Kill the Ones You Love

by Robert Scott

  “It just got worse and worse. He got the place in Pocatello.” (Author’s note: He may or may not have rented a place there.) “So there was another rent. And then he picked up a real nice Mercedes. The money would just come in and go out before we could save any. He just kept applying for more and more credit cards. All the money was just going out.”

  Jesse McCoy also heard this line of reasoning from Gabe. Jesse recalled, “He said he wanted to go to Oregon and be around Mom and the ones he loved. He was having marital problems, but the next thing I knew he was back with Jessica once again. I wasn’t aware that he was having any financial difficulties.”

  Bill Pope had heard this all before, but he loved his daughter. He knew how much she wanted to keep her family as a unit. He very reluctantly agreed to give them $7,000, and told Gabe to declare bankruptcy in Oregon. Since Gabe didn’t even have a car now, they had both been repossessed, Bill loaned them the use of a pickup truck. With grave misgivings, the Popes watched as Gabe, Jessica and Kalea drove off and headed westward to Oregon in September 2009.

  By the time Gabe and his family reached Bandon, Oregon, Robin had divorced James Anstey and was now living with new boyfriend Bob Kennelly. Bob owned a place out on Highway 42 South, which was several acres on the south side of the Coquille River, about six miles from Bandon. This was a very pretty area of woods, farms and ranches along the river and rolling forested hills. The immediate area was known as the Flower Hill Ranch. It was a postcard setting for that part of Oregon.

  Bob had been born in Los Angeles, California, but the family moved to Redwood City, up in the San Francisco Bay area, where Bob spent his school years. He met a girl named Linda Sellers there, and they got married in San Jose in 1985. They eventually had two daughters.

  In the 1990s, Bob and family moved up to Oregon, where he worked for the JGS Machine Shop for many years. He and Linda divorced in 2002, and Bob then married Linda Bray in 2004. In 2008, Linda died of cancer.

  Bob and Robin Anstey began dating after she divorced from James. Besides having a nice place up on Flower Hill and raising alpacas, Bob liked hunting and riding his motorcycle. Bob and Robin also liked eating out a lot at the local restaurants. By 2009, Robin was living full-time at Bob’s place outside of Bandon.

  Bob’s property included the main residence, a large shop building, with a second story, and several outbuildings. The main house was a spacious split level. Its setup allowed Robin and Bob to have their own area downstairs, while Gabe, Jessica and Kalea lived in their separate upstairs section. Robin and Bob had a master bedroom on the ground floor, large kitchen, dining room, bathroom and living room. Upstairs was a bathroom, two bedrooms and another small bedroom in a turret. This was only half jokingly called the “Castle Room.” Gabe and Jessica had one upstairs bedroom; the second bedroom was used for storage; Kalea slept in the Castle Room.

  The main residence had an unusual pattern. The main stairway to the upper rooms led to a balcony, which looked down upon all the open space below. From the balcony and stairway, there was an unobstructed view of the living room and the front door.

  Even before Gabe and Jessica left Idaho, an idea had supposedly been floating around that he would go into business with Bob Kennelly and his mother concerning a bed-and-breakfast place. Gabe and Jessica would manage the B and B. At least, that scenario was present in Gabe’s mind, but none of that ever went beyond the dreaming stage.

  There was also another option that never went anywhere. When Robin moved in with Bob, she had her own house in Bandon, which no one was living in. Gabe and Jessica thought they might be able to move in there. As Jessica explained later, “That house had not been lived in for about a year by the time we arrived. And it needed a lot of work. It was really disgusting. It never got new drywall. And so it never happened.”

  Gabe promised to go to work in Bandon, but it was Jessica who got work first. She applied for and got work at Bandon Bookkeeping. Right from the start, Jessica proved what a good worker she was. She was very competent and got praise from the owner of the establishment and from her coworkers.

  As far as Gabe went, it was altogether a different story. He did approach his stepfather, James Anstey, with a business proposal. However, it was not one that James wanted to hear. Gabe said he would drive to Nevada, steal items there and secret them back to Oregon, where they could be sold at James’s antique store or on eBay. James turned him down flat.

  James wondered what had become of the bright, cheerful boy he had once known. Gabe now was very troubled and angry all the time. He seemed to have lost his moral compass as well. It was incredible that he’d been a deputy sheriff not that many years before and still claimed that he followed the tenets of the Mormon Church.

  Stymied by James’s unwillingness to go along with his illegal scheme, Gabe turned to something controversial that was now legal in Oregon. He proposed to Bob and Robin that he start a medical marijuana–growing operation on Bob’s property. Neither Robin nor Bob smoked marijuana, but they agreed to go along with this. It would at least provide Gabe with some income.

  In December 2009, Bob, Robin and Gabe applied for, and were granted, medical marijuana cards. Gabe might have been able to do this by citing an arm injury while he was a deputy sheriff. Whether he really had sustained an arm injury was up for debate. They were also granted the right to grow marijuana on the property.

  It soon became apparent that Gabe liked smoking his product more than trying to make a living from it. He was also hitting the booze very hard. He even bragged during this time period that he was drinking a bottle of hard liquor per day, along with countless beers. For someone who still professed to be an active member of the Latter-day Saints Church, he certainly wasn’t acting like a responsible member of that faith.

  Even worse, Gabe was the caregiver of Kalea by now. He constantly smoked dope around her, and he kept marijuana paraphernalia in her room, as well as “roaches,” the burnt remains of marijuana cigarettes. Gabe’s main “ job” became sitting around the house, getting high and playing computer games. He was as addicted to those games as he was to booze and dope. He could barely be pried away from the computer screen to eat or take care of Kalea. It was an irritant to Bob that Gabe couldn’t seem to tear himself away from the games to help around the place.

  One of the games that Gabe was addicted to was called Perfect World. It was a game where people socialized and tried to create their own alternate reality of life, as compared to the one they were actually living.

  One of the people with whom Gabe interacted a lot in this game was a young woman named Judy Ward (pseudonym), who lived in Dumfries, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Judy later spoke of how she met Gabe: “We met through one of the servers, and we just happened to get in a group together. And then he started talking to me more, and we joined a guild. Not his, but just a guild. When we left the faction, he wanted a way to contact me. We needed a way of contact for this other project he was working on. It was just a project to bring people together for graphics work, stuff like that. Just to help inspire people.

  “He told me he worked for the air force, with the OSI or something like that, and that he had a team who tracked and caught terrorists. I don’t know how it worked, but that’s the impression I got. So that’s what I thought he did.”

  While Jessica earned her keep, Gabe was nothing but a freeloader in the household. His caregiving toward Kalea was worse than useless; he’d become a burden to Robin and especially to Bob. The money that Bill Pope had loaned him was long gone, and it appeared that Gabe had no intention of finding any productive job in the area at all. Gabe and his family were using Robin and Bob’s food, using their water and using their electricity. It’s not recorded if Jessica was paying them something, but Gabe certainly was not.

  When he wanted, Gabe could still be charming and personable. When Gabe’s stepsister’s husband, Robert Hayden, first met Gabe, he thought he was a “cool guy.” Gabe was friendly and
did not act weird around Isabelle’s husband.

  But he was slipping a lot in other aspects of his life. Incredibly, he now pronounced that he didn’t approve of his mother living in sin with Bob Kennelly. This was incredible—in light of the fact that he’d just cheated on his wife and had done a myriad of other illegal acts.

  But Gabe told Robin and Bob that he was a “spiritual man.” And then he absolutely floored them with his next comment: “I’m the forerunner for the Second Coming of Christ.”

  Gabe did not explain how a boozing, dope-smoking, wife-cheating slacker was somehow the forerunner of Christ. Robin didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this outrageous statement.

  When Robin and Bob refused to acknowledge his wild claims, Gabe became angry and visibly upset. By now, Gabe was not just telling them that he was the forerunner of Christ’s Second Coming; he had started telling others in his church as well. In fact, it became his new mission to tell others exactly how the local church should be run.

  Gabe started to fall prey to rumors that some folks gossiped about and spread—claims that Bob’s previous wives had not died natural deaths. None of these charges were true; but since Gabe was already antagonistic toward Bob, he began to believe in them wholeheartedly. In fact, this belief began to take on darker and more sinister tones in Gabe’s mind as time went on. What had only been rumors in some quarters became a matter of faith in Gabe’s mind.

  Gabe had believed a lot of things about himself over the years, but now his beliefs bordered on madness. It wasn’t some con, some artful duplicity. No, he actually believed his wild claims. He caused scenes around town and even at his church. He said that he had the true faith, and the leadership at the local LDS church did not.

  Pamela Hansen, who lived in the area, had known Gabe for sixteen years by 2009. Often called “Pam,” this young woman originally knew him as a person who was “extremely bright, energetic and smart. All the world was his stage, and everyone liked him.”

  Pam recounted, “We were teenagers when we first met, and my family hadn’t moved to Bandon yet. We just went to church there whenever we were in the area. Later, Gabe was friends with me and my husband. He visited us more after he came back from his mission to Australia. Gabe always had big ideas and hopes. He didn’t brag about them, but he was excited about going to BYU.

  “Gabe always showed compassion to others. He was interested in what other people were doing, and it wasn’t all about himself. He saw good in other people and considered them to be a child of God.

  “Robin and James Anstey had a shop in Bandon and thought very highly of Gabe. He was full of life and ready to take on the world. He loved the Gospel and liked to have discussions about it. My husband was an avid outdoorsman, and he and Gabe liked those kinds of things.

  “I attended the reception in Bandon after Jessica and he were married. They were very happy together. Later I met Kalea. He seemed to be a good husband and father. Gabe had a good relationship with Kalea, and she was well-behaved, loving and happy.”

  Pam once again became acquainted with Gabe when he, Jessica and Kalea moved to Oregon in 2009. “When he came back from Idaho, he reinitiated contact. He was a little less enthusiastic about life, but not out of the ordinary. He had responsibilities as a husband and father. We had them over for dinner and the only thing that stood out was that he seemed stressed out about getting work.”

  And then things started to change: “Gabe came over in the afternoon one day between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 2009. He spent a long time [here] and did most of the talking. He was talking about mystical, magical kinds of things. He said he was a forerunner of Jesus Christ and that these were the Last Days. In other words, the Second Coming of Christ.

  “He talked about a pre-mortal existence and he had been a dragon rider. Whether he was fantasizing or not, I’m not sure. But he said we had been together in the pre-mortal life and I had been his queen. Together with an army of Heaven, we had expelled Satan and his hosts from Heaven.

  “He then told me he had done some things in this life that he wasn’t proud of. I told him we can be forgiven. Through repentance he could go forward and live a good life.

  “He was very excited when he told me this. I kind of went along with him, and I asked what color dragon he rode. He said it was blue, so I asked him what color mine was, and he said he didn’t know.

  “He was very serious about what he said. Gabe told me that I was his queen, and he knelt before me with tears in his eyes. He said that he would do anything for me. Then he said, ‘Please, just tell me what to do.’

  “Certainly, I thought that Gabe was under some kind of distress. So I reiterated that he should ask for repentance and lead a good life in the future. To this, he said that he liked coming over and talking to me. It made him feel calmer.

  “He told me I needed to leave Bandon because it was going to become a dangerous place. It was an apocalyptic end-of-time kind of thing. I needed to leave the area to be out of harm’s way. I thought a lot of what he was saying was gibberish. It was very random and hard to follow.

  “This whole visit lasted about three hours. When he left, he seemed to be much calmer. He gave me a big hug and said good-bye. When he left, I thought he had an emotional breakdown. I was concerned for his well-being.”

  Jesse McCoy saw Gabe around this time and said later, “I saw him at Mom’s house and he was drinking a lot. He was more than just drinking—he was belligerent drinking. He would drink a whole bottle of hard liquor at one time and get drunk. He was also openly using marijuana, even in front of Jessica. He did not give me a reason why he was doing these things.

  “He was also addicted to video games. When I left there, he would call me on the phone and say that he was spending endless hours playing them. He even called up once and said that he had special powers from God. It was very alarming to me.”

  Boozing, smoking dope, addicted to video games, Gabe’s tenuous grip upon reality was becoming frayed to the breaking point. He’d always had a hard time telling fantasy from reality. Now the two had blended as one in a toxic mix of anxiety, grandiosity and paranoia.

  Gabe had been playing Perfect World constantly on the computer in 2009; but by that point, his real world was anything but perfect.

  CHAPTER 14

  To what depths Gabe had descended into paranoia can be ascertained by his remarks to his wife in January 2010. He began telling her that Bob Kennelly was trying to poison them. Gabe said that Bob was putting rat poison in their food and was also wiping it on their plates.

  By this point, Gabe was so delusional that he later claimed that he absolutely knew he was being poisoned. He said he purposefully imbibed the rat poison, knowing that it would kill an ordinary person, but that he was no ordinary person. According to Gabe, because of his extraordinary powers granted by God, he was able to heal himself.

  Around that same time, Dillon Hogan, Bob Kennelly’s son-in-law, had dinner with Robert and Robin at their house. Robin told Dillon how Gabe was claiming that he could run through the trees of the forest at night, at full speed, and see God and hear His voice. Gabe claimed he never hit a tree or stump because God was guiding him. Robin was so alarmed by this that she said she thought that Gabe was psychotic now.

  James Anstey was equally alarmed. He later said, “He was no longer the Gabe I knew. He thought he was some kind of superhero. He spoke of scams in Las Vegas and all kinds of crazy things. He was totally irrational. Something inside of him had broken.”

  Around that same time, Gabe went to visit his old boss David Grover at his restaurant the Kozy Kitchen, in North Bend. Grover recalled, “Gabe stopped by the restaurant with his wife and daughter. In the beginning, he was very cordial, as he always had been. He was a lot thinner than I remember him being.

  “As the conversation went on, he told me he knew I was a good person, and he said he knew that because of my smile. He went on to talk about some kind of mission he was on. He said that if there were any peopl
e who were giving me problems, he would help me out on that. He added that he was on some kind of military mission and there were other people in the area helping him out. It was like secret agent stuff, black ops kind of things.

  “He had always been honest with me in the past, so it was hard to discount these stories, but it was all very odd. I hadn’t seen him in six or seven years and I asked him what he was doing back in town. Then I said to him, ‘Oh, right. Your mom lives around here.’

  “He said he wasn’t seeing her or her boyfriend. ‘They’re bad people! I love my mom very much, but I can’t be around her.’”

  In January 2010, Gabe and Judy Ward, who lived in Virginia, met each other in a Skype chat room. That was the first time she had seen his face. She recalled, “On Skype, we never talked about his real life. It was all about either the game or working on a website and getting it up and running. He just seemed like a caring person.”

  Around that same time, Gabe began going over to his stepsister Isabelle’s house more often. Now married, she and her husband, Robert Hayden, lived in the Bandon area. Isabelle recalled, “Gabe began stopping by once a week. I started noticing there was a big change in him. It was the way he would talk and preach to us. His conversations were more intense and his stories were more wild.

  “He started talking about God giving him missions. He was preaching about a lot of things he could do. He said he was in special operations—secret agent stuff. It got progressively worse. It got to where I didn’t even want to come to the door when he showed up. But I’d open the door because it was Gabe.