One Breath Away: The Hiccup Girl - From Media Darling to Convicted Killer

by M. William Phelps

  But as Lane later explained, the next part of the night made her “stomach hurt.”

  “Rachel could not have been more distant,” she opined. “Almost disappointed.”

  Disappointed?

  Yes!

  As she stood there, divulging the good news, judging Rachel’s reaction, Lane believed that the hiccups were finished. Jennifer’s claim to fame was gone. Therefore, the Hiccup Girl saga was over.

  Rachel, however, didn’t see it that way. Rachel told me later: “She was in there maybe forty-five minutes to an hour, and when she came out, the hiccups were gone.” She said she asked Lane, “How the heck did you do that? I was absolutely elated. I was in tears, and Jennifer was in tears. I gave [Lane] a hug. I hugged Jennifer.”

  Jennifer later confirmed much of this, as did Allison Baldwin.

  According to Lane’s notes, the session went well over three hours. “And I never saw Rachel shed a tear,” she added.

  Rachel described Lane as a “typical” professional who asked “medical questions about the patient. She told me she hoped the therapy would work to stop the hiccups. She asked me if I thought Jennifer could be hypnotized and told me the only people who couldn’t be hypnotized were people who were insane or had mental illness.”

  After the session, when Jennifer appeared not to be hiccupping any longer, what Lane surmised was that Rachel was upset because Jennifer would no longer be a media sensation, thus deflating the air out of any future earnings.

  “Ignorant,” Rachel said of that accusation. “Nobody knew us and lived in that house with us, and understood what we went through. It’s totally ignorant to make claims like that when the truth was the total opposite.”

  “I love you,” Jennifer said to Lane again in the waiting room as Rachel and Allison Baldwin, Jennifer’s friend, looked on. Then she looked at her mother. “They’re gone!” She walked over and hugged Rachel.

  According to Lane, Rachel was not happy.

  “People are going to say what they feel—I’ve gotten used to it,” Rachel commented later after I explained that some were saying she wanted Jennifer to have the hiccups. “I would tell them to look at her medical files and see that she has a medical condition. At no time did I ever seek to exploit her. I looked for answers as to why this was happening. Instead of being haters, they should have spoken to me directly or even gone to a few doctors’ appointments!”

  Rachel was disturbed by the notion that several people, she explained, having no idea how taxing this entire ordeal was on the family and especially on Jennifer, had judged them without knowing any of the facts.

  “The way I see it is, if people are uninformed enough to think that she/we staged and faked and manipulated her medical condition, rather than coming to me and talking to me and getting correctly informed, well, ‘ignorant’ is the nicest word that comes to mind. I could say much worse, but I won’t sink to their level.”8

  After she thought about it later and learned all of the facts, Debbie Lane said, “If she was faking it, she missed her calling in theater.”

  As the session ended, Lane explained to Rachel that Jennifer needed to return for several follow-up appointments, that this first session was, essentially, only the beginning. Jennifer had stopped hiccupping; but in order to keep Jennifer in this “new” state of not hiccupping, she would need to continue to see the hypnotist and finish the therapy.

  They agreed, Lane said later, to return. So the hypnotist booked a few appointments.

  “I don’t believe she mentioned a follow-up and I don’t believe she gave Jennifer anything,” Rachel said regarding the end of the session and what she and Lane had spoken about. “I think it was kind of a onetime thing. There may have been a follow-up appointment, but I don’t know that we ever went back.”

  There was no reason for them to go, Rachel went on to say. Jennifer’s hiccups were gone. After the hypnotist, Jennifer went to see a neurologist, Rachel explained, and she was then diagnosed with Tourette’s.

  “Another point that needs to be made,” Chris Robidoux added, “is that if we were coaching Jennifer, making her fake the hiccups, wouldn’t we have ‘made her’ stop them the first few times she had used that Hic-Cup cup?”

  It’s a fair assessment of the situation. If making money and exploiting Jennifer and her ordeal by controlling it had been the intention, wouldn’t Rachel have told Jennifer to stop once she began using the Hic-Cup cup so they could collect on an endorsement deal?

  Lane watched Jennifer, Rachel, and Allison Baldwin leave. She had reservations about what had just transpired and how Rachel and Jennifer were going to deal with it. By Lane’s personal and professional estimation, she had just cured Jennifer of the hiccups. They were completely gone as Jennifer exited her office. Jennifer appeared relaxed and totally able to breathe now. Lane had given her a fresh start.

  Those reservations of Lane’s came to fruition, she said, the following day. As Jennifer made her rounds, talking to local media and a few syndicated radio shows, she started off by saying that the hiccups had stopped the previous night inside the hypnotist’s office. However, as the day progressed, Lane’s work would be totally wiped out of the picture as Jennifer was saying she wasn’t really sure how they had stopped.

  “I couldn’t believe how she was saying that they weren’t sure,” Lane said later. “It had gone from Jennifer telling the world it was in my office to ‘we’re not sure.’ I was shocked.”

  Even though Jennifer and Rachel had effectively “dissed” her and the hypnotherapy, Lane vowed to honor the appointments she had made with Jennifer, wanting nothing more than to help the girl.

  So she called and called, but Jennifer or Rachel never returned her calls or showed up for another appointment.

  The hypnotist had given Jennifer a CD of some relaxation techniques and things to do, which they had created together during the session, and told Jennifer to use it regularly.

  “We did the equivalent of ‘three sessions in one’ that night.”

  Lane wanted to make sure that within all of the information Jennifer had gotten, she knew what to do and how to focus on relaxing within that hiccup-free zone Lane had created for her. But Debbie Lane was now seriously concerned that without Jennifer returning for those follow-up hypnotherapy treatments, she would start hiccupping again.

  CHAPTER 36

  IN THE DAYS following her experience with Debbie Lane, Jennifer Mee remained hiccup-free. She had a new lease on what she had described for the hypnotist as a chaotic life inside a small home—all of the above partly responsible for her hiccupping in the first place. She could finally think about school again or going out with friends to the movies and to the park. She could just be normal—whatever Jennifer’s new normal was at this point in her life. Of course, there would be a wave of publicity surrounding the hiccups being gone, which Jennifer could ride; but after that, Jennifer could go back to her life. Something she claimed to want more than anything else.

  Jennifer asked her mother about going shopping for clothes. Jennifer talked about desperately getting back to high school and how some new duds would set her on the right track.

  “Of course,” Rachel said.

  That feeling of being a bug in a glass jar that everyone was gawking and squawking at began to diminish for Jennifer as the middle of March came and she finished a small round of publicity surrounding her being “cured.” She had enjoyed the celebrity life. She had taken in all of the attention, and she had loved it. But she and Rachel knew from day one that it would all end someday, and Jennifer would have to cope with the result. The question was (and perhaps Rachel and Chris Robidoux had been unprepared for this part of the entire experience): Was there a plan to bring Jennifer back down to earth?

  With the hiccups gone, Jennifer felt she could perhaps even turn her life around, using the experience and notoriety as a starting point toward a better way of life. Arguably, according to her, Jennifer was not the innocent little girl her mother—and Americ
a—thought her to be. If what Jennifer later told me is true, she had been dabbling in some very hard-core drugs, smoking weed, having sex, hanging out with “thug”-type people, and carving out a life on the streets for herself—all while staying with a boy who was beating her anytime he felt like it. The hiccups had slowed that lifestyle down some, along with Tyrone O’Donnell going into juvenile detention, but her previous life was still percolating there in the recesses of Jennifer’s soul—that is, if she chose to step back into it. Jennifer could not escape from who she had become. The only difference now was that everyone knew her name, and many her face. Her ego was already getting the best of her, her head a bit bigger than it had ever been (just about everyone around her later agreed with this), and she realized that doing things in a big way could get her the attention she told Debbie Lane she had craved so much.

  Still, Jennifer Mee had the opportunity to cut that cord and begin anew. She was at a fork in the road of her life right now. It was her choice. And what was the big attraction to that life on the street, anyway?

  “I don’t know what made me want to live the hustla life,” Jennifer told me. “I guess ’cause maybe it was fast and easy money and that’s what all my mind knew? I cannot really tell you.”

  Rachel had purchased an iPhone for Jennifer, something Jennifer never had. Jennifer had been in the dark about most things until she heard it from a friend or saw it on the news. Not now, though. She had a direct link to the world outside the door via her own phone.

  “I did not want a computer, ever,” Rachel later said. “Moving into the ‘big city’ of St. Pete,” Rachel added, “I was overwhelmed by what the kids could be exposed to just down the block. For that reason, I kept them all close to me and never allowed them any room beyond the household. I wanted to know where they were and what they were doing at every moment. I figured a computer would invite elements into their lives I didn’t want them to know about.”

  “I blame myself for everything that happened to Jennifer,” Chris Robidoux said. “We should have never moved into the city. It exposed Jennifer and the kids to all kinds of things they should have never seen or heard. I’m responsible.”

  “With me working as much as I did and taking care of my parents, I realize now that there was a lot going on I did not see,” Rachel said, “or chose to look the other way and not see.”

  The one thing Jennifer could now do was text, which became a habit she took to effortlessly. As her hiccups subsided—now back at home with a hic here and a hic there, but nothing like what she had suffered from—Jennifer texted back and forth with friends and met new people. She wanted to get back into the social campfire of school and what was happening down at the park. Tyrone was still in juvenile detention, but he would be getting out soon enough and Jennifer had decided to give the relationship another chance.

  When she and Rachel returned from shopping, Jennifer met with Karen Ardis, a teacher who had come to give Jennifer the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) inside her home. Jennifer had gone into school weeks before to take the test but was “kicked out of the classroom,” according to Rachel, because she was disrupting the test with her hiccups. Taking the test at home at least made Jennifer feel as if she was getting back into a way of life she had known before the hiccups had taken over. After taking the test, she could go back to the classroom, especially now that she was not hiccupping (and disrupting class) anymore.

  “The one thing I want, Mom,” Jennifer had said on the evening she approached her first twenty-four hours totally hiccup-free, “is that we never use that H word again.”

  Rachel agreed.

  What Rachel looked forward to most was returning the household to its normal daily routines of kids and school and meals and problems to solve that did not involve going to doctors three and four times a day, several days a week, on top of meeting with an infectious-disease-control person (which they were scheduled to do) and being under the microscope of the world. It was no way to live. No way to raise a family of five girls.

  “Jennifer had even spoken to a faith healer over the telephone at one point,” Rachel remembered.

  Was it actually all over? And did Rachel and Jennifer want it to be over?

  “There was nothing I wanted more,” Rachel said.

  “It was incredible,” Jennifer added, explaining the relief she felt from not being a slave to the hiccups any longer.

  CHAPTER 37

  SOMETIME LATER, ACCORDING to Jennifer, it started all again. Without any warning this time: hic, hic, hic.

  They were back.

  Just like that.

  As quick as they had left her, the hiccups were again controlling Jennifer Mee’s life.

  The satellite trucks had not yet pulled away, and the calls had not stopped coming into the house from media across the globe, when Jennifer looked at her mother with a grimace, her shoulders drooped, indicating they were now back to square one.

  Hic-hic-hic . . .

  There seemed to be something different this time around, however. “I need to go to the hospital,” Jennifer told her mother. Her hips and chest hurt worse than she could ever recall. It was an intense pain and she was unable to deal with it.

  So Rachel and Jennifer were off to the All Children’s Hospital emergency room once more—a familiar task they had gotten used to by this point. But again, like the past few times they had seen a doctor, there wasn’t much the hospital could do but prescribe medication and tell Jennifer to go see a specialist.

  Thorazine, a very strong and powerful antipsychotic medication, was a common prescription Jennifer was given. The medication turned Jennifer into a zombie every time she took it, Rachel knew. Thorazine was generally used to treat psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia or manic-depression, on top of severe behavioral problems. It was the go-to for doctors after diagnosing children between the ages of one through twelve who were exhibiting those symptoms. The generic term is chlorpromazine, and it is a common drug handed out to children showing signs of tics, twitches, nausea and vomiting, anxiety, and chronic hiccups.

  “She had seen a chiropractor who got in contact with me through e-mails to the Tampa Bay Times,” Rachel explained later. “He saw her five times. She saw an acupuncturist and Debbie Lane, the hypnotist. The chiropractor she saw multiple times found some compressed vertebra. The first visit to the hypnotist and her hiccups stopped . . . but then . . . well, it was so disappointing, they came back.”

  As far as the hiccups coming back, Lane said, “The hiccups were always a go-to for Jennifer, a fallback for attention. It’s where she learned people would care.”

  Not that she was faking, Lane was quick to point out, but the hiccups got Jennifer noticed. The thought was, Jennifer needed to be loved and the hiccups gave her that attention and love she so much desired. So her body, when she didn’t feel those emotions, went into action.

  “That’s absolutely untrue,” Rachel said. “The hiccups came back, were real, and we had to deal with it. No one else. Just us. I wish people could understand what our lives were like. They don’t. Instead, they judge us. Jennifer never faked the hiccups.”

  If Rachel and Jennifer did not realize how big Jennifer’s story had become, all they had to do was turn on NPR on a Saturday morning near this time when everything seemed to crash. National Public Radio’s popular show Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me led its broadcast with a report on Jennifer.

  “All of you follow the news, so I know that you’re concerned . . . about the fate of Jennifer Mee . . . who became the subject of an intense booking war between Today and Good Morning America because she’s been hiccupping nonstop for four weeks.”

  The comment brought several laughs out of the live audience.

  “She is still hiccupping, and apparently even Diane Sawyer banging on her door at four in the morning with flowers could not scare the hiccups away” was the next comment, which produced a big round of laughter for Peter Sagal, the voice behind this sarcastic game show bu
ilt around news and popular culture stories.

  It was quite insulting, actually, that a reputable, somewhat highbrow, and definitely ultraliberal public radio organization as big and powerful as the mighty NPR was poking fun at Jennifer (a child) and her plight. While Jennifer and her family were at home, pulling at their hair trying to figure out how to stop the hiccups and get Jennifer back on track and in school, Jennifer was a punch line. She was a person to laugh at and mock. That opening few lines recited by Peter Sagal truly proved how big a phenomenon the Jennifer “Hiccup Girl” Mee story had become.

  Heading toward week seven, Rachel wondered what they were going to do. They’d tried just about everything. Nothing had totally worked.

  Then, on March 14, 2007, out of seemingly nowhere, Jennifer opened her eyes on a new day with a different feeling.

  She wasn’t hiccupping anymore.

  * * *

  Jennifer had gone to four different doctors leading up to the hiccups once again stopping.

  “That’s all they did,” Chris added. “Go to doctors.”

  The idea that they were gone brought Jennifer to tears, with a certain amount of trepidation, because she and Rachel had gone through this before and thought it was over, but the celebration had been fleeting. The hiccups had always come back.

  Yet something told Jennifer this was it—they were gone for good.

  Finally.

  Recently, since getting her own phone, Jennifer had reconnected with her “real” father and they were calling each other every day.

  “That was a big mistake,” Chris Robidoux said of Jennifer hooking back up with the sperm donor known as her father.

  Jennifer called her biological father to share the great news.

  “Dad, they’re gone. . . .”

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  “Yeah, they’re gone.”

  “Wow, that’s great. Can you believe it?”

  One day went by and they had not returned. Then it was two days.

  Then three.