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Copyright 1995 The Times Mirror Company
Los Angeles Times
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December 20, 1995, Wednesday, Home Edition
SECTION: Life & Style; Part E; Page 1;
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LENGTH: 2533 words
HEADLINE: NO PLACE TO REST;
THEY WANTED THE CHARM -- AND THE SECURITY
-- OF LIFE IN A SMALL TOWN. BUT IT ALL WENT TRAGICALLY WRONG FOR ROXANNE
ELLIS AND MICHELLE ABDILL, KILLED, PERHAPS, BECAUSE THEY WERE IN LOVE.
BYLINE: By KIM MURPHY, TIMES STAFF WRITER
BODY:
This is a town of grassy
hills dotted with barns, a shopping mall where Sears is the big draw and
a downtown, draped in winter frost and Christmas lights, five blocks long.
No wonder legions of Californians have been driving in over the Siskiyous,
plunking down their savings for a house or a small farm, and staying.
Since Jerry Lausmann moved here in 1942 --
he's been mayor five terms, only one man ever tried to run against him
-- Medford has busted out from a town of 11,500 to more than 55,000.
Five years ago, Roxanne Ellis and Michelle
Abdill left the increasingly uneasy atmosphere of Colorado Springs, Colo.,
where people objected to their lesbian lifestyle, to live in a small town
where merchants in the stores would know who they were and they'd see
faces they knew on the street when they went outside.
It worked. The two women started a successful
property management business and got elected to the board of their church.
They gave lectures at the schools on lesbian lifestyles and appeared on
TV on behalf of local gay rights causes. They bought an old Craftsman-style
house and fixed it up, cooked elaborate Mexican meals from scratch, became
a pair of doting grandmas to Ellis' 3-year-old granddaughter.
They slipped into a friendly network of gay
men and lesbians from places like Los Angeles and San Francisco who had
found that, like much of the rest of America, they wanted a safe and comfortable
place in which to grow old.
Veterans of urban violence sadly will find
little to shock in the finale to their story: The bodies of the two women
were found earlier this month in the back of Ellis' pickup, their hands
and feet bound together with duct tape, each shot twice in the head. But
in Medford, a postcard town suddenly forced to examine its own underbelly,
there is much about the past weeks that has shaken what it imagined about
itself.
Although Robert James Acremant -- the 27-year-old
suspect arrested Dec. 13 in the case -- reportedly said he shot the women
during a robbery attempt, gay rights organizations throughout the country
have demanded a fuller explanation. And Medford itself has had to come
to terms with a growing intolerance toward homosexuality.
The deaths of Ellis, 53, and Abdill, 42,
come at a time when Oregon has narrowly defeated two statewide ballot
measures prohibiting special legal protections for homosexuals -- and
conservative groups have launched new campaigns in Oregon, Washington
and Idaho. Medford and surrounding Jackson County are among the jurisdictions
that approved local anti-gay rights ordinances in 1993, although the measures
have since been tied up in court.
Nationally, gay rights organizations say
the move to limit legal protections for homosexuals has led to a surge
in violence against gay men and lesbians. Anti-gay murders have nearly
doubled in the years since such initiatives emerged in Oregon, Colorado,
Idaho and Maine, and a total of 151 anti-gay murders were reported nationally
from 1992 to 1994, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
"Although a suspect has been apprehended,
much to the relief of all who knew the couple, we as a community have
many unanswered questions and persistent concerns," the task force said
in a statement Thursday. "Like many in the Medford community, our concerns
and suspicions about the motives of this crime cannot be fully assuaged
until we understand the connection between anti-gay prejudice and the
risk of hate crimes against gay people."
The case of Ellis and Abdill has prompted
gay organizations to demand a Justice Department inquiry into the link
between hate crimes and anti-gay ballot initiatives, and it also has drawn
a flood of financial contributions from around the country into Medford,
where the couple's friends are hoping to build a gay community center.
At a memorial service for the two women last
week, Lausmann declared Medford a hate-free city, and city leaders have
launched a series of meetings with the community to determine what that
will mean and how it can be implemented. Flags around the city were flown
at half-staff last week.
"Whatever happens, this case will have had
a lasting effect," Lausmann said in an interview. "There's been a very
slowly growing groundswell of this kind of thing (intolerance). But this
case has brought a lot of understanding between the gay community and
the straight community. There was so much sorrow and revulsion over this
thing that it's just not going to go away."
*
Ellis and Abdill met in Colorado, where Ellis
was working as an obstetrical nurse and Abdill got a job in the same doctor's
office. Ellis was divorced, with two children, but the two women realized
that the bond of friendship between them was growing into something more,
and they committed to each other as lifetime partners.
Wanting to get out of Colorado, they joined
Abdill's mother in Medford, where she had started a real estate school.
Once there, they started their own property management business, hiring
Ellis' daughter Lorri to work in the office.
The two women quickly eased into the community,
becoming outspoken activists in the fight against the two anti-gay rights
initiatives in 1992 and 1994. They appeared on television and at fundamentalist
Christian churches, bringing the message that biblical scripture does
not condemn homosexuals.
"They were tremendously brave in quiet and
unobtrusive ways," recalls friend Laura Hamilton, who came to Medford
from San Francisco a few years ago because of its comfortable, small-town
atmosphere. "They weren't hugely public or anything. But they were eloquent
one on one."
When two friends were dying of AIDS last
year, Abdill and Ellis went to their home daily, bringing meals, changing
bedpans, adjusting IVs and working in the yard.
"I spent a lot of time with that family,
and I never heard any one of them say anything negative. It was always
just a whole lot of love," said Rhonda Loftis, a transplant from Long
Beach. "They complemented each other, their personalities. This is how
I'm going to memorialize them: Michelle was the flame that burns, and
Roxanne was the candle that supported her, and gave her this energy and
fuel to shine."
The two women were frequently seen toting
around Lorri's daughter, Hannah, who called Ellis "grandma" and Abdill
"baba." Cherie Garland, a close friend of the couple whose own two children
are homosexual, made Hannah a T-shirt playing off the booklet often waved
around by anti-gay groups, "Heather Has Two Mommies." The T-shirt Hannah
wears says, "Hannah Has Two Grandmas."
Garland is another immigrant from Southern
California -- from Pomona. She said she has encountered a rising homophobic
sentiment that has been part of the backdrop in Medford. A few years ago,
she and her husband began getting anonymous calls about their son. "Is
that bastard queer son of yours dead yet?" the man said. "Why don't you
take a gun and shoot him?"
"The ignorance is astounding. Absolutely
astonishing," Garland said. "Last night my husband talked to his sister
in Texas. He was explaining to her how wonderful these women were and
why we were grieving. Her response was, 'Well, I hope you're not going
to turn gay.' He was undone. Just undone."
*
The Portland-based Coalition for Human Dignity
has tracked a number of ultraconservative, racist groups operating in
the Medford area, including a chapter of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, Christian
Identity, the Ku Klux Klan and two citizens' militias.
The Oregon Citizens Alliance, the powerful
conservative group that sponsored the two previous anti-gay rights ballot
initiatives and is collecting signatures for a third, has said it has
no connections to any violence against homosexuals. But director Lon Mabon
said sentiment in Oregon is even stronger now in favor of legislation
prohibiting special legal protections based on sexual orientation.
"I think we'll be successful," said Mabon,
noting that last year's initiative fell just short of 49% of the vote.
"I think more people are realizing what we said eight or nine years ago,
that there's an agenda to make normal in American culture certain sexual
behaviors. There are more instances of diversity training, more things
coming to light about multiculturalism, that homosexuality is presented
as normal in AIDS education, and there's nothing in place, nothing in
the law, to stop it."
Medford police say they have no evidence
that the two women's murders were a hate crime, but they are not yet ruling
it out.
"We're going to take it very slowly, not
jumping to any conclusions," said police spokesman Sgt. Mike Moran.
Although Acremant, the suspect, has told
several people that he had simply intended to rob the women, he has also
said it "crossed my mind a couple of times" that they were lesbians. The
families and representatives for the gay community here say the facts
don't fit with a simple robbery, and the authorities admit there are lingering
unanswered questions.
Police believe Ellis made contact with her
killer at 11 a.m. on Dec. 4, when she made an appointment to show a rental
property in northeast Medford. She failed to respond to frequent pages
from her daughter later in the day, and at 4 p.m., Lorri got a vague call
from her mother saying she was going shopping. Lorri was disconcerted;
it wasn't like Ellis to simply go off shopping on a busy day and not respond
to pages.
At 5 p.m., Abdill said she was leaving the
office to go help Ellis, whose car reportedly wouldn't start. No one knows
if the call came from Ellis or someone else. Later, Lorri drove over to
the complex where her mother was going to be showing the apartment and
saw the pickup, but said it pulled away from her as she tried to follow
it.
Neither woman was ever seen alive again.
Ellis' truck with the two bodies in the back of it was found in a parking
lot on the other side of town three days later.
Police now believe Ellis was with the suspect
all afternoon. There was nothing wrong with her car, they said.
After widespread publicity about the case,
a woman who had moved to Medford from California three weeks earlier with
her son phoned a police tip line to say she believed her son, Acremant
-- an MBA graduate from San Francisco's Golden Gate University and an
employee at a trucking company in Los Angeles until May -- might have
committed the murders.
Police contacted authorities in Visalia,
where Acremant had also lived earlier this year, and found he was also
under investigation there in the Oct. 3 disappearance and suspected homicide
of one of his friends. He was tracked down to a Stockton motel room a
week ago and arrested.
In a jailhouse interview with the San Francisco
Examiner in Stockton, Acremant said he tried to rob the women because
of his frustration when he couldn't find another position after quitting
his job at Roadway Trucking in Los Angeles. He said not having money became
"a major stressor," and he broke up with his girlfriend because he didn't
have enough money to visit her in Las Vegas.
He told the newspaper that he planned to
get money from the property management firm by luring Abdill and Ellis
to a vacant apartment. Killing them was simply a sudden impulse, he said,
but he also admitted he knew and didn't like the fact that they were lesbians.
"I don't care for lesbians," he said. "I
couldn't help but think that she's 54 years old and had been dating that
woman for 12 years: Isn't that sick?" He added, "That's someone's grandma,
for God's sake. Could you imagine my grandma a lesbian with another woman?
I couldn't believe that. It crossed my mind a couple times, lesbo grandma,
what a thing, huh?"
In a subsequent interview with the Oregonian,
Acremant said there was a common thread to the killings of the two women
and his friend, Scott George, who police believe Acremant shot before
coming to Oregon. After Acremant told his father where he had hidden George's
body, police Monday morning found a body believed to be his at the bottom
of a mine shaft on the father's ranch outside Stockton.
"You have to know something about pathology,
something about signatures," Acremant told the Oregonian. "The definition
of a mass murder is more than two murders as part of the same act. What
was the act? That's the big question."
Authorities in Tulare County believe Acremant
also burst into the home of a 20-year-old family friend there the day
before his arrest last week, handcuffing her, holding her at gunpoint
and demanding money.
*
Leaders of Medford's gay community say they
still aren't convinced the killing of Abdill and Ellis was simply a robbery.
"We know the killer enacted a deliberate,
calculated process of entrapment. We know the killer wanted both victims.
We know that money and credit cards were left at the scene. We know that
the murderer killed the victims execution-style -- bound at the hands
and feet, gagged and blindfolded before being shot twice in the head at
close range," community leaders said at a news conference last week. "We
want our suspicions to be addressed, and we need our concerns to be laid
to rest so we can move on in peace."
Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. John Bondurant said
he is less inclined than he was to consider the killings a hate crime.
But he also said he does not believe the intent was simply a robbery.
"I can't say for sure, but I personally don't
believe that robbery was the motive," he said. "It may have been part
of it, but there's just too much evidence there that doesn't point to
a robbery. There's no property of theirs that he took. There were purses,
wallets, jewelry, cell phones and money that was not taken. So that to
me does not point to a robbery."
The arrest, meanwhile, has done little to
ease the fears of lesbians in Medford, who wonder whether the small town
haven they longed for is as safe as they believed.
"There's a tremendous sense of fear, and
I don't think it's ended because of this arrest. (Acremant) represents
a faction we all know is in this community and in this country. For me
personally, he's just one of many people out there who mean me harm, and
that's something I go through my day with consciously," Hamilton said.
She added that she often gets "weird looks"
when she pulls into a convenience store, and then realizes it's because
of her bumper sticker, which says, "We Are Everywhere."
"There are people out there who are aggressively
threatened by me driving around with that bumper sticker," she said. "I
came from the Bay Area, where there was more vocalized outrage. Here,
it's more subtle."
Robert Bray, spokesman for the National Gay
and Lesbian Task Force in San Francisco and a friend of Abdill and Ellis,
said the case reflects the kind of problems typical in conservative small
towns.
When the two women moved to Medford, "I remember
wondering why would they do something like that, move to a place like
Medford? But I realized they appreciated those same small-town values
that everybody else does -- a close-knit community, everybody takes care
of each other," he said. "Until the time comes when we know that gay people
can live safely in small towns, then our souls will never rest easily."
GRAPHIC: Photo, Robert James Acremant reportedly
said he shot them during a robbery attempt but gay rights activists are
demanding a fuller explanation. BOB GALBRAITH / Associated Press; Photo,
Dan Abdill and Lorri Ellis, with her daughter, Hannah, grieve at a memorial
service for his sister and her mother, partners in business and in life
who were found slain in the back of a pickup truck. BILL McCLAIN / Mail
Tribune, Medford, Ore.; Photo, Roxanne Ellis, left, and Michelle Abdill,
at top, were found shot in the head earlier this month.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: December 21, 1995
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