Drugs put slaying victims out of their families' reach
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Oregonian
newspaper:
Drugs put slaying victims out of their families' reach
The three women found dead in Forest Park had relatives nearby, but
mental
illness and addiction pulled the women to the streets
Monday, June 14, 1999
By DAVID R. ANDERSON, MAXINE BERNSTEIN and ROBIN FRANZEN of The
Oregonian staff
Lilla Faye Moler, Stephanie Lynn Russell and Alexandria Nicole Ison were
not
alone in this world. Their families lived minutes away, ready with a
place to
stay, help getting into treatment, whatever they could provide.
Yet the women seemed miles beyond their reach.
As heroin addicts, they were pulled to Burnside Street. To get their
next fix,
they jeopardized their safety, using their bodies to earn cash. All of
them
apparently struggled with manic-depression and low self-esteem. And all
were
found strangled in Forest Park, victims of a suspected serial killer.
It's uncertain what role, if any, the victims' hard lifestyles played in
their
violent deaths. But as heroin addicts with mental illnesses, they were
part of
a group experts consider dangerously vulnerable: impulsive in their need
for
love and drugs, unable or unwilling to accept lasting help, ready to
trust
people they shouldn't.
"They're sensation-seeking, and their risk-taking is related to their
drugs,"
said Katie Evans, a drug and alcohol counselor in Beaverton who has
treated
hundreds of women with both drug addiction and mental illness. "When
they're
using, they're going down the road at 100 mph with no brakes."
But even with their intense problems, these women were precious souls to
the
families who tried to stop the skid.
Moler wrote gospel music and bought her 10-year-old son perfect
Christmas gifts
last year, a remote-controlled car and jeans with the exact pockets he
wanted.
Russell had a bubbly personality, loved her children and opened up
easily to
people, even those she didn't know well. She liked to laugh.
Ison, known on the street as Tomorrow, charmed those she met with her
silly
antics, empathy for others, love of animals such as her pet rat, and her
paintings, poems and songs.
On May 7, Moler, 28, was found in the park. The next day, searchers
found
Russell, 26, nearby. On June 2, hikers found Ison, 17, about a
quarter-mile
from the others.
For Russell's parents, the news came at a point when they thought
Stephanie was
out of any real danger. For the other families, it confirmed their worst
fears.
Said Louis Moler, Lilla's stepfather: "We just kept waiting for a phone
call."
It's difficult to imagine Lilla Moler's bleak future based on her
childhood.
She grew up in Eugene as one of 10 children. The family raised rabbits
and had
pigs, chickens, a couple of horses and a milk cow. Moler could read and
write
before she started school.
But her family's history worked against her. Moler's mother and other
relatives
were alcoholics.
Her siblings also struggled with substance abuse.
Valerie Martin, the fourth-youngest sibling, is winning a battle against
methamphetamine.
"There's just a pain inside of us, and I don't know if we know where it
comes
from, but it never goes away," she said.
When Lilla was about 10, the family moved to Clarkia, Idaho, where Louis
Moler
had bought a bar. Lilla was a cheerleader and a basketball player. If
she could
have been a cheerleader at her own basketball games, she would have
practically
been in heaven.
She also liked drawing, especially women's hands.
As an adolescent, Moler started cutting her arms with knives. She was
diagnosed
as manic-depressive and was prescribed lithium, but she stopped taking
it.
About the same time, when she was 13, Moler started drinking with
friends.
Once, she drank about a fifth of vodka, overdosed and was taken to the
hospital. Louis Moler remembers going to a lot of counseling sessions,
but
Lilla would show up only when she felt like it.
The family moved to Cornelius when Moler was about 15, but she was
already
adrift. On a Greyhound from Spokane to Portland, Moler met Jose. He
introduced
her to speedballs, a combination of cocaine and heroin. She was 16.
When she was 18, Moler got pregnant, but she was still on the streets
doing
drugs. One of her older sisters spent six hours looking for her in
downtown
Portland. She found Moler and set her and Jose up in her Gresham home.
Baby Josh celebrated his first birthday in a halfway house in Milwaukie.
Moler
held down a fast-food job. Still, she used drugs.
"At that point, it was a lifestyle, a choice that she couldn't make,"
said Lisa
Moler, the youngest of the siblings.
When Josh was about 2, Lilla Moler entered the first of many
drug-treatment
programs in Forest Grove at her mother's urging.
"She went through so many places," Lisa Moler said.
She would stay clean for a while, once as long as about two years. She
worked
regular jobs, selling house siding over the telephone for Sears and
running a
hot dog cart. Two years ago, she moved to Tillamook and stayed in a
Christian
halfway house. She worked at the Thriftway and wrote gospel songs.
"Love lights the way from me to you May I learn to love me, as You do!
Mercy
and love shall see us through!"
But she always fell back into drugs, unable to realize the hope of her
hymn.
"It's like she sabotaged herself," Lisa Moler said.
She often ended up in jail on drug and prostitution charges. In 1995,
her
family had to tell her through a little glass window at Inverness Jail
that her
mother had died. She wasn't allowed out for the funeral.
Lilla Moler allowed Lisa to adopt Josh about three years ago. But Moler
would
remain beyond her family's help. The more she used drugs, the more she
was
ashamed and the less contact she had with her family, calling once every
month
or two.
"If Lilla wasn't ready to be helped," Lisa Moler said, "you couldn't
help her."
"She had no self-esteem. She was a real pretty girl, but she didn't even
know
that."
That's how Denise Douglas will remember Stephanie Lynn Russell, the
woman
jailed with her on drug charges two years ago. She will also remember
how quiet
Russell could be -- until she got mad -- and how her temper seemed to be
ignited by a yearning for the children she left in Utah with their
father.
"She was trying to stay clean long enough to see them," Douglas said.
Russell's family agrees she was a loving mother. But family members are
reluctant to dwell on the factors that led her to drugs, offering only a
sketchy picture: Born in Little Rock, Ark., as a child she moved to
Tigard,
where she attended middle and high school. Later, an obituary said, she
graduated from high school in Phoenix, though some family members
dispute that.
Somewhere along the line, her parents divorced, scattering her life in a
way
that friends say would become the norm.
In court records, Russell's sister, Tina, said Russell was diagnosed
with
manic-depression, though other relatives say they knew of no such
illness.
With drugs added to the mix, her troubles grew. Russell's stepmother,
Diane
Russell, who first met Stephanie as a 20-year-old, thinks she probably
began
taking them as a young woman in a bad marriage. Douglas said Stephanie
told her
she started in her teens. "It was her demon and her savior," she said.
After returning to Portland several years ago, Russell began hanging out
in Old
Town with a group of regulars. They became like family -- something she
craved,
said Stephanie Banka, co-founder of Rose Haven, a center for homeless
women.
She was popular for her willingness to share drugs and her humor. "She
could
joke in times of hard trouble -- she was notorious for that," Banka
said. Her
life was almost mainstream. She kept ties to her father and stepmom. And
though
she moved around, she always had a place, clothes and enough money to
get by.
And to buy drugs.
That was despite years without steady work. The only known jobs she had
were as
a cleaner at Northwest Portland's Trevor Arms apartments, where she
lived last
year; as a factory worker shortly before her death; and for two years as
a
dancer for the Pretty Girls Agency, 1995 court records show.
It was a life littered with wreckage. Trevor Arms residents remember how
destroyed Russell's place was when she moved out and tell of a brawl
between
Russell and her boyfriend last October. In a police report, she accused
the
boyfriend of trying to strangle her before hiding in a neighbor's
bathroom.
"When police arrived, they went into the bathroom," said neighbor Daniel
Sweet,
"and she was sitting there, firing up."
Twice in the past two years, Russell had sought drug treatment.
But former downtown Portland neighbor Sam Condron, who said Russell told
him
about her previous job as an exotic dancer, saw evidence of drug use
this year.
Still using speed and pot, he said, "she was awake 23 hours a day."
Her parents last saw her in early May, the morning after she finished a
third
detox program. She was clean and appeared to be excited about the
future.
"She asked me, 'Aren't you proud of me, Mom?' " Diane Russell recalled.
"I
think she was proud of herself."
Then she told her parents she was leaving for her Forest Grove
apartment. They
never saw her again.
"She was going to be reunited with her children this summer," Diane
Russell
said. "She was planning to be married. It was supposed to be the
beginning of a
whole new life."
Alexandria Ison told friends she wanted to be famous.
She dreamed of being an actress, an artist, a singer.
Yet an unstable childhood, mental illness, a drug addiction and her
craving for
adventure pushed her into a risky street existence. Now her name is
known, but
for all the wrong reasons.
Alex was born in Portland, and at age 2 was placed in foster care. Her
father
was in prison; her mother was in recovery from a drug and alcohol
problem.
Two years later, she returned to her mother's care. She was 5 when her
parents
divorced. Ison attended grade school but never made it to middle school.
At age 12, she started skipping school, running away from home and
forging
friendships with street kids in downtown Portland. She experimented with
alcohol.
A year later, she turned to marijuana and LSD, her mother said.
Her mom described her as a "free spirit" she couldn't rein in.
"She was just so hyper, impulsive," Susan Ison said. "I did everything I
could
to try to keep her from going downtown, but I had no control."
Susan Ison placed her daughter in the care of the state children's
welfare
agency, which referred her to the Rosemont School, a residential
treatment
school. She stayed nine months and received mental-health and sexual
abuse
counseling. Counselors say she was an energetic, endearing girl who
expressed
her feelings through painting and poetry.
And she boasted of friends on the street, rattling off a list of 50 kids
she
knew by their street names. Something always drew her back to them.
When she was 13, police in Tacoma picked her up, high on LSD, head
shaved,
hitchhiking with a 19-year-old man. Ison held a sign: "Free Pot for a
Ride."
"She was just too trusting and too willing to take a risk without
thinking
about the dangers of it," counselor Daphne Morrison said.
Back at Rosemont, months later, staff remember her shaking, curled in a
ball on
the floor of her room, in drug withdrawal. She was transferred to a
psychiatric
facility, then to the Oregon State Hospital, where she spent eight
months,
diagnosed as manic-depressive.
"The only way I could keep her safe was to have her locked up," Susan
Ison
said. "There's not many resources for teen-agers, unless they're
involved in
the criminal justice system, or neglected."
Later, she enrolled Alex at The Christie School, another residential
treatment
program. Alex ran from that, too, kicking out a window the day she
turned 16.
Back on the streets, she fell deeper into heroin and cocaine. "I think
she
self-medicated," her mother said. "She told me it calmed her down."
She panhandled and prostituted herself to feed her drug habit.
Throughout, she
kept in contact with her mother by phone.
"She gave me details of her life which broke my heart. I didn't want to
prejudge her because I didn't want to break that trust and connection,"
her
mother said.
Last fall, Ison was twice arrested on drug charges. The day before
Thanksgiving, Portland police arrested her for heroin possession. She
spent two
nights in jail and was let out, despite her mother's pleas to keep her
behind
bars.
"I thought if she got caught up in a criminal act, that would give me
leverage
to get her help," said Susan Ison, a former drug and alcohol counselor
familiar
with services in the city.
"My skills went out the window with my child," she said. "I could have
accepted
her dying from an overdose better than I could this. Because I would
have been
prepared."