Something Happened to Grandma

by Engstrom, Elizabeth

  Broke and now in debt, the couple moved back to Blackfoot, Idaho, to be near Jessica’s parents. Gabe worked for a while at the Idaho State Mental Hospital as a psychiatric technician trainee. He enjoyed working directly with psychiatric patients. Later, Gabe graduated from the Idaho Police Academy and joined the Bingham County Sheriff’s Department as a patrol deputy, about the same time he and Jessica welcomed the birth of their daughter, Kalea. From all outward appearances, life was smooth again for Gabe and his family.

  Kalea, Gabe and Jessica Morris

  Family Photo

  According to newspaper records, Gabe fit in well with the police department, but when someone else got the promotion to detective that he thought should be his, he quit the force in 2007, telling his supervisor that he got a job in Alaska as a bush pilot. He complained to his brother that he felt his life had been put into jeopardy during a raid, and that his fellow officers unfairly trapped suspects. He told a variety of stories to a variety of people about why he left the force, continuing the pattern of not sticking with much of anything and blaming everyone else for his failures. As soon as things didn’t go quite his way, he quit. This time, as with the Air Force, he was required to reimburse the department for his training at the academy, as he didn’t fulfill his contract with the required years of service.

  When he left the force, he left with good solid training in firearms and the ways of police work. Might it also be safe to say that a “scary smart” guy like Morris also left his employment at the state mental hospital with a good idea of what mental illness looks like?

  He went to work at Gold’s Gym in Blackfoot, where, true to his fast-talking, charismatic nature, he charmed all the clients, and a woman named Allie Smith in particular. One of the Gold’s Gym clients recognized a good salesman in Gabe and offered him a job with American Family Insurance. Gabe took the job and hired Allie Smith to work for him. Eventually, he told her that he and Jessica were divorcing, igniting a romantic relationship. They took trips to Las Vegas, spending money neither of them had. Gabe lied to her, saying that he sold antiques for his stepfather, James Anstey. Gabe even went so far as to move to Pocatello and file divorce papers, which were never completed. Somehow, Gabe acquired access to Allie’s credit cards and quickly ran up $30,000 worth of charges, instead of tending to the insurance business, all the time telling his supervisors that things were going well.

  But things weren’t going very well with Gabe and Allie Smith.

  In 2009, he returned to his wife, who took him back after he lied and said that he and Allie Smith had not been romantically involved. Jessica believed him. She wanted to believe him. She wanted her daughter to have a father. She wanted a family.

  Needless to say, Jessica’s parents were none too thrilled with their son-in-law, particularly after Allie Smith began calling them, looking for her money. “He’s a real scumbag,” Rita Pope said in a newspaper interview. “He makes Tiger Woods look like a saint.” The Air Force was looking for its scholarship money. The police department wanted to be repaid for his training. The insurance company was discovering that he was not making the sales he claimed to be making, and the squeeze was on to pay for the Mercedes he bought for Allie and the BMW he bought for himself to impress his insurance agency clients. In a few short years, Gabe had blown through Jessica’s settlement, racked up about $100,000 in debt and had no job.

  When her parents tried to talk to Jessica about Gabe, she wouldn’t hear of it, according to a Register-Guard interview. “She thought she could make a responsible, hard-working fella out of him. Those two characteristics never seemed to appear,” Bill Pope said. “She had all the faith in the world in God and his ability to transform people. It never happened. The subject of Gabe was kind of off limits for family discussion.”

  The pressure mounted and Gabe began to drink.

  www.crimescape.com

  Chapter 3—A Fresh Start

  Back in Bandon, Oregon, Gabe’s mother, Robin Anstey, had a house on Bowman Way that was falling into disrepair. She had just divorced James Anstey, and they had closed the Hidden Treasures shop and were liquidating all the antiques that had been put into storage. Robin was living with Bob Kennelly in his nice home in the woods, and it was always their plan to fix up the Bowman Way house and sell it, but the real estate market wasn’t good. Gabe thought he might be able to help her with that. They could fix up the living space over the garage and live there and rent out the main house. Jessica thought they might turn it into a bed and breakfast. Maybe he, Jessica and Kalea could move there and he could quit drinking, work on the house and help James Anstey with his antiques business. Jessica could get a job and they could file bankruptcy and start over.

  Reluctantly, Jessica’s father agreed that a fresh start was in order. He loaned the kids his red GMC pickup truck and $5,000 in cash and wished them well. They packed up their daughter, and in September 2009, the family drove to Bandon.

  Bandon by the Sea, as it’s called in tourism publications, is a picturesque little coastal town on Highway 101. It sits on the banks of the Coquille River, renowned for its seasonal salmon runs. Bandon, the little town of Coquille, and the larger town of Coos Bay are all located in Coos County, a heavily wooded area of Oregon hit hard by the economic downturn in the logging industry. There’s a nice casino in Coos Bay and a world-class golf course in Bandon. Both help bring tourist dollars to this depressed area. Its saving grace is the fact that it is located on arguably the most beautiful coastline in the country, and in the summer, visitors in RVs and campers file up and down Highway 101, taking in the sights and filling the hotels and campgrounds to participate in the beach and ocean activities. In the winter months, the coast is cold, windy, foggy, and rainy.

  The Morris family arrived at Robin and Bob’s home in September 2009, eight miles inland from Bandon on Bob’s 28 acres that included a beautiful shingled 2,800-square-foot two-story home facing the Coquille River, a detached six-car garage/shop with offices and living space above, a barn and several other outbuildings. Bob raised alpacas and goats on the acreage and spent most of his time maintaining the property that he bought in 2008 after his second wife died of cancer.

  Balcony in Kennelly’s Home

  Police Evidence Photo

  The house had vaulted ceilings and a turret, which they referred to as the “castle room.” A large iguana resided in an enormous cage on one side of the well-appointed living room, which was filled with antiques and Robin’s artistic touches. French doors led out to a wrap-around deck, with a hot tub in a gazebo. Inside, the spacious kitchen had oak cabinets and granite countertops.

  Bob and Robin occupied the master suite on the ground floor, and Gabe, Jessica and Kalea moved into an upstairs bedroom across from the upstairs bathroom. The bedroom next to theirs was used as storage. Down the hallway, which opened as a balcony to the kitchen and living room below, was the castle room, where Gabe played video games, smoked pot and watched Kalea during the day while Jessica worked as a bookkeeper, taught seminary classes at the local LDS church, and volunteered at the Women’s Safety and Resource Center in Coos Bay.

  In the castle room, Gabe smoked a lot of pot. He and Bob bought a pound with the intent to sell it to make a few bucks, but Gabe smoked his half in a bong he kept in the castle room, where he went online every day and played Perfect World, an online fantasy game with dragons, queens, and quests that began in a time before humans and ended in apocalypse. Gabe had always been a gamer, beginning in his high school years, continuing through his time in Provo, but now he was a stay-at-home dad, and he had all the time he wanted to delve into his fantasy worlds. Bob, not a pot smoker, put his half-pound into one of the two safes he kept in the house and eventually traded it for an ivory statue that he intended to sell.

  Because pot was expensive, Gabe talked Bob and Robin into getting Oregon medical marijuana cards so they could buy it as patients. Robin, not a pot smoker either, had whiplash from an old automobile accident, Bob claimed some in
jury, and Gabe put down a shoulder injury he received while on the police force. The three of them drove to Medford, filed their paperwork and received their cards. They also got a permit to grow marijuana to sell to other card-holding patients or caregivers, as well as to a new medical marijuana clinic that was soon to open in Coos Bay.

  They bought building materials, built a secure room inside the garage and began a small-scale marijuana-growing operation. Somewhere along the line, Bob Kennelly loaned Gabe $25,000 with which to launch their business, and that debt became a bone of contention between them.

  Gabe even contacted James Anstey with a business proposal: He’d go to Nevada and steal things, specifically antiques, which Anstey could sell in Oregon. Anstey declined and tried to talk some sense into Gabe, telling him that he was on the path to destruction. Gabe didn’t listen.

  Tensions in the house began to escalate over the few months the Morris family lived in the house. Gabe didn’t like the fact that his mother was living “in sin” with Bob without being married. Bob didn’t like fact that Gabe and his family were living there without paying anything toward the household expenses. Robin confided in Jessica that she didn’t want to live with Bob, but she needed a man in her life. “I can’t just leave him and go back to my own house and be by myself. That scares me more than staying here,” Robin said.

  One day, Jessica started to feel ill. She got dizzy in the kitchen and Gabe convinced her that Bob Kennelly was putting rat poison in their food. At first, she was skeptical, but there was rat poison in the utility room, and Gabe showed her a white residue on some of the dishes. While Gabe and his family fixed their meals at home, Robin and Bob ate out. There was no question that she wasn’t feeling right.

  What they didn’t know was that she was pregnant.

  Gabe was the master of spinning tales out of thin air, and he began to get very creative with his art. Soon, everything started to smell like rat poison to Jessica’s sensitive nose.

  Gabe told her that he was developing a new video game with someone in Brazil. His conversations with others began to be peppered with tales of his time in the Air Force, when he was in “black ops” (Black Ops is a popular video game). He talked of going to China for one last mission for his employer, a secret government agency. At one point, he said that as soon as he told people that he worked for the government or the military, they relaxed and were willing to help him. He said people “want a story. They want to think that I work for the government. They want to think I work for the military. They want to think something, so I go along.” He used this bit of knowledge to great advantage. Gabe began what appears to be a very well-conceived and systematic revisiting of all his old friends from the days before he got himself into such trouble. He began to consciously lose a lot of weight.

  Was his mental health deteriorating, or was he practicing an alibi and a new persona—one that was manic and seemed a little crazy—for a crime he knew he would inevitably commit?

  He visited an old employer and told his grandiose stories, saying that he could “take care of” any problem that might arise. The inference was clear, although the former employer had no idea why Gabe visited him. They hadn’t seen each other in years.

  He visited Pam Hansen, a woman he knew from church when he was a teen, and spun an outrageous story that in the “pre-mortal days” (part of the Mormon theology), she was his queen and they rode dragons together (dragons are a part of the Perfect World game). He said he was the forerunner of Christ’s second coming. He had begun to perfect the rambling rants at this point, mixing fantasy and reality, queens and dragons with military secrets and working security for a prostitution ring. Looming over the whole morass was fear for his family. He had to protect his daughter from being molested by Bob Kennelly, he had to protect Jessica and Kalea from the rat poison Bob was feeding them, and he had to protect his mother, even though he thought she was in on Bob’s rat poison scheme and was a “lost cause.” Pam was concerned for Gabe, but didn’t think he was in any danger of harming himself or others. He was just really, really stressed out. Yet, when she heard about the murders, Pam Hansen knew exactly what to do. She called the police and told them about her latest chat with Gabe.

  Jessica was involved in a woman’s group at the Bandon LDS church. Around the same time, a month to six weeks before the murders, Gabe came to the group and acted in an inappropriate manner. When confronted by the leaders of that particular church, he said he was Christ and was told to leave the building. This Gabe was not the exceptional young man that the Mormon community had known when he was a teen and a missionary.

  Pressures continued to mount as Jessica’s parents called Robin and told her about Gabe’s money problems. When Robin confronted him, he exploded in anger. Unknown to Jessica, Robin had asked Gabe to contribute to the household expenses, which Gabe thought was completely unfair, and he found their accounting suspicious. During this big blow-up, Robin even showed Gabe the paperwork on his childhood custody case. She had not abandoned him. She tried to tell him how hard she fought for him, but he wasn’t listening. He had held on to his abandonment issues for too long to give them up now. He told his brother that their mother was evil. He began to describe Bob and Robin as bad people, and he began to convince Jessica that her parents were evil as well.

  Toward the end of January, Gabe convinced Jessica that they needed to leave the house immediately, before any of them ingested more rat poison, so he sent Jessica to their room to grab a few possessions and get into the car. Jessica did as she was told.

  Bob and Robin

  Family Photo

  With no apparent plan, they drove to Medford, about three hours away. Jessica, loyal to a fault, was not happy about missing work at the bookkeeping office, especially as tax season approached, but there was no denying that she felt funny, and Gabe was very convincing.

  Realizing they were ill-prepared for a road trip, they went back to the house the following day to pack up some belongings. Robin and Bob wanted an explanation as to why they were in such a hurry to leave, but Jessica was busy packing Kalea’s things and making sure she had everything they were going to need, and Gabe was busy packing up a few things from the castle room. Jessica didn’t want to talk to Robin. “I didn’t want to say, ‘Because I think your boyfriend’s hurting us’,” she said. Forty-five minutes later, they were out of the house and on their way to Gabe’s grandmother’s house in Silverton, where they washed all of their belongings to get the stink of rat poison out of them.

  Gabe said he wanted to talk with his uncle, Scott Walsh, to see if there was a way to get Robin safely out on her own, maybe back into her own fixed-up house. When he did call his uncle, Gabe just ranted about a business opportunity he thought Scott ought to invest in. He never said a word about helping Robin, or getting the family back together. It was all a manic rant, a pathetic attempt to find some money.

  They needed to find themselves a new place to live, too, because they couldn’t live with Bob and Robin anymore. That good idea hadn’t panned out as well as it had first seemed when they were in Idaho.

  They went to church that Sunday and Gabe continued his systematic renewal of acquaintances with his new persona. He went to see Mike Woods, the shop foreman at the BMW dealership where Gabe trained during his Mount Hood Community College days. In those days, Gabe was a calm, compassionate guy. Now he seemed delusional, with multiple grandiose stories about his involvement with secret black ops units in the military.

  He went to see David Bastian, with whom he served his mission in Australia. David said that Gabe used to be a sincere individual, but this time, seven years later, Gabe was very excitable and said he worked for a black ops agency cracking codes. He insisted on talking with David in private. He began to talk about apocalyptic happenings in California and Utah. (Perfect World has an apocalyptic aspect). He said he wanted to move to Silverton and open a coffee shop so he could preach, and his wife wanted to open a bed-and-breakfast to help pay the bills. He talked
nonstop about the $200,000 car he had bought to outrun the police, and then he began to talk about killing anyone who tried to molest his daughter. He said that people who had a lot of money and nice houses should share with people who don’t have as much. That night, David was mildly troubled about this new Gabriel Morris, but he didn’t think that Gabe was in any danger to himself or others. He just thought Gabe was going through some stressful times.

  Gabe and his family continued their ill-conceived road trip, searching for a place to live, although they had no money to get started and didn’t have most of their belongings. They headed to Seattle, where Jessica unsuccessfully tried to borrow money from old friends, as she had served her LDS mission in the Seattle area. Then they headed back down south, pawning their wedding rings for gas money, talking about moving here and there, all the way to San Diego, where Gabe showed her the severely distressed neighborhood where he grew up.

  He continually added new stories to his rant. Now Bob Kennelly was building a place where he could molest Kalea (the marijuana grow room they had built was secure and relatively soundproof). One of his wildest stories was that his father took him out into the ocean when he was 4 years old, dropped him in and left him to drown. He said he sank to the bottom, heard the voice of God and realized he could breathe underwater, so he just walked out of the ocean and back up the beach, to the amazement of his parents.

  Now he could heal.

  They spent a week in a motel in San Diego as the memories of a desperate childhood resurfaced. He remembered abuse at the hands of his father and his older brother and perceived abandonment by his mother. Perhaps a few things began to come into focus for him with regards to his mother’s series of boyfriends and her current choice of Bob Kennelly over Gabe and his family.