, it was said that Laren’s intelligence quotient was rated at 140, which certainly put her in the top echelon for brains, if true.

In its early days, Brooksville was the retail center of a rural county that employed most people in its limestone quarries, although some worked in the timber industry—for years the area was the main manufactory for the wooden cases for Eberhard Faber pencils. Brooksville had a long history, even though for most of its existence it had fewer than 2,000 souls. Named in honor of Preston Brooks, a South Carolina congressman who gained national notoriety in 1856 when he beat U.S. Senator Charles Sumner senseless with a cane after the latter had expressed his abolitionist sentiments on the Senate floor, the town was founded as homage to Brooks’ violent dedication to states’ rights, slavery and later, segregation. During the Civil War, the nearby village of Bayport was used by rebel blockade-runners, and in the aftermath of the conflict Brooksville continued to maintain its color-line traditions, the remnants of which can still be seen today, along with the statue of the Confederate soldier on the county courthouse lawn.

The years after World War II, however, began to bring change to Hernando County and Brooksville. First the population doubled, then redoubled, with much of the new development spreading westward across the low hills between Brooksville and the Gulf, particularly around the community of Spring Hill to the west. As recently as 1970, Spring Hill had only three or four hundred residents; by the year 2000, it had nearly 80,000 people who called it home. All that development did more than just bring money to the Brooksville area; it also brought new ideas and new people.

Among those who moved to the area were three brothers, Jesse, David and Charles Sims, and their families. The Sims brothers began a manufacturing business in Brooksville, Sims Machine and Controls. The business soon grew to be one of the town’s largest employers, and was very prosperous indeed; as the years passed, the Sims brothers and their families became socially and politically prominent in Hernando County. Jesse Sims and his wife and their children settled into a comfortable upper-middle-class home northeast of Brooksville, amidst the oaks and pastures of the horse country outlying the town, with every reason to be optimistic about the future.

Later, much of the early background of Laren Sims would be uncertain, not least because Jesse and Jackie, her parents, were intent on keeping it that way. Although a lawyer representing the Sims family agreed to communicate a request for an interview to them, they did not respond to the invitation to share their recollections of their daughter. That certainly was their right, and even understandable, in light of the events that had by then unfolded. Both Simses loved their daughter dearly, and the tragedy that was to occur did nothing to lessen that love. Sometimes talking about the pain doesn’t really make it go away—sometimes it only makes it hurt more.

In perhaps the only interview by Jesse and Jackie in the aftermath of the events with which this book is concerned, given to Jamie Jones, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, Jackie Sims noted only that as she grew older, “Laren’s life seemed to change, and she began to make some wrong choices.”

According to Jones’ account, some of those changes had their origins at Hernando High School, when Laren began to hang out with the boys near the Brooksville bowling alley, Louie’s, and drink beer under the nearby power lines. She spent weekends with the fast crowd that liked to hang out at Pine Island, a then-isolated spot on the coast. While this was likely a reflection of typical teenage rebelliousness, a closer look at two photographs from Laren’s high school annual seems to tell a more profound story. In one photograph, taken her sophomore year of 1981–82, Laren looks like a naive tenth-grade girl, someone whose innocence is all too apparent. The photograph of the following year, 1982–83, is, by contrast a portrait of a confident, knowing woman. It is almost as if they are two different people. It therefore seems possible that whatever happened to make “Laren’s life seem to change,” it happened between her sophomore and junior years.

By May of 1984, in her last year of high school, Laren dropped out to marry a young man named Virgil Scott Jordan, who was from the northern, panhandle area of the state. Just how and where Laren encountered Scott, as he was called, wasn’t all that clear from the records many years later, but according to the Simses’ family lawyer, Thomas Hogan of Brooksville, Laren met Scott at a dance somewhere in north Florida in the spring of 1984. Scott, Hogan said, was in military service at the time. According to the Times’ Jamie Jones, who apparently got the story from Jackie Sims, Laren married Scott at a ceremony at the Simses’ house in Brooksville; the state’s official records indicate only that a marriage license was taken out on May 12, 1984, in Jackson County, in north Florida near the Florida/Alabama/Georgia border.

The following January, Laren gave birth to a daughter, Haylei. What next transpired was to be shrouded in the mists of uncertainty and reluctance to discuss it, but it appears that shortly after Haylei was born, Laren and Scott split up, and were soon divorced. Laren returned to Hernando County with her infant daughter.

There, Laren began a relationship with a Brooksville man. Soon she was pregnant again. On March 17, 1986, she gave birth to a son. By early the following year, that relationship had gone sour as well, and Laren was in court seeking child support payments from the father of the boy. In an agreement in June of 1988, the father agreed to pay $165 a month in child support, as well as a $750 lump sum for Laren’s lawyer’s fee.

Somehow during this period of time Laren found the time to finish high school, obtaining a GED, and if the Hernando County records are accurate, it appears that she also attended college—a later court record notes that she had four years of college (more probably just two years, however) and certification as a dental technician.

Still, from 1988 forward, there would be an ever-widening angle away from the straight-and-narrow for Laren. What began as a small deviation from the law, over time and with continued probation violations, grew larger and larger, more and more serious, and eventually, led to fatal results, like a long-term bond accruing compound interest. Some of this early veering away from a life of honesty was due to Laren’s headstrong, independent nature. Some was due to Jesse and Jackie’s decision to deal with their daughter in terms of “tough love,” as Hogan later put it. Much of it—perhaps most of it—was due to Laren’s consistently unfortunate choices in domestic partners, and her apparent willingness to be used by them, at least in the beginning. But some of it was clearly the result of some form of mental illness, as the court records would eventually suggest.

For one thing, in reviewing Laren’s subsequent criminal history, one can’t help but be struck by the pettiness of almost all the charges. At least half of the scrapes that she would get into between 1988 and 1993 involved taking things that had very little actual value, but were in fact connected to, or owned by someone with whom Laren was having a personal dispute, or some sort of emotional relationship. That there was a psychological dimension to Laren’s criminality was obvious to almost everyone. It wasn’t as if she were inherently an evil person, it was just that she had problems—issues, as the word is now used—with authority, with men, with property and security. In one sense, the stealing might be seen as an attempt to get even; at the same time it represented an attempt to get someone to rescue her.

Among Laren’s first criminal escapades was the shoplifting of a hair-coloring kit worth less than $5, in St. Petersburg in 1988. For this she received a fine and probation. By the fall, the problems deepened: Laren took ceramic flower arrangements and a telephone from a neighbor with whom she’d been having a dispute, total value $170. A month later, she burgled the house of her boyfriend’s ex-wife, taking a telephone answering machine, jewelry, clothes, a musical instrument, and an all-terrain vehicle. According to lawyer Thomas Hogan, Laren did this to please the boyfriend, not because she wanted the stuff. Indeed, the boyfriend may have felt he had some legal claim to the property, including the ATV, but was barred from the premises, and somehow cajoled Laren into getting the goods for him. Laren’s willingness to do this, Hogan would suggest, only indicated her naivete at the time.

But nevertheless, here is a clue about Laren’s personality: the apparent desire to please an older man. As she was to progress through the remainder of her life, this would be a pattern repeated again and again: getting close to a man who was older, then either breaking the law in some fashion to please him, or alternatively, getting even with him by using him in some scheme. This would be seen in Hernando County; Las Vegas; Reno; Lodi, California; Nashville; Biloxi, Mississippi; and again in Florida at the end of her life, when her last objective would be Hogan himself.

By January 8, 1989, these early malefactions had caught up with Laren. A Hernando County sheriff’s deputy, acting on a complaint by the boyfriend’s former wife, went to Laren’s home to arrest her, but she fled. The deputy was patient. Eventually a friend arrived to pick Laren up, so the deputy collared him instead. The friend told the deputy that Laren had admitted burglarizing the ex-wife’s house, saying it was the ex-wife’s own fault because she had left her keys in her car in front of the house, “a fact that only the victim knew about and the perpetrator,” the detective reported. Eventually Laren was located near Tampa, arrested and taken to jail in Brooksville. She denied committing the burglary, but admitted being in possession of the stolen goods.

Now that they had Laren in custody, the Hernando County authorities cleared two more petty burglary cases: the ceramic flower pot caper, and a second intrusion into the ex-wife’s house, in which another answering machine was also taken. In addition, the arresting detectives noticed that two other police agencies, in St. Petersburg and Winter Haven, in Polk County, had holds on Laren for cases they were investigating. It appeared to the cops, at least, that Laren was fencing stolen property at various pawn shops in other cities. When she was booked into the jail, Laren called her father, Jesse. Laren was held on $5,500 bail.

By March, apparently reconsidering their initial inclination to let Laren sleep in the bed she had made for herself, the Simses retained Hogan to represent her on two burglaries, a grand theft, a petty theft, and a charge of dealing stolen property. Hogan, who had represented the Sims brothers in their factory business dealings, negotiated a deal with the Florida State Attorney’s Office. Laren would agree to plead guilty to the two burglaries, the grand theft and the petty theft, and the dealing in stolen property charge would be dismissed. In return, Laren would avoid any more jail time, agree to pay restitution to the victims in the amount of $1,184, and be on probation for 5 years.

“Also,” said Hogan, “the assistant state attorney has requested counseling, and Ms. Jordan has already enrolled in counseling, so that will be easily fulfilled.”

The judge asked Laren if she was willing to agree to this deal, and Laren said she was. “How far did you go in school?” he asked.

“I have a GED,” Laren said.

The judge agreed to accept the negotiated plea, and sentenced Laren to serve 5 years probation, concurrent with 3 years she was serving on probation for the St. Petersburg hair-coloring caper, and that she pay court costs of $500 in addition to the restitution. The judge also ordered her to undergo a mental health evaluation, but Hogan objected to this.

“I’d like it to be noted,” Hogan said, “that Ms. Jordan is already in counseling of her own volition, and she doesn’t need to be evaluated. She’s already evaluated voluntarily.”

“Okay,” said the judge, apparently amenable to this. “Ms. Jordan, do you have anything further to say?”

“No, sir,” Laren said.

“That’s the order of the court,” the judge said, “and you’re so sentenced.” He struck his gavel. “Good luck,” he told Laren.

But good luck wasn’t on the horizon for Laren. By May she was flat broke, and began writing a series of bad checks—mostly for food and other necessities, occasionally for clothes. Indeed, a pattern began to reveal itself: when Laren grew depressed, she would go shopping for clothes. It was a way to offset all the anxieties and disappointments, buying something new to wear. Eventually this would become very nearly a mania with Laren. It wasn’t clear what became of the counseling—whether she had ended it as soon as the gavel hit the bench, since the judge hadn’t required an evaluation, or if it just petered out from a lack of interest. Yet there was every indication that Laren’s mental problems were growing worse.

Between May and June of 1989, a period of a little more than six weeks, Laren wrote eighteen bogus checks, every one of them a violation of her probation. In the middle of this spate of depression, Laren’s landlady kicked her out of the mobile home she was living in; the landlady later claimed that Laren had taken $1,300 in fixtures and furnishings when she left.

Laren found a new place to live, but didn’t tell her probation officer; nor did she file any of the required reports, or pay any of the costs of supervision. The police apparently knew where to locate her, however. She was arrested on the bad check charges on August 24, 1989, and booked into jail. The booking sheet identified her as 23 years old, five-feet-nine inches, one hundred thirty-two pounds, build “slim,” with a scar on her upper lip, a Baptist, divorced, a dental assistant who was unemployed. Jackie was listed as her mother, Hogan as her lawyer, and each of the bad checks as a separate misdemeanor count of obtaining property by means of a worthless check, each count carrying a bond-out amount of $150. The same detective who had arrested her for the earlier burglaries got her for the bad checks.

A month later, Laren’s probation officer filed a warrant for her arrest on additional charges that Laren had violated the terms of her probation from the burglary cases. This is how such situations compound themselves into ever more serious problems.

It appears from the records of the Hernando County court that, after getting released from jail on the bad check charges, and before the probation violation warrant could be filed, Laren decided to get out of town. The probation violation warrant, for example, wasn’t served until October 26 of the following year, 1990. Just where Laren was during this period of time is something of a mystery, at least as far as the publicly available records are concerned, although the arrest report indicates that she had been working as a dental hygienist for a Tampa-area dentist the previous seven months. Just how she came to be arrested—again by the same detective who had arrested her twice before—was likewise unclear.

Now facing the check charges and the probation violation, Laren returned to Hernando County Circuit Court on November 2, 1990. This time she was represented by the public defender’s office; apparently Jesse and Jackie had decided that tough love was the way to go, after all.

By the time of the hearing, Assistant Public Defender Alan Fanter had agreed to a deal with the state attorney’s office, one that would dispose of all the charges. The deal called for Laren to serve 3 years in prison, to be followed by 10 years of probation. Laren would still have to pay the restitution. Fanter offered to have Laren undergo “mental health and/or substance abuse counseling and/or treatment at the request of her probation officer.”

Laren objected to the requirement that she undergo substance abuse counseling. “I don’t think I need anything like that,” she said. When the judge said she had to be evaluated anyway, Laren meekly agreed. With this, Laren was sent to the Florida Department of Corrections to begin her 3-year sentence.

However, less than three months later she was back in court in Hernando County. This time the state attorney was asking the judge to cut Laren’s prison sentence short—in fact, to end it altogether.

“Pursuant to information provided to me by law enforcement of other jurisdictions,” the state attorney said, “this defendant has provided substantial assistance to such a degree that she should be given a break as far as the DOC time. Subject to her information and assistance, they are requesting that the DOC time be commuted.”

In other words, in return for becoming an informant—“substantial assistance”—Laren would be let out of prison. The judge agreed to this proposal, and custody of Laren was transferred from the state penitentiary back to Hernando County.

But not long after she was released, Laren committed a new theft violation, this one involving the fraudulent use of a credit card in Pinellas County to the south; the story that filtered north to Hernando County was that Laren had befriended a Tampa police officer in a bar, had gone home with him, and while he slept, had picked his place clean, taking his credit cards, which she’d then used to rack up substantial charges. Laren was soon back in prison, at the Jefferson Correctional Institution at Monticello, Florida.

By the fall of 1991, Laren was again trying to get out of prison, asking for a speedy trial on an unresolved probation violation case in Hernando County. She wanted to be allowed to go to work release, but the prison officials wouldn’t let her out with the probation violation case still hanging over her head. In one sense, this is illustrative of the compounding nature of Laren’s criminal record—every new violation brought additional charges from violating the probation from the one before, and soon the multiplied charges began swirling around her head like a flock of self-replicating vultures.

In November of 1991 she wrote to the Hernando County court clerk, asking that the probation case be scheduled for hearing as soon as possible. The clerk wrote back, saying the case would soon come before the judge to be scheduled for hearing. Laren responded with another letter. As before, it was well-composed, her handwriting neat.

“Thank you for your prompt response concerning my motion,” she wrote. “I would like the chance to explain to my judge, anyone who goes to prison and does not learn their lesson deserves to go back.”

In January, a Hernando County judge tried to sort out all the conflicting probation terms, to at least get the system on the same page as far as what time Laren owed to various jurisdictions; otherwise, she faced the prospect of a revolving door of release, violation of probation and re-arrest that promised to go on for years. By March 11, 1992, Laren had completed enough of her 3-year sentence to be eligible for parole, and she was allowed to go to work release.

For most of the next year, it appears, Laren stayed out of trouble. But by early 1993, she was again in jail, charged once more with violating her probation—primarily the requirement that she make restitution to her victims, but also in staying in touch with her probation supervisor.

For a hearing held on February 3, 1993, Laren was represented by a Tampa lawyer, John Fitzgibbons. Fitzgibbons asked for leniency for Laren, saying she was ready to admit the violations, but that there was an explanation for her behavior.

“We would like to briefly give the court an explanation,” Fitzgibbons said. “Most of these are financial considerations, and my client obviously has some financial problems, and it’s been difficult for her to make restitution. One or two of these deal with her conduct while being supervised, and we certainly admit she has not been the best as far as being supervised, but it’s nothing major in terms of committing crime—well, major things.

“In summary we’ve had a psychologist, Dr. Farzanegan, who’s present here in court, examine Ms. Sims. We call her Ms. Jordan, also. Dr. Farzanegan, I would proffer to the court, has conducted a psychological evaluation and has concluded that she suffers from a mild illness, but it is treatable. He has a course of treatment and therapy that he’ll be recommending to the court.”

Rather than sending Laren back to prison, Fitzgibbons said, the court should let her continue on probation, but this time under a “very strict supervision program which would include the ankle bracelets.” The probation department had said it could supervise Laren by the use of the ankle bracelets, which would send a radio signal to tell a computer where she was at all times. “If she deviates from her course of conduct or allowed conduct,” Fitzgibbons said, “probation will know it.

“In summary, Your Honor, she has a bad history. There’s not a history, though, of violence or other things. It’s just a series of relatively minor, financial-type crimes that shows a pattern, that concerned me when I came into the case. That’s why I asked Dr. Farzanegan to take a look at her. She’s a mother of two children. She’s pregnant at the present time … I think probation is recommending about a year in the county jail … we would respectfully submit to the court that there’s an opportunity here to salvage this person. That’s what Dr. Farzanegan is recommending. I don’t think sitting in the county jail is going to accomplish much, Your Honor, and I think with the structured program that we’re proposing and the professional assistance that Dr. Farzanegan will tell you about, I think his projections for a successful prognosis are very optimistic and very encouraging.” Laren had a job and an apartment waiting for her in Tampa, Fitzgibbons added.

The nature of Laren’s “illness” and its “pattern” was never specified in court, at least for the record, so one can only speculate as to what Fitzgibbons was talking about. Dr. Farzanegan later said he could barely remember Laren, and in fact insisted that he wasn’t even present when Fitzgibbons made his remarks, although the court record shows he was. Still, there seems to be little disagreement that Laren had some sort of psychological problem, and that there was at least some sort of plan to deal with it.

Perhaps cognizant of the Sims family’s political and social prominence, the judge decided to accept Laren’s lawyer’s plea for renewed probation. While he was inclined to accept the probation department’s recommendation that Laren go back to jail for a year, said Circuit Court Judge John Springstead, “I’m also trying to balance the need to get this restitution paid to the victims …” Fitzgibbons’ assurance that Laren would have a job counted for a lot, the judge said. “I have fairly considered the representation of counsel with regard to Ms. Jordan’s psychological problems, and that also enters into the equation …”

Springstead ordered that Laren’s remaining jail time be suspended, provided that she prove that she was working, that she agree to the electronic ankle monitors, and that she continue her psychological counseling. Laren obtained a job in Tampa.

Three weeks later, Laren agreed to give up legal custody of her son, then almost 7, to his father, who still lived in Brooksville. The document specified that Laren would retain custody of her daughter, Haylei.

Three weeks after that, on March 16, 1993, she used her boss’ credit card to take Haylei out to dinner, and to buy some housewares at a local discount store. The total charged was $180 including $2.95 for a child’s plate of macaroni. Nine days later Laren was arrested and charged with credit card fraud, another probation violation. Faced with going back to prison, Laren snipped off the ankle bracelet and disappeared, taking her 8-year-old daughter with her.

Afterward, there would be little clarity, at least in the public record, about where Laren and Haylei had gone. There is some evidence that the pair went to South Pasadena, Florida, on the Intracoastal Waterway near St. Petersburg. At least, a later credit check seemed to show that a Laren Sims Jordan, with Laren’s Social Security number, was living in that town as of November of 1993. There was also a report that Laren Sims Jordan, again with the same Social Security number, was holding a post office box in Ruskin, Florida, across Tampa Bay and south of Tampa in July 1994.

But by that time, Laren had already arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada, where, on May 5, 1994, using the name Elizabeth Ann Barasch—the true name of someone Laren had once met in jail—she married a Las Vegas businessman named Kenneth L. Redelsperger. Curiously, while using a stolen name to marry the 35-year-old Redelsperger, Laren completed the marriage license application with her parents’ true first names, although she amended their surnames to “Barasch.” Laren also changed her year of birth to 1967, apparently to match the real Barasch’s birthdate. From the time of this marriage forward, though, Laren would be known as Elizabeth, or “Elisa” for short. Eventually, in fact, she would be known as Elisa McNabney, even when the Federal Bureau of Investigation made her the subject of a nationwide all-points bulletin as the “black widow” who had murdered her third husband, the once-prominent Nevada lawyer, Larry McNabney.