“With me, most of the time,” Susan responded. “We’d had a good visit until he got jealous about someone I was dating and started beating me.”
“Where did he spend the night Thursday?”
“In my dorm room,” Susan answered.
“I don’t think I want to have anything to do with this case,” the lawyer suddenly said and proceeded to deliver a lecture on morality.
Susan was startled by the turn of events. “This means you will not represent me?” she asked uncertainly.
“That’s exactly what it means. And I’d advise you that you need to review how you choose your friends and how you live your life.”
Susan and Irene left the office in stunned silence and drove back to the campus. “I guess I just ought to be happy that the pain in my head is going away now a little at a time,” Susan finally said.
Still fearful that Pernell might return, Susan and her mother came up with a plan to make certain that there would be no repeat of Susan’s ordeal. They reasoned that the danger was less great while classes were in session, because others would be around to help if she needed it. But on weekends when many students were off campus, Irene would fly from North Carolina to stay with her daughter. Only six weeks of classes were left before Susan would be spending a two-week break at home.
Those two months passed with no more trouble from Pernell, and Susan felt safe enough for her mother to stop the weekly commutes when she returned to start summer school classes.
Susan’s relationship with Ian had ended with the spring quarter. They had dated a few times after her abduction, but the romance was gone. None of Susan’s dormmates was taking summer classes, and she was without a social life when she returned to campus. That gave her plenty of time to study and bring up her grade point average.
Twice during summer school, letters arrived from Pernell in Greensboro, neither mentioning the ordeal he’d put her through, nor his proposal of marriage. But one letter did indicate that he might be planning another trip to Florida. Susan put it out of her mind.
She was studying late on a hot July night when she heard a knock on her dorm door near midnight.
“Who is it?” she asked pleasantly without opening the door.
“Guess,” said a familiar voice that caused her heart to sink. Despite her fear and anger, she opened the door.
Pernell looked more powerful than ever, the result of his intense weightlifting routines.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” he said.
“Come in,” she said, “but I’ve got a lot of studying to do, you know how summer school is.”
This was going to be another long night for Susan, but decidedly different from her experience in April. Pernell wanted to talk, and he was on his best behavior.
“We talked all night long,” Susan remembered. “He talked about how he didn’t mean it when he hurt me in April. He told me again and again how sorry he was. And he kept saying, ‘Let’s be friends, just friends.’”
Through the long night, Susan refused to be swayed. And that was a new experience for her. Since those early days at Guilford College, she had always taken him back. But this time, she felt a resolve she had never known before.
It’s over! she told herself jubilantly. And the thought gave her courage.
Pernell was still talking when the sun rose, giving no indication of leaving, and Susan was trying to think of ways to prod him.
It was about ten before she finally suggested that he might need to be going, adding that she needed to do some shopping.
“I’ll take my car and you can take yours and we’ll say good-bye at the mall,” she said.
Driving the maroon Datsun that was still registered to Susan, Pernell followed her MG through the busy morning traffic to a mall in Hollywood.
Susan found a parking space near Marshall’s, a department store. Pernell had pulled into another spot nearby and hurried to the MG. As Susan was getting out of her car, he grasped her by the arm and began pulling her forcefully toward the Datsun.
Suddenly, Susan could picture all the horrors of April returning, and she began screaming—frightening, piercing screaming.
“Don’t do that,” Pernell told her. “I’m not going to hurt you. We’re just going to go to my car and talk.”
But Susan continued screaming, struggling to get away from him, and she attracted the attention at last of an elderly couple who were emerging from their car a short distance away. The couple hurried toward them.
“Hey, what are you doing?” the man called out, coming closer. Pernell looked momentarily uncertain, then released Susan.
“Just remember that I still know where you are and I can watch you,” he said before he ran to his car and sped away.
Susan watched him go as the elderly couple hurried to her. She was trembling, trying to catch her breath.
“Thank you,” she said. “You may have saved my life.”
“Can we do anything for you?” the man asked.
“Just let me walk with you to the mall.”
Flanked by two brave senior citizens, Susan entered the mall. After thanking the couple again, she found a phone and called home.
“Mom,” she said. “He came back.”
Following Irene’s instructions, Susan left the mall and after making certain that Pernell wasn’t lurking nearby or following her, she drove to a hotel, checked in and called her mother again.
“I’m on the next flight to Miami,” Irene told her.
This incident caused Susan to resolve anew to take charge of her life. Her test came within a week after her mother had returned home and she had gone back to classes. She answered the phone and heard Pernell’s voice.
“Where are you?” she asked firmly.
“Does it matter?” he shot back. “I moved in with a friend of mine up here in Hollywood just so I can keep an eye on you. I just called to tell you that I know everything about you, where you’re going and what you’re doing.”
“That’s it, Pernell,” Susan said, her anger rising. “I’ve had enough of you and your threats. If you ever come close to me again, I’m going to the police. Do you understand that?”
“I understand,” he said, suddenly meek, surprising her.
During this conversation, Susan discovered that Pernell thought he was a wanted man, that there were warrants for his arrest and that, through cunning and daring, he was staying one step ahead of the police. She decided to take advantage of his paranoia.
By threatening to expose his location, she could control him, and by allowing him to call or write occasionally, she could keep track of him.
“I decided I’d have a lot more peace if I knew where he was instead of wondering where he might be,” she said later.
Pernell agreed to her terms.
Late that summer, Pernell completed the classes he needed to complete his degree at Guilford, but he never attended a graduation ceremony. His diploma was mailed to his mother in Benson, and years later it still hung on her living room wall. Surprisingly, he kept his word to Susan. He didn’t bother her any more while she was at St. Thomas. She received her master’s degree in the spring of 1987 and went to work in the marketing department of a professional soccer team in Fort Lauderdale. That fall, she called her former roommate, Ellen, at St. Thomas to see how things were going.
“You’ll never believe who showed up on campus yesterday,” Ellen said.
“Who?” Susan asked.
“Pernell.”
That night, Susan wrote a strongly worded letter to Pernell reaffirming her demand that he never attempt to visit her again. Although they continued to speak occasionally on the phone, Susan would see Pernell just once more.
During a visit home late in 1987, she ran into him in a shopping center parking lot. Pernell pulled the Datsun alongside Susan’s car and they talked through open driver’s side windows, neither getting out.
Pernell told her that he’d bought a dog, but Susan revealed little about her li
fe. They said good-bye and drove off in different directions. Afterward, Susan called Greensboro lawyer Pella Stokes, a former football player at Guilford College, and asked him to contact Pernell about returning the Datsun. Stokes suggested to Pernell that Susan was willing to take him to court over the matter. Two days later, the Datsun was left in her mother’s driveway in Winston-Salem with a note under the windshield wiper.
“Here’s your old car,” Pernell had written. “I don’t need it anymore. I’ve got a new sports car.”
15.
The Champion
AFTER GETTING HIS DEGREE, Pernell had remained in Greensboro. He found a job selling athletic shoes in an outlet store in Greensboro’s Cotton Mill Square and continued to haunt his old college hangouts. Still committed to one steroid cycle after the other, he spent his evenings becoming bigger and more powerful, stronger than he’d ever been as a football player.
He left the health club where he had trained for years and moved to a gym known for its emphasis on competitive lifting.
“This was a hard-core gym,” Pernell remembered. “Anything goes.”
He occasionally introduced himself to people at the gym as a former Cleveland Browns football player.
During his junior year at Guilford, Pernell and Joey Monsay, another football player, had entered a lifting competition at Rehobeth Beach, Delaware, and Pernell had finished seventh. Now he began to train for serious competition.
For two hours five days a week, Pernell stuck to his routine: Monday was for bench presses, Tuesday for squats, Wednesday for accessory work, Thursday for bench presses again, Friday for deadlifts. His diet, he later would boast, consisted of proteins, carbohydrates and steroids.
Pernell used his best lifts as a college senior as his bench mark. In 1984, he had succeeded at 425 pounds on the bench press and had set a record for defensive backs at the college with a squat of 630 pounds.
He matched that squat twice in 1986 competitions, first in Winston-Salem, again at the Greensboro YMCA. He had bench presses of 435 pounds and 415 pounds, winning that title on both occasions.
Pernell’s former teammate Lamar Boykin had taken a job with a paper company and moved to Virginia Beach. Pernell had been visiting him regularly and began entering weightlifting competitions in the Tidewater area, where by 1987 he was becoming known as an accomplished power lifter. He won one bench lift competition with a dozen repetitions at the 315-pound weight and then had a stunning victory at a fitness center in Virginia Beach with a bench press of 445 pounds and a squat of 705, both records.
Impressed by his own success, Pernell now decided to move up a level competitively and entered the North Carolina Powerlifting Championships held in Charlotte in September 1987.
“The competition was so intense that on my first squat of more than 500 pounds, blood came from the pores on my forehead,” he said.
He was named the novice state champion in the 198-pound class, but that turned out to be his last big success in competition.
“It was okay to be a champion,” he said years later. “But I thought this type of full power training was too stressful. I didn’t take it seriously after that.”
At work, Pernell had become friends with an attractive young woman named Judi,* who worked in another store at Cotton Mill Square, and they soon began dating. Like all of Pernell’s girlfriends since he had entered college, Judi was white. Pernell occasionally took her with him to spend evenings at the home of his college coach Tommy Saunders and his wife Betty.
It didn’t take long for Judi’s relationship with Pernell to fall into a familiar routine of verbal abuse and violence, but for the first time, Saunders became aware of this side of Pernell’s character. Judi began to confide in Saunders and his wife and they were startled by her revelations. In college, Pernell had babysat with their children, and he still seemed like a son to them.
“He was playing games with Judi,” Tommy remembered. “Most of the time, he knew where she was and what she was doing. Today we’d call it stalking.”
One night late in the summer of 1987, Judi called the Saunders home distraught.
“She was hysterical,” Tommy said. “She said that Pernell was outside her apartment waiting for her and she was scared to death.”
Saunders drove to her apartment and searched the parking lot for Pernell or his car. Seeing no sign of him, he took Judi back to his house and she remained there two days, too frightened to leave.
Shortly before Christmas, Judi again called the Saunders home. She was even more frightened than before. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “He’s scaring me and I can’t get away from him. I have nowhere to go.”
This time, she remained with the Saunders for three days. Pernell never thought to look for her there.
“She called me one other night,” Tommy recalled years later, “and I went over and found that her apartment had been broken into. Pernell had kicked the door down to get in and had taken all the trophies he had left there and a lot of other stuff.”
This time Tommy called Pernell at work.
“We’ve got to talk,” he said pointedly.
When they met that evening, Saunders said, “Pernell, I’ve got something to say to you and I want you to listen. You need to get away from Greensboro and Guilford College. You’re not a college kid any more. You don’t need to be hanging around the campus. You’re still living in the past. You’re still trying to be somebody’s hero. That’s over. Your football days are gone. You need to accept that and move on, go somewhere and get started on your life. Find something to do.”
Then he brought up Judi, warning Pernell about bothering her. Pernell was startled that he knew about it.
“When I started talking to him about Judi,” Saunders recalled, “Pernell started backing off in a big way.”
Clearly, Pernell did not want to discuss his relationship with Judi, and he soon stopped coming to the Saunders house. He didn’t stop bothering Judi, however, and on Valentine’s Day, 1988, she swore out a warrant charging him with aggravated assault. The case was later dismissed, primarily, Pernell later claimed, because Judi had filed similar charges against two other men in the past.
By the time the charges were dropped in March, Pernell had taken Saunders’ advice and left Greensboro. Later, he claimed that Judi got his number from a friend, called and begged to see him again, and they met at a Burger King in South Hill, Virginia. “We ended up staying the night at a local motel,” he said. “Then we went our separate ways.”
Judi later married and moved to Atlanta. She made friends in Greensboro swear to keep her new name and address secret. She never wanted Pernell to be able to find her again.
Pernell had moved in with his friend Lamar in Virginia Beach. He also had renewed acquaintance with Mike Reardon, the former Guilford College running back with whom he once had gotten into a fight on the practice field in Greensboro. Reardon had become an officer in the K-9 section of the Norfolk Police Department and worked out regularly at a fitness center to keep in shape. He told Pernell about an opening there for a trainer, and he was pleased when Pernell landed the job.
16.
“Looking Good, Baby Girl”
DENISE HAD STARTED WORKING out with Jeannie and Jeannie’s new friend, Mike Reardon, and she was there the night Mike introduced Jeannie to Pernell Jefferson.
Mike had described Pernell on the way to the center that evening. “He’s a body builder,” Mike had said. “And he’s got a body most people would kill for.”
Denise thought that Mike’s description was apt. Pernell stood almost six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds. Jeannie looked tiny beside him. Pernell was well groomed, Denise noted, and his bronze skin seemed to glow. His arms and shoulders bulged from beneath his knit tank-top shirt, and his snug knit shorts showed off his well-developed legs. He moved gracefully, and when he squatted to instruct Jeannie, the large muscles in his upper thigh flexed in an interesting manner. Denise knew that Jeannie would notice that. Sh
e never failed to notice such things.
“Jeannie always went for the Mister America types,” Denise said years later, “and Pernell was certainly built like a Mister America.”
Jeannie was so taken with Pernell that she failed to introduce him to Denise until they were halfway through her training session. “He was very pleasant, very nice,” Denise recalled. “He seemed well-educated, well-mannered, and he was really built.”
Jeannie talked about Pernell a lot after that first night. She believed that he was going to transform her body, and in coming weeks she looked forward to her training sessions with increasing eagerness. Even when Mike couldn’t go, she was always there, and Denise was usually with her. Denise always worked out nearby, close enough to hear that Pernell increasingly raised his voice at Jeannie, especially if Jeannie spoke during a lift.
“I thought he was like a drill sergeant,” Denise said later. “He wanted things done exactly his way; he wanted perfect silence except for the sound of the weights, and he was a taskmaster. I just didn’t think that sort of intimidation was necessary.”
Such treatment was in marked contrast to Mike’s gentle manner when he had tried to instruct Jeannie, but she didn’t seem to mind. Within a month, Denise had begun thinking of Pernell as mean-spirited, demanding, a prejudicial tyrant.
“C’mon, Baby Girl,” he would say, pushing her. “You can do it, Baby Girl. Make it hurt, Baby Girl! Looking good, Baby Girl!”
Though Jeannie seemed not to mind being called “Baby Girl,” Denise came to hate the expression. To her, it was the ultimate male putdown of women, machismo at its chauvinistic worst. But Jeannie didn’t mind it at all.
The more she saw of Pernell, the more Denise disliked him. She thought he was phony. “The first clue was that he kept telling people he had been a big time football player,” she said. “He kept talking about all he was and all he had. He kept telling people he had played for the Cleveland Browns, and he told Jeannie he had checks from the NFL he hadn’t even cashed yet.
Deadly Goals Page 12
