They discussed dates surrounding that October 14 night Kelly had claimed Jason killed Chris.
“So on the fourteenth, [Chris] comes over here—and was that to get his ‘present’?”
Kelly smiled. Nodded affirmatively. “Yeah.” The present comment was based on a remark she’d made earlier that day.
“Are you going to tell me what his ‘present’ was?”
She laughed. “No.”
Ogden suggested they go downstairs and talk about what happened, where, how.
“Okay,” Kelly said.
From the kitchen, four steps led down onto a small landing, where they’d walked into the house; the copy of the search warrant was still on the floor. If one headed down the stairs, to the left was the door heading outside (the same door they used to enter the house). Directly in front—to the left of the entryway door—was an open doorway leading down additional flights of concrete stairs into the basement.
Ogden stood in for Chris, to the left of the basement doorway, inside the door frame. Kelly stood in front of him, to the right side of the doorway leading down into the basement. They faced each other.
Kelly grinned. She wore a heavy black coat with a furry collar, the sleeves too long, covering her hands. Gray sweatpants. Her black hair was pulled back in a bun, disheveled, dirty, oily; twisted bangs brushed her cheeks. In back of Kelly, painted on the wall, a familiar, inspirational quote: Sing like no one is listening.
As Ogden asked questions, Kelly blurted out: “We were messing around right here.” Meaning, they’d started to get frisky on the landing between the two doorways. “We didn’t make it upstairs.”
“You were having sex right here?” Ogden asked, pointing at the ground.
Kelly nodded her head. “Yes,” she whispered, smiling.
“And we . . . we . . . we’re getting ready to go up the stairs and . . . and that was it.”
Ogden took a step toward Kelly, close to being in her face: “What happened?”
Kelly looked down. Her hands folded crossways in front of herself. She described what happened next, how she utilized the stairs and wall to help brace and position them in the doggy-style position. “He, like, stopped,” she said. “His weight, like, completely fell on me.”
“Which direction?”
“Back,” Kelly said, pointing toward the stairs heading down into the basement.
“Where was Jason?”
“In the basement.”
“Where were you?”
“I went down the stairs with him.”
Ogden asked particular questions as he had Kelly act out what happened. Her story fell apart as she told it. First she said they were having sex; then they were walking up the stairs to go into another section of the house to have sex; next she walked in back of Chris as he went up the stairs; before that, she went up the stairs first.
Ogden stood in for Chris on the second stair leading up into the kitchen.
Kelly stood behind him.
“You’re telling me that Jason shot him from behind?”
Ogden knew it was a lie. If Jason was in the basement, there was no way he could have made the shot, no matter how accurate his eye and hand. Logistically speaking, impossible.
“Yeah,” Kelly said. She hugged herself and twisted her upper body back and forth, hands folded in front, staring down at the ground. She came across like a six-year-old girl caught in a lie, trying desperately to act cutesy to get out of it. “At the time,” she added, “I didn’t know he was shot.”
“Okay. Then what happens?”
“He fell back. . . .”
“Okay, so he fell back and both of you tumble down the stairs?”
They discussed the layout of the stairs and where Kelly and Chris landed.
“So Chris is lying down there,” Ogden said, pointing again, “and he’s on top of you?”
Kelly nodded her head. “Yes.”
“Where’s Jason?”
“He was . . . there. . . .” She pointed down the stairs.
“Is he standing down there, to the right?”
Kelly nodded yes.
“What’s he doing?”
“Holding a gun.”
“What kind of gun is he holding?”
“It wasn’t a shotgun? . . . Um, maybe it was a shotgun. It wasn’t a handgun.”
“It wasn’t a handgun. It was a long gun?”
“Yeah! I had the handguns. He had the shotguns and rifles.”
“Okay, so what kind of rifle would it have been?”
They spoke in detail about Kelly’s story, which continued to fall apart. She mixed up small details and lied about others. Yet, within the story, the truth existed somewhere. Once more, it was about patience. Allow her to think she was smarter. Controlling this. And she would eventually give up everything.
Kelly said she split her forehead open when she and Chris tumbled down the basement stairs. Ogden wondered how bad it was and if the wound had required stitches.
“It did,” Kelly said. “I stitched it up.”
“You what?”
“I stitched it up.”
“You stitched up your own head?”
“Yup.”
Kelly said she blacked out for maybe five minutes while Chris was on top of her at the bottom of the stairs.
“What happened when you came to?”
“Everything I said . . . that . . . the way it happened.”
This response was not going to fly. “Huh?” Ogden said, gesturing toward her.
She shrugged.
“Did you do anything to Chris then—check him for a pulse, anything?”
She shook her head. “No. He was gone.”
“Did you have blood on you?”
She perked up. “You know, I don’t think so. None at all.”
Kelly said she wore a pink tank top and jeans.
Ogden tried to understand this. He pointed to the stairs leading up into the kitchen: “So, okay, right here, he’s inside you? You’re having sex? What did you do, just drop your pants around your ankles?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, what does Jason say to you?”
“Nothing. He just looked at me.”
“Look, eventually he says something!”
“Not that day.”
“The whole day he stayed silent?” Ogden had his hands in his front pockets. He shook his head. Stared Kelly in the eyes.
She nodded. “Yeah.” Nodded again, not looking him in the eyes. “Uh-huh.”
“Okay, then, so what did you guys do at that time?”
Kelly coughed. Then looked down the stairwell toward the basement. “Only thing Jason said was ‘We gotta take care of it.’”
She interpreted that to mean get rid of Chris’s body.
“Did you throw up . . . down there?”
“Yes,” she said. She vomited on the basement floor, on the stairs, and upstairs in the bathroom.
64
ROLE REVERSAL
I HAVE BEEN HAUNTED BY THIS FOR SO LONG, KELLY WROTE IN HER FINAL statement, which she gave after that walk-and-talk, pretend simulation she put on with Jeremy Ogden inside her house. This horrible thing happened on October 14, 2014, at approximately four forty-five . . . at six p.m. Chris was killed at our house....
From that launching point, Kelly broke into a history of her relationship with Chris. For the next six, single-spaced pages—and perhaps so blinded by her extreme narcissism, she didn’t realize it—she trashed the guy. Kelly justified every one of her actions, while minimizing her role in what was a premeditated, planned, brutal murder and horrific body disposal.
I tried to pamper him like he was the amazing man I was falling in love with and tried to convince him he was worth it . . . , she wrote, as if Chris had suffered from self-esteem issues (which he certainly did not).
Kelly could wax intelligent and articulate, but also come across as crass and foolish. She more often than not spoke with a drifter’s, drug-using, streetlike temperam
ent: I believe every time we had gotten together we had sex, or at the very least I gave him a blow job.
After that line, she then spent several sentences describing oral sex between them, using raw, tactless detail.
For the next few pages, Kelly talked about what she believed were Chris’s faults in and out of the relationship. It was a strange way to show any type of sympathy. And the truth is, Kelly, a tried-and-true psychopath, harbored no empathetic emotions.
Kelly is full of self-validation and blame of others. She does not know how to love.
After a long explanation of the relationship, Kelly wrote, On the night of . . . , before breaking into her first version of what happened.
Kelly texted Chris early afternoon, October 14, 2014.4
You coming over my house?
Generally, they “kept” the relationship and time they spent together “towards [Chris’s] house because of my respect for Jason. . . .”
Chris arrived at 66 Lawrence Street near four-thirty. He parked his car in the back of the Lawrence Street house, in an “alleyway,” so no one would see it. He’d driven his car “this time,” Kelly said. But would usually meet her in his truck.
Kelly was cooking lasagna. She heard Chris come to that back door by the basement, right off the kitchen, where she and Ogden had talked. She walked from the kitchen to greet him at the door.
“Dinner’s ready,” she said.
“Great!”
Then, without another word, Kelly “dropped down to [give] him” oral sex “since I had been blowing him off lately.”
She talked about not being mad at Chris, though the relationship was becoming too much for her to handle because of her marriage and seeing several other men at the same time. She didn’t have the time or energy for Chris anymore, and he was sensing an end to the relationship.
“It was hard to keep up with all of them [the men] and their sexual needs,” Kelly wrote. “I tried to see all of them every single day.”
She went to work on Chris there in the entryway, dropping to her knees. Not using the most refined language, Kelly wrote: “After I had sucked his cock for a little while and he moaned with pleasure for the entire time,” she stood, dropped her pants, turned around, and “had him put it in, from behind, which I really enjoyed with him especially for how large he was.”
At that moment, she claimed, while they were having intercourse, she “might have” heard a shot. She wasn’t sure. Yet, within a second, Chris’s “lifeless” body fell on her back. This threw her off balance and they tumbled down the basement stairs.
The way she described it, Kelly had no idea what happened. She claimed she did not know that Jason was even home.
She had no explanation for how she knew Chris “was only shot once and he died instantly,” adding there were “no movements or sounds,” with the exception of “me cracking my head open.”
Hitting her head on a board halfway down the stairs, Kelly blacked out.
Coming to sometime later, Kelly opened her eyes to see Jason standing over her, his .22-caliber rifle was pointed directly at her head.
“This is your entire fault,” Jason uttered. “If you weren’t such a stupid fucking whore, I would not have had to kill him.”
Jason “yelled at” her “briefly” and continued to call Kelly “mean and nasty names.”
Scared and disoriented, Kelly tried to stand. She was dizzy and out of it, blood trickling down her forehead. Chris’s inert body was slumped over her. She had a hard time getting up.
Jason turned, walked away, and began looking for something. Kelly didn’t know what he was doing.
After having a difficult time pulling herself out from underneath “Chris’s heavy, dead body,” Kelly found her bearings, wiggled herself out, stood, and watched her husband.
Jason rummaged through a toolbox. Found something. Then turned around.
Kelly looked closely into the darkness of the basement.
A set of hemostats? she thought, realizing what Jason had in his right hand.
Forceps. A pair of medical pliers, a surgical tool used mainly for clamping and controlling bleeding.
Jason walked toward his wife and placed the barrel of his .22 on her head, handed her the forceps.
“Get that fucking bullet out of his head.”
“What?”
“Pull that bullet from his head with those.”
Kelly bent down and acted as if she was extracting the bullet from Chris’s head, saying later she was able to convince Jason she found it and flushed it down the toilet.
Jason put his gun down and dragged Chris into the middle of the basement floor. Stood and took a long look at him. Then he turned and began to “gather tools for a way to dispose of or minimize the size of Chris’s tall, big body.” At fifty-three years old, Chris was just over six feet tall, a slim 170 pounds. In excellent physical condition.
Chris was lying in the center of the basement floor. “Let’s get rid of his car now, so no one is suspicious of it,” Jason said.
It was getting late. It was dark out by this time.
“Don’t fucking draw any attention while we do this, understand?” Jason said.
“Okay.” 5
“I’m going to drive it off a cliff into a lake so no one finds it,” Jason said, then hopped into the driver’s seat of Chris’s car.
Kelly claimed she was told to follow close behind in their truck.
“How ’bout that parking lot in Bates?” Kelly suggested just before they left. She wanted Chris’s car to be found, she claimed. If Jason drove it into a lake, it would “be decades before” it was discovered.
Jason agreed—though she never said why—and headed for the park-and-ride in Bates.
Jason pulled in first. Parked the car. Hopped out. Jumped into the truck.
“Hurry now, go,” he said.
Kelly took off back home.
“Drive faster,” Jason urged. Kelly didn’t understand his sudden need for speed, because the last thing they needed was to get pulled over.
“He had me race toward Ice Lake Road,” Kelly said. “I had really hoped we’d get pulled over, but the luck I was hoping for wasn’t there that night.”
65
BLOOD WILL TELL
WHEN THEY GOT BACK TO 66 LAWRENCE STREET, KELLY JUMPED OUT OF the truck and “started throwing up.”
Jason stood over her, yelling.
As she finished and was wiping her chin, Jason got in her face: “Go inside and make me a burger and fries.”
The guy was hungry.
“I wanted to run and escape, but was paralyzed by what I had just seen in front of my eyes.”
As Kelly flipped burgers, tended to the fries, she vomited into the frying pan. Jason went back down into the basement. Ten minutes later, as she cleaned up her own puke, she could hear Jason walking up the basement stairs and into the kitchen.
“After all I have done for you, you’re so fucking weak. So . . . stupid. I cannot believe you did this to me.”
Kelly stared at him.
Jason grabbed the frying pan and hurled it across the room. Grease and hamburger meat smashed against a newly painted kitchen wall.
“Clean that up,” he screamed. “Now, bitch.”
On her hands and knees, Kelly scrubbed the wall and floor as she cried.
“This comment stuck in my mind for such a long time,” she said in her statement, “because he took the man I loved (Chris) from me in such a horrible, senseless act, right in front of me.”
“You know why I did this?” Jason said. He laughed. “I did this specifically to hurt you. For no other reason than to make you hurt. Feel pain.”
Kelly stood and stared at her husband.
“I’m teaching your whore ass a lesson.”
Jason turned and walked back down into the basement.
Kelly finished cleaning up the kitchen and heated up the lasagna she had prepared for her and Chris.
As Kelly got the food ready, she h
eard loud noises coming from the basement.
Power tools? she thought.
Curious, she walked down the stairs, unsure of what to expect.
Jason stood over Chris’s body, a SAWZALL in his hands, a knife in his back pocket.
There was blood and body parts everywhere, Kelly claimed. She didn’t say anything at first. The scene was so surreal, so abnormal. She had no idea what to make of it.
“It was scary to see this” was about all she recollected in her statement about the moment she first saw her boyfriend cut into pieces.
As she turned to walk upstairs, “to make him his plate of food,” Jason beckoned her.
“Hey?”
Kelly turned.
Jason held one of Chris’s hands, which he’d just cut from the body, above the wrist. He had blood all over his face and clothing. He waved Chris’s dismembered hand at her, saying, “Bye, bye, Kelly . . . no more being a whore to your husband.” Then Jason laughed.
Kelly claimed she fell to the ground, starting wailing and blubbering “like a baby,” having no control over her emotions.
Jason grabbed his rifle, walked over to Kelly. Pointed it in her face.
“You see, whore, this is what will happen if you ever do this again and hurt me. I’d like to kill you, too, because you do not deserve to live for what you’ve done to me. I’ve loved you. You need to learn a lesson, bitch. Understand?”
Kelly went upstairs while Jason “cut him up completely.”
Later, Kelly heard Jason yell for her from downstairs: “Bring me the large garbage bags. We need to get the pieces together so we can transport him to the final destination for dumping.”
Kelly found the bags and walked downstairs.
“Help me package him up.”
Kelly looked at the room. Blood spread from one end to the other. Body parts scattered all over the floor. Chris’s head cut off, sitting in a small pool of blood by Jason’s feet.
“I cut him up. You will put him in bags.”
“I can’t, Jason. I just can’t.”
It wasn’t the disturbing nature of what he wanted her to do, Kelly said, that bothered her. It was the possibility of her throwing up and “then my DNA would have been all over the body parts.”
Jason paced.
He stopped. Waved his index finger at Kelly.
Where Monsters Hide Page 24