By July 2004, Holly had had enough of sticking to her grandparents’ rules. She packed a bag, sneaked out of the house, and went to Sandy’s mother’s home. The girls stayed up late watching TV and smoking pot. When Holly didn’t come home, Mrs. Collier called the police to report her as a runaway. The cops tracked her down and brought her home two days later. The next week Holly and her grandparents had to appear in court, and Holly was put on probation for a year. As they left the courthouse, Holly angrily told her grandfather, “ I’m going to kill you for making me do this.”
DEADLY PLAN
On Sunday, August 1, Holly secretly brought Sandy into her grandparents’ basement. That night the two stayed up smoking pot and crack. They were so wired that they couldn’t sleep, so Sandy suggested they take Holly’s grandparents’ Chevy truck to get something to calm them down. “We’ll have to kill them to do that,” said Holly, who for the past few days had been thinking about doing just that. Suddenly she came up with a plan. She grabbed a pen and wrote the words kill, keys, money, jewelry on her arm. Then she hurried upstairs and pulled three large knives from a wooden block on the kitchen counter. “We have to practice first,” she told Sandy when she returned to her room. Holly raised a knife and stabbed her bed. “Like this. Try it.” They practiced for several minutes on the mattress.
At around 5 P.M., Holly and Sandy hid the knives and Holly lit the joint to lure her grandparents downstairs. “Quick, hide under the bed,” Holly told Sandy when she heard their footsteps. After Holly had stabbed Mrs. Collier and struggled with both adults for the knife, her grandparents caught hold of her arms and pinned her to the bed. “Why aren’t you helping me?” Holly shouted to Sandy, who was still hiding. At that moment Sandy jumped out with a knife in her hand and stabbed Mrs. Collier in the chest. Terrified, Mr. Collier turned and ran upstairs. “Go get him! He’s gonna call 911!” Sandy yelled. Holly chased her grandfather into the kitchen. When she caught up, he had the phone in his hand, so Holly ripped the cord from the wall. Holly was too fast and too strong for him—she took her knife and stabbed Mr. Collier in the neck. Blood spurted all over her, but she kept stabbing until he fell dead on the linoleum floor in a puddle of blood. Meanwhile in the basement, Sandy stabbed Mrs. Collier over and over. Finally the older woman stopped fighting back.
TWO FUGITIVES
Once both of the Colliers lay dead, Holly and Sandy knew they had to get out of the house. Holly grabbed a duffel bag, threw the knives inside, then drove off in her grandparents’ Chevy with Sandy. The girls were covered in blood, so they decided to go to the house of Sandy’s friend Sara Polk, 16, to take a shower. “What happened?” Sara asked them at the door. “We killed my grandparents,” said Holly, smiling. Stunned, Sara grabbed two towels but told them they couldn’t come in. Holly and Sandy wiped off the blood and changed clothes in the driveway. After they left, Sara told her parents what had happened and called 911.
Around midnight Holly and Sandy arrived at Tybee Island, a small beach community near Savannah. They had no money, food, or place to stay. As they drove near the beach, they met Brian Clayton, 22, and his younger brother. Holly told them she and Sandy had run away from home and needed a place to crash, and Brian took them to his house. The next afternoon Holly and Sandy heard helicopters overhead. Sandy went to the window and saw police officers swarming the house. Within minutes the police were inside. “I’m so sorry,” Sandy cried as several cops handcuffed her. “Those people didn’t deserve to die.” But Holly started giggling. “Are they all the way dead?” she later asked.
Sandy confessed and cooperated with the police. On April 14, 2005, both girls pleaded guilty in court to two counts of murder. When the judge asked Holly why she had stabbed her grandparents, she said, “For Sandy. So that we could be together.” Both Holly (whom a sheriff described as “cold-blooded” and “cocky”) and Sandy were sentenced to life in prison. They are currently serving their terms at separate Georgia prisons.
Today, Kevin Collier still struggles to make sense of his parents’ brutal murders, and plans to sell their house and move to another town. “My parents were always there for Holly,” he says. “It’s hard to believe she did that to two people who loved her.”
An
Imperfect
Crime
In a desperate bid to save their family
home, these 14-year-old twin sisters did the
unthinkable: They robbed a bank.
On the morning of October 29, 2002, two young girls burst into the Barnegat, New Jersey, branch of the Sun National Bank. One of them held what looked like a silver handgun. “Give me your money,” she demanded of the teller. “What is this, a joke?” asked the teller, since it was Halloween week and the girls seemed too young to be actual robbers. “No, I’m not f***ing playing,” answered the girl, her face obscured by a black knit ski mask. “Give us your money.” Her sister, wearing a black nylon skull cap pulled so tightly it was almost transparent, held out a trash bag to be filled with cash. The teller gave up what she had: $3,550. Then the two girls ran outside and jumped into their getaway car, a 1992 Buick Skylark. Their mother was waiting behind the wheel.
PLANNING THE HEIST
Fourteen-year-old twin sisters Chelsea and Elysia Wortman thought their family was in serious financial trouble. The girls’ stepfather, Kevin Jones, a six foot four, 310-pound construction worker (and convicted cocaine dealer) had been recently hospitalized for congestive heart failure and was unable to go back to work. The girls’ parents, who had been having financial troubles for years, had filed for bankruptcy protection to save the house from foreclosure. At the time of the robbery, up to 12 people lived in the four-bedroom house: Chelsea and Elysia; their mother and stepfather, Kathleen and Kevin Jones; their sister, brother, and two stepsisters; Kevin’s mother and brother; a friend; and a former coworker.
The morning of the heist the girls overheard two troubling phone calls: one from a lawyer saying bankruptcy proceedings were stalled, which meant they could still lose their home; the other about an overdue phone bill, says Supervising Assistant Ocean County Prosecutor Michel Paulhus, who later prosecuted Kevin Jones. “We were having money problems in our house and my family was upset,” Chelsea testified later. So she quickly thought of a plan: “I decided to rob a bank.”
When she told her mother about her plan, Kathleen Wortman Jones, 34, laughed and resisted. “She told me, ‘You are not doing this. You’re going to get into trouble,’” Chelsea recalled. But Chelsea insisted, “No, I’m for real. We need this money,” and began to prepare by painting the orange tip of her brother’s plastic BB gun with metallic nail polish to make it look more dangerous.
Within an hour, Kathleen had agreed to a plan to rob a bank that was just five minutes away. Initially Kathleen, Chelsea, and Chelsea’s stepsister Devinee, then 16, were in it together. But on their ride to the bank, Devinee decided the plan was too risky, so they dropped her off back home. It was then, Paulhus says, that Kathleen ordered Devinee to “go get Elysia.”
A few weeks before, the family had started going to church again, so right before the heist, Chelsea and Elysia paused, dropped to their knees, bowed their heads, and prayed. Then they burst through the bank doors.
A DONE DEAL
After they pulled off the heist, the twins and their mother went back home, passing a cop car speeding toward the bank. They walked in, Kathleen slapped the money on the kitchen table, and Chelsea announced, “We did it.” Their stepfather flipped out. “I was raging, telling them to get the f*** out of my house,” testified Jones, 38. But instead he ended up driving his wife, the twins, and Devinee to Atlantic City that afternoon. Jones did this, he says, because he panicked and wanted to get away from town. However, prosecutors allege that the adults laundered the stolen money by gambling at Caesar’s casino—the idea was to cash in their chips for different dollar bills so the money wouldn’t be traced to them. Meanwhile, the girls shopped at a nearby mall.
ON THE TRAIL
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By the next night, the family was back from Atlantic City and the Barnegat police were starting to put the pieces together. They saw the twins get out of a car at a convenience store, and made the connection between them and the petite figures in the grainy surveillance photos caught by the bank cameras. The police were able to get the license plate number of the car, which was registered to Jones. On November 1, three days after the robbery, a SWAT team raided the Joneses’ home to apprehend the people they believed had robbed the bank at gunpoint. The officers brought the twins and their mother, whom they suspected was involved, down to the police station.
Kevin Jones wasn’t home at the time, but his mother was. She proclaimed her stepgranddaughters’ innocence as they were being led away. But Detective Sergeant Michael Duffy, who was present when the girls were arrested, says Elysia blew their cover right then and there. “Grandma, shut up. Me and Chelsea robbed the f***ing bank,” Duffy heard her shout.
COMPLICATED GIRLS
“When we picked them up, the twins had a tough shell around them,” the detective sergeant remembers. “But after we started talking to them, they softened up and were very respectful, very polite.” At first, Chelsea tried to take responsibility for the crime, which, according to friends and family, was typical of her. They describe her as a “mother hen” who likes to take charge and fix problems. “She is the caretaker,” says stepsister Danelle, 16. “She wants to help everybody.” But she’s also loud and outspoken and often clashed with her teachers. She likes Jay-Z and Ja Rule and dresses like the rap stars she idolizes—covering her head with bandannas or wearing her long, dark hair in cornrows.
Elysia, a blue-eyed strawberry blonde, is more introverted than her sister. She’s a huge Mariah Carey fan, loves singing along to her ballads, and enjoys sketching and cooking. But like her sister, Elysia has a tough side. After a string of fights at school and frequent absences, the school administration ordered her to be tutored at home. “I don’t think Elysia had the maturity to weigh what was right and what was wrong,” says friend Tiffany Ford, 17, who has known the girls since 1997 and lives two blocks away. “I don’t think she understood what would happen if they got caught. But Chelsea—she knew what would happen. She was down for the ride, would do whatever.”
In the interrogation room at the Barnegat police station, the questioning dragged on all night. By morning, Duffy had patiently secured confessions from the twins and their mother. As the girls were led away in handcuffs to a youth shelter, they asked to see Duffy once more. He met them outside the police station and, though the girls were handcuffed, they both grabbed his jacket. It was the closest they could come to giving him a hug.
GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES
The twins never really knew their biological father. Kathleen Wortman left him when the girls were very young, and a few years after the divorce, their father completely vanished. Eventually Kathleen met Jones, and the couple had a daughter, Kiannah, now 11. As preteens, the twins attended Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Barnegat with their family, where the girls sang in the choir and were known as cheerful and obedient. “They were model children,” says their pastor, Reverend Richard Bell.
Their friend Tiffany recalls that when she first met the family, they had an orderly home. “It seemed like they had money, a nice car, a nice living room set,” she says. “You had to take your shoes off in the house, couldn’t put your hands on the glass table, or talk with your mouth full.”
This orderly life apparently started to change as Chelsea and Elysia approached their teens. Money tensions mounted, and Kevin and Kathleen started fighting. And the girls were rebelling. They began smoking and, says Jones, “they didn’t want to go to school,” partly, he explains, because they felt out of place. Chelsea and Elysia’s mother is white and their stepfather is black—and Barnegat is a predominantly white town.
The school situation only got worse in middle school, when both girls came down with mononucleosis and missed three months of classes. When they got better, Jones says they had zero interest in going back to school. That’s when Elysia was transferred to the home-tutoring program. “She couldn’t function in school,” says Jones. “Someone would say something to her, and before they could get another word out, she’d punch them.” Chelsea was still enrolled in school, but she wasn’t doing much better. Jones would drop her off at school on his way to work, only to have his wife call saying she had walked right back home.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
In January 2003, the twins pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a maximum of four years at a juvenile detention center in Bordentown, New Jersey. Now they live with 46 other girls ages 14 to 20 and attend school five days a week. There is also a salon where inmates can receive cosmetology training. Although the twins aren’t roommates, they see each other all the time. Even so, their stepsister Danelle is certain that Chelsea and Elysia are homesick and want their freedom. But Detective Sergeant Duffy and Supervising Assistant Prosecutor Paulhus are confident that the sisters are better off in the detention center. “When two 14-yearold children rob a bank,” says Paulhus, “you have to look to their parents for fault. The best thing that ever happened to those children was getting caught.” Paulhus believes the girls got into this trouble in the first place because they were worried about losing their home. “Now they have a warm, dry place to sleep; plenty to eat; and they’re getting an education,” Paulhus says. Duffy has been to see the girls a couple of times, and during a recent visit he found Chelsea happily cornrowing hair in the prison salon. She’s resumed her Bible studies and recently sent a letter to her friend Tiffany vowing to create a positive future. “When I go home, the things I want to do will be through God,” she wrote. “I want to live my life. It took getting locked up for me to realize that, but it’s true.”
Elysia is making her mark in other ways. In a hallway at the detention center are two large wall murals filled with messages of success and perseverance. The artist signed them “EW”: ElysiaWortman.
LIFE TODAY
As for their parents, Jones went on trial this past September. He faced a maximum of 50 years for his crimes, including covering up the robbery and endangering the children. Jones eventually accepted a plea bargain of five years in prison for receiving stolen money and hindering apprehension of his family. He will be sentenced and sent to prison in January.
The twins testified against their stepfather in exchange for a reduced sentence. During her testimony, Elysia looked at him and said, “I’m mad at him and my mom for getting me into this situation.” Kathleen pleaded guilty to armed robbery and using her children in a crime. She was sentenced to 15 years in New Jersey’s state prison for women. She can’t be paroled until 2016, when she has served 13 years of her sentence. And until her daughters are released, in 2007 or sooner (due in part to their testimony against their stepfather), her only contact with the twins will be by mail.
In the end, the Jones family lost the house Chelsea and Elysia wanted to save so badly. And all of their siblings are now separated—some living in foster homes and others with relatives. “I struggled so hard to keep my family together against all odds,” says Jones. “We’d come so far, and then in 15 minutes, 14 years of struggle was destroyed.”
The Woman
Who Seduced
Teenage Boys
Guys liked to hang out at Kristin’s* house
because her mom, Silvia, let them drink. But
the 40-year-old wanted sex in return…
Jon had been drunk and had passed out. The 17-year-old Arvada, Colorado, high school senior was lying on the floor when he woke up. He’d been hanging out in his friend Kristin’s house after a typical school day in fall 2003, and he and several friends, mostly other guys from Arvada West High School, had been drinking shots of peppermint Schnapps, Goldschläger, and beer. Jon didn’t know exactly how much alcohol he’d consumed, but he knew it was a lot.
As Jon was lying there he felt a tug, like someone was undressing h
im. He realized that was exactly what was happening: Someone was beside him, pulling off his clothes. But who was it? Kristin, 15, had a boyfriend. Then he saw who the person was: Silvia Johnson— Kristin’s mother.
SUBURBAN MOM
Since the early ’90s, Mrs. Johnson had lived on a tidy cul-de-sac in Arvada, just outside of Denver, with her husband, Jeff, and their three kids—Kristin and her two younger siblings. On the surface Mrs. Johnson didn’t appear very different from any other suburban middle-class mom. “Whenever I saw her around the neighborhood, she always seemed nice, and she spent a lot of time with her children,” says her next-door neighbor, Dorrel Bowler. “For years, she organized the neighborhood Easter-egg hunt.”
Mrs. Johnson had felt like an outsider in high school, although the locals in Arvada generally considered her to be friendly and outgoing. But she also talked really fast, often blurting everything out at once; neighbors said she could be rambling and erratic. “She always seemed hyper,” says Mr. Bowler, “like she was in a rush to get somewhere.” He just assumed she had a lot on her mind.
By the summer of 2003, Mr. Bowler noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were fighting a lot—more frequently than most husbands and wives he knew. “Through their window I could hear them screaming and yelling,” he says. “The neighbors called the police a few times.” Sometime around then, Mr. Johnson moved out. He later filed for divorce.
PARTY TIME
One afternoon, about two months after Mr. Johnson moved out, Kristin’s boyfriend, Gus,* 16, and several of his guy friends went over to Kristin’s after school. When they got there, Mrs. Johnson stayed in the living room, talking and joking with them as if she were their age—even giving them shots of tequila.
That afternoon Mrs. Johnson sat between Jon and Rex,* 15. As they all drank, she began touching them while she was talking, flirting with each of them. The two guys thought it was weird that she was acting like one of the group and coming on to them—but no one else’s mom would let them get drunk, so they went along with it. Kristin didn’t seem to care that her mom was hanging out either. When the guys left that night, Mrs. Johnson told them to come back soon—and they were excited that they’d found a new place to drink and party.
Seventeen Real Girls, Real-Life Stories Page 5