Even now, so long afterwards, I keep returning to the night I met Elizabeth Roxanne Haysom, picking over the memories again and again, searching for some meaning to all that followed. Everything, everything flowed from those first few hours Liz and I spent together: our grand, obsessive passion, the murders of her parents, the escape from Virginia to Yugoslavia and onto Thailand, our arrest upon returning to England, the extraditions and trials, and the inevitable appearances on "Inside Edition", "Hard Copy" and "Geraldo Rivera". But as often as I have relived that first night and the ensuing disasters, I have yet to find any meaning, any purpose to it all. Perhaps there is none. Perhaps my memories are only a record of my flaws and the tragedies they caused, a chronicle which begins one evening late in August of 1984.
Darkness was falling on our first day at the University of Virginia. Across the campus, in old dorms and new, the air seemed to vibrate with that thrilling mixture of joy and trepidation which sweeps through all first year students upon their arrival at college. Earlier, our mother had cried while unpacking our suitcases, our fathers had given us long lists of emergency telephone numbers, and we had more or less gently hustled them back to their station wagons and waved good-bye. Now we were free at last, free at last! But, we all asked ourselves, could we really handle the responsibilities of our new lives as independent adults? Or would we overdose on cold pizza and endless midnight replays of our roommates' record collection?
It was to address these uncertainties that college administrators summoned all first year students to orientation lectures on that first evening at U. Va. The two hundred or so honors students who had been assigned to Watson dorm were scheduled to be oriented together in Webb lounge, in the basement of the new dorm adjacent to ours. Herded along by third and fourth year volunteer counsellors, we poured into the long, low room a buzzing mass of frazzled nerves and forced smiles. All around us there were so many faces, dozens and dozens, and not one of them familiar!
Wait. . . there, in the corner, that Chinese- American girl, I knew her, that was Karen Wong! Reminding her of our first encounter during the Jefferson Scholars competition five months ago, I reintroduced myself and congratulated her on winning one of those sixteen academic scholarships. Karen, however, was not pleased to see me again; unlike me, she had not been named Jefferson Scholar but had decided to attend U. Va. anyway as a regular honors student. Preferring a conversational partner who did not recall past failure, Karen quickly handed me over to her roommate, Liz Haysom. She had won a scholarship, too, and -- Karen informed me with lip curled in a smirk -- hers was a scholarship with Cambridge University, England. All three of us, having recognized each other immediately as snobs, knew that Cambridge's reputation exceeded the University of Virginia's.
Suitably chastened for unintentionally offending Karen, I turned to her distinguished roommate. Elizabeth certainly did not look prepossessing, pale and skinny beneath her purple denim jeans and a T-shirt that would have been white if she had washed it more frequently. But the dubious impression created by her appearance was soon dispelled by her manner. Standing at right angles to Karen and me, she threw a sharp sideways glance in my direction, so she would not have to look up at someone whose scholarship was inferior to her own. Then her blue-grey-green eyes turned back to the crowd, measuring everyone coolly from beneath the fringe of short, unkempt, dirty-blonde hair. One leg was cocked to the side, one hand rested on its hip, and the other hand slowly brought a cigarette to her lips for a long addict's drag.
"Yah," Liz drawled in her pure BBC-British accent. She had won a scholarship to Cambridge. But she had turned it down. Things had come up. . .
Few could have made a success of such a performance, but Elizabeth did. Her secret was, I think, her innocent knowingness. That bored look as she blew smoke through her nostrils was designed to remind us that she was experienced, while we were merely fresh-faced ignorant teenagers, interchangeable in our eager naivete. Yet Liz's face, with its high cheekbones and impish upturned nose, had maintained some childlike softness of its own. Though the hard-boiled act clearly was not pretence, she had to work at it, and occasionally she would steal quick glances at our reactions when she thought we were diverted. Elizabeth need not have worried; she had the natural actor's gift of enlisting her audience to cheer her on, to want her performance to succeed.
But before she could continue to impress and entertain, the first of a gaggle of professors stepped up to the microphone on the lectern at the other end of the room. Having coughed and gurgled the meeting to order, the professor and his learned colleagues proceeded to induce that familiar hypnotic trance which overcomes all teenagers when they are forced to hear lectures on "the responsibilities of being student leaders, and the challenges and risks of independence." All I could remember from my orientation session was U. Va.'s most sacred campus rule: freshmen are never called freshmen, but always first year students. It is possible, I suppose, that the professors did mention that there might be one future double-murderer and one future accomplice to double-murder with us in Webb lounge, and that we should consequently be circumspect in our choice of friends. But if such a warning was given, I missed it.
After the professors had completed their duties as soporific Cassandras, we students drifted back to Watson dorm and tried to shake off our drowsiness. It was Elizabeth, I believe, who suggested that a small group of us should climb Observatory Hill behind our dormitory. Although that night changed my life so completely, I can now only remember one other participant in our excursion, Karen Wong. Even then Liz was the absolute center of mine and the others' attention.
The black pines along the narrow road soon wrapped us in darkness as we embarked on our journey. But we climbed on steadily, leaving the mundane world of dormitories and classes far behind and below us. Our only guides were the moon- and the starlight and the sound of Elizabeth's soft British accent, charming us like a pied piper's tune. The higher we rose on our way to the summit, the deeper we penetrated those dark woods, the more we felt strangely privileged to be there with Elizabeth, apart from the others at the foot of the hill.
In the black night she told us of her past: her birth in Salisbury, Rhodesia, now called Harare, Zimbabwe; her family's ties to English aristocracy and the Astors; her education at exclusive Swiss and English boarding schools; her vacations at her parents' estate in Nova Scotia, Canada, where her father had been chairman of a steel company; the prize-winning plays and novels she had written, the plaudits she had earned as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, England, the skiing medals and field hockey championships she had won before her knee injury, the piano and saxophone and cello recitals she had mastered; and of course her academic scholarship to Trinity, the most exclusive of Cambridge University's colleges.
We who climbed Observatory Hill with Elizabeth that night were awed by her accomplishments. As first year honors students, all of us had been high achievers before coming to U. Va. , but none of us could compare with her. My father for instance was no steel baron but merely a mid-level German diplomat. Like Elizabeth I had grown up around the world, in Thailand, Cyprus, Germany and Atlanta, Georgia. But unlike her I apparently allowed the many moves to hinder me. I could boast of no more than being editor of my school newspaper, as well as Best English and Best Art Student at my church-affiliated private high school. My musical talent did not extend beyond playing the electric guitar with my friends in a couple of rock bands, and my acting career had been limited to the role of the dim-witted killer in the tenth grade production of "Arsenic and Old Lace". No prizes, awards or championships for me! And Elizabeth's scholarship to Cambridge was not only superior to mine here, but she had also refused to accept hers, a coup of snobbery so enormous that I could only quiver with envy.
But, at least for a while, we were distracted from Liz's wondrous past by a strange orange light glowing through the trees ahead. Soon the light was joined by a mysterious humming sound which also grew louder as we approached, and I for one was beginning to feel just a little nervous. Who knew what could happen in dark woods at night? But it was only an electric power substation, protected by security lights and high fences with signs reading, "Danger! High Voltage!" We walked past quickly to return to the blackness of our narrow road and the shadowy embrace of the pines. The night was what was familiar and comfortable now, while the artefacts of everyday life, like electric substations, seemed an intrusion.
So Elizabeth began playing her piper's magic tune again, but this time in a darker, melancholy key. Now she told us of her beautiful lesbian lover, Miranda, who had not won a scholarship to Cambridge and thus could not join Liz there; her decision to run away to Europe with Miranda, so they could be together and free; her thieving and dealing and using heroin in Italy; her dossing in an anarchist commune near the Berlin Wall; her capture, after an accident, by a friend of her parents in U.S. Army Intelligence; her involuntary return to Lynchburg, Virginia, where her mother's family came from and where her parents had now retired; and her delayed enrolment at U. Va. , which made her two years older than the rest of us first year students.
How many times in the coming months would I listen to Elizabeth use her voice magic, bewitching me and others again and again! I know that we who followed Liz into the black woods on Observatory Hill that evening believed her every word. She was a messenger from a world of excitement and adventure, a world whose existence we had so far only suspected. Our parents and teachers had sheltered us too perfectly from lesbians and anarchists, so we thirsted desperately for Elizabeth's knowledge of such delicious dangers. We believed her because we needed to.
As Liz finished her tale, we rounded a turn on our road and finally reached the clearing at the top of Observatory Hill. There was nothing to see in the darkness, and the small observatory itself was closed and blind to the stars overhead. But the long journey to the summit had been worth the effort! In Liz's presence we all felt our lives more sharply: the pines by the clearing smelled sweeter, the lights of the cars far below twinkled more brightly, the wind around us tasted fresher, the grass on which we sat to rest felt softer and richer, even the silence seemed to echo with messages meant only for us. It was our first day at college, our first night as independent adults, a time of portents and omens for the future that stretched out ahead. And it was Elizabeth who made that night special.
Sometimes when I lie in my cell and feel depressed, I wonder about those "portents and omens for the future." I wonder whether some mysterious deity with a sick sense of humor was indeed trying to send me a message. Elizabeth and I lived in a dorm called Watson; twenty months later, when we were arrested in London, England, we lived in a flat just off Baker Street, the home of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The place where she spun that first snare, the fantastic story of her scholarship to Cambridge, was a lounge called Webb, and this one was not as innocuous as Charlotte's. Liz led us to an observatory where nothing could be observed and convinced us to feel grateful for the experience. On the way to the summit we passed sings warning of, "Danger! High Voltage!", prefiguring the large role Virginia's electric chair would play in my future. Oh, I was warned, I was warned! I have only myself to blame.
But then, in the autumn of 1984, I believed that Elizabeth was of a completely different, superior calibre to the rest of us first year students. It was only natural for her to disappear from dormitory life during September and much of October, spending all her free time with third and fourth year students her own age. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of Liz running to some party in her old baggy clothes, a style I thought of as Salvation Army chic. Her hair changed colors frequently, though her personal hygiene remained as dubious as on that first night. When Elizabeth began writing a book about her travels in Europe, some of her dorm- mates were allowed to type a few chapters, since such mundane tasks were beneath her. Otherwise the only traces of her existence were the love-struck, stoned, pseudo-artistic young men and women who left desperate messages with her roommate, Karen Wong.
It never occurred to me during those first few weeks at college that Elizabeth and I might soon fall in love. But I was having too much fun to feel her absence from my life. Although I took too many courses at far too advanced levels, I achieved good grades with relatively little work. On weekends I stumbled from one beer-sodden fraternity party to the next, like everyone else. My second band's drummer from high school was now living in a nearby dorm, so we made grand plans for a new rock band.
To my complete astonishment I also discovered that I had a small following among the girls in Watson dorm. Throughout high school I had been forced to restrict my dating to summer vacations in Germany. Only there had I found girlfriends who could hold a conversation about the nouvelle vague of the French cinema or the pros and cons of Pershing missile deployment. The girls at my very preppy private school in Atlanta, on the other hand, had been as dull and uninspired as our school uniforms.
But at the honors student dorm at U. Va. I was suddenly surrounded by scores of intelligent and attractive girls. And a few of them now pursued me quite determinedly! Later Elizabeth told me that my popularity was inspired by my continuing public devotion to Katerina, the German girlfriend who had recently dumped me after I returned to America for college. But perhaps my advertising this exploitable weakness was only her reason for noticing me.
Liz drifted back into dorm life some time in the middle of the fall semester, when she began going to movies with a regular group which included Karen Wong and me. On the surface there seemed nothing inevitable about our slow convergence. Yet the two of us often found ourselves walking side by side to the student-run campus theater, and afterwards we usually became absorbed in discussions of the finer points of cinematic technique.
In the course of November, 1984, Elizabeth and I started seeing each other almost every day, not just twice a week after our dorm group's excursion to the cinema. The Tree House, a campus snack bar near our dorm, became our regular meeting place. At closing time we were often still deep in conversation, and for a while we became something of an institution there. If anyone needed to find us, he only had to go to the Tree House. Friends would come by for a chat, and afterwards we two would pick up our private discussions where we had left off.
Of course Liz regaled me with countless tales of her travels in Europe, after running away from England. She made it all sound like so much fun: sleeping on the beach in Italy with her lover Miranda, cracking open pay telephones to finance their heroin addiction, moving into a Hare Krishna shelter near Rome when the money ran out, living on lentils and curds and chanting Buddhist prayers at dawn, and running away again, this time to Berlin, to a commune near the old Reichstag and the Wall. If Charles Dickens had lived in the twentieth century, he would have sent his Oliver Twist on adventures like Liz's!
But many of her stories were far from amusing. While attending an elementary boarding school in Switzerland, Elizabeth had been raped in a particularly brutal manner. Her whole life had been altered by this trauma, she told me. Soon after the rape she began abusing drugs and seeking physical affection from other girls at her single-sex boarding schools. Of course she found it impossible to trust others, especially men.
Even more painful was the attitude of her parents. Elizabeth felt that they did not comfort her sufficiently after her rape but instead shunted her from one English boarding school to another while they stayed in distant Canada. And now, after her capture in Berlin and her return to Lynchburg, her mother and father kept her on an unbearably tight leash.
I listened with awe to Liz's outpourings in the Tree House. No one I knew had suffered the sickening tragedy of rape. A few of my high school friends had smoked marijuana regularly, but none of them had experienced anything like the terrors of cold turkey heroin withdrawal, as Elizabeth had. The loneliness of seeking love in gay bars, the cold isolation engendered by reflexive mistrust, the desperation that drove her to run away to Europe -- such unhappiness had never touched my placid existence.
Yet in spite of these horrors Elizabeth had made her life a success, winning awards in high school and making A's in college. Sometimes she even joked about her past! I could not help but see her as a saint, elevated to greatness by passing through hellish suffering.
And Liz was also an excellent listener at a time when I truly needed a friendly ear. Throughout the fall semester I was slipping deeper and deeper into the dreaded Freshman Identity Crisis, a common phenomenon among preppies suddenly removed from the safe confines of parental homes. The goals I had cherished in high school now appeared empty, and the process of finding new dreams was painful and confusing.
I had come to college with the intention of studying psychology as a major. But the University of Virginia's Psyche Department had little room for my favorite, Freud, or personality psychology in general. Instead the professors here expected eager students to pay their dues by drilling holes into thousands of rats' skulls, attaching electrodes and watching which way the poor rodents jumped when the current was turned on. Psychobiology was too blood-thirsty for me! I would have to look for a different major.
Another of my main interests from high school, journalism, was also fading fast during the fall semester. In ninth grade I was suspended from my school's newspaper for one year because I wrote an article about cancer-causing artificial colors in the imitation orange drink served with lunch. But parents who read my article forced the school to bring back pure orange juice, so I was instantly hooked by the power of the written word! When my suspension was over, I worked hard until I became the paper's editor-in-chief in twelfth grade.
But the overwhelming poverty I saw during a vacation in Mexico in the summer of 1984 shattered my faith in the powers of journalism. Travelling from the beautiful wealthy districts of Mexico City to the Aztec pyramids in the countryside, I had to pass through miles of shanty-towns. Here, enormous chemical factories vomited green smoke on unprotected workers' huts while half-naked children played among dried human faeces because sewers did not exist. There was no ignoring the deprivation; even with eyes closed, the stench seeped through the car's air conditioner. And it seemed endless, endless, endless!
For the first time in my life I noticed how incredibly privileged and sheltered my life was. On the way home from Mexico I glided through the airport undisturbed, just by waving my German diplomatic passport with its large U.S. diplomatic visa! The other travellers had to wait patiently in line for immigration control, and they were the lucky ones. Most people on the planet saw airplanes only from underneath, from those rows of cardboard-and-mud hovels.
I could not imagine how those people lived. And I certainly could not imagine how I could help them by writing editorials for some newspaper. I began to question the whole direction of my education so far: my bilingual upbringing in German and English, my five years of French classes and two of Latin. What good did my talent for languages do, if words could not change anything?
Elizabeth listened patiently as I pondered these weighty questions in the Tree House. My obsession with my Freshman Identity Crisis was so complete that I never wondered why she seemed to take me as seriously as I took myself. To me, Liz was an older and wiser mentor, and nothing more. Meanwhile I continued to take girls from our dorm to dances and parties, and she presumably attended exotic drug orgies with lesbian art history majors.
So I was completely flabbergasted by Elizabeth's reaction when I joked one day that we seemed like an old married couple, since we spent so much time talking. Liz stared at me --and then she announced that she had loved me from afar for two months!
But that was not all. She wanted to sleep with me, immediately! This of course was far too much for my virgin nerves to handle. I sent Elizabeth to her room and went to mine alone, almost faint from the shock.
It took Liz four hard days of persuading until we finally ended up in the same bed. Naturally it was a complete disaster. The second time things worked, but only just. Two weeks later I was enjoying myself so much that I failed my psychobiology exam, dropping my final grade from the perfect A I had maintained so far down to a flat B.
During the first half of December, 1984, Elizabeth left this letter in my college dorm room:
"Jens, I am writing this down because I am a writer -- not a thinker or speaker -- writing is the only way in which I can communicate with any depth; also I need to talk to you now, and you must not be disturbed. So with all of that please forgive the elementary school notion of passing notes.
First of all: I love you. I love you selfishly and I love you with pain.
I can envisage writing long lists of how desperately I love you, but I have written too much already. Fatigue and weariness of affection will drive you to indifference and boredom. (You just left; how hard it is not to cling to you). Our talk this evening struck me to the whites of my toes. I was shaking so much I could hardly speak. I am glad you realize that I have never physically touched a man the way I touch you, but how can I make you understand that no woman could ever take your place?
Two months is a long time. It is a longer time when you feel a wheezing pain of loneliness. It is a time long enough to discover one's own mind. During this period I tested every aspect of my devotion. I even tempted my devotion: I pulled and twisted it into multiple amoebas of contortion. I studied as the Jesuits do and still it held fast. The night I went to the gay bar, I was picked up. She was very attractive, amusing, confident and very seductive. For a moment I thought I was rid of the pangs. But as lovely as she was, sitting there, staring at me with enormous blue eyes, tempting, teasing, daring me, she didn't spark any desire. The only thought which passed was a trickling rivulet of giggles that I could still attract the most beautiful girl in the room. A vanity, a small conceit which left a blinding void. Yes, I would have enjoyed dancing with her, feeling the sensuous delight and dangerous thrills of a female companion, but I didn't want her companionship. I wanted her for show. Miranda was for show. There is a special deliciousness in possessing the most desired person in the community. For them to want you and for you not to feel anything. It is an intricate and exotic game. It is a forbidden game. These things made it appealing to me in the past. The difference now is that I want to feel. I want to enjoy the tortuous, wrenching tides which batter me. It has very little to do with genitals. Girls attract me because they are forbidden. The uncertainty, the isolation; it fascinates me. I enjoy defying the values I'm instilled with. If men have physically tormented me, girls have too, because one is so vulnerable in a lesbian affair.
I'm rambling -- excuse me.
Joe Cardinal is sleeping in my bed.
I could have fallen in love with a girl. I didn't.
I fell in love with you.
When I'm with a woman I long for a man. When I'm with a man I long for the forbidden thrill of a woman.
When I'm with you I feel only longing for all of you and to possess the sweet and equally forbidden fruit of love.
Love has always been forbidden to me. Not for a daisy's whisper I have cared for someone. [sic] They passed through my life if I enjoyed them, and when they bored me I abandoned them. Yes, I have been very cruel. I revelled in being a stone. No one affected my life very much.
I hated my love for you for a long time. I hated myself for discovering vulnerability, but as the weeks passed I began to understand. I had always believed that I made men fall in love with me so that I could take out all the hatred I felt for them by humiliating them. I despised their cheap lust and easy passions. And in the end I made them hate themselves for loving me and the torture I inflicted. I would make a man humiliate himself to obtain me, then I would give him the best fuck he's ever likely to get and then walk out. Then I searched and discovered that the supposed relief and comfort I found in women was exactly the same. I treated them the same way, except I was kinder. It had nothing to do with genitals -- it was me. For ten years I've been despising myself, and you changed that. You cared without lust, and you made me feel like a young girl again who had the sun in her eyes and not just a moon between her legs. You were always caring -- just caring. I have known (sounds like grandpa) many people, and simple, straightforward caring is a rare thing. One other person in my life cared -- she always picked up the pieces -- but I never loved her.
That is why I love you (not only because you care, but against all odds -- being male -- you care) and that is why I continued in almost peace -- a sort of turbulent peace -- to love you for two months and why I want it to go on forever. (At this stage I feel that I can afford to be naive and optimistic. ) My mind is full of grandiose expressions which I will spare you --this has all been quite enough.
Looking over it, it is as feebly expressed as anything I have ever said, and even more confused. So it shall suffice to say that I love you, and it may alter in intensity and direction from time to time, but I will always love you with a part of me which no one else will be able to snatch. Elizabeth." 1:1 (rtn 1:1)
So much of our bond was reflected in this letter, so much of my own future could be read in these very lines! If only I had paid attention. . .
During those long discussions in the Tree House I had come to doubt the power of words. What a fool I was! I should have used my expensive private schooling, with its emphasis on languages, and examined the words in Liz's letter: "I would give him the best fuck he's ever likely to get [. . . ]. And in the end I made them hate themselves for loving me and the torture I inflicted." Like the "Danger! High Voltage!"-signs on our excursion to the summit of Observatory Hill, this letter was a warning. And because I ignored it, two lives were ended and two more were destroyed.
Over the years I have had much time to pace my cell at night and ask myself, why? Why did I not refuse Liz's attentions? Why did I not choose one of the other girls in our dorm who asked me to dances and parties? Why was I drawn to Elizabeth Roxanne Haysom? It was in 1991, I believe, that I happened to look at a photograph of Liz while passing time by torturing myself with these questions. Suddenly, after so many years buried, a memory returned: my very earliest recollection.
I can remember nothing before the age of two, when I was operated for a suspected brain tumor. But now I recall waking after surgery in the German hospital to which I had been sent from my father's posting in Cyprus. In the I.C.U. cot next to mine there was a small boy. He was a little older than me, with short blonde hair, blue-grey-green eyes and porcelain white skin -- beautiful. I showed him the orange Ferrari with the battery- operated engine fire, which my maternal grandmother brought me. He showed me his white and blue river ferry with its little red cars.
I next remember him lying motionless under the bubble of a plastic oxygen tent. And then I remember his bed empty. He had gone to heaven, the nurse told me.
Through the mysterious logic of children I concluded that heaven was the terrifying blackness beyond the edge of my memory, before the operation, that void where sight, sound, taste, smell and touch were meaningless.
My very earliest memory thus is of the death of my first friend, my comrade in adversity. As soon as I found him, I lost him again to that awful nothingness which I had just escaped. And there, in the photograph which had prompted the resurrection of this memory, was Elizabeth: a little older than me, with short blonde hair, blue-grey-green eyes and porcelain white skin -- beautiful.
1:1 -- This letter is available in the public records at Bedford County Courthouse. (rtn 1:1)