AINJIL: Talking about
the night that everything happened,
sometimes it feels like it happened so long ago.
And sometimes it feels
like it happened to somebody else.
[distant, indistinct screaming]
But most days,
it feels like it just happened yesterday.
Real evil absolutely exists.
The worst kind of evil is when it comes from somebody
you thought you could trust.
So you're asking me if
I think that
William is evil?
I think he's the definition of it.
I had sustained eight gunshot wounds from an AK-47.
The areas in which I was shot
was two in the right leg, upper thigh,
two in the left leg, also upper thigh,
one in the groin area,
one in my left arm, upper left arm,
one in my chest,
and one in my right hand.
I don't think he anticipated that I would survive.
The loss lives in you like a scream you can't scream,
all the time.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
-[knock at door] -[creaking]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[water dripping]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
I don't need to look at that.
I've seen that photo enough times to where it's
ingrained and burned in my memory.
I think a lot of people might look at the photo
and say like, "Oh yeah, how do you not know that guy's crazy?
He looks crazy," like yeah, he's acting crazy.
That's what he wants you to see.
That's all part of
the manipulation that, you know, he got very good at.
It's worked for him in the past -- it absolutely has.
It worked on me.
He was -- seemed like he had plans in life
and things that he wanted and things that
he wanted to achieve.
It paints a picture.
And I think that was something that he was always really good
at, was showing you what you wanted to see and not
necessarily who he really was.
I hate him so much,
I don't ever want to admit that I cared.
So I don't like talking about it.
I don't like acknowledging
that there was ever a moment in my life
that I wanted to be with him.
So back in 2003, I was living in Las Vegas,
and I was in my early 20s
and pursuing a career in tattooing.
Things were starting to go in a direction where I was really
starting to make it on my own.
My roommate at the time had met William out at a party and had
invited him back to our apartment.
My initial impression of him when my roommate introduced me
to him was that he was very good-looking.
-It's nice to meet you. -You too.
I think a lot of what kind of spurred my interest in him
in the beginning was, you know, we -- it did really
feel like we had a lot in common.
He was actually quite artistically talented, as well.
So there was a lot of things to talk about that were familiar
and easy to talk about.
I learned really quickly that he was in the Navy.
He was in Las Vegas visiting family while he was on leave.
We had a conversation about his application
to join the Navy.
There was a question on the application form that
asked, why do you want to join the Navy?
He told me that he wrote, um,
"Because I want to kill people."
And he turned that application back over to the recruiter,
and I believe the recruiter read his answer and kind of looked
at him and said, "Well, you joined the wrong branch."
He kind of played it off like it was a joke, like, well,
I didn't know what else to say. It seemed funny to him.
Back then, I just kind of laughed it off,
despite the fact that it was kind of uncomfortable to hear.
It didn't feel particularly funny to me.
But, you know, looking back on it now,
I know it wasn't a joke.
I think he meant it. I know he meant it.
I don't think I was necessarily thinking about,
you know, the real meat of what comes with a marriage.
When you're 20-something years old, you know, I think you've
got it in your head that I've got complete control
of my life -- I was very naive.
I was excited that, you know, I had the opportunity to see
him more often and build this relationship, you know?
You know, I said...
"Yes," I mean,
what's the worst that could happen?
It was only really a few weeks after I had gone out
and visited him in Jacksonville that he calls me up, and he was
like, "Hey, I'm on my way back to Vegas.
I got discharged."
I was like, "Well, how did that happen?"
And he said, "I told 'em that I was hallucinating and that I had
"spiders crawling on my arm.
"So I grabbed a razor blade and I cut up my arms,
you know, so that they would think I was crazy."
AS AINJIL: What are you talking about?
AINJIL: And I remember being, like,
shocked, like just absolutely shocked
that he was able to
so effortlessly deceive the military.
I'll see you soon.
AINJIL: I think he knew what sounded crazy.
I think he knew if I play at this character, it's so off
the wall, people are gonna think I'm out of my mind.
And I found out, you know, that it was
a routine that he was very good at.
He lied as easily as he told the truth,
which made him very believable.
Looking back on all of it now,
these extremes that he went to, to get out of his commitment to
the military and to come back and be with me,
it's a huge warning sign, that degree of obsession.
As soon as he got back, I mean,
we were just thrown into
chaos with his behavior.
It was literally that very night, he got arrested
for his first DUI.
All of a sudden, we're having to help him out of
this situation that he's put himself in.
Now he needs to get out of jail.
You just got back, and now I feel, like,
this immense sense of responsibility to
take care of you, to babysit you.
And now he's likely not gonna have means to travel,
you know, even to and from work.
In my head, I kind of convinced myself that it might be hard
for a couple of months, but, you know,
eventually he'll get the swing of things.
We'll find some way of making it work out.
Come on. Let's get you home.
I hoped that there was some part of him that was somewhat
capable of being the person that I had originally met,
that seemed so well put together
and with a lot going for him.
I think I...
really desperately wanted
other people to see whatever it was that
I saw in the beginning.
So one evening, I come home from work,
and I'm made aware of
the fact that, at some point, he had decided that it would be
a good idea to try and break into
an apartment at the complex.
And he somehow obtained and used a chainsaw
to try and cut down the door.
I don't even know how somebody gets it
into their head that they're --
maybe that they're gonna break in somewhere,
but to do so with a chainsaw?
After the arrest, the charges were officially
malicious destruction of property.
When he got out, and we finally had the opportunity
to actually talk about what happened,
it was the same excuse that I had heard,
like, a million times.
"I was [bleep] up, I was high, I was drunk."
AS AINJIL: That is not an excuse.
He was very good at convincing me of that, like that it wasn't
his fault, because he was drunk or he was on drugs
or because he couldn't remember.
I needed to be more
understanding or empathetic.
As ridiculous and stupid
as the whole scenario was,
and as foreboding as it ended up being,
I had no reason to think that
any kind of incident involving a chainsaw
was ever gonna happen again.
At the time, I had a cat.
So on the last trip back to our old apartment,
me and my sister had gone back to pick up Monkey, my cat.
And we went in, and she didn't come out.
And so we're looking around for her, and we don't see her.
And slowly, we're starting to realize her stuff isn't here,
like her litter box, her cat bowl, her toys.
We decided, well, we're gonna make some
flyers really quick.
We'll put them up around the apartment complex.
We never got a phone call. We never heard anything.
When my cat went missing, it was devastating.
I loved that cat very much.
She was, um... [short laugh]
She was my first best friend when I was, uh --
when I moved out here.
Sometime later, in the course of yet another massive argument
that he and I were in the middle of...
There's so much wrong here!
...in the exchange of saying hurtful, awful things
to each other, he fires at me,
"I took your cat out into the desert, and I shot her.
"And then I went, and I grabbed all of her things,
and I threw it in the dumpster."
And, you know, in the moment, I --
I really thought, what an awful thing to say to me.
I didn't believe it.
Why would you say something like that to me?
You are sick!
AINJIL: Like, I really thought that he was
trying to say something to me
that was so cruel and mean that he knew
would just absolutely break my heart
instead of focusing on, wait, did --
did you really do this?
I didn't really become convinced that this is what
happened to the cat until after everything happened.
That was the sign.
That moment was a sign that, you know, that I had missed,
exactly how cruel and heartless
and monstrous he really was.
So one evening, I was in bed.
I believe it was around midnight or so.
And, you know, William had come home and pretty much walked
straight into the house, up the stairs,
and crawled directly into bed.
And I don't think it was more than really a few moments later
that I hear a knock at the door.
[knocking noises]
So I get up and answer the door,
and I'm face-to-face with a police officer.
I knew immediately that that officer was there for him.
They were investigating a break-in at a couple of
townhouses down from ours.
He had tried to break into the house by
shattering the glass door.
The woman who lived there was
a young lady, like, living by herself.
And I believe she had managed to call the police.
And that had ultimately scared him off.
So obviously, they wanted to speak to him.
He said that he was drunk.
AS WILLIAM: Sorry, officers, I've been drinking a bit.
And he didn't remember what house was ours.
And he thought it was locked, so he just broke
the back glass door.
And I remember thinking, that's ridiculous.
It never made any sense to me.
Am I under arrest?
AINJIL: He didn't come home drunk.
He kind of came into the house almost like
running in to hide.
And they arrested him and took him right then and there.
[handcuffs clicking]
But I knew he was lying, but I wasn't there.
I couldn't prove otherwise.
I just knew that it wasn't the truth.
I believe that he knew exactly what he was doing,
and he went there for a purpose.
What that purpose was, I couldn't say,
but I guarantee that it was...
it was nothing good and likely could have been a lot worse.
Once I knew that he had been arrested again,
I was done, I was over it.
It was never gonna change.
I didn't know how long it was gonna take,
but my real intentions
were to start to prepare myself to leave.
I started spending more time with my coworkers,
and during that time,
I had met Jonathan Lestelle,
whom we called Caine.
We all had so much in common with him.
You know, he grew up kind of a misfit kid the same
way we all did, he loved Halloween.
Obviously, it's my favorite holiday.
And before very long, we definitely got very personal
about the state of our marriages.
He was very unhappy in his marriage, as was I.
His situation in his marriage was quite different.
He did have a young son.
I would try and be a friend and give him advice.
And, you know, he would do the same for me.
At some point, I remember thinking something was up.
He was a little quiet.
He looked at me and said, "I have something
I gotta tell you, and I don't know how to say it."
I said, "Well, if you're having a hard time saying it,
like, we can text it."
So picked up his phone and sent me a text.
And I picked up my phone, and the text I got
from him said,
"I'm in love with you."
And I remember taking a moment,
looking at him and telling him,
"I'm in love with you, too."
He kind of looked at me with real seriousness,
and, uh...
said, "What are we going to do?"
And we decided together that we knew that we needed to tell
our significant others that
we no longer wanted to be in the marriage,
and, um, that we weren't going to move
forward with anything between the two of us
until we had done so.
I was going through like a hundred different scenarios
and a hundred different sentences
to try and start the conversation.
As I'm sitting there, he took me
completely by surprise
and turned to me and said, "I have something that
I wanna talk to you about."
And he said to me, you know, "I felt for a really long time
that the spark of our marriage has been dwindling."
I have to say I am really unhappy,
and I don't think this is working.
And I remember nodding my head and saying, "Okay,
I feel the same."
And at the exact moment that I'm sitting there thinking,
like, I want out, how do I tell him I want out?
He tells me he wants out.
Give me a few days to get my stuff out of the house,
and it's all yours.
Our ultimate breakup was just -- it was so...
easy, it was really
more of a perfect scenario than I could have hoped for.
And I really had no reason to think
that he wasn't being sincere.
This is a photo of Caine.
Actually, my favorite photo, in fact.
He was an amazing friend and an incredible person
just all around -- very gifted,
artistic, adventurous, talented -- very talented.
People talk about, you know, fairytale love stories,
and we really were living that.
Maybe that's why everything was so --
so magical throughout our time together, because it was --
it was nothing like what I knew.
It was like I'd known him all my life.
In July of 2008
we found out we were expecting.
As happy as we were to find out that we were pregnant, we were
also very nervous, because the reality set in.
It was only gonna be a matter of
of a couple of months, maybe, before I started to show.
Not long after finding out, I got a call from William.
And I picked up the phone and I said, "Hello."
And he said, "Are you pregnant?" And I said, "Yes."
Almost right away, he started harassing and being
aggressive and just cruel over the phone.
AS WILLIAM: I will destroy him
and everything you built!
AINJIL: I think one of the things that hurt
the absolute worst was that it was all
he can do to keep
from coming down and shooting me in the stomach.
I was very shocked.
I didn't expect him to
really, um, lash out the way that he did.
You will regret this.
I really, kind of, resolved myself to the idea
that he's just saying these hurtful things to be hurtful.
I never thought for a second that he was being literal.
This is a photo of Caine and me.
This was our first Halloween together.
We were in the best place.
We both actually wanted to go as Freddy Krueger.
Caine had
just gotten his divorce granted.
Everything was moving forward exactly how
we had intended it to -- the next step was to
start the process for my divorce.
I was definitely starting to show here.
This photo was taken
just maybe just over 48 hours
before our whole world changed.
We had no idea.
There weren't gonna be any more photos after this.
Shortly before Halloween, I get a call from William.
[phone ringing]
And, you know, it was a --
it was a very friendly phone call.
"Hey, how are you doing?
I just wanted to call and wish you a happy Halloween."
I don't recall being particularly concerned with
the fact that he was really asking a lot of questions.
Everything he needed to know to do what he did,
the information that he needed, he got out of that phone call.
By the Halloween weekend, I was 18 weeks along.
The baby had started kicking and had started moving.
After having dinner and winding down with
a movie, we decided to, uh, go to bed.
And a few seconds later, we started to hear
what sounded like power tools -[chainsaw revving]
in the hallway outside of our apartment.
[chainsaw revving]
So we -- we jumped out of bed
and went to go -- went to go investigate.
We saw...we saw a chainsaw coming through the door.
I remember him telling me to call 911.
And Caine yelled out, "Who the [bleep] is there?"
I didn't know what to do.
And he came towards me, and...
[heavy exhale]
And as...
as a bullet started coming into our apartment,
he tried to push me out of the way.
[audio recording, Ainjil screaming]
As I was falling back,
I just remember feeling like I was being punched
all over my body
before hitting the ground. -[gunshots popping]
And I remember the...
the bullet fire just kept coming.
[gunshots blasting]
And then...
And then it was so quiet.
And I remember laying there
with my head to the side
and...
smelling what smelled like fireworks.
Like...
like two dozen fireworks
had just been let off in our apartment.
And I remember feeling very warm
and...
very tired.
And I -- I just wanted to close my eyes,
and I wanted to fall asleep.
And I realized that I had...
I had called 911, and I didn't know
where my phone was, but I was --
I was still on the line, somebody was still on the line.
So it was all I could do to try calling back out to her,
letting her know that I was there.
And she stayed on the phone with me
until I could hear the sirens making
their way to our apartment.
And I remember
the paramedics coming in, and the whole time,
all I could think was, uh,
[sniffles]
they're here, somebody's here, we're gonna be okay.
It's okay. We're gonna be okay.
And I remember a detective said
that witnesses had seen a red Honda Civic
leaving the parking lot.
And I knew -- I knew right then and there.
I said, like, "My God,
"it's...
it's my ex-husband."
I think I woke up the next morning,
and there was a nurse there.
And I, uh -- I said,
"Wait, you have to tell me
"where...
"where my fiance is.
He would have come in with me."
And she said, uh...
She said, "Baby, nobody came in with you.
It's just you."
And I knew that meant that Caine was dead.
I said, "Well, then, you -- you have to get the doctor,
"because I'm pregnant.
We need to check on the baby."
I named him Shadow.
This is the first and only series
of sonograms that we got of Shadow.
I was so excited to bring these photos home and show him,
like, I -- we can actually see the baby.
We were really super proud of what, um...
of what we were gonna have together.
The doctor, she was like,
"Don't -- don't try to get up, don't move."
I know now that she knew
that...
the baby hadn't made it.
But I think it was really all she could do for me to...
to nod her head and bring in the ultrasound machine
and... and show me that
he was there,
but there was no heartbeat.
And, uh...
just like that, I lost my whole family.
William murdered my child.
Waking up
to finding out that you were
more alone than you've ever been in your entire life,
I don't think that feeling ever really leaves.
Once they felt that I was healed enough, I was gonna have
to go into the maternity ward, and they were gonna have
to induce labor.
So the doctor came in
and told me to start pushing,
and it was very quick.
So when the baby came out, uh,
they, uh...
you know, they let me hold him,
and...
I, uh, I remember holding him,
and, um...
you know, rolling his little hand between my fingers.
He was truly perfect,
and, um...
you know, he was -- he was a baby.
And then as soon as I had him, they were taking him away,
because he was evidence.
Our baby was evidence.
And that was -- that was the last time I got to see him.
After that, it wasn't over.
And I struggle with how to say this,
but, um, I -- I pushed out a bullet.
And I can still feel the exact moment of the metal rolling
against my thigh -- that was the bullet that --
that ultimately killed our child.
They had charged him with attempted murder,
felony battery with a deadly weapon,
murder, and murder of an unborn quick child.
I learned from the detectives what had happened.
He had... obviously come to our home
in the middle of the night and, um...
had, as we knew,
had attempted to saw through
the door with the chainsaw.
Our door handle to the apartment was shot off,
and he was firing through the hole of the door handle
into the apartment, really just, uh...
just spraying the apartment.
Everybody agrees that the catalyst was finding out
that I was pregnant.
I truly believe that he left there that night thinking that
he had killed all of us.
I don't think he anticipated
that I would survive and that
I would be alive to point the finger.
There's no execution date.
Until that time, it's never gonna be over.
And until that time, there's always gonna be
a huge part of me that -- that...
is angry and -- and afraid.
I don't think that I will ever really have a moment of peace
with this until I know that he is not breathing the same
air that I breathe.
To this day, there's still a lot of lingering scars.
Some of them are quite visible, and some of them are invisible.
So you're asking me if
I think that
William is evil.
I think he's the definition of it.
My life today, I...
I can say with all sincerity, is -- it's really beautiful.
I'm -- I really am very lucky
to be where I'm at today, to meet
somebody that I love,
and to
be married with a family.
He took everything from me,
but I got a lot of it back.
Different, but I'm really happy
to be so fortunate, truly.
♪
That's the eyes of evil right there.
He murdered the two people in the world
that trusted him the most.
Knowing that if I said something
maybe they still would be here.
That was really hard.
It would tough.