In August.
When Steensland asked her to remove it, she apparently refused.
“Gave me some real lip, called me a dirty old man, whole thing,” he remembered a few years later. “But she took it off in the end.”
And when she did, Steensland noticed the fading bruises on her arms, bruises that looked very much like fingerprints. She claimed she’d gotten them helping her mother, Beth-Anne Bailey, cover some windows at her souvenir shop, but that didn’t make any sense to Steensland. When he later confirmed she had in fact called Landon the day of his death, that made two lies he’d caught her in.
And, of course, that nail. Steensland had looked closely at Lo’s hands when she came in, and while several of her nails were cracked and broken—more damage from storm prep, according to Lo—the paint that remained was the same hot pink.
It wasn’t much, not at first. Circumstantial at best, flimsy at worst.
But that was before one of Lo’s friends came forward with a story about seeing Lo and Landon together in the hours before the storm made landfall, about Lo’s near-rabid jealousy and determination to hold on to Landon at all costs.
And that was before Landon’s own friends told policeabout Landon’s wandering eye and his growing frustration with his teenage mistress.
Murder is a chaotic thing. It’s a violation of the natural order, an event that should never happen to any of us, an act none of us should ever commit, and yet every year, the impossible happens over and over and over again. What do we do with that?
More often than not, we try to make it make sense.
We tell ourselves a story.
And the story that was beginning to twist itself around Lo Bailey made a lot of sense to a lot of people.
By the time she went to trial in the spring of 1985, that story had sharpened and refined itself like a blade.
It went like this.
Lo, realizing that she’s losing her grip on her married lover, makes a desperate play, begging him to come to St. Medard’s Bay. Is it a test? That’s the prosecution’s angle, another example of how manipulative Lo is: “Prove you love me by racing toward me as a hurricane approaches.”
We’ll never know the reason Landon agreed, but he does. He meets Lo at their bungalow on the beach, as is confirmed by Lo’s best friend, who sees the two together.
They argue.
Landon is tired of Lo’s demands, tired of her petulance, ready to put an end to it all, but Lo is not going easily.
The fight moves down the beach, the prosecution speculating that Lo makes dramatic threats. Maybe she’s heading toward the ocean, threatening to walk in and drown herself if he leaves her, to refuse to take shelter as the storm comes in.
They struggle, resulting in Lo’s bruises and the broken fingernail found inside Landon’s jacket.
And here is where the story falters, just the littlest bit.
Lo strikes him, they claim, but with what? No weapon is ever found, and the best the coroner can say is that thewounds are consistent with that of a “heavy object with sharp edges, possibly a lightweight anchor.”
It makes enough sense–—that stretch of beach between the Rosalie Inn and the nature preserve is often littered with debris from a handful of shipwrecks just off the coast. Maybe it was an anchor, maybe it was some other piece of metal, but in any case, the prosecution alleges that Lo strikes him again and again, until the back of his skull caves in and he drops to the sand.
Now? Panic. What to do?
Here’s where the prosecution really leans in. Lo, they say, grabs Landon’s wrists and starts tugging him toward the water. She’s banking on the fact that the storm will cover up what she’s done, hoping that the ocean of her childhood will wash him out to sea and this whole thing can be chalked up to a bad dream.
But Landon is now deadweight, and Lo Bailey is a petite woman. She can’t move him very far, and the storm is only building, and before long she’s forced to give up, no doubt assuming that the surging seas will take care of the rest.
Unfortunately for her, they don’t. Landon’s body is found the very next day, in a condition that can’t be fully explained. A young woman’s small lies make no sense unless they’re covering up a much bigger one, and just like that, Lo Bailey goes from mistress to murderess.
Deadly Waters, Deadly Loveby J. Anthony Marsh, Pocket Books, 1988
LANDONP. FITZROY, ESQ.
9/4/83
