THIS MANEUVERING WAS COMPLICATED BY THE FACT that neither was operating in a vacuum. If Elizabeth had been acting alone and she wanted to go back to the United States, that was one thing. If Jens had been acting alone and he wanted to direct his efforts toward getting to Germany, that was another. But they were irrevocably bound together; neither was free to act independently. They were tied inseparably by the murders of Derek and Nancy as well as their emotional involvement.
Jens was afraid Elizabeth could sabotage his efforts to be extradited to Germany. Then if he were extradited to the United States instead, she could testify against him and help seal his date with the executioner. So he had good reason to worry about what she was saying and doing.
Elizabeth feared that Jens could insure she got as stiff a sentence as possible by putting the blame for the murders squarely on her shoulders. In that case, she would become the Wicked Witch of the West, the older woman who lured a young schoolboy into crime and depravity.
Needless to say, given such conflicting interests, the situation soon got nasty.
It is difficult to determine exactly what happened and when. Elizabeth saved some of Jens’s letters. Some, she said, were stolen as part of a plot hatched by Jens, which involved representatives of the German government. And then there were those that were shortstopped by prison officials. She saw enough, though, to make her realize that their relationship was undergoing a metamorphosis.
On August 11, Jens wrote to her saying that his father had seen a clipping from a Virginia newspaper saying Elizabeth had been giggling during one of the court hearings.
Jens said he
knew
this didn’t happen because he had been there, but Klaus, who had
not
been there, was convinced it had occurred. He warned her to be on her best behavior.
On August 30 Jens wrote encouragingly, saying that the American judicial system treated violent criminals very leniently, and, since she had not been accused of any violent action, she was even better off. Elizabeth took this as a strong hint not to make waves.
In a postscript he asked whether Ricky Gardner had asked her about Annie. Elizabeth interpreted this as a way of reminding her that she could do both of them a favor by suggesting to investigators that Annie Massie may have played a role in the murders as well. He had told Elizabeth before that he believed Annie had been in the house after Nancy and Derek were killed. That is, actually
in
the house and not just to open the door, glimpse Derek’s body sprawled on the floor, and summon the police. Jens had sworn to Elizabeth that he had not mutilated Nancy’s and Derek’s bodies. If he didn’t do it, he argued, someone must have come in after him and done it. During one of their fights he had even accused Elizabeth of hiring someone to do it.
This message hit home to Elizabeth because she was still perplexed about one thing Annie had done soon after the murders. The night after she found the bodies Annie and her husband drove to Charlottesville to tell Elizabeth the horrible news. Elizabeth said she noticed that Annie was acting strangely but she attributed that to shock. However, she said Annie also gave her Nancy’s old address book. When she got to thinking about it later, Elizabeth said she decided that Annie
had
to have gone into the house at some point because that book was kept on a desk on the far side of the living room from Derek’s body.
Then Jens wrote angrily attacking Virginia officials. This may have been a response to the formal extradition request filed with the British government a few weeks previously, a copy of which may have just found its way to Jens. He expected Virginia officials to seek the death penalty. He predicted
that regardless of their efforts he would still be extradited to Germany and tried for manslaughter. If that proved to be true, he said, it would be very difficult for the Virginians to try her as an accomplice to murder, which would be a more serious charge than the one he would face.
As far as the extradition battle went, Jens was still certain that the best way to go was for them to direct all their efforts toward getting him sent to Germany. If he could be tried there before she was tried in Virginia, her trial would be anticlimactic and she would get off lightly because he, the “star attraction,” would not be making an appearance.
Elizabeth, on the other hand, felt increasingly put upon. All of Jens’s energy was focused entirely on his getting extradited to Germany. Granted, he kept telling her how much that was going to help her as well, but the main purpose was to save him.
On October 10 they met face to face during a joint legal visit, and Jens increased his demands on her by suggesting to her that she ask for a meeting with officers from the British Special Branch, which is roughly like the American FBI, to hint about their possible involvement with the IRA. This was part of one of Jens’s subplots. If the plan to be sent to Germany ran into problems, he figured they could delay a stepped-up move to extradite them to the United States by making themselves too valuable to the British to be surrendered. In other words, given the emphasis put on antiterrorist activities in the United Kingdom, if Jens and Elizabeth could make the British want to keep them more than they wanted to send them back to Virginia, it would be to Jens’s and Elizabeth’s advantage. One way they could do this, Jens reasoned, was by claiming dealings with the IRA. They already had hinted at such connections in the journal that was confiscated in their flat when they were arrested.
Twelve days later Jens again wrote encouraging news, saying his government connections were beginning to pay off and his lawyers had lined up some valuable allies in the United States, including a federal judge and a district attorney in Virginia. He did not identify either one.
His mood was not so cheery three weeks later, after he saw a television program on capital punishment in the United States. One of those interviewed was the executioner for the state of Virginia. Jens described to Elizabeth in detail what the man had said, including how witnesses to the execution sometimes had to insert Vaseline into their nostrils to help block the smell of burning flesh. He added that fortunately she had very little to worry about because she, unlike him, would be treated leniently.
That letter had a tremendous effect on her. Jens knew the right buttons to push.
THE MORE SHE THOUGHT ABOUT EXTRADITION, THE more she realized she did not have the will to fight as hard as Jens. She was too overwhelmed by guilt. On December 11 she wrote him a letter of a page and a half saying she had decided not to fight extradition, that she planned to go back to Virginia and plead guilty to the charges against her.
There were a number of other wrongs, she added, that she was guilty of but she would never be officially called to account for. One that was weighing heavily on her mind was something that Jens may not have even stopped to consider, and that was what she had done to him, how she had ruined his life. Since he was so “saintly,” she said, he probably had not given that issue any thought, but sooner or later he would and when he did she hoped he would not think too badly of her.
Jens, of course,
did
realize that. He was not “saintly” about it. And he was already beginning to think not very kindly toward her.
ON DECEMBER 17 ELIZABETH AND JENS APPEARED IN Kingston Crown Court to be sentenced on the bank fraud charges. She and Jens each got one year sentences with credit for time served. As soon as the sentences were handed down, Scotland Yard detectives produced warrants for their arrest for the murders of Derek and Nancy.
Months later Elizabeth told Ricky Gardner that while she was in the dock that day, a woman she had never seen befare tried to attack her, but a court official stepped in and turned the assailant away. She said she believed the incident was planned by Jens to try to frighten her. Curiously, a story in the next day’s London
Times
did not mention an attempted attack. It could have been another of Elizabeth’s excursions into fantasy.
Jens’s letter in response to Elizabeth’s message, however, was no fantasy. Dated December 18, 1986, it began by urging her to stop and think about her actions, to quit acting stupid.
The charges against her, Jens said, could not be made more severe, and despite how grim it might look, the situation was completely under control. It was a puzzling statement, and Elizabeth could only believe that Jens was confused and operating under the impression that she was charged with second degree rather than first degree murder.
As far as his not realizing that she had ruined his life, he said that was ridiculous. He was not so dumb, he said, that he did not realize how he had gotten into such a mess.
It was, however, the death knell for their relationship. When they appeared together in court again in February 1987, Jens growled at her, “You’re going to be damned sorry.” He must have added something even more threatening
because the next time they appeared in court, he was handcuffed to a policeman and was kept well away from her.
That was the last time she saw him, but it was not the last contact.
A couple of weeks later, a woman visited Elizabeth, saying she had news from Jens. He no longer loved her and had not for a long time, she said, but he was worried that she was going to try to get even by putting the blame for the murders on him. Instead, the woman said, Jens had a counter suggestion. If Elizabeth would allow Jens to blame
her
for the killings so he wouldn’t get the death sentence, he would compensate her with money when she got out of prison. This could easily be done because Elizabeth planned to plead guilty anyway. Since that would be before Jens was even extradited, she could testify at his trial that it was all her fault. This would make a jury look more favorably upon him.
Elizabeth was too shocked to reply immediately, but on March 19 she wrote Jens an abrupt letter asking what was going on.
Jens responded that he was surprised at her hostility. Personally, he felt no enmity at all. He still loved her, he said, even though she did not understand what was happening.
Whether she understood or not on the day before her twenty-third birthday, April 14, she appeared in court for an extradition hearing. The judge ordered her returned to the United States. She had made up her mind not to fight the decision.
HOLLOWAY PRISON HAD THREE PRIMARY CENTERS FOR social activity. One was the dining hall. Another was the common area on each floor where inmates could gather to play pool or watch videotapes. And the third was the window. Each of the cell windows, instead of bars, had barriers, disguised as windows, which were cleverly worked into the framework so there was no “prison” look. More importantly, inmates could open the louvered panes and use the windows as communication ports.
One of the favorite pastimes at Holloway was for the women prisoners to yell greetings to male prisoners who were imported to do the gardening. Frequently, through this hollering back and forth, friendships developed. Names and addresses were often exchanged, and pen-pal relationships blossomed. Elizabeth became quite friendly with a male inmate from Pentonville Prison about halfway through her stay. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she shouted her name and address. He wrote her. She answered. But that was all. The relationship proved short-lived.
On the whole, Elizabeth kept a low profile among the other prisoners, concentrating on her reading and writing rather than on friendships. The prison library had a rule that limited inmates to three check-outs per visit. But Elizabeth convinced the librarian to double her ration, and she went through the stacks voraciously.
As far as writing went, Elizabeth must have been the prison’s Letters Division champ. During a 10-week period between early February and late April, she posted 76 letters, an average of almost one a day, and received almost as many as she sent, 65. Her correspondents, in addition to Jens, were a varied group, ranging from her former UVA roommate, Charlene Song, who was then studying at Cambridge, to an old friend in Belgium. Prison regulations restricted inmates’ letters to four surfaces—the back and front of two pieces of paper—and this proved confining to the compulsive writer. Frequently, Elizabeth tried to get around this rule by writing very small, an infraction for which she was continually reprimanded. In addition to her letters, Elizabeth also wrote stories, essays, and may even have continued the novel she began at UVA. One of her short stories, entitled “The Sleeper Awakes,” won a prison-wide competition.
More poetry than prose, it is largely autobiographical, detailing the thoughts of a female narrator laden with guilt. Written with a ballpoint pen on a lined yellow pad in her characteristic cramped, hard-to-decipher script, it is part fact, part fiction. But that doesn’t matter. It is all Elizabeth
Haysom, a young woman to whom fact and fiction were consistently intermingled.
The protagonist in the story was suffering from insomnia, unable to sleep because of the memories churning in her brain, haunted by the knowledge that there were many things she had omitted to do.
Grudgingly, it seemed, the protagonist confessed that her biggest sin was that of omission. Normally, that was not a truly terrible sin, but it multiplied in severity because it was one that she habitually committed.
Her protagonist had a physically repulsive lover who also was mentally unbalanced. Although this man loved her “beyond reason” she did not love him, and her reluctance to tell him that was an example of her sinful ways.
Failing to tell her lover that she did
not
love him was one of her sins of omission. Another was her failure to tell her father that she
did
love him.
Still another was her attitude toward her mother. Her protagonist wrote that she was deeply resentful because the woman tried to control her life. Nevertheless, that did not absolve the protagonist from
her
sin, which was to omit to make allowances for her mother’s weaknesses and forgive her for them.
Now both her parents were dead and there was nothing she could do to rectify her omissions.
As for herself, her protagonist said, she was just another of her own victims. By neglecting to stand up for her right to self-determination she had allowed her parents to impose their ambitions and desires upon her. That had not been fair to them or to her and she despised herself for it.
By the time her protagonist had written these thoughts, she had purged her conscience; her insomnia was cured.
IN REAL LIFE ELIZABETH’S REMORSE WAS EQUIVOCAL. AT night, when the male prisoners had all been driven back to their own institutions, the women of Holloway used their cell windows for their own internal communications system, gathering at their windows and speaking their thoughts into
the night air. Communication in this manner was rather limited because a voice can carry only so far, especially when there are competing voices. But it was convenient if an inmate happened to have a good friend in the next cell. Elizabeth
did
have such a friend, one of the very few she cultivated during her stay at Holloway. Her name was
Joan Alexander,
and she was serving a sentence for a drug law violation. She and Elizabeth were of similar backgrounds, and they had similar interests. They spent countless hours at their windows laughing, chatting, and exchanging verities in uninterrupted semiprivacy. Just before she left for the United States, Elizabeth’s conversation with her friend turned serious. Speaking of the fate that awaited her, Elizabeth was optimistic. “They have nothing on me,” Elizabeth whispered into the dark, referring to Updike and Gardner. “There’s no way they can tie me to the murders.”
Although she professed at length, particularly to Jens, to be truly contrite over the deaths of her parents, many who have come in contact with her over the years, including some members of her family, have serious doubts. This very lack of remorsefulness, in fact, was the first of three things one of her warders at Holloway remembered most about Elizabeth. The second was that she always hated to shampoo her hair, being content to let it fall in long, greasy strands. The third was that she was utterly convinced she would “walk” on the charges in Virginia. When she left Holloway in May 1986, she told her fellow inmates that she was confident she would be able to return to the United States and convince the judge to give her a sweetheart sentence.