Dismembered NC girl's stepmom led a troubled life (AP)
Thursday, February 3, 2011 11:01 AM By dwi
HICKORY, N.C. – Elisa Baker had an uncanny knowledge to meet aweigh of calculate collectors, police, ethnic workers and her multiple husbands, The Associated Press unconcealed in an enquiry of the blackamoor who led polity to the dismembered relic of her disabled, 10-year-old stepdaughter.
Few saw her pattern because when she abandoned a relationship, she usually cut every ties. In seven years, she had no inferior than 42 assorted addresses. During a assorted three-year stretch, she was mated to threesome men at the same time.
In interviews with threesome dozen people, and a analyse of hundreds of suite and personnel documents, AP unraveled a chronicle of dissimulation described by friends, kinsfolk and the vulnerable men she wed, including whatever with disabilities. At times, they said, she was physically abusive.
Elisa (eh-LEES'-uh) Baker is springy with obstructing the enquiry of the disappearance of Zahra Baker, the freckle-faced blackamoor who fought bone cancer, but no digit has been springy in Zahra's death.
The stepmother has been the edifice of the investigation, though, and the info of her unnatural relationships and primeval kinsfolk chronicle support vindicate why.
Neither Elisa Baker, 42, who is jailed, nor her attorneys, responded to repeated requests for comment. Other members of her family, including her daughters, declined to intercommunicate with the AP.
Those who knew Elisa described an attractive broad edifice student who became manipulative, guileful and insecure, struggling with obesity. Even as she got older and gained more weight, men were worn to her.
At added times, she semidetached herself from society, immersed in the online world. There, she prefabricated herself over as E'lesa, a darkly exciting blackamoor whose attraction reached Zahra's father, cristal Baker, an inhabitant who lived farther from her economically depressed crossway of Appalachia.
"This is a blackamoor who intellection she could style her artefact discover of anything, that she was smarter than everybody else. But she never told the truth," said saint diplomatist Jr., her ordinal husband. "She hurt a aggregation of people."
___
Born Elisa Fairchild, she grew up as the region female of threesome girls whose parents worked in the western North Carolina textile mills and furnishings factories in the late 1960s. She was a pretty, chubby-cheeked blackamoor with jet-black hair.
Her ascendant doted on her patch her mom was the disciplinarian. As she approached her teenage years, she began talking back, dedication at her mother, who would slap her, said Elisa's aunt, Bonzetta Winkler.
"That was meet the artefact grouping around here disciplined their children," her aunty said.
In school, Elisa was popular.
"We went to sport games. School dances — she was a good dancer," said Jerry comedienne Winkler, who dated her soured and on in broad school. Winkler is not attendant to Elisa's aunt.
Elisa and Jerry Winkler both dropped discover of edifice and lost touch for most a assemblage before he ran into her at a topical gas station. She was with her newborn, Amber, and told Winkler the baby's ascendant had mitt her.
Jerry Winkler asked her out, and a week later, he proposed.
Since they were both low 18, they needed their parents' permission. They lied to Winkler's parents and told them he was the father. To establish it, they forged a double of a murder test.
They were mated Sept. 14, 1985. Within days, Winkler was overwhelmed. "I was 17 and mated with a kid. It meet impact me every at erst and I desired out," he said.
Winkler's ascendant was upset, too, because he was tricked into gift permission. The ascendant asked a determine to annul the marriage, which was finished inferior than quaternary months after it began.
___
Nearly a assemblage later, she met Joseph Proctor, who walked with a walk from a near-fatal automobile accident. They dated for months, and when she told Proctor she was pregnant, he proposed.
They were mated Sept. 5, 1987. She was 19; he was 28. Their son, Douglas, was born a some months later. A assemblage later, they had their ordinal child, Brittany.
The wedlock was rocky. The pair lived in a bag owned by Proctor's mother, Levirtis White. In Apr 1989, White asked a determine for a restraining order, claiming Elisa was stealing and destroying property in the home.
According to the mother-in-law, Elisa said: "If I impact to intend discover of here, I'll burn the house down. I'm feat to blackball this baby. I'm feat to wreck this car. I'll blackball those kids."
Two months later, the pair reconciled. Proctor's tending dropped the complaint.
Their split wasn't final until 1992, but the relation ended Christmas Day in 1990 when Elisa walked out. She gained custody of Amber and Brittany; politico went to springy with Proctor.
___
Andrew diplomatist Jr. recalled the prototypal instance he patterned Elisa, nursing a Jack Daniels at a little honky-tonk in Lincolnton.
He had meet walked into the Tri-County Bar after added daylong shift at the J.P. Stevens textile plant. She waved at him.
"We meet impact it off," he said. "She was cushy to style to."
They mated a some months after on Apr 17, 1992.
Soon her personality changed. She was ofttimes angry, and she took it discover on her daughters, diplomatist said. She yelled and impact them, he said.
"I'd say to her, 'Why do you impact them in their flat again?' She'd meet move mastication most how she didn't want to deal with them. The actuality is she aerated them same dirt," he said.
After a fisticuffs in primeval 1994, diplomatist mitt the house for a some days. When he returned, it was empty. No furniture, guns or sportfishing rods.
"There was null pleasant most that woman," he said.
___
In the move of 1994, a neighbor told Darrell Putnam she had institute the amend blackamoor for him. Putnam was 30 and had been unheeding nearly his entire life. He crapper understand style with his chance aids on, but his impairment prefabricated it difficult for him to encounter dates, said his mother, Margie Putnam.
Elisa and Darrell Putnam went to a bar. She told him most her girls, but lied and said 8-year-old Amber had cancer.
Within weeks, they touched in together.
About this time, Elisa's tending died of cancer, and she had ballooned to more than 300 pounds.
"I wouldn't wager her for days," Darrell Putnam said, at nowadays using clew language as his tending interpreted. "She would go discover and intend drunk and circularize on. She was never home."
Worse, when she was there, she would "smack around" her children, Darrell Putnam said.
They mated Feb. 4, 1995, but their relation apace disintegrated.
One period after work, Putnam institute her in bed with added man. He walked to his mother's house, and returned a some chronicle later. Everything was gone, including his expensive chance aids.
"All he desired was a family," Margie Putnam said. "He idolized those girls. He stayed with her because of those girls. But in the modify she broke his heart. She was pure evil."
___
Jeffrey Allred remembers, with a shudder, the terminal instance he saw her in the spring of 1998.
She had place her daughters in the automobile and headlike to Walmart for groceries. When the tail lights receded in the night, he pulled a packed suitcase from a room closet, jumped in his pushcart and headlike in the oppositeness direction.
"I meet couldn't verify the shout anymore," said the 6-foot-2 Allred, who weighs 260 pounds.
He said she beat him with a ballgame wink and threw rocks at him. He was so spooked that he never divorced her; he was likewise afeard he might wager her in court.
The relation didn't move discover that way. There were nights when they would drive around the upscale neighborhoods of Hickory, and she would verify him her imagine was to springy in digit of the noble houses.
They mated Oct. 3, 1997, then she changed. "It was same a light alter went soured and she said: 'I got him now,'" he said.
__
Aaron Young, who met Elisa patch she was mated to Allred, picked up the pieces. It was the prototypal instance a blackamoor had paid tending to him.
As a child, he had rickets, a bone disease ofttimes caused by slummy nutrition that crapper drive skeletal deformities. He had individual operations on his mitt leg, and there was a steel rod in the other, a condition that prefabricated him self-conscious and shy.
The pair were mated Aug. 8, 1998. She was 30; he was 20.
"He was a rattling responsible kid," said Young's brother, James. "When he mated her, he grew up overnight. He took existence mated earnestly and was a stable influence in those kids' lives."
It was during their wedlock that Elisa unconcealed the Internet. She would pay daylong hours in face of a computer.
She got tattoos and denaturized her material colouration from individual to black with fire-engine-red streaks. Aaron Young's tending patterned her kissing added man in a automobile in 2007, and her ordinal wedlock ended.
In primeval 2008, Elisa said she was headlike to state and she wouldn't be returning.
"We intellection she was making that stuff up, meet same she ever did," James Young said. "I surmisal we were wrong."
By this time, she had mitt a progress of coercion notices, small claims judgments and liens against her from landlords, utility companies and added calculate collectors, according to suite documents reviewed by the AP.
___
The prototypal instance cristal Baker saw his future spouse in mortal was at the airport. They had met finished Instant Messaging Virtual Universe, a website where users create three-dimensional characters to represent themselves, using the avatars to interact in a realistic world.
He was 33; she was 40. The pair lived with cristal Baker's tending in Giru, in the southern conception of Australia. But his friends and kinsfolk had their doubts.
"Her stories seemed rattling outrageous. We kept wondering: What is she doing here?" said Kim Wright, a kinsfolk friend.
Wright had embellish something of a surrogate tending to Zahra, whose natural tending mitt when she was a baby.
They were mated in his family's backyard July 8, 2008. A some months later, cristal Baker told his tending he was agitated to the U.S.
His kinsfolk was worried. In Australia, Zahra's scrutiny treatments were free. But cristal Baker told his friends and kinsfolk Elisa Baker had money and would verify tending of the bills, designer said. By now, Zahra was using a prosthetic handicap and chemotherapy mitt her partially deaf, forcing her to ingest chance aids.
___
When the pair returned to North Carolina, they touched in with her father, but he apace kicked them out, presumably over the communication of Zahra.
Family members and neighbors recalled Elisa Baker touch Zahra and protection her in her room. Social assist agencies in seven counties investigated shout allegations, but the authority has said they are illegal by law to discuss the cases.
In September, the pair touched into a house in Hickory. On Oct. 9, they reported Zahra missing. About a period later, Zahra's prosthetic handicap was found. Then her remains, in locations 5 miles apart.
"She was ever hunting for attention," said Allred, her fifth husband. "She ever desired to be known, to be famous. Well, I surmisal she got what she was hunting for after all."
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