Anderson Curtis Dean - Letters from a serial killer : the story that inspired Blessed are the dead

Letters From a Serial Killer

The story that inspired Blessed are the Dead

By Kristi Belcamino
and Stephanie Kahalekulu

Copyright 2016 by Kristi Belcamino and Stephanie Kahalekulu

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Book Layout 2016 BookDesignTemplates.com

Letters from a Serial Killer/ Kristi Belcamino Stephanie Kahalekulu. -- 1st ed.

ISBN 978-1523954902

Prologue

The Box

There is a box I keep in my basement, tucked far back in a corner where the kids will never stumble upon it. Ive lugged this box 2,000 miles across the countryfrom my life as a San Francisco Bay Area newspaper reporter to my life as a Minneapolis Italian-American mama.

From the outside, there is little indication of what the box contains. It is marked only with three letters: C.D.A.

Curtis Dean Anderson.

The box has become a dark memorial to a man I feared and despised. Nearly a decade after his death, I hold onto this box that contains sick mementos of a monster, a convicted serial killer who preyed on little girls.

This white cardboard box contains dozens of reporters notebooks filled with interviews with Anderson and newspaper articles I wrote about him while I was a police reporter for the Contra Costa Times .

Odd tidbits of a killers life remain in my safe keepingan original birth certificate; requests to interview him in jail, stamped approved or denied; photocopies of maps I pressed to the glass window separating us, begging him to point out where the bodies were buried; a tiny piece of paper where I wrote the code he used to tell me sensitive information during recorded jailhouse interviews.

And then, also in the box, are the letters he wrote meat first, from Solano County Jail and later, from San Quentin State Prison.

Letters from a man who infuriated me by writing: Seems Xiana will never be avenged.

Xiana Fairchild was a seven-year-old girl kidnapped and killed in my beat area when I was a reporter. It was her story that brought me to him.

In the beginning, during those nighttime jailhouse visits to Anderson, what I wanted more than anything was to find out if she was still alive somewhere.

Later, when they found Xianas skull in the Santa Cruz Mountains, my goals changed. I wanted him to confess to kidnapping and killing her so hed be locked away for life.

And I wasnt the only one receiving his rambling, bizarre letters.

The woman who raised Xiana Fairchild was also visiting him in jail and corresponding with him. Like me, she first had hopes she could bring Xiana home alive, and later, to see justice served.

That woman, Stephanie Kahalekulu, and I share a special bond. We both have looked into the face of evil.

For years we talked about sharing our letters from Anderson. And now, with this collaboration, we hope to further purge this man and his memory from our minds, hearts, and souls.

Stephanie co-wrote this book with me by putting herself back in that difficult place and time so she could write about her feelings and thoughts as she relived this tragedy on paper. Together, we wrote, read and edited in hopes that we could purge and heal from this time in our lives. It was an amazing experience to finally face, expose the evil mind, and conquer this horrible monster.

I had already seen the healing power of writing about Anderson.

Years after I left my reporting job and sat down to write my first book, Blessed are the Dead , I retrieved these letters from their box in the basement. I plucked the most horrible lines from them and stuck them right in the mouth of my antagonist.

I wrote that book to get him out of my head. I put his words on paper so I wouldnt have to hear his voice when I watched my daughters play outside. Every once in a while I still think of him as I watch my children walk to the bus stop. I remember how he sat in his car, watching a girl walking home from school on the sidewalk, and then jumped out and grabbed her.

Thats when I remind myself that he is dead.

He was serving a 251-year-sentence at Corcoran State Prison when he died, at 46, of natural causes on Dec. 11, 2007, eight years and two days from the day Xiana Fairchild disappeared on Dec. 9, 1999.

In writing Blessed are the Dead , in creating a work of fiction, I did what I couldnt do in real lifesave a girl he took and make him die a terrible death. Despite hours trying to find out if Xiana Fairchild was still alive and where she might be, I failed. She was already dead. There was nothing I could do for his victims and nothing I could do to this man.

But I wouldnt let him do anything more to me. I wouldnt let him affect me as a mother. So I sat down and wrote a story that ended up spanning a crime fiction series. For the most part, I have kicked him out of my head, but for some reason, I cant destroy the letters he sent. I dont know why. So I will keep his letters buried in my basement, in my house, but not close to me. I will keep them in the farthest, deepest, darkest corner of the place I live. Like a shadowy secret that cant ever see the light of day, thats where you will find my letters from a serial killer.

CHAPTER ONE

Xiana Fairchild

During the late 1990s, much of downtown Vallejo, a waterfront city that lies across the bay from San Francisco, was decrepit. Boarded-up buildings, liquor stores, trash-strewn empty lots, and a population of homeless people were the norm. The specter of the downtown areas seedy pastwith hard-drinking sailors, knife fights, prostitutes and saloonsstill lingered.

Compared to other cities the same size, Vallejos crime rate was one of the highest in the state.

Vallejos downtown, which lies along the waterfront separating the city from the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard, was years away from a flood of young professionals who would migrate from San Francisco and renovate the dozens of Victorians and Craftsman homes scattered through the neighborhood.

On this gray and drizzly Dec. 9, 1999 morning, Xiana Fairchild left her Georgia Street home to walk the downtown streets to the school bus stop. The one-room apartment where she lived with her mother and her mothers boyfriend was on the first floor of an old Victorian crammed between two other buildings. Georgia Street was one of the main thoroughfares through downtown and dead-ended where the Napa River turned into the Mare Island Strait.

It wasnt the first time the seven-year-old walked the three long blocks alone. Usually, she left the apartment around seven-thirty, about a half hour before the school bus picked her up and drove her to Mare Island Elementary School.

On this day, however, the petite girl with the flashing dark eyes, long black hair, and two missing front teeth, never made it to the bus stop.

Later, her biological mother, Antoinette Robinson, told police that Xiana was wearing a puffy purple jacket and a gray sweat suit. But that clothing was later found in the Georgia Street apartment, so it is still unknown what she was wearing at the time she disappeared. Robinson would also later tell police she found it strange that her daughter hadnt taken her Hello Kitty backpack to school like she normally did.

Because so many stories were told about Xianas last morning at the Victorian it is hard to say if Robinson, or Robinsons boyfriend ex-felon and convicted child abuser Robert Turnbough, even saw Xiana that morning before she left for school.

Heres what we do know:

Passersby did witness Xiana walking to the bus stop that morning.

Around one in the afternoon, when Xiana didnt return home from school, Robinson called Mare Island Elementary School and learned that Xiana had never made it to school that day.