Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.
~Rabin-Dranath Tagore/Fireflies
Chapter 9
After Charles and Lucinda Reed left, the police transported Jacob to the sheriff’s station in Divide, a spot in the road four miles west of Woodland Park. Teller County is ill equipped to handle serious crime, certainly not murder, and the deputies had to scramble for an appropriate place to put their suspect. They finally decided on the drunk tank. It was extremely hot in the cell, especially after the chill of Woodland Park’s police station.
As the hours passed, Jacob realized he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since the family’s last dinner more than twenty-four hours ago. Odd that all those weeks he couldn’t choke down anything and now all he could think about was filling his stomach. The old guy on duty was pretty short with him, but he did round up a blanket and a meal. All in all, Jacob couldn’t complain about his handling by law enforcement. Nobody had slammed him around or yelled at him or treated him the way cops supposedly treated suspects on TV. Some of the deputies actually seemed fairly compassionate.
Jacob hadn’t seen Gabriel, though he understood that his partner had been taken into custody. Jacob didn’t know or care much about anything beyond what was directly happening to him. He had no idea whether the media had even reported the murders. Only later did he learn that the story led both local and regional broadcasts, and was picked up by national wire services. Jacob wasn’t worried about the news media or legal representation or anything else. It was one o’clock in the morning—exactly twenty four hours since the murders—and he was feeling the effects of months of insomnia. Sometimes it hit him that he was in a lot of trouble and when he’d faced Charles he’d been remorseful, but most of the time nothing much registered. All he really wanted to do was sleep.
Jacob was emotionally exhausted from everything that had happened that day. He curled up on the cot with the wool blanket wrapped around him and dozed. Around 2:00 he was awakened and told that he’d be going to Zebulon Pike, a juvenile detention center in Colorado Springs.
A deputy handcuffed Jacob and placed him in the back seat of the sheriff’s vehicle. Was all this really happening? Jacob felt so detached—and so tired. As if he could sleep for a thousand hours straight. He wasn’t allowed to rest in the car, however, so he stared blankly out the window. His whole life had been turned upside down, but none of it seemed like any big deal. And the steel of the cuffs encircling his wrists, the stern faces of the officers, the wire mesh on the squad car, all of it somehow seemed every bit as familiar as his “other life.” So this is where his fifteen years had been headed, toward this particular moment. When Jacob Patrick Ind is snatched by the law and wrestled to its bosom. To be taken away from his parents and to be punished seemed appropriate somehow.
The ride down Ute Pass to Zeb Pike took approximately half an hour. As they passed Green Mountain Falls, Chipita Park and Cascade, Jacob studied the clusters of lights. The Rockies rose tall and ghostly on either side of the highway. How long would it be before he passed this way again? He needed to concentrate, to squirrel away details so that he wouldn’t forget. Manitou Springs, nestled in the foothills with Pikes Peak looming in the background, looked like one of those miniature villages from holiday displays. Christmas lights, like hundreds of fireflies, decorated the shrubbery on a mansion overlooking the city.
The cruiser turned off Highway 24 toward Zeb Pike. Street lamps cast a mellow glow upon the glassy blackness of asphalt. Businesses dominated this part of the west side of Colorado Springs, and beyond the businesses people were sleeping in their beds where it was warm and everybody had enough covers and enough love and they were safe and nothing could disturb them. Dark and quiet and peaceful in those houses where fear did not exist.
But Jacob couldn’t comprehend that. Mom and Dad were nice. Mom and Dad were monsters, exactly like his parents, and those peaceful-appearing homes were precisely that—”appearing.” Behind the surface they were every bit as nightmarish as his own had been. Jacob could often hold two mutually contradictory thoughts. Everyone’s family was as screwed up as his. Nobody’s was. All kids hated their parents; all parents hated their children. No, only the Jordan family and Jacob Ind. His situation was unique. Hardly. Everyone experienced the screaming, fighting and hatred that had made Jacob disappear inside himself and never come out again. If only he could now disappear into the physical darkness of this December morning the way he had so long ago disappeared into that emotional void. But this was real. The deputies were real. His handcuffs were real. The cold was real. The deed was real. No way to go back even if he’d wanted to. But where would he go? And what choice had he had?
The cruiser headed up 21st Street on the last leg of Jacob’s journey. The road was nearly deserted and he suddenly felt so abandoned. Jacob might even have been afraid, but if he was, he quickly shoved down that feeling. Just another new experience, he told himself, as the detention center came into view. Something different. Everything’s okay.
Zebulon Pike Detention Center, named after the Army officer and explorer who “discovered” Pikes Peak, looks remarkably similar to a regular school. The two story sprawl of buildings, separated from the city by a desolate stretch of road and barren hills, has a lot of windows, which surprised Jacob. He guessed he’d been expecting bars and a prison atmosphere. And barbed wire, rather than the chicken mesh surrounding the enclosure.
Once inside the facility, he was placed in a tiny holding cell containing a bed, a toilet and window. Jacob drowsed until around four a.m. when he was awakened by a staff official.
“Your lawyers are here to see you.”
Jacob followed the official to the visiting room. He really hadn’t given much thought to attorneys. He figured his super-responsible brother had hired them. Which was good. If it had been left to him he probably wouldn’t have done anything.
Jacob was met by Shaun Kaufman and Jim Dostal. Even though Jacob was destitute, a lot of lawyers were interested in such a high profile case so he could have had his pick. But Jacob didn’t question Kaufman and Dostal’s credentials or expertise, and within the legal community they were generally considered to be competent attorneys.
Shaun, who would remain on Jacob’s case until the sentencing, was the younger of the pair. He was dressed casually in sweats and wore his hair a bit longer than usual, perhaps a quiet statement regarding his political views and/or his love affair with the Grateful Dead. To Jacob, Shaun seemed a little better than the usual lawyer because he had a sardonic sense of humor reminiscent of Charles’s. Jim Dostal, a bearded man in his early forties, was quiet and Jacob found him intimidating. Even at this early hour Dostal wore a tie.
Shaun and Jim stayed for approximately half an hour. Dostal, who took his responsibilities seriously and expected his client to do the same, warned Jacob not to talk to anybody about anything.
“This is what you tell them,” said Jim. “I have a lawyer and I do not wish to speak with you about my case at this time.”
They didn’t ask Jacob anything much about what had happened, and it was only during another visit that Kaufman told him that he’d committed a very serious crime.”You could get life.” Generally, when Jacob talked to his attorneys or to Charles, he realized the enormity of his actions. Otherwise, it just didn’t sink in. It was as if he’d wake up the next day and get ready for school and just get on with the life he’d always had. But now he was part of a very different life.
Jacob stayed at Zeb Pike for ten days before being transferred to a “real jail.” The food was good and for the first time in months he actually looked forward to meals. He found it easy to adjust to the routine. Jacob has always felt far safer with schedules and predictability. With his parents his well-being had depended on their whims, on whether they’d had a bad day at work or too much to drink, a phone call from Jacob’s father or a “look” from himself. Here, although the rules didn’t always make sense, they remained constant. And, by virtue of his crime, the other teens treated him differently. For the first time in his life, he received a certain amount of respect. Either the residents kept a deferential distance, as if fearful that he might go off on THEM, or they sought him out. He had no idea that “Jacob Ind, the Woodland Park youth accused of murdering his parents,” was already a familiar media phrase. He hadn’t read about himself or watched any of the newscasts, so he didn’t realize his burgeoning notoriety. The Gazette Telegraph had rated the murders as one of the top ten local stories of 1992. Still functioning with one foot in reality and one foot in dreamland, Jacob went through the motions and simply accepted everything that came his way without comment or question. Life just was. He didn’t think about his parents or the past or about much of anything except the present moment. Beyond that and his mind simply shut down.
*****
Pamela and Kermode were buried on December 21. Family started arriving beforehand. Jacob’s father visited his son as soon as a meeting could be officially arranged. Frank Ind, a good looking man whose dark hair, eyes and facial structure clearly establish his paternity over Jacob, tried desperately to make sense of his child’s actions.
“Why couldn’t you have waited?” Frank asked, referring to Jacob’s plane ticket to Rockford. “Why didn’t you ever mention what was going on, that you were so unhappy?”
Frank vowed he had no idea that anything was wrong in the Jordan household, which made Jacob’s murderous rampage all the more bewildering.
“Did Pam and Kermode physically abuse you?” “Emotionally?” “Sexually?”
Mindful of his attorneys’ warning, Jacob replied to each question, “I can’t talk about that, Dad.”
Frank cried, but Jacob felt contempt rather than pity. “He wasn’t crying for me,” he later said. “He was crying for himself.”
Jacob’s grandparents, Daniel and Grace Wallace,(*) also visited. Jacob hadn’t recently had much communication with them. When Jacob was younger, Grace had tried to help her daughter whenever possible by flying in from Arizona and helping with babysitting or household chores and expenses. Daniel, who considered Jacob his favorite, had enjoyed their fishing expeditions. But early on Pamela had made it clear that her first loyalty was to Kermode, which had created tension among the trio. Pam often said cruel things about her mother, and had deliberately tried to distance Jacob and Charles from Daniel and Grace. The Wallace clan is a complicated web of bruised feelings, divided loyalties, ancient hurts and outright animosity. All that internecine intrigue, whether regarding grandparents or aunts and uncles, had been pretty boring to a kid so Jacob had pretty much ignored it all. Now he was surprised, though grateful, to see his grandparents.
Daniel and Grace treated Jacob with compassion. Daniel shook his grandson’s hand and Grace hugged him. That must have been particularly difficult for Grace since she had just come from discussing funeral arrangements with other devastated family members. At one point, Grace had actually collapsed from the strain. Oddly, Charles, who had been standing nearby chatting with friends, swivelled around, watched his grandmother fall, turned his back to her and continued talking.
Jacob himself had had little input regarding his parents’ funeral service. He and Charles had discussed the matter briefly over the telephone. When his brother asked what to do with Kermode and Pamela’s bodies, Jacob made it short and sweet. “Burn ‘em.” Beyond that, he hadn’t been all that interested in what was taking place outside of Zeb Pike. None of that seemed real.
Family members had their own viewpoint on what was taking place in the days following the murders. Charles’s apparent coldness toward his stricken grandmother shocked them. As did peculiar comments which led some to wonder whether Charles might even have been an accessory to the crime. Several of Pam’s siblings remarked on the eighteen-year-old’s lack of emotion. Later, during the trial, when they heard testimony from Lucinda Reed regarding his weeping, they expressed scepticism. As one said, “Charles’s behavior surrounding the funeral service was bizarre. Some people attributed it to shock. I knew better. He told us all basically to butt out, he was handling the estate, Jacob, everything. He expressed no sadness, no feelings whatsoever for either Kermode or his mother. He was more excited about going away to Cornell College than upset that his parents were dead.”
So sarcastic and “dark”, Charles was a far more likely suspect than his younger brother. It wasn’t that anyone was terribly surprised by the tragedy. Grace had been so concerned for her grandsons that over that last summer she had discussed a possible intervention on behalf of the boys. In a macabre way, murder almost seemed a logical outcome following eleven years of turmoil. Only the identity of the triggerman was incomprehensible. Jacob and the brutal events of December 17, 1992, just didn’t go together. There appeared to be a lot of missing pieces to this puzzle.
*****
Christmas 1992 arrived. The staff at Zeb Pike handed out trees and decorations and conducted a contest to see which pod could do the best job of decorating their area. Jacob’s pod won and was rewarded with Burger King whoppers. Christmas morning each teen was provided with a small gift. Jacob was given a travel checker player. He didn’t mind Christmas in detention. In fact, it was a lot better than being at home.
“It felt like a family. There was a closeness I’d never experienced before.”
One night Jacob did experience a flashback. He and his roommate slept on the floor with only a thin mat, a sheet and a blanket. As Jacob drew the sheet up around his shoulders, he smelled an odor exactly like that of bear mace. Instantaneously, he was back in Ridge Drive’s master bedroom, re-living the murders. The experience unnerved him, though it wasn’t the last time he would be involuntarily transported back to December 17,1992.
Jacob’s mental state remained fragile. He made several phone calls during this time. Almost everyone he talked to agrees that he appeared “out of touch with reality.” One of those whom Jacob contacted was his pal, David Mabie. During these interchanges, Jacob was clearly into his prison persona. Once he asked David to kill Gabrial.
“If you get Major,” he said, “they’ve got nothing on me.”
Jacob had heard from other juveniles that his partner in crime had gotten out on bond. That was false, but Jacob was so isolated he had no way of separating fact from fiction. He was furious over the very thought that Gabrial Adams might be walking around while he had been denied bail. He also expressed concerned that Major might harm Charles. When talking to David, Jacob remembered attorney Dostal’s warning not to speak about his case, but he didn’t think it applied to Dave. David was one of his best friends, wasn’t he? David was totally loyal, wasn’t he? Jacob could say pretty much what he wanted, couldn’t he?
No, he couldn’t.
Later, Jacob would find out just how good a friend David Mabie had been.
*****
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, as Jacob was decorating his pod, Charles Ind was being interviewed by two officers from the Teller County Sheriff’s Department. Nick Adamovich, the lead investigator, and John Falton were particularly interested in the conversation that had taken place between Jacob, Lucinda Reed and Charles at the police station. Jacob hadn’t talked since then and that confession formed a major part of their case. Charles, who had no legal representation, was willing to be cooperative, but he didn’t want to inadvertently hurt Jacob. A self-contained young man, Charles had no trouble setting boundaries.
“My conversation with Jacob that night is confidential,” he said.
The officers immediately backed off. Charles wasn’t under suspicion of anything and if he shut down, the entire interview would be wasted. Instead, Adamovich and Falton asked Charles about abuse. Both detectives were interested in what would drive a fifteen-year-old to kill his parents.
“Why did you leave home?” asked one.
Charles, who had just buried his parents two days previously and was emotionally exhausted, chose his words carefully. He mentioned some mental abuse, but didn’t go into detail.
“I was tired of Kermode’s drinking and I couldn’t take the abuse and put downs.”
“What putdowns?” asked John Falton, a tall cowboy-type with a friendly smile and down-home manner.
“Kermode would always criticize my friends. Most of my friends didn’t have nearly as much responsibility and Kermode didn’t like that. Generally, I worked forty to fifty hours a week, did housework and ran errands.”
Charles ran his hand over his short dark hair, which he’d recently tipped blond. The detectives waited. “My mom would say things to me like, ‘You cannot survive out in the real world without us. You’re nothing without us’”
Charles measured each word, trying to decide what to reveal and what to keep hidden. It was always difficult to think about the past, and nearly impossible to be cooperative with two men who were committed to putting his brother behind bars, possibly for the rest of his life.
“Pam (When his mother was being “bitchy,” Charles often referred to her by her given name) would slap me in the face if she thought I was talking back. The last time she slapped me was two days before I moved out. I hadn’t washed a fork. I said, ‘I did all the rest of the dishes.’ Pam hit me with an open hand across the face.
“We had no privacy. She would walk into my room whenever she wanted. I always had to study and couldn’t go out with my friends. Even when I finished studying, she wouldn’t believe me. She wouldn’t let me do much of anything.”
Charles continued, “The rule was that we couldn’t take money out of the household. All our money had to be in the bank. Mom co-signed with Jacob so he couldn’t get access to anything he’d earned without her approval, though I could technically withdraw funds. One time last summer, the summer before the…this happened, I decided to buy some clothes—two pair of shorts and three shirts. They cost maybe fifty-seventy five dollars. They told me I didn’t need the clothes. Then they said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are spending your money without our permission?’”
None of this sounded serious to the detectives.
Adamovich, a broad-shouldered man with strong facial features and a commanding voice, asked, “Was money tight?”
“They never made it apparent that they were in debt. Finances were none of our business. I saw one of Kermode’s paychecks for sixteen hundred dollars. I thought it was per month. I really didn’t know.”
Adomovich asked, “Do you blame Jacob for killing your mother?”
Charles lit another cigarette. “No. I’m not glad about it but we tried to get help a week prior to the murders. I went to Mr. Greathouse twice, once a week before the murders. I also went to the Department of Social Services. Jacob opened up to David Greathouse. We told him about the drinking episode in August where Kermode fell down the stairs. And we told him about the Christmas recital, when Kermode slammed Jacob around. I also went to Ralph Morris at DSS before I moved out and told him about Kermode’s drinking. I thought I had given Greathouse and Ralph enough information to start an investigation.” In a statement that was later contradicted by others, Charles claimed that he’d only contacted DSS once.
The detectives asked Charles about Jacob’s companion in crime. “Gabrial Adams is a potential psychopath,” Charles said flatly. He had met Gabrial, who had lived in Woodland Park two years, when they were both juniors. At first Charles merely considered him eccentric.
“Gabrial preferred to be called Major. He told that to the entire class. The reason he called himself that was because he met a person who claimed to be an assassin for the army and was a major and so Gabriel emulated him. Gabriel often talked about war games. He said he had been a World War II soldier fighting Germans and that he was in the Vietnam War. One time he wrote an electric schematic on the board. I said, ‘Hey, Major, what are you doing?’ Gabriel said it was battle plans and ‘It would take me six months to explain them to you.’”
“Did you ever discuss your feelings about Gabriel with Jacob?”
“Yes, last summer. I said, ‘Gabriel is crazy. Stay away from him.’ Jacob agreed. He told me that Gabriel had once come up to him, given him a knife and said, ‘Here. Stab me.’”
Gabriel had never been to the Jordan house, at least when Charles lived there. Major did have a friend who lived close by, but the only contact Jacob and his partner had before the murders, as far as Charles knew, was while riding the same bus.
Still seeking an understandable motive for parricide, the detectives continued pressing Charles about abuse.
“After I moved out all the attention I was shielding from Jacob fell on him and he couldn’t handle the mental abuse. Pam and Kermode often quarreled. Jacob would eat dinner upstairs and turn the radio up so he couldn’t hear them fight.” [1]
“Did Jacob ever talk to you about killing your parents?”
“No. I would have stopped him. During our conversation at the police station, I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And Jacob said, ‘Because you would have stopped me.’ And he was right. I would have taken him home, packed a bag and ran my ass down to Social Services and told them, ‘You have a kid here who is willing to kill his parents.’”
Jacob told Charles that he and Gabriel had been planning the murders for two weeks, and that Major had done most of the planning. During that time period, Charles had noticed that Gabriel would try to stare him down at school. He had no idea what the kid was trying to prove—at least not until after the murders.
The detectives asked how often he and Jacob had seen each other before the murders.
“Not often.” Chain smoking throughout, Charles lit yet another cigarette. “The previous Saturday we had a forensics tournament at Pueblo East (approximately an hour’s drive from Woodland Park) and Jake and I ate lunch together. He didn’t say a lot except that he was a couple of minutes late for the trip down and Mom yelled at him. Jacob said, ‘If you’d been late she would never have yelled at you.’”
The detectives returned to the night of the murders. Adamovich particularly, appeared frustrated by the course of the interview. He was trying to understand why Jacob would commit such a heinous crime, but what Charles had so far recounted sounded pretty normal.
“Jacob had to kill them,” Charles said. “As far as Major was concerned, they could have bled to death. Jacob was executing almost a mercy killing. All he wanted was for the deaths to be quick and painless.”
Adamovich, who believes that teachers and Social Services do a terrific job reporting abuse and assisting children, again asked, “Why didn’t you ask for help?”
“We tried to but nobody bothered to listen to us. We both felt trapped. I could move out because that was accessible. Jacob had three more years and that seemed like a lifetime.”
“Why didn’t anybody do anything?”
“Because they didn’t care.”
“But counselors are there for a reason,” Adamovich said, apparently ignorant of the many complaints lodged against Teller County’s Department of Social Services, as well as problems at WPHS.
“Yeah, but they weren’t doing their job,” Charles said bluntly. “Greathouse didn’t do a damn thing.” Charles also told his friend Lucinda Reed about Kermode’s drinking during Charles’s junior year, and she had “begged Pamela to get family counseling.” But no one had really helped.
Charles’s explanations did little to shed light upon the crime, or help the investigators understand what had precipitated Jacob’s actions. They were looking for one specific act that could somehow explain this most unspeakable of crimes. Where was the motive? Adamovich, who never spoke to Jacob, later dismissed the fifteen-year-old as a psychopath. According to his way of looking at things, Jacob had deliberately faked the panic attacks, the loss of weight, had gone to the counselors merely to concoct an abuse alibi, and had disposed of his dogs in order to keep the neighbors from being alerted upon Gabriel’s arrival.
“Jacob and I were like caged animals,” Charles said. “It’s really hard to describe the constant nitpicking, what we felt. After I left all my responsibilities were transferred to Jake and he wasn’t used to it. Before, Jacob’s responsibility was primarily the floor. I did everything else—the trash, the dogs, the dishes, that sort of thing. [2]
“He used to have to clean the bath, hallway, vacuum, and dust weekly. Once a month when I was home we had to scrub down all the walls with Clorox. Whenever we were cleaning, Mom and Kermode would drink beer or wine and watch TV. Mom did do the cooking,” Charles added dryly.
Charles was as frustrated as the detectives with the course of the conversation. He wasn’t ready to reveal the secrets—the wounds were too raw—but he hoped to make them understand that his brother wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. For so many years, he and Jacob had been warned to keep their mouths shut and now he was expected to bare his soul? And to Jacob’s would-be executioners? Later, during the trial, the prosecution used the interview to their advantage, saying, “If there was sexual abuse, why didn’t Charles mention it at that time?”
“We weren’t allowed to watch TV on weekdays,” Charles continued. If Pam caught Charles, she would turn it off because “You should be reading.” She did allow Jacob sometimes to play Nintendo or be on the computer. Jacob was the bright one, without Charles’s learning disabilities and physical flaws, and mechanically inclined, whereas Charles would be the first to say all he knew about computers was how to turn one on. Kermode and Pam always cultivated perfection, in whatever form. Anything less was ridiculed.
Nick Adamovich still couldn’t understand what was so terrible in the Jordan household. No TV? Big deal. And every kid got slapped around and yelled at. He certainly had when he was growing up and it hadn’t hurt him any. “You’re going to have to help us out here,” he said.
The detectives continued to press, but Charles had had enough. “I don’t want to remember what went on in that house,” he said flatly. “If I remember, I can’t function anymore. I don’t even want to think about my parents right now.”
But during the subsequent months the detectives thought often about Kermode and Pamela. They had personally witnessed the carnage inflicted upon two virtually defenseless people. And Woodland Park, this prosperous mountain community with its airy homes and pristine way of life, wondered about the Jordan family. What would drive a child to murder his parents? Was Jacob simply a bad kid who killed them “because they made him take out the trash,” as some asserted, or did the answer lie in abuse? “Something had to be horribly wrong in that household,” others maintained. “A child doesn’t kill his parents for no reason.”
What then was the reason?
[1] Jacob later said that his parents seldom fought. His assertion is contradicted by a neighbor who, during that summer, awakened between two and three in the morning in order to feed her baby. Through the open window she often heard Pamela and Kermode screaming “for what seemed like hours at a time. It was really awful stuff.” While some of that might have been directed at Jacob, who wouldn’t have dared raise his voice, Pam and Kermode were obviously having marital problems.
[2] Jacob later contradicted Charles concerning who did what chores. And Jacob was far more of an animal lover than Charles, so Pike and Chaka were his responsibility. Family and friends spoke of the cleaning chores BOTH boys were subjected to. But whatever the truth, those close to the situation agree that after Charles moved out Jacob was a virtual slave.
________________________
That is the land of lost content. I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
~ A.E. Housman The Welsh Marches
Chapter 10(click to entire chapter)