Beheading on Mount Baldy

The strange tale of how a man lost his home, his money and his head to the woman he took in

Comments (0) By Paul Ciotti Thursday, May 12 2005

Illustrations by Joel Kimmel

Jack Irwin wasn’t a recluse. He liked people just fine. But he liked them in small doses. For 18 years he lived alone in a small cabin on a steep, rocky slope on Mount Baldy, a mile or two below the ski lift. Raccoons and bears ambled through the brush at night. Squirrels and blue jays scolded each other from the towering fir beside his deck, and on weekends the smell of scorched brake pads came up from the sharp two-lane switchbacks just below his house.

Although Jack was long retired, he never lacked for things to do. He kept his countertops clean and the pencils on his desk sharp. He religiously changed the oil every three months in his beloved 1993 Subaru, even though he’d driven only 60 miles since the last oil change. When work was done, he would sit in a rocker in a sunny corner of his living room, with its sweeping vistas of high snowcapped ridges and the San Gabriel Valley far below, reading the novels of Tom Clancy, Louis L’Amour and John le Carré.

At 71, Jack was quite comfortable financially, thanks to a real estate investment that enabled him to put $234,000 in his savings account. He generally kept another $10,000 around the house and carried a wallet so thick with bills it looked like he had a knot in his rear pants pocket. Despite his money, he was frugal to a fault, never coming close to spending the $722 disability check he received from Social Security each month, his only expenses being $20 a month for his Forest Service lease, another $20 for water, $6 to $9 for electricity, a few bucks for gas, plus whatever minor outlay it took to keep him in peanut butter, Cup-O-Soup and frozen hash-brown potato patties, which Jack would heat up two at a time, spread with ketchup and eat like a sandwich.

As an Army vet, Jack didn’t worry much about creature comforts. He slept on a regulation steel-tube cot with a thin, hard pad. He bought his clothes at thrift stores and wore the same (carefully washed) T-shirts until they were virtually transparent. His cabin was so cold on winter nights that the water froze in the toilet bowl. It wasn’t that Jack was too cheap to buy propane, but he thought the propane man cheated him and thereafter refused on principle to have his tank refilled.

Life at the 5,700-foot level wasn’t easy for someone like Jack. He’d been gravely wounded in the Korean War while working on a helicopter MEDEVAC team: He was smoking a cigarette when he saw what he thought was a brown football flying over a tent. When he woke up (in a hospital in Japan), he discovered he’d been blown up by a hand grenade. Jack was subsequently transferred to military hospitals in Hawaii and San Francisco, where a superior told him they were throwing him out of the Army.

“How come?” said Jack.

“Your eye is funny.” Jack had a wandering eye.

“My eye was funny when you drafted me,” he said.

Before the war, Jack had been a vital, active guy. A picture from the late ’40s shows him in standard hot-rodder attire — black engineer boots, blue jeans and a white T-shirt with a cigarette pack rolled up in the sleeve. He raced hot rods and motorcycles up and down Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard and speedboats around local lakes. But, perhaps as a result of his war injuries, he’d never gotten married. His neighbors on Mount Baldy felt sorry for him. Tom and Sandy Bailey made it a point to invite him to their home for Thanksgiving every year and on Christmas take him out to dinner. At times, just for company, he’d sit for hours in the lobby of a mountain lodge, sipping on a soda.

Jack’s problems went beyond mere loneliness or the lingering effects of war wounds. He also suffered from dystonia, a progressive neurological disorder that began as an uncontrollable nose twitch and ended up as a crippling affliction of his fingers, foot and, most distressingly of all, his vocal cords. Strangers couldn’t understand him. He sounded as if he were trying to talk and gargle at the same time. The doctors inundated him with pills, and then, every time he went to the VA hospital, tried to run another battery of tests. He got so depressed, he once told Tom Bailey, there were times he wanted to die.

He got his wish in a way he never dreamed.

In the winter of 1998-1999, after nearly two decades on the mountain, Jack announced that he was “cold.” He got in his car, drove 10 miles down the mountain, and, for $160,000 cash, bought himself a two-story, four-bedroom house on a neat and comfortable cul-de-sac in Upland. Shortly thereafter, he sold his cabin for $48,000 to two women — Marcia Ann Johnson, a sometime computer programmer with long, blond hair and a hot temper, and her partner, Judy Gellert, a reserved and sober-minded drug counselor at Chino women’s prison.

Perhaps because he was so lonely, Jack offered Marcia and Judy surprisingly generous terms — he would hold the mortgage for them, and they in turn would pay him $582 a month for the next 10 years. As part of the deal, Jack also offered to throw in his washer, dryer and refrigerator. At first Marcia was disdainful — “I don’t want your stuff, old man” — but when she looked in the refrigerator and saw that it contained nothing but peanut butter and Rice Krispies, she felt so bad for Jack that she brought him a roast. “That’s the kind of person I am,” she said. It was only later, Marcia would come to admit, that “I began to wonder how I could use him in my life.”

Actually, the person least likely to know “the kind of person I am” was Marcia herself. Over the years she’d been variously declared to be suffering from “poor” insight, “impaired” judgment, “auditory hallucinations,” “a history of panic” and bipolar manic depression, a cyclical syndrome in which Marcia alternated between feverish activity and suicidal depression.

By Marcia’s own account (as revealed in court records), her childhood was one disaster after another — a “nervous breakdown” at age 10, molestation by the police officer next door at age 13 and poor parenting by what she claimed was her “mentally sick” family all her life. Her mother, she said, “never talked to me. She never said she loved me. She showed me naked to my father.” By her account, her father beat her, her grandfather tried to rape her, and a violent ex-boyfriend “fuckin’ almost killed me.”

Angry at the world, Marcia dropped out of school in the eighth grade. She lied, stole, cheated, got drunk, did drugs and started having “sex with anyone.” “I became very hateful as a child and never grew out of it.”

She was so starved for attention, Marcia said, she initially welcomed the molestation by the cop next door, even though it made her hate her “sex parts” so much she couldn’t have an orgasm. She also became “very selfish and dishonest,” repeatedly trotting out her molestation stories to “make people feel sorry for me and get what I want.” Concluding in her late teens that men were “gross,” Marcia became a lesbian. In her mid-20s, she began experimenting with suicide, slitting her wrists, spraying her wounds with Raid and trying to shoot herself in the head (“the bullet went somewhere else”).

In 1985, just before her 25th birthday and after two perhaps not entirely sincere attempts to kill herself, Marcia ended up at San Diego Mental Health Services. As a nurse noted on her intake report, “She and a friend got drunk, decided they were over-stressed and should drive off a cliff together. As they were contemplating the advisability of this, they were arrested.” Finding out that jail was no fun, Marcia tried to hang herself with a shoelace. After that, police took her to a psychiatric-care facility, where she came across as a “giggling, extroverted white female who seemed to think all this is a lark.”

In March of 1990, Marcia ended up in another psychiatric facility after she tried to kill herself with a knife. A month later, she was back again, complaining (with rare insight) that her lover had left her “because I’m crazy.”

In 1993, despondent over losing a ring, denting her car, fighting with her girlfriend and disappointing her family by breaking three years of sobriety, Marcia ended up comatose after she swallowed 150 Navane and Traxadone capsules, followed up by three Zantacs (to calm her upset stomach). In December of 1996, she overdosed yet another time after hearing her dead father’s voice on the wind, calling her to join him. In September 1998, she ended up on a temporary psychiatric hold for banging her head on the floor and trying to “jump out the window.”

Marcia had often worked as a waitress and had even graduated from a computer-programming institute in 1998, but such recurring psychotic episodes made it hard for her to hold a steady job. Compared to Marcia, Judy Gellert was far more stable. She had grown up on a farm in Indiana, majored in physical education at Ball State and got married. After she divorced seven years later, she became dependent on alcohol, marijuana and methamphetamines. When she got straight, she volunteered to work at Stepping Stone, a drug-treatment center in San Diego, which later hired her as a counselor. It was there, in the late ’80s, that she met Marcia.

Although they spent the next 10 years together, Judy once wrote in a journal that she and Marcia tended to “fight, disagree and pick at each other over small things.” Marcia, who at 39 was seven years younger than her partner, complained that after Judy went through menopause, she wasn’t interested in sex anymore. In late 1998, Judy declared bankruptcy, claiming debts of $95,000 and assets of only $33,000, including a $250 Jack Russell terrier. Later, Marcia declared bankruptcy too, listing debts of $44,000 and only $900 in assets.

To save money, Marcia and Judy had spent the better part of the last five years living in a 1989 Gulfstream motor home, moving between RV parks in Chula Vista, Alpine, Pepperdine, Santa Anita and finally, by Christmas 1998, to a small campground at the 4,500-foot level southwest of Mount Baldy Village in an area known as Cow Saddle. They had met the campground owner, Ron Curtis, at a chili cookoff. He subsequently let them stay for free in exchange for watching over the place and collecting camping fees from the occasional visitor. It was a lonely, desolate place in the dead of winter, when cold winds swept up the canyon and freezing rains drummed on their metal roof. Deciding they needed a more permanent home, in January 1999 they stopped by the Mount Baldy community bulletin board, where Jack’s real estate agent had posted a listing for “the cleanest cutest cabin you ever saw.”

As his new neighbors Susan Hegemier and Doug Hopkins soon discovered, the disabled old man who had bought the house next door to theirs in their cozy Upland cul-de-sac was funny, friendly and almost compulsively neat. Every morning when Hegemier left for the office, she’d see Jack standing in his already-immaculate front yard, picking up stray leaves and waving goodbye to the neighbors as they drove away to work. When Hegemier finally traded in her sagging 1981 Olds Tornado for a new Chevy Cavalier, she remembers, Jack was as happy for her as she was for herself: “Suzie, you got a new car! A new car! Congratulations!”

It was in the summer of 1999, when he started sharing his big two-story, four-bedroom house with two women — Marcia Ann Johnson and Judy Gellert — that Hegemier first began feeling nervous about Jack.

Sensing perhaps that the neighbors might think it strange that two openly gay women would want to live with a disabled old man, Marcia and Judy explained to Hegemier that in the process of buying his cabin they’d become so fond of Jack that, when they had trouble reaching him on the phone, they decided to move in with him to keep house, cook his meals and make sure he took his meds on time.

Prior to this, Jack’s lifestyle had been so austere that his dinner service consisted of little more than one cup, one bowl, one fork and one spoon. But after the women entered his life, he began spending money like a sailor, buying in rapid succession a new stove, dishwasher, satellite dish and color TV.

“I can get 400 channels, Doug,” he told Hopkins. “400 channels!”

That’s great, said Hopkins. “How many do you watch?”

“Four.”

When Jack first moved in, in February 1999, his only living-room furniture was an easy chair and a tray table. Now that room featured a large painting of two naked women, shown from the rear, exchanging adoring glances. Whereas on Mount Baldy Jack never left the cabin except to go to the grocery store or gas station, now, he proudly told Doug, he and “the girls” had been to San Diego to see a gay-pride parade. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jack told Hopkins. “There were people walking around with their rear ends showing.”

Jack had always been the most accessible of neighbors, but now it became hard to talk to him without “the girls” hovering around in the background, reminding him to eat and cloyingly calling him “Dad.” Once, when Hegemier knocked on Jack’s door to tell him to turn off his long-running lawn sprinklers, she found the three of them sitting in a dark room filled with candles, holding what she first thought was a séance.

“What are you doing?” said Hegemier, a short and feisty Italian-American.

“Oh, now that we’re family,” explained Jack, “I’m telling them my life story and they’re telling me theirs.”

In mid-August, Hegemier went out to get the mail one day, when Jack called her over to ask her opinion. What did she think? he wanted to know. He’d put all his assets in a trust and then put both the girls’ names on it.

“Why?” said Hegemier. “Are you crazy?”

“Well, we’re family now,” explained Jack. “If I die, they get everything I have. And if they die, I get everything they have.”

“But Jack,” said Hegemier, “they don’t haveanything.”