Beyond Reason (20 page)

Authors: Ken Englade

WHILE ELIZABETH HAD BEEN SURLY WITH INVESTIGATORS and seemed uncomfortable in their presence, Jens reacted differently.

At the beginning Jens was Jens: arrogant, argumentative, and egotistical. As soon as he walked into the interview room and sat down, he looked defiantly at Beever and asked him to turn off the tape recorder. He let them know immediately that he was more concerned with getting information than giving it. “What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.

“Are you worried about it?” Beever responded with a chill in his voice.

“Yes,” said Jens.

“Why?”

“Because I murdered two people,” he said matter-of-factly. “You know that, don’t you?”

That said, he appeared to relax, to view the interview from then on as a game or an intellectual exercise. Pushing his glasses up on his nose, he seemed to say, Okay, let’s see you top that.

Beever was inwardly pleased, but his face showed no emotion. Leaning over, he opened a dialogue, trying to establish a rapport with the owlish-looking young man on the other side of the desk.

Jens was circumspect and evasive, but in a different way than Elizabeth. Her area of expertise was obfuscation; her tactic had been to retreat into silence. But Jens was verbally aggressive; he wanted to toy with the investigators, to challenge them to a rousing argument.

One of the first things Beever noticed was Jens’s irritating habit of answering a question with a question, which was quite disconcerting until investigators began to expect it.
Where Elizabeth’s tactic was to lead investigators down paths that twisted and turned, dipped and ran into each other, Jens’s was to attack. He could be quite voluble, but only if he thought he was controlling the interview.

Jens had overlooked one thing: In his disdain for investigators, he had woefully underestimated them. For their part investigators had to get a feel for Jens; they had to work out a formula for drawing him out. It was a learning experience on both sides.

Not long after Beever began chatting with Jens, the detective maneuvered the conversation to Derek’s and Nancy’s murders. Soon, what had been a discussion turned into a question-and-answer session. Jens seemed to be reacting well to Beever’s questions, and the detective thought he was cleverly leading Jens into his trap. Finally, the detective got to the big question: “You murdered the Haysoms, didn’t you?” he asked for the record, expecting Jens to reply in the affirmative.

Jens responded with a huge grin. “You handled that very nicely,” he said with apparent sincerity. “But you know I’m not going to answer that.”

FOR TWO DAYS THE INVESTIGATORS LEFT ELIZABETH alone in her cell while they concentrated on questioning Jens. Then late Sunday morning, Wright and Beever brought her in for another session. Gardner was absent because the British detectives planned to question her only about journal references regarding their fraud schemes and about the possibility that Jens and Elizabeth had smuggled drugs into England. Beever and Wright also were curious about the reference to “Rover” and the IRA. In Britain police take talk about the IRA very seriously indeed.

As soon as Elizabeth was seated, Beever pointed to an entry in the journal. “It states here, ‘Walk to Faulkner to pick up stuff,’ then an arrow points eastward and the number
803
. What does
stuff
mean?”

Elizabeth shrugged, replying that “stuff” referred to cake mix and chocolate that she and her roommate, Charlene Song, had left behind in a friend’s apartment. They went back to pick it up, then returned to their dwelling at 803 Rugby Road. She shook her head vigorously when Beever wanted to know if Jens had been with her at the time. Jens had already left for Europe by then, she asserted.

Beever was disbelieving. “The word
stuff
could mean drugs, couldn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes,” she agreed. “It could mean anything.”

“The problem I have is that Jens has offered me an entirely different explanation about the entry ‘stuff,’” he said, giving her her first indication that Jens was talking freely to investigators.

It was Elizabeth’s turn to look disbelieving. “I don’t know why he would say that,” she said. “He wasn’t even there. He doesn’t know anything about it.”

For the moment Beever let it drop. Instead, he asked her about the notes mentioning Rover.

Elizabeth smiled tightly. Rover, she said, was a product of her imagination.

When Beever asked her why she had made up material to insert in the diary, Elizabeth said she and Jens planned to use the document as the basis for a book they wanted to write later and they were trying to spice it up as much as possible.

“Are you saying that all these entries would form part of a book?” Beever asked incredulously.

“No, I’m
not
saying all of these entries would form part of a book,” Elizabeth said petulantly. “What I
am
saying is that I was interested or amused by the possibility of writing an adventure book and the entries would be the basis for that.”

She told him that she fantasized a lot, that she often said or wrote things that were not true. She added that the diary was actually written several weeks after the events took place and that she and Jens had both contributed information. They even took turns writing the entries. Some of the details she inserted about what happened after Jens had left for Europe were fiction, but Jens did not know that.

“Do you suffer from a lot of fantasies like this?” Beever asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve always let my imagination run away with me.”

Beever still was skeptical and asked her again about her use of the word
stuff
, trying to get her to admit it was a euphemism for drugs.

She shook her head. “In America, they use that awful expression to encompass anything,” she insisted. “For instance, ‘I’ll go pick up your stuff’ can mean anything like books or clothes or bicycle. It could be lecture notes or a car. Whatever.”

Beever asked her why, since they had been intent on running away together, they had traveled separately.

Smiling tightly, she replied that they had decided it would look odd if they disappeared at the same time.

Reading from the journal, Beever asked her if she had, as she had written, flown from the United States to Paris or if she had gone to London first. The implication, which she recognized immediately, was that she had stopped in England and left a package, perhaps containing drugs, for the IRA.

Elizabeth’s eyes flashed. “Look at my passport,” she said. “You’ll notice that I did not enter London or England before 1986.”

Beever, undiscouraged, pressed on. If she and Jens had nothing to do with drugs, he asked, why did they write in the journal that they had discovered in Thailand that the only way to make money there appeared to involve drugs.

That was more fantasy, she replied nonchalantly.

ALTHOUGH THE INTERVIEW CONTINUED FOR ANOTHER twenty minutes, Beever and Wright were unable to get her to admit to any other significant contradictions in anything she or Jens had written in the diary. Outside of her admissions that she lied indiscriminately and often, both in words and on paper, Beever had not pulled much of value out of her. In fact, he may have given more than he got. When she went back to her cell, Elizabeth must have been thinking, correctly, that Jens was spilling his guts while she, so far, had said nothing. Now
that
was something to ponder.

ELIZABETH MAY HAVE BEEN REFUSING TO COOPERATE, but Jens soon abandoned his misgivings. Indeed, he got almost chummy with his old enemy, Ricky Gardner. When Gardner asked the youth if he had suffered any wounds during his struggle with Derek, Jens’s eyes lit up. “Oh, yeah,” he said, lifting his left hand. “Look here,” he directed, pointing to two thin scars. “I got those at Loose Chippings.”

After a few sessions with the investigators, Jens overcame his aversion to the tape recorder as well as his unwillingness to discuss his role in Derek’s and Nancy’s deaths. Before Sunday rolled around Jens had told the detectives practically everything they wanted to know about what had happened at the Haysom house on March 30, 1985. Exactly what he said has not been disclosed because, for a variety of legal reasons, his transcripts were ordered sealed. There is no doubt, however, that he admitted to the killings. At length and in detail. Although prohibited from discussing
what
he said about the murders, investigators readily confirmed that he
had
been very forthcoming.

There was, however, one thing he would not talk about, and that was Elizabeth’s role.

“She knew why you were going to see her parents though, didn’t she?” Gardner asked.

Jens was silent for a long time. Finally, he said slowly, “I would have to say that we discussed it, obviously, but I don’t think that either of us was truly clear about what was going to happen at all.”

He asked Jens to elaborate.

“Well,” he said after another pause, “we knew that sooner or later I was going to have to speak to Mr. and Mrs.
Haysom about their feelings about me. But I don’t know how Elizabeth felt about me driving down there or what she thought my motives were. I don’t know what she thought.”

When Gardner asked him why he did it, Jens said the answer was simple. “I fell in love with the girl,” he said, as though he were explaining long division to an eleven-year-old. “We talked about killing her parents. I didn’t want to do it, but I drove to their house to kill them, and I got caught.”

To Elizabeth the explanation was not clearly so clear-cut.

ELIZABETH SPENT ALL THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON AND most of the evening thinking about what Jens may have told the detectives. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that she had been betrayed—that she had maintained her silence while Jens was jabbering his head off. At five minutes before ten o’clock she pushed the call button in her cell. When the duty officer appeared, she told him she would like to see Beever.

Beever had been waiting for her call. Shrewdly, he had judged that she would change her mind. But when he appeared at her cell door, she asked only to see Jens. He refused. “I can’t let you do that,” he said. “I’m still conducting a murder inquiry, and it would be highly irregular for you to see him at this point.”

Elizabeth thought about that for a few moments. “Has he admitted the murders to you?” she asked softly.

“I’m not going to tell you that,” Beever replied, inwardly jubilant. “But I can say I’m perfectly happy with the way the investigation is going.”

Having said that, he turned on his heel and walked away, noting with content the worried look that flickered across her face. Back in his office, he looked at the clock. She will call me back, he told himself. He was right. Fifteen minutes later she summoned him again. “I’d like to speak to you alone,” she said.

That time there was no mention of Jens. She had apparently decided—correctly it turned out—that Jens had told his side of the story. Now she wanted to tell hers. “I want to get this off my chest once and for all,” she began.

Beever let her talk for about ten minutes before he stopped her. Her statement was useless, he said, unless he had a witness and a recording. She said she had no objection, but she did have one request: For reasons she did not share with Beever, she asked that the witness
not
be Gardner. Beever nodded and called Wright, who also was waiting in the wings. After ordering steaming cups of coffee for everyone, Beever propped a recorder on the desk, punched the “record” button, and noted for the record that the date was June 8, 1986, the time 11:15 P.M. Elizabeth swallowed hard and began Version 1 of the story of her parents’ deaths.

Derek Haysom in his days as a Canadian steel executive. (Abbass Studios, Ltd.)