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

by M. William Phelps

  But that didn’t work out, either.

  So she moved back home—which was when things between Chris and Jennifer took on an entire new level of dysfunction.

  CHAPTER 44

  CHRIS SAT AT the family computer. Outside the window was another beautiful, picture-perfect Florida winter day with temps averaging around 72 degrees. The sun, of course, was perpetually shining its golden rays into the house through the blinds. As Chris scrolled through screens, he wondered what Jennifer had been up to. He didn’t trust her, obviously. Ever since she’d returned to the house, their relationship had gone from bad to worse. He could sense something was up with Jennifer and she was getting involved with people who were easily influencing her. The arguments between them were more blistering and hostile every time they had it out. Insults and cusswords were hurled at each other as if casual conversation. Both Chris and Jennifer were guilty of screaming and swearing and saying things they would both one day woefully regret.

  Staring at the screen, Chris logged on to Jennifer’s Facebook page and scrolled through to see if he could gain some insight into what she was doing and what was going on in her life outside the house. Snooping? Spying? Sure! But this was where they were in their relationship. And social media was a great tool for a parent to learn about the “real world”—a way to uncover what a problem teenager was actually involved in outside the confines of the household.

  “And that’s when I saw it,” Chris said later. It was one of the most startling, disturbing, spiteful things he could ever recall finding out about Jennifer at the time, clearly directed exclusively at him. It was altogether hurtful, dangerous, and unhealthy, not to mention the pain it would cause Rachel when Chris sat her down and explained.

  Incredible! Chris said to himself, reading a few posts Jennifer had just made. What in the hell does she think she is doing?

  At that moment, had someone suggested to Chris that Jennifer had been faking the hiccups, he might have leaned toward believing it. He wondered if he ever truly knew Jennifer and what she was doing on her own time. But later, after it was all done, Chris said the idea he and Rachel had been manipulating Jennifer to keep the hiccups going—a common accusation online—was absolutely preposterous. Their lives during the hiccup period and shortly thereafter were a testament to how much chaos the hiccups and the media attention had caused the family. Chris had sat and witnessed Jennifer’s entire suffering play out before him, feeling the implications personally as his relationship with Jennifer dissolved into them hating each other.

  “She was offered [a lot of money, by his perception] by Hic-Cup in the beginning to use the cup and see if it stopped the hiccups completely,” Chris said, making what was an excellent point. “If we were manipulating her, um, that would have been the time to tell her to stop.”

  It’s a solid argument: If she was faking, Jennifer could have stopped after the offer was made and said, “Wow! This cup totally cured me.” She could have taken a payday and walked away.

  According to Rachel and Chris, the family “lost money” during the time Jennifer had the hiccups. As Chris recalled, “We never capitalized on any of this. There was never any money. People said we used Jennifer like an ATM. I won’t even try to explain or defend that, because we never made a dime.”

  As he sat and stared at the computer, Chris’s jaw would have hit the floor if it could have reached that far. Reading what Jennifer had posted on her Facebook page, Chris was startled and hurt by what he read. He couldn’t help but think back to that little girl he met when he first started dating Rachel. Jennifer was a mere eighteen months old. She was so fragile, Chris recalled, so delicate and cheerful.

  “Just a joy,” Chris said, speaking of that time in Vermont when it was just Chris, Rachel, Jennifer, and Ashley. Things seemed so simple back then. “I coached her basketball team and it was just wonderful.”

  * * *

  Chris had not had the most picture-perfect life leading up to meeting Rachel. In 1988, Chris was arrested for attempted murder, which he was able to plea bargain down to a second-degree aggravated-assault charge. In total, Chris wound up spending five years in prison for the crime.

  According to Chris’s version, he was living with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend at the time and something happened between them. Chris said the girlfriend made a “pass” at him, and, as one might suspect, that had caused a great friction between the two siblings. Chris was eventually kicked out of the residence. A few days after he left, Chris returned to speak with his brother. He wanted to clear the air.

  Only, Chris brought a small handgun with him.

  His brother was not home—but the girlfriend was. An “altercation” took place between Chris and the girlfriend. A shot was fired by Chris and it hit the girlfriend in the chin.

  She lived. Chris was arrested a short time later.

  There was a second arrest about ten years hence. It was shortly after the rape allegations made by Jennifer against the two males blew up. Chris was upset because he believed law enforcement had not done enough as far as charging the alleged rapists. In fact, “no charges that I know of,” Rachel said, were ever brought against them.

  Rachel explained that after “neither of them was arrested . . . Chris became really upset by this.”

  Chris started to call the perpetrators on the telephone and made harassing threats. He was relentless.

  The family pressed charges: stalking. When all was said and done, Chris did another sixty days in prison.

  Since then, Chris had kept his life—legally—in order. Maybe moving to Florida had been a good thing, after all.

  As for being a father, “Whenever Chris introduced either of us,” Ashley McCauley said later, “he always said, ‘These are my daughters. . . .’ People would try to correct him. ‘Stepdaughters, right?’ And Chris would say, ‘No, my daughters!’”

  That small-town life in Vermont was something that Chris kept bringing up; how leaving Vermont was a mistake Chris blamed himself for ever since they packed and moved, ultimately winding up in Florida. Relocating to Florida, Chris had felt from day one, was not going to be good for the family. But he understood that Rachel needed to be there for her parents and he supported that decision. The major gaffe Chris kicked himself for was that they moved to St. Pete.

  * * *

  The way Chris later explained it, he and Jennifer didn’t start “butting heads” until Jennifer grew into her later teen years while in Florida. Yet, that developing distance between them took on new lengths after she became Hiccup Girl.

  It was her cell phone, the individuality that becoming a celebrity ostensibly gave Jennifer, the slow expansion of her ego, a belief that she was somebody she was not—it all contributed, Chris later observed, to the demise of their father-daughter, close relationship.

  Misunderstandings the two of them had after the post–Hiccup Girl fame evolved into verbal brawls, slammed doors, insults, and name-calling. They were hurting each other almost every day.

  What really fired Chris up was finding those letters Tyrone and Jennifer had written to each other while Tyrone had been locked up. They were graphic and vile, Chris recalled. Tyrone would talk about the sexual acts he wanted to perform on Jennifer when he got out, and it was clear Tyrone was writing to an experienced partner, not a young and innocent teenager. It was also the drug talk from Tyrone in the letters that bothered Chris. It said a lot about how much Jennifer was willing not only to tolerate from the boy, but how far she was willing to dive in with him.

  “I even called the detention facility and told them about the letters and how we didn’t want him writing to her anymore, but it didn’t matter,” Chris explained. “They did nothing.”

  “Jennifer, listen,” Chris said one day after reading the letters. “We don’t want you two writing to each other anymore. I don’t even want you seeing him.”

  Rachel stood by, agreeing. It would be best if Jennifer broke it off.

  “You don’t like h
im because he’s black!” Jennifer screamed angrily, accusing Chris of being a racist. It was a card she’d pull out from time to time when Chris disagreed with her lifestyle and the people she hung around.

  “Look, you certainly don’t need to be associated with anybody that is doing and or dealing drugs,” Chris said. “Especially a guy who wants to have sex with you! He’s using you, Jennifer. You’re way too young for all of this.”

  “You’re a racist” was Jennifer’s comeback.

  “I don’t like anybody from the ghetto,” Chris said. Black, white, brown, it didn’t matter to Chris, he explained, what color a person’s skin was. He was interested in how they acted, how they treated others and his daughter, along with how mature they were.

  “Not everybody from the ghetto is bad,” Jennifer snapped back.

  “I’m not saying they are all bad, Jennifer. But the ones you seem to like and hang out with are bad.”

  Chris didn’t even want Jennifer dating, he told her.

  “And certainly not that element!” He was steaming.

  Part of the problem for Jennifer, Rachel later said, was that she didn’t understand Chris’s condition. Chris had several issues he was dealing with at the same time. He also battled his own demons. The main medical problem was a thyroid condition, which can vary from patient to patient. An adult with a problem thyroid left untreated was prone to mood swings, Chris said, along with fatigue and several other debilitating symptoms. Because of that and other things, Chris had been in and out of the hospital and not at home for the girls all the time. Jennifer saw this as an emotional weakness and often threw it back in Chris’s face. His nerves, before he started taking the drug Synthroid to combat the thyroid condition, frayed very easily.

  “Especially where Jennifer was concerned,” Chris recalled.

  “He treated me differently because I was his stepdaughter” was Jennifer’s argument.

  “When things were good back when we lived in Vermont,” Chris remembered, “I never looked at Jennifer any differently. She was my daughter. When the hiccups happened and later when she started to go off the rails, there were times when I felt, ‘Why did I even bother getting into this?’”

  “You’re just my stepfather,” Jennifer would say when they had heated arguments. “I have a real father.”

  “Yup . . . sure thing, and you’re just my stepdaughter,” Chris would hiss back.

  (“In a sense, I lowered myself, and it was wrong,” Chris explained later. “It would get ugly. I blame myself every day for what happened to Jennifer.”)

  Chris sometimes viewed himself as the “evil stepdad,” he said. A lot of this went on without Rachel around because she worked all the time and took care of her ailing parents after work. Part of Chris could accept that he was the so-called evil stepdad, disciplining the girls the way he saw fit. They were not going to be happy with every parental decision he made. But when Jennifer would call him “stepdad” and tell him his rule and order did not hold weight any longer in his own house because he was her stepfather, it hurt Chris a lot. And he would always react in kind. Words would be exchanged and a battle would ensue. Next thing they knew, Chris and Jennifer weren’t speaking.

  On top of that, Chris and Rachel had a strict curfew for the older girls: 8 P.M. sharp. No excuses. After becoming a celebrity, Jennifer pushed it, Ashley explained. “She thought she could get away with it—and she did.” Ashley knew what Jennifer was doing when she was out, and she often talked with Jennifer about her behavior. But it did nothing. Jennifer was now going to do whatever she wanted to do, and nobody was going to tell her different.

  “Rachel,” Chris would say when Rachel got home from work. “I cannot take it. You have to do something. The way she talks to me, the things she says—it needs to change.”

  Rachel would often side with Jennifer after Jennifer lied and said she hadn’t done or said anything and Chris was making her out to be the bad person. This caused a tremendous friction between Chris and Rachel. Chris would go off by himself and feel terrible that his wife did not believe him.

  Jennifer expressed a desire to be treated as an adult, not a sixteen-year-old. She often talked about how Chris did not know how to take care of any of the kids. And Chris later admitted that his “parenting skills, at that time, in Florida, were sorely lacking. I cannot defend it. I don’t believe I took the time, nor did her mother, to sit down and explain to Jennifer, ‘This is wrong. This is right.’”

  Outside influences were a major point of contention and a serious problem that had, post–hiccup situation, gotten so out of control there was little Chris or Rachel could have done at this point, save for locking Jennifer up.

  “She felt we didn’t care,” Chris said. “She felt that my problems were maybe more important than hers.”

  And that is the thing about feelings, isn’t it? Doesn’t matter if the person is right or wrong, but how she feels is how she feels. Respecting someone else’s feelings and sharing differences and expectations can mend any fractured relationship.

  “We never sat down and talked,” Chris explained. “It was always an argument. . . .”

  The world outside the confines of the Robidoux doors had swallowed this naïve, undereducated little girl, whom Chris, Rachel, and Ashley all described as a sixteen-year-old with the mentality of, at best, a twelve-year-old. Jennifer bought into everything those in her world—including whomever she met online—told her. She believed she was “all that” because she had been on television. She thought she could handle whatever was about to come her way. Yet, what Jennifer never completely understood was that the street, sometimes, can be a merciless abyss of misfortune and criminal activity that one does not realize he or she is immersed in until it’s far too late.

  Chris portrayed Tyrone, that person Jennifer claimed had initiated her into the “thug life,” as a “waste of a life, period.”

  Sitting at the computer, reading through her Facebook pages, whatever Tyrone had done would pale in comparison to what Chris had just found out. As he’d scrolled through Jennifer’s posts, what for him was the beginning of the end for Jennifer living inside the Robidoux household was there before his eyes. On Facebook, Jennifer had bragged that while Chris sat in the living room, watching a football game, on the other side of the wall from where he sat, inside a bedroom she shared with her three sisters—Ashley had moved out by then—Jennifer had brought a “black boy” (not Tyrone O’Donnell) into the house and had sex with him all that afternoon.

  And he doesn’t even realize it! Jennifer reportedly mocked on her Facebook page, before describing some of what they had done.

  It was a bold, subconscious statement to the fact that Jennifer wanted to be taken seriously as far as her being given privacy and more space. She was screaming out emotionally, wanting desperately to be noticed. But she was also sticking it in Chris’s face at the same time.

  This posting, she had to realize, would eventually be seen by Chris and Rachel.

  And maybe that’s exactly what she wanted?

  “I’ve never hated her, but after reading that, I was pretty, pretty upset,” Chris said, adding, “My fear was one of her little sisters walking into that room while she was having sex with this boy. It was enough for me.”

  CHAPTER 45

  PURE, UNFETTERED RAGE. That was how Chris felt staring at the computer screen, reading what Jennifer had done inside the room opposite him as he watched the New England Patriots football game on that warm Florida Sunday afternoon.

  She’s got to go, Chris thought.

  “I want her out,” Chris told Rachel.

  “Well, let’s talk about it,” Rachel said.

  “Nothing left to talk about. I’m dealing with this every single day now, Rachel. I cannot do it anymore.”

  “If I remember right, I said something to Jennifer and it started another fight,” Rachel recalled, going back to the moment Chris told her what Jennifer had posted on Facebook. “I remember being in disbelief—a
kind of ‘what the hell’ mode. That she would do such a thing and actually post it on social media, I know was to slap Chris mentally. First having sex, then with a black guy, then under our roof, and then posting it. Talk about spitting venom.”

  Rachel and Chris were at odds. Not regarding what to do with Jennifer—but with each other. As Chris saw things, not only was Tyrone O’Donnell the worst-possible scenario for Jennifer to be involved in at her vulnerable age (and it wasn’t even Tyrone with whom Jennifer had had sex in her bedroom), but Jennifer was playing Chris and Rachel against each other. Whenever Rachel was around, Jennifer was the sweet little momma’s girl, treating Chris with respect. Yet, as soon as Rachel walked out the door, Jennifer’s true self emerged: a combative, nonconforming, aggressive know-it-all, who was not going to do anything Chris asked of her, on top of arguing with him and insulting him.

  Jennifer was seventeen. It was late summer 2008.

  “She was too big for her britches, as my dad used to say,” Chris explained. Even though it had been over a year now since her star was born, “she had fallen in love with her fifteen minutes and could not let it go. I did not see things getting any better. There was no chance. I only saw things getting worse.”

  By now, ecstasy, weed, alcohol, pills, and other drugs were a constant part of Jennifer’s life. She had an entire new group of friends she hung around. Tyrone was now out of juvenile detention influencing Jennifer and showing her the ropes as far as dealing crack cocaine. Jennifer had fallen into the “hood” lifestyle rather congenially, walking the streets at all hours, carrying dope, having sex, treating those in her life she claimed to love with as much disrespect as she could muster.

  “This cannot end in a good way,” Ashley would say, trying to talk Jennifer out of the life she was leading. “Please, please, listen to me. . . .”

  “We should have shaken her and locked her up,” Rachel said later.

  Jennifer was the oldest. Ashley had looked up to her all their lives. But now, with Jennifer falling off the deep end, Ashley was greatly concerned and trying to act like the big sister herself.