Deep inside, however, Jennifer was harboring deep-seated resentment and anger toward Chris, she said later.
“I’ve always felt out of place because I’m not Chris’s biological daughter. I feel as if he has always treated me and my half sister [Ashley] different from the other three girls.”
One thing Jennifer said she noticed while growing up was how Chris “spoiled the three girls, but when it came to me and Ashley, it was always ‘no.’
“He was always very strict on me,” Jennifer claimed. There was a resentment Jennifer had against Chris she could not shake.
Once Jennifer got a “taste of the real world,” she said, beyond the confines of a home where her mother had gone through a lot of “B.S. . . . in her marriage,” Jennifer never looked back. “I wanted more.”
So she ran away.
CHAPTER 15
THE SPPD TOLD Rachel on the morning she reported Jennifer missing that it would issue a BOLO (be on the lookout) immediately and see what happened. Beyond that, the officer explained to Rachel, they would assign a detective to the case and begin a search.
Rachel didn’t know what to do. She sat and thought about Jennifer’s life over the past six or seven months and realized the child had been on a whirligig of celebrity because of her hiccups, which had suddenly come to an end. It was enough to throw any child Jennifer’s age into a plunge of confusion, depression, and hostility. Add to it Jennifer’s learning disabilities and sheer lack of understanding regarding what had truly taken place as her celebrity rose and fell, and it was no wonder the kid had run away. She had been a celebrity one minute, known by name and face around the world. The next moment, she was the butt of jokes and online taunts, threats and absolute disparaging comments so vile and degrading that Chris and Rachel wondered if the sheer bullying and cruelty of some of the comments were enough to push an already depressed young girl over the edge.
“I saw a drastic change in Jennifer’s personality and believed most of it was due to the medication [for the hiccups] she was taking and the international television exposure she had endured,” Rachel commented later. “She was being called so many names and people hated on her so badly, saying she was making it all up for the attention. It was awful.”
A lot of the name-calling and insult hurling brought Jennifer back to when she was a youngster in school, she later explained.
“I remember growing up and always being picked on because I had a mustache and because I am overweight,” Jennifer recalled. “Plus, I think I lost all type of feelings when I was raped.”
Rachel once referred to her daughter as having a “defiant nature.”
Perhaps like many kids her age, Jennifer was ramming horns with the authority figures in her life, but she had been cut some slack because she had been through so much in such a short period. Jennifer was not momma’s girl any longer, as she had been much of her life.
Rachel began to see the change transpire as the hiccup celebrity status, which Jennifer had gotten so used to, all of a sudden diminished. One of the telltale signs for Rachel was how Jennifer started to come and go as she pleased, without paying any mind to what Rachel and Chris asked of her. She stopped saying where she was headed when she left the house, and Rachel and Chris feared she was falling in with the wrong crowd. It was about this time, Chris later noted, when he discovered several racy letters between Jennifer and a boy.
“I’m hoping she’s just acting out,” Rachel told Chris as they waited at home that next morning for word that Jennifer was okay. They convinced themselves she just needed some time alone to work things out.
But it went much, much deeper for Jennifer. That “taste” of the outside world, which she had always talked about, felt so good.
“Chris never let me have my freedom,” Jennifer claimed. What’s more, they had always lived in small houses and the girls shared one bedroom—that’s five girls in one room. Jennifer never felt she’d had any privacy growing up.
“I never had my own room.... I was always getting the shit end of the stick because I am the oldest. I always had to take the heat.”
When a reporter reached Rachel after word got out that Jennifer had run away, Rachel said, “I am very close with Jennifer. That’s why this is really bothering me. I have always tried to be her friend and her mother. I want her to feel like she can talk to me about whatever she wants to talk about.”
Obviously, however, that intimacy between mother and daughter had been over for a while. Jennifer had become a renegade.
* * *
SPPD detective Dave Wawrzynski soon became involved in Jennifer’s missing person case.
“Very briefly,” Wawrzynski told me.
Wawrzynski went out searching for Jennifer as part of a law enforcement team put together by the department in order to locate the girl. There was some pressure from the media to find Jennifer because she had been a celebrity. All eyes were on the SPPD to find the girl.
“And as [Wawrzynski] was looking for her,” Rachel later claimed, “he was driving his car slowly and Jennifer popped out from somewhere and he nearly ran her over. This really pissed him off. It got to him. He was upset to begin with that they were made to all go out looking for the Hiccup Girl, and here it was, he had almost struck her with his car. Ever since that day, I believe, in my opinion, Detective Wawrzynski had it in for Jennifer. He wanted to nail her on something.”
“With regard to a ‘vendetta’ against this girl,” Wawrzynski later explained to me, “that’s really, uh, comical. My entire dealing with her was so minute. . . .”
The reason why Wawrzynski had come in contact with Jennifer in 2007 in the first place was because he was in patrol at the time, involved with Crimes Against Children (CAC), which Jennifer’s case—and that BOLO—fell under.
“Running away is not a crime,” Wawrzynski clarified. “It’s a civil problem the department takes very seriously. You call the police for help. If that kid runs from us, we cannot go chase them, tackle them. We have to say, ‘Damn, there they go again.’ And begin to look for them.”
And as the search for Jennifer progressed, that’s what happened. Jennifer Mee did not want to be found. Every time the SPPD got close, she took off.
Wawrzynski was told by department heads that because Jennifer had some “sort of semblance of notoriety,” they needed to find her quickly.
“So I was asked to help them look for her,” Wawrzynski told me.
Wawrzynski went out searching that day. As he was driving down an alley, he explained, “she ran out and I almost ran her over.”
Jennifer knew cops were looking for her and she was purposely trying to avoid them. Was Wawrzynski a little perturbed that she’d dashed out in front of his car while she was trying to slip out of the grasp of the police department?
Absolutely.
But it was that one instant, maybe ten seconds, Wawrzynski said, that became his total involvement with Jennifer Mee in 2007. He said he might have also been inside the Robidoux residence as another officer discussed the search with the family, but that was the extent of his involvement.
“So, for that one instance to become a vendetta later, wow,” Wawrzynski said with all due respect to Rachel and Jennifer’s family. “If every person that ran in front of my car, if I had the ability to go back and get even with them, I would have burned out a long time ago.”
By the time he became the lead in the Shannon Griffin murder investigation, three years after that runaway incident, Wawrzynski was an experienced detective. He realized and “totally understood” that the family—Jennifer’s—needed someone to blame for everything that had happened.
“That’s okay, if they want to cast me in there as well as a bad guy, that’s fine,” Wawrzynski concluded. “But unlike a TV show, that’s not the way it happened.”
What’s more, until Jennifer Mee had told him her name when he met up with her in 2010 as part of the Shannon Griffin investigation, he “had no freakin’ clue as to who she was.”
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br /> CHAPTER 16
ON THE DAY Detective Wawrzynski almost ran Jennifer over, she was out there dodging the cops any which way she could. She had slept in Fossil Park on a park bench overnight, and had made a decision that she was done with being a child in the Robidoux household. She was now going to strike out on her own and live on the street among those friends who knew her best.
“For the most part,” Jennifer recalled, “I had an okay family. Don’t get me wrong—all families have problems. Like I said, the thing I wish could have been different was my mom being home more. My stepdad was not ready to raise a child, let alone a child that was not his.”
No one could locate Jennifer Mee that day. But as evening came, a neighbor called Rachel and Chris and reported that Jennifer was at the park, sitting on a bench all alone. She looked tired and hungry and in need of some love.
Chris and Rachel rushed to the park.
As they walked up to Jennifer, she looked as though she wanted to run again and be done with everyone. However, Jennifer slumped into the park bench and cried, instead.
Rachel nestled up against her firstborn. What a ride they had been on since those days in Vermont, when it was just Jennifer and Rachel.
“What are you doing?” Chris asked. He was frantic and ecstatic all at the same time. Pissed at what she’d done, happy they’d found her. What a scare. Chris loved this girl, despite how Jennifer saw it. Rachel knew that. Why was Jennifer having such a hard time with it?
Rachel said, “Jennifer, we’ve been up all night, worried sick.”
“You haven’t slept?” Jennifer asked, looking at them.
“No, Jennifer,” Rachel said through tears.
Jennifer looked up and saw that Chris was crying, too. “A grown man,” she said later. “He was crying for me.” And that, coupled with her parents being awake all night and worried sick about her, was when she realized she’d screwed up.
“I had done wrong,” Jennifer said later. “I realized this in that one moment.”
“Let’s go home,” Rachel said.
“I’ll never do that again,” Jennifer promised.
They decided that Jennifer would spend some time with her grandparents over the next few days, out of the house, on her own, so they could all have a moment to breathe, some quality time away from one another.
Rachel was considering counseling for her daughter. She wanted to learn how to handle what they had gone through with the international fame—not to mention the rise and fall of celebrity, Jennifer’s Tourette condition, and an entire host of other problems now coming to light.
“I need to know how to cope with it all,” Rachel said.
Jennifer had a different take. Sounding quite articulate and fairly knowledgeable about what was going on in her life as she worked her way back into the Robidoux fold, she told the St. Petersburg Times in the days after she went back home: “We need to do something about all the drama that’s going on. We need some help so we can be a family and not a bunch of strangers living in one house.”
CHAPTER 17
ACCORDING TO RACHEL, when the opportunity arose with the murder of Shannon Griffin and Jennifer’s “potential involvement,” Detective Dave Wawrzynski saw an opportunity and went after Jennifer with everything he had at his disposal. If that was the case, one might reckon any cop in Wawrzynski’s position of being employed to solve a murder might do that same thing. Rachel was under the opinion that the SPPD wanted her daughter for this crime from the moment they realized Jennifer was part of the drama surrounding it.
“There are too many unanswered questions,” Rachel remarked.
Wawrzynski was a smart detective with a variety of investigatory accolades, with hardly a blemish on his career. As a detective who has seen just about everything the street has to offer, Wawrzynski knew there was the Jennifer Mee her family had been familiar with and knew intimately, and then there was the Jennifer Mee whom they had not been familiar with—a young woman they knew nothing about. It did not take a team of investigators to figure out that Jennifer had led a life at the time of Shannon’s murder away from her family, and she did not want anyone to know about it. Not to mention that one had to look at this case—and Rachel’s accusation against the detective—through a clear, unbiased lens: would a decorated detective, like Wawrzynski, “go after” a young girl on murder charges solely because she had run in front of his patrol car, on top of a resentment rooted in the notoriety she had acquired while suffering from an uncontrollable condition brought on by Tourette’s?
It hardly seemed plausible. In fact, once all the facts of the case were made clear, it would become obvious that it would also be nearly impossible.
* * *
Let’s begin with Wawrzynski’s life. He was an army brat, growing up not in one place, but rather moving all over the country, and sometimes the world, with his military family. Yet it was St. Pete, Wawrzynski later said, he’d choose if he had to call one of those places home. That’s where Wawrzynski graduated high school after moving with his family to the city in the mid-1970s. After a stint in the army himself, part of which included the military police, he decided to apply to the SPPD in 2003. It was the comradery and working with a unit, pooling ideas and collectively discussing and figuring things out, that attracted the law enforcement latecomer to the job. Wawrzynski was thirty-seven years old when he put on the blues for the first time, not quite your typical, wet-behind-the-ears criminal justice major.
Wawrzynski had offers to join the Customs Department and even the Secret Service, but it was the SPPD he chose. His goal, of course, was to become a detective—and within a short, two-year period he did just that.
The caseload Wawrzynski ran into as a detective in Crimes Against Children was enormous. Each detective in the unit dealt with between thirty and forty cases per month. And when you’re talking crimes against children, you show up every day and your hours are generally not filled with happy stories of reuniting families and children. Your days, instead, are consumed with the vilest, most violent, disturbing, and chilling acts committed against the most innocent people on the planet.
Yet, Wawrzynski explained, a lot of what he faced every day included the unit “disproving crimes more than it did proving” them. There were so many false reports that came into the Crimes Against Children unit, at any given time, they outnumbered the actual real cases almost three to one.
“That’s what made testifying so much easier in CAC cases, because when you built a case against someone that did not fall apart, one that you were able to back up with physical evidence and/or testimony, and it never fell apart, those were so rare.”
Seventy percent of the time, Wawrzynski commented, “we are out there disproving allegations.”
A lot of it revolved around “regret sex”: a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old who’d had sex with her boyfriend, and the mom and the dad didn’t like him, so a case was filed.
“Certainly, some of this is criminal,” Wawrzynski said, “but it may not always rise to the level of prosecution.”
Needless to say, Wawrzynski learned through his involvement there how to deal with families: to feel them out and develop a general consensus of what’s going on behind the words they speak and the allegations they make, and, beyond all else, what’s happening behind closed doors when no one is around.
Those years in the CAC laid the foundation for Wawrzynski to step into the Homicide Unit. Within a short period while in the Homicide Division, as Wawrzynski began to learn the ropes and get a feel for the types of cases St. Pete saw on a usual basis, there was one certainty he ran into in just about every murder: “Unlike any other crime, in a homicide, the victim cannot lie.”
As far as murder cases, Wawrzynski explained, “you go where they take you. There is always something to do in a murder case until it is closed. They’re permanent—always yours.”
It wasn’t the number of murders, or a particular case, that Wawrzynski recalled when he was asked about “that case�
� every cop has in his memory bank. It was something else.
“I have never been shocked or surprised by what I’ve seen, but the level of depravity,” he said sincerely, “or how cheap life is to some people is what gets me.”
He once had a case where two guys got into an argument over a bicycle. One guy stabbed the other guy in the throat and the guy died in under a minute.
All because of a disagreement.
The value on human life today, without a doubt, is the lowest it’s ever been.
There was another case in which the driver of a car in a mall parking lot “almost” ran over the foot of another man walking into the store. Never did, mind you, but came awfully close. The guy broke into a rage and followed the driver. As he got out of his vehicle, the pursuing man pulled a gun and started to fire into an open crowd of people, killing one—and it wasn’t even the driver.
CHAPTER 18
JENNIFER MEE THOUGHT the world of her mother and called her life with Rachel “awesome—she was my best friend and she did everything she could for me.”
The only complaint Jennifer had with her mother and the life they shared up until her arrest was that she wished her mother had “been home more while [I was] growing up.”4
I asked Rachel about this. I had heard it from several sources close to Jennifer—how Jennifer had complained about having a mother who was never around much, someone she could confide in and talk to when needed. Was it an excuse? Was it a legitimate complaint from a girl who needed guidance and felt like she could only go to her mom? (Chris was home all the time, after all, so why not go to him?)
“I worked a lot of hours as a server while Jennifer was growing up,” Rachel explained. “And when I wasn’t working, I was helping my parents out.” Rachel’s father had ailments all his life and she needed and wanted to be there for him and her mother. “My mom was legally blind. She couldn’t do much.... Chris was home.”
One Breath Away: The Hiccup Girl - From Media Darling to Convicted Killer Page 6
