Read Online Possessed by Kathryn Casey - Free Book Online Page B

funeral, Leos temporarily moved back into the house to help with the girls. Later, Ana said that while he was there, he called her and threatened to kill himself. When she arrived home, she found him trying to hang himself from a bedpost. She cut him down with a knife, then called his parents. After his release from the hospital, she claimed that he broke into her house and held herhostage for six hours. “He moved me to the bedroom, and he raped me,” she said. Initially, she pressed charges.
    â€œWe all convinced her to drop them,” said Sowell. “We didn’t want to see Marcus in prison. Ana agreed. I thought later that changed her, and we shouldn’t have asked her to do that.”
    Describing how Ana contended with the alleged rape, Sowell said that Ana had a way of blocking from her mind what she didn’t want to acknowledge. “If Ana could push it down, she didn’t have to deal with it,” she said. “If she didn’t feel it, it was like it didn’t happen.”
    Despite the chaos in her personal life, Ana thrived at work.
    At Coke, she entered contests and won special-edition Coke memorabilia and trips. She moved up the job ladder, from delivery to a merchandizing slot, where she was given a route handling larger stores and worked developing new business by helping to place Coke machines in office buildings and stores. As part of her new position, Ana drove a company car that came with a gas card to keep its tank full. Many of her coworkers had college degrees, and she was proud. Later, she’d describe it as “very tough” being both Hispanic and female in what was for the most part a male world. “I did very well,” she said with a smile.
    The court thought so, too, and when the divorce from Leos finalized in May 2000, the judge gave Ana custody of Siana and Arin.
    A single mother with young children, much as her own mother had once been, Ana moved to a one-story house that backed up to a grove of trees in nearby Bryan. She dropped Marcus Leos’s last name and went back to her maiden name, Ana Trujillo. Despite her claims that Leos had attacked her, she continued to drive the girls to Waco to see their father, and would later say she believed he was basically a good man.
    That same year, 2000, Jim Fox, a pharmaceutical rep who called on neurologists, walked through a hospital in Temple,another of the small cities not far from Waco, and saw Ana wearing little makeup, her Coke T-shirt, and slacks, her long, thick, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Can you help me?” he asked, saying he had to find a particular doctor’s office. “I’m lost.”
    â€œSure,” she said. They walked together, and before they reached the doctor’s office, he’d invited her out to lunch.
    They dated for a year. Later, Fox, a quiet, tall, slender man with brown hair who at thirty-three was a year older than Ana, would describe her as working hard to care for her family. Yet perhaps there were signs from the beginning that it wouldn’t be a lasting match. Jim Fox liked things orderly. When he picked Ana up at her house for dates, Siana and Arin ate Cheerios on the floor and dishes were stacked high in the sink. “But Ana was so kind,” said Fox, divorced with a son who lived with his mother in Houston. “She loved her kids. Ana was a great mom, and in the beginning, she made a great wife.”
    After the marriage in July 2001, Ana’s girls lived with them in a brick one-story on a tree-lined street. They settled into married life, both going to work. As there often are in blended families, life wasn’t without challenges. While Arin, Ana’s younger daughter, then just three, adjusted easily, calling Fox “Daddy,” the older girl, Siana, then nine, seemed to resent him. “She didn’t like it when I told her to pick up, or what to do,” said Fox, who described himself as finicky about