CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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

“How are you doing today?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” she said in a quavering voice. “She did not have a lot of friends. She had friends, but, I mean, she didn’t have a lot of callers.”

Despite having a suspect in custody, Antoniadas wanted to tighten up his case. Detective Mark Cordova, Antoniadas’ partner, had interviewed Dora’s boyfriend, Louis. If they needed to, they could talk to him again. He was pretty broken up. Antoniadas had assigned Detective Mason Yeo to track down the paper—the bank records, the store receipts, the original checks from the bank—and to interview the clerks to nail down the times, see if they recognized Dana’s picture from a six-pack of mug shots. Antoniadas wanted to profile Dana as well as Dora and find out something about their personalities and their habits. He also wanted to know how Dana had gotten into the house.

“OK. In reference to Dora’s habits, was she pretty outgoing?”

“No, she was a very retiring person. Very much to herself.”

“OK. How would she behave with strangers if somebody came to the house? I don’t know how to put this any other way, but was she gullible or was she pretty sharp if somebody came to the house and wanted to go in—was she suspicious of people?”

“She never let anybody in. She was very cautious,” Helen said. “That’s why I can’t understand this, because I can’t see how she’d let anybody in.”

“OK,” Antoniadas said. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Dora that you think is important? Any of her habits? Anywhere she frequented?”

Helen paused again.

“Well, she was a very religious person,” she said. “She sang in the choir. She’s the one that got me into the choir. Her husband is the one that got my husband into ushering and we used to go to church together all the time.”

2:06 P.M.

“She was a very caring person,” said Darlene Addison, the nursing supervisor who had fired Dana. “She was the first person to go when someone was down and out. The flood victims—she gathered clothes; the dog shelter—she gathered cans. She organized everybody’s life as well as her own. I had no contact with her after I terminated her because, of course, she hated me and let it be known to everyone in surgery that she hated me.

“I have letters from her. Many cards from her. You know, stating life was getting rough. She was having a hard time … dealing with the bankruptcy, the divorce, the loss of her house, the foreclosure … the world was closing in on her.”

Darlene said that Dana had a lot of “idiosyncrasies,” but didn’t think she was capable of committing murder. Antoniadas wanted to know how well she fit in with the other nurses at the hospital.

“One of the girls summed it up in that our surgery is like a family and it’s probably the best home life Dana ever had,” Darlene said. “She had a hard time fitting into situations and we made a lot of allowances for her and she did seem to function very well there.”

Darlene said that Dana was hard to work with because she always had to be in control and organize everything around her—her own life and everyone else’s. She was domineering and critical and made her co-workers’ lives miserable until they let Dana take the reins. When she first started in obstetrics, no one got along with her and the hospital considered terminating her. Dana asked to be moved to post-op recovery, and fit in there a little better. Darlene decided to give her a chance and moved Dana to surgery, where she worked up to the point that she was fired for stealing drugs.

Antoniadas had expected Dana to be controlling in her work life like she was in her personal life. But he had to know something else.

“I know this is a strange question, but I have obvious reasons for asking. Did she ever have any problems with any of the elderly people?”

“None at all,” Darlene said. “She took excellent care of people. As far as patient care, I’ve never had a complaint. I’ve had a complaint about other co-workers against her, but never a patient complaint …

“She is sarcastic. She does get her point across if she’s crossed, or doesn’t get her way. But I mean, that’s something that we all knew and accepted.”

3 P.M.

The clanking from the thick shackles around Dana’s ankles cut through the buzz of casual conversation. The bored photographers and reporters sprang into action as she entered the courtroom, escorted by two sheriff’s deputies. The press had been waiting most of the day for her arraignment. Dana’s cuffed hands were awkwardly linked to a thick chain slung around her hips. She nervously scanned the courtroom, stone silent except for the whirring of motor-driven cameras. She spotted a few familiar faces. She pretended not to see her brother Rick, who was sitting with the cluster of reporters. She saw Lisa Sloan, a nurse she’d worked with at Inland Valley Regional Medical Center. She knew Russell and Jeri would not attend her arraignment, but would visit with her later. Rich Bentley was seated at the prosecution side of the counsel table, next to the defense table facing the judge. Dana sat down next to her court-appointed lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Stuart Sachs, trying to ignore murmurs from the crew of news photographers and reporters and the drone of high-speed cameras. While the press was waiting, Bentley fed reporters a few quotes about nabbing the county’s first and only known female serial killer. He told them that getting a chance to prosecute a female serial killer “is rare.”

The purpose of an arraignment is to formally read the accused the charges they are facing and allow them to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. It is typically a very brief, pro forma procedure—a legal necessity lacking the glamour of a trial, live witnesses or the dramatic presentation evidence. In this case, though, it was the media’s first look at the comely serial killer who had been terrorizing the region’s elderly population. The judge had acquiesced to requests to photograph the defendant and was allowing a few minutes for pictures before he took the bench and started the proceedings. Dana was like a caged, feral animal. She was forced to sit and have her picture taken whether she liked it or not.

A bailiff uncuffed Dana’s hands while she sat hunched with Stuart Sachs. The defense had opposed photographers in the courtroom, but it was a losing battle. The law allows the media to cover news stories in the third branch of government—the judiciary. Stuart explained to Dana what was going to happen, how he thought they should proceed and what to expect from the prosecution. Stuart told Dana that he wasn’t ready to have her enter a plea. He wanted to delay her arraignment until they had received more police reports and investigative results from the DA’s office. It was the prosecution’s job to turn over all material they planned to use at trial to the defense, a process called “discovery” that usually drags on much longer than a day or two after the initial arrest, especially with large, comprehensive investigations. In this case, there were two agencies that had investigated four different crime scenes and seized mountains of evidence from those scenes as well as from the defendant’s home. It would take months to get all the reports. Dana wasn’t thrilled with delaying anything. She was in a hurry to get to trial and get out, but she went along with Stuart’s suggestion.

When they finished talking, Rick tried to get her attention, but he found he was competing for her attention with Lisa Sloan, who was blowing kisses to Dana. The press went wild, taking pictures of the beautiful blonde nurse blowing kisses to an accused female serial killer. If Dana and Lisa were lovers, or if the slayings were part of a lesbian love triangle, they wanted photos. Dana didn’t return the kisses, but simply turned and smiled at Lisa. Dana saw Rick and ignored him. He finally went up to the bailiff to see if he could have a word with her, but the bailiff said he could not. Rick then asked if he could ask Dana to sign something and pulled a sheet of paper out of a folder. It was a form Dana needed to sign before the police could release the contents of the storage unit containing his belongings. The bailiff took the paper over to Dana. Rick could see from where he was standing at the rail that she refused to sign it. Rick got his paper back and returned to his seat in the courtroom.

The proceeding took just a few minutes. Dana never said a word. Sachs asked for a continuance and the judge agreed, setting a return date for April 8. Still chained, Dana was led out of the courtroom as Lisa continued to blow kisses.

Afterward, Rick Ward courted the press, revealing his theory of why his half-sister had become a serial killer who went on post-murder shopping binges. He recounted how he had raised his younger half-sister from the age of 13 and said she had always been a spendthrift with budget problems who was constantly asking friends and relatives for money. Rick told reporters that he had been generous with emotional support and had even loaned Dana his furniture and other personal belongings, which he was now trying to get back. Rick told the reporters the last thing his half-sister had said to him: “Are you pissed off enough to stroke off and die? I hope so.”

6 P.M.

“Do you think I did it?”

Dana’s voice was quiet. She was looking at her father through the glass in the visiting room of the county jail. On one side of the glass was a long row of inmates seated at shallow carrels facing their husbands, boyfriends, children, parents and friends on the other side of the glass. Each side had a row of big, black phones. It was very noisy. Children were squealing as they played around the chairs, visitors shouted over the din and the noises reverberated off the hard linoleum floor.

Russell hesitated a bit.

“Th–the evidence is very damaging, honey,” he said carefully. “I don’t think—I think a lot of it’s circumstantial.”

“You know, we’re not supposed to talk about the case over the phone, but I needed to ask you face-to-face,” Dana said, her voice quavering slightly, “because I need your love and support, Dad.”

“You’ve got that,” Russell said quickly. “You’ll always have that, whether you did it or didn’t do it. You know that.”

“OK, that’s all I wanted to hear.”

Dana and Russell had been talking about the mess left by police after the search, which had left Jim’s house looking as if it had been tossed upside down. Jim was incensed about the hole—about the size of a newborn’s fist—that criminalists had cut in the driver’s seat of his truck. Police had taken his checkbook, his bankbook, and several sets of keys, including those to a storage shed out back. Dana said she wanted to compensate Jim for his loss.

“As soon as they release my Cadillac, I want you to sell it and I want you to give the money to Jim to fix his truck,” Dana said.

Dana also wanted her father to pick up some pictures of her mother that she had left at an art and framing store. She spelled out the name of the store and the location. But Russell was still curious about his daughter’s culpability.

“What do you think, do you think you did it, honey?”

“No,” Dana said flatly.

“Hm?”

“I did use June’s credit card.”

“…I know that,” Russell said.

“And I did write checks and take some money out of a lady’s account I didn’t know. But I did not kill June. I did not, Dad.”

“What about the lady in Sun City?”

“No. I’m not supposed to talk about it—”

“Well, we won’t—”

“—over the phone, but I’m telling you no.”

“OK, we’ll go through the attorney,” Russ said.

Dana said she wrote out an explanation for Stuart that she wanted Russ to read. She also read him a portion of a letter she had written to Jim about keeping Jason in his private preschool, which brought Dana to tears. She said she was concerned that Jason would be traumatized by the events. Russell said he was too young to really understand what was going on, but Dana insisted that he was being harmed. She said she had been trying to give Jason a stable mother to come home to every day, something Dana’s own mother could not provide her because she had worked during the day.

“But with Jason now, what’s going to happen if the worst happens to me? I want Jason to have as much love and support when he comes home,” she said, crying. “What does he have to come home to? There’s no Dana there to give him a bath and cook his meals!”

Dana turned her anguish from Jason to her dire straits behind bars. She pleaded hysterically with her father to help her get a vegetarian diet and medical attention for her “terrible” bleeding. Even though Russell had just placed $100 in her jail account, she asked for more, tried to play on his sympathy, claimed she was vomiting every day, and told him that the jail psychiatrist wanted to medicate her.

“Every single meal I have thrown up,” she said with surprising vigor for anyone who was truly ill. “I’m real weak, Dad. I can’t eat. It’s been six, seven days since I’ve eaten …

“I need to get some help [for] my female problems at a real doctor at a real hospital … This is a butcher place.”

Russell reminded her that he was having knee surgery and would be “laid up for a few days,” but Dana was unable to consider her father’s needs.

“Well, I hope someone comes out to see me, Dad, because it’s, it’s hell.”

Monday

3/21

Jim, I [sic] sitting here waiting at 8:00 P.M. at Night to take a fucking shower!

Her first letter to Jim was more than 20 pages, scrawled in pencil and giving him a snapshot of the indignities of living life in a 6-foot-by-12-foot cinder-block cell where privacy is nonexistent. “I had a day-crew of pod officers (they oversee us) that acted like it was too much that I needed extra peripads just ’cause I’m bleeding my brains out!” Her fear of abandonment was so acute, she immediately started to question Jim’s loyalty and even discussed their relationship with her father before even speaking to Jim. “I talked to my dad and he assures me even more how you won’t ditch me.” She promised that her parents would “watch over him” and told him that despite the nasty stories in the press, “… I see our live as a hot summer blast against all the shame, finger-pointing and crap we both endure. We can come out about this. We must do it together as a family…”

TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 1994, 2 P.M.

By this time, Dana had just about had it with the same questions from the mental health counselor every day. Although there were different counselors on different days, the questions were the same. Dana was getting to the point where she was answering questions before they were asked. RN, accused of murder, history of alcohol abuse and depression, divorce, foreclosure, bankruptcy, miscarriages. She claimed to be eating and sleeping well, didn’t want any medication and wanted to get out of the fish tank, get away from the video trained on her every movement, twenty-four hours a day.

The counselor recommended that she stay in the observation unit.

In a letter to Jim laced liberally with Biblical references, Dana tried to wrap the apron strings of her family around Jim and Jason, including having her parents pay for Jason’s kindergarten tuition. She groused about the horrors of jail life, playing the part of the wrongly accused inmate ingenue terrified at being housed with real criminals. Dana said she was finding solace in God from reading the New Testament—which she’d first picked up the day before. Although it was the only reading material she had access to as a prisoner at that point, she asked Jim not to be negative about her “getting religion in prison.” Dana demonstrated her overnight spiritual awakening by explaining what drove her to “do what she did,” although Dana steadfastly maintained she was not a murderer.

“Negativity and self-pity take a lot of energy. I know, I spent a lot of time there lately.” While Dana said she had done some soul-searching, she divulged no real insight. Dana admitted that she “held a lot in” before her arrest and had spent hours talking with her father in his visits to the jail. While she said she was not blaming anyone, she pointed the finger at Tom Gray for messing her up and saying she was “too weak to see what I was letting happen to myself. I see how it helped get me here.”

3:30 P.M.

Tom stood in line at the police impound yard. He’d gotten the phone call to pick up the Cadillac, but he was scared shitless about going down there. As the co-owner of the Cadillac on the DMV records, he got the call from the police to retrieve it. He thought he was going to be questioned. When it was his turn, he showed them his driver’s license and they made a photocopy of it, checked the paperwork, and handed him the keys. He couldn’t help but ask a few questions about what was going to happen to Dana.

It’s in the hands of the courts, the clerk told him, handing him a form to sign.

When he went to get the car, he saw that a big hole had been cut out of the driver’s side seat and the floor mats. No big deal. He got in, kicked on the engine and drove away. It had been painful for him to come in, but now he felt good.

7:30 P.M.

“I’m OK. I don’t have anything to say.”

Another day, another mental health interview. Dana had very short answers for the jail’s mental health counselor.

“I feel good. Can I get out of observation status now?”

Dana said her depression was gone, she had no suicidal thoughts and didn’t want to see a psychological counselor in jail anymore.

“I have my own who will see me,” she told the counselor.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 1994

Dana not only wrote one or two letters to Jim each day, she also phoned him every night. Her emotions swung wildly from hope to despair. When the previous night’s phone call yielded a cold shoulder from Jim, Dana used a mixed bag of anger, religion, self-pity and outright emotional manipulation to win reassurance from Jim to stand by her. She claimed to be fearful of his “chills and coldness” and anger that she found so “violent in tone” that it made her “quake in [her] boots,” and said she was afraid of losing him—then attacked him for not figuring out what was wrong with her.

“You always said you couldn’t tell me what to do, but you could! And you still can. You just always expected me to figure it out for myself and I couldn’t…! I was weak and mixed up and trying desperately to be in control and appear normal …

“We both have much mental healing ahead of us. I hope we can lighten each other’s load and do it together.

“I LOVE YOU right through your fucking COLD ASSED ARMOUR. DEAL WITH IT!”

8 P.M.

While Dana wrestled with her relationship with Jim, Antoniadas was building a picture of Dana from her sky-diving friends Jeff and Lynn Fogleman, brother and sister, who had watched her grow up as a young teenager. With his partner, Mark Cordova, Antoniadas talked to the Foglemans separately. Jeff wholeheartedly agreed that Dana was an intense and vindictive person who wanted things done her way and would embarrass people in public. Their relationship sank when it appeared that friendship worked one way with Dana—her way.

“My wife and Dana were supposed to be friends, but then my wife would tell me how, you know, she was only a friend when she wanted to be and when it was convenient for her, but if my wife needed something, or help or support or somebody to talk to, [Dana] didn’t really concern herself much about it.”

Even though they were still friends, Lynn called Dana a bitch.

If Dana was angry, “she’ll get right back in their face … She’d make sure that you knew she was upset about something.”

SUNDAY, MARCH 27, 1994, 3 P.M.

Dana’s mood toward Jim turned conciliatory as she experienced the long days and lonely nights without her live-in companion, expressing an intense desire to become pregnant with his child: “My hormones are wiggin’ big time. If I was home and feeling like I do now—you’d never leave that bedroom til I was pregnant—that’s how overwhelming this drive is.”

Ever the organizer, Dana compiled numerous “to do” lists for Jim, including the dispersal of her belongings, ordering books to be delivered to the jail, and maintaining a web of support that she expected would become useful in her defense. As details of her crimes reached the newspaper, Dana countered by accusing the district attorney’s office of sensationalizing her case because it was an election year, and attacked the press: “…as we know, the paper is 99% bullshit.…”

In the next breath, she leaned on the Holy Spirit to lend a hand in her defense and closed with a hope that Jim can “feel the love I’m sending you every moment. It’s alot Babe. I love you. God Bless.”

Dana was moved out of the observation tank and into protective custody, a wing of the county jail, separating certain inmates from the rest of the general population. Protective custody (PC) was reserved for inmates whose release into the general jail population could cause a disruption because of their notoriety, like police officers accused of crimes, or the type of offense, such as baby killing or child molestation. Being accused of killing helpless, elderly ladies in a high-profile serial murder case more than qualified Dana for PC status.

As she sought to regain control of her surroundings, Dana mounted an intensive campaign to establish a network of friends on the outside, convincing her supporters to believe in her innocence and directing her parents to collect and dispose of her belongings as she liked. Unable to shop, drive or phone, and without direct contact with family or friends, Dana was desperate to have her needs met. Not only did she ask for books and crossword puzzles to stave off boredom, she tried to fill the constant, aching emptiness within her. In the same way that she had continually badgered Tom to say he loved her, Dana solicited visits, phone calls and letters, attempting to whip up enthusiasm for what amounted to a “Support Dana” committee. She dispersed phone numbers and addresses to her friends and relatives, all with the focus on keeping her spirits up, and helping with whatever errands she needed, including being character witnesses at her trial.

Nursing buddy Lisa Sloan took charge of dog duties, bringing “Penny,” Dana’s white, black and brown Queensland Healer, home to live with her. She acted as Dana’s spiritual compass, visiting and providing Bibles and religious passages to assist Dana, who insisted to Lisa that she was no “jailhouse convert … Pray for me Lisa to get out and get on with my life.”

She asked another nursing buddy to call Jim, gave her his phone number and his work schedule, and described her life behind bars in contrast to the wretched conditions she was moaning about to Jim and her parents.

“Tonite was a real up nite! I got to exercise in the exercise rm! I smelled real nite air and got to see the beautiful full moon. I went on the exercise bike, used the weights … played basketball and had a great time. On the way out the door I made 3 one handed basketball dunks in a row! Then got to hang out for 3 hrs with the girls watching TV, taking showers, and getting to know some of them better.

“The one girl I’ve been wanting to know was extra sweet to me and 3 of us held hands and did a prayer out loud (It was super special.)…”

Despite her hatred of Tom Gray, Dana kept in touch with his father, tried to enlist his support and supplied him with a phone list. “I have always loved you DAD, you’ve been the best to me … Just one letter from you, from your heart, would mean the most to me…”

At the same time, Rick was also mounting a campaign to get his things back. He wrote a seven-page letter to Russell on March 29 apologizing for “blowing up” at him when Rick called him to enlist his assistance in getting the furniture and other items returned. Rick recounted how he had loaned Dana his possessions all the way up to Dana’s ugly phone call on January 30.

Rick told Russell he was not shocked at her arrest and, with insight, honesty, and a stunning lack of sensitivity, offered him some insight as to why his only daughter was a killer. “I had warned her on many occasions in the last seven years that her behavior was not going to get her where she wanted to be. But she never listened, she just became more set in her ways. I still never dreamed it would come to this…”