In 1993, I was sitting in govern-ment class at Arcata High School when I heard the tinkling of bells in the hallway. The door opened and a girl entered, dressed as a fortune teller, with chimes sewn onto her skirt. The teacher introduced her as AJ, a new student. There was no explanation of why she was in a costume, although at that age, easily jealous of other girls, I wrote her off as wanting attention. As a theater kid, I wasn’t above random cosplay, but AJ’s getup seemed almost unfair because she was so lovely. Petite, with dark brown hair and eyes, she had sloping pear-shaped cheekbones and a straight nose; she resembled a young Jane Fonda. To me, it was obvious everyone would notice her—no need to try so hard. Yet for the rest of the week, the parade of costumes continued: belly dancer on Tuesday, princess on Wednesday, old-timey reporter with a press card in a fedora on Thursday. By Friday, I was anticipating the next outfit despite myself when AJ came in wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. The show was apparently over.
After that, AJ was on my radar. We were never close, yet if AJ was in the room, I was watching. You could call it competitiveness, but it was really admiration mixed with envy. To put it another way, I wanted to be her friend, but didn’t know how.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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And AJ was interesting. Before class, she ran around hugging all the boys like a reverse-gendered Georgie Porgie. Then I heard she was in love with another girl and they had an anarchist wedding in the graveyard. She changed her name to Lazlo. She modeled for the yearbook and attended the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Whatever she was doing, her life seemed more exciting than mine.
AJ wasn’t unusual for a girl from Humboldt County, a place known for hippies, marijuana, and redwood forests. While I was growing up, the women around me broke societal conventions for how they should act. They went topless at festivals and chained themselves to trees to save them from loggers. I wasn’t allowed to do anything like that. My mom was too worried I’d be kidnapped. This was also the era of children on milk cartons, and the news was full of girls being abducted. Jonelle Matthews, one of the first girls on a milk carton, disappeared before a Christmas concert in 1984; Polly Klaas was stolen from her Petaluma home in 1993; and JonBenét Ramsey was murdered in 1996.
My mom was adamant that wouldn’t be me. She was overprotective, tracking whom I was with and rarely letting me go places by myself. The good news is, nothing bad—in the sense of kidnapping or assault—happened to me. By high school, I was fixated on leaving Arcata, impatiently enduring the end of childhood while riding around in my boyfriend’s red Mazda truck like a bird circling the boundaries of its aviary. When I turned 18, I moved away from Humboldt for good.
As an adult, I searched for AJ on social media, but she seemed to have many names, which confused me. Was the woman who looked like AJ but was named Jen Dicelli the same person? Or was she going by Tallulah Love Lee? She was enigmatic, clothed in shifting personalities like the costumes she wore her first week of school.
Then in 2021, I opened Instagram, and there was the teenage AJ I remembered. In a black-and-white photograph, she stood on a jungle gym in a flowery dress. Another classmate, Kelli Martinelli, explained that AJ had died at age 43 following a yearlong disappearance.
“She passed away in January, on the wrong coast. In a strange home. Under mysterious and tragic circumstances,” Martinelli wrote.
I learned that her name was never AJ. It was Jennifer. The initials stood for Another Jennifer, a rueful joke about her ordinariness, or maybe the ubiquitous nature of her name.
AJ was found in Waterville, Maine, a place where she had no connections and knew no one. In an article in the local newspaper Morning Sentinel, writer Amy Calder described AJ’s death. One winter night near a Waterville smoke shop, AJ approached a man named Roger Whitehead and his companion asking for a place to warm up, as she had nowhere to go. She died soon after, in the middle of the night, in the flophouse where the men lived. The cause of death was heart failure, a complication from bronchitis. There were no drugs or alcohol in her system, aside from a mild decongestant.
One detail stood out to me: Whitehead said she wouldn’t talk to the men much. “She kept her face covered,” he told Calder. “You couldn’t see her face.”
How, I asked, could someone so vibrant end up dying alone among strangers, face hidden from the world? The safety of women has been on my mind lately. Every year, around 270,000 women and girls are reported missing in the United States. Often, they’re on the fringes of society and don’t have resources to rely on for when things go wrong. I wondered about the difference between AJ and myself, how we could start in the same place and follow such divergent paths. The more I looked into her story, the stranger it seemed and the more questions popped up. Finally, I resolved to try to understand what had happened to AJ.
Born on June 9, 1977, to Kenneth Dulin and Judy Schwartz, Jennifer Lynn Dulin was the youngest of three children. By high school, her parents were divorced and she was living with her mom in a trailer pulled by a Suburban truck.
Martinelli was AJ’s best friend in 10th grade. AJ was Another Jennifer, and Kelli was Another Kelli. Their friendship was cemented in the RV park near Martinelli’s home. The park had a game room where local teenagers hung out—in fact, it’s where I learned to play pool. When Martinelli discovered that AJ was staying in the RV park, she invited her to live at her house instead. Schwartz moved the Suburban into the driveway, and AJ took a bunk bed in Martinelli’s room.
When I asked Martinelli to describe AJ, she used a word that came up repeatedly: AJ, she said, was magnetic.
“She lived out loud in a ‘look at me’ kind of way, but never in a way that put other people down,” she said. “It was like, ‘Let’s have fun together. Let’s play together.’… And that’s why we meshed so well. Our weirds met, and in a really great way.”
Martinelli felt that Schwartz seemed entitled. She asked AJ for cash, which surprised Martinelli, who’d “never heard a parent ask a child for money before.” Schwartz complained that Martinelli’s mom blocked MTV from the cable. “I was like, Dude, you can’t be pissy about that. You’re living here for free.” Once, Schwartz took the girls to the mall and came out to find the Suburban’s window smashed and her possessions stolen. Schwartz’s fury was palpable. “On the drive back from Eureka to Arcata, the tension in that Suburban was awful,” Martinelli said.
A darkness plagued AJ’s life, belying the sparkly girl on the surface. “She was so vibrant and colorful,” Martinelli said. “But on the edges, there was whatever was happening [in her family]. It was like she was trying to break through melancholy, trying to be something other than what was predetermined for her by the circumstances she was born into.”
In 1993, AJ began dating Tyson Saner, who’d graduated from Arcata High. They met at The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where Saner was a cast member, and dated for three years before AJ left to attend Cal State Long Beach.
Saner, who’s married with a child, also called AJ magnetic. “She had this way of making you feel like you were the most interesting person on the planet,” he said. “If she was into you, it was better than any drug. She was laser-focused. But when she was angry, it came back on you.”
Sometimes Saner noticed confusing behavior from AJ, whom he called Jenn. She had a temper and would get irrationally angry. She might see someone make an obscene gesture that no one else saw, or she would bring up things that Saner knew hadn’t happened. Sometimes she would read into movies. In the 1993 film Benny & Joon, Mary Stuart Masterson plays Joon, a free spirit with schizophrenia. AJ believed she could read Joon’s mind, as if she thought the film was real life.
When I wondered aloud about her shifting identity, Saner said he thought it had to do with her mother’s insistence on privacy. Even after Schwartz bought a house in 1994, she didn’t want AJ telling people where she lived. “I think part of the reason why they didn’t have a permanent address for a while is because they were hiding from her relatives,” Saner said. “There were definitely parts of her family with some kind of unsavory element—or Jenn thought there were.”
In 1999, AJ graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in religious studies and decided to pursue acting in Hollywood. Her stage name with the Screen Actors Guild was Jennifer Dicelli. From 1999 to 2014, she worked as a background actor, performing nonspeaking roles in shows like Ugly Betty and The Twilight Zone as well as movies like Love & Mercy, a 2014 biopic about the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.
Background actors are uncredited, which made it difficult to track AJ’s career. Even if she was in a scene, she might be cut from the frame or swallowed in a crowd. I scanned Love & Mercy, which is rife with bombshell brunettes like AJ, but couldn’t find her. Was she one of the bikini-clad bodies whose faces I couldn’t make out? Or a figure at the party where Wilson talks about hearing voices? (He had schizoaffective disorder.) AJ is like a ghost haunting the film, there but not there, embedded somewhere in the fleeting whirl of images.
One video does have AJ in it. In a 1999 clip from The Howie Mandel Show, Mandel explains that his cameraman Jeff Haymes has listed his preference for “quality cuddling” on a singles website. Declaring his intention to get Haymes a date, Mandel asks the audience, “Does anyone want to come down and cuddle with Jeff?” Up pops AJ, followed by a blonde companion. Wearing a shiny pleather jacket, with a scarlet streak in her hair, she hugs Haymes and kisses him on the cheek.
“That’s quality right there,” says Mandel.
It was the beginning of a friendship between AJ and Haymes. Now retired, he worked for 30 years as a cameraperson for programs like NBC News. “I really love Jennifer,” he said, the third person to call her magnetic. “She had a super-big personality, and when we went out, we just had a great time.”
Once, a group including AJ and Haymes wanted to go to Universal Studios but balked at the admission price. Turning to the guard, AJ said, “Will you let us in if I show you my boobs?” The man agreed, so AJ reached into her bra, pulled out the padding, and held it up. He let them into the park.
“I would like to know,” Haymes said, “why did that guy leave her right before they got married?”
I’d heard about this. AJ’s fiancé, Evan Zelig, had broken off their engagement close to the wedding. “That’s what really upset the applecart,” Haymes said. “It seemed as though she was scarred after that point, and that’s when things went a little bit crazy.”
Today, Zelig is an attorney in Santa Rosa. He met AJ in college, and they dated from 2012 to 2014. I emailed to ask if he wanted to speak to me about her and left it at that.
To my surprise, he called me. After confirming they had been engaged, he suddenly shouted, “Jennifer was very, very mentally ill! She was completely delusional to the point that she thought she was married to someone else! I am married with three kids now!”
“OK,” I said. “Thank you.”
“She was driving around the country, completely delusional,” he said. “I know she died in some random place in Maine somewhere.”
We hung up, and a few minutes later he called back—he would call five times that afternoon. “She thought she was married to someone else,” he repeated. “She thought she was in a relationship with Josh Radnor! Do you know Josh Radnor?”
“The actor?”
“He’s from How I Met Your Mother. The reason she was in Ohio is because she thought she could talk to Josh Radnor.”
Though Zelig calmed down and sort of apologized—“I’m sorry you thought I was yelling at you”—he continued to act as if memories of AJ drove him to distraction. To be fair, the news that she believed she was in a romance with Radnor, who played Ted Mosby on the show, suggested an extreme level of mental illness. AJ was an extra on How I Met Your Mother, according to Schwartz, although I couldn’t confirm this independently. The nine-season comedy was often set in a crowded bar, and AJ could have been in any episode.
According to Schwartz, AJ’s mental health declined after several tragedies, including the deaths of loved ones and the breakup with Zelig. In addition, she had a history of head injuries. In college, a drunk driver plowed into her car, and her book bag was flung up and knocked her unconscious. She also fell off the stage at a No Doubt concert.
On a GoFundMe page seeking to raise money for AJ’s funeral expenses, Schwartz wrote that after the engagement to Zelig ended, her daughter “started sleeping all the time.… Then she woke up, and she was different. To me, it seemed she dreamed a new existence for herself, a new life in a different world, with entirely different people.”
When I contacted Schwartz, she told me she would only email and text, although she did eventually agree to a call. Now retired, she lives in Arcata. When AJ disappeared, Schwartz posted everywhere she could, filling the internet with anguished calls for her daughter. The resources available to her were scant. Police and health officials sent her into voicemail rabbit holes or told her they couldn’t reveal AJ’s private information. Adding AJ to missing persons databases only led to accusatory emails or unhelpful advice from strangers.
“It’s not against the law to go missing,” Schwartz wrote to me. “If you happen to get a lead on a missing person, nobody will tell you anything because they’re adults, and there are [privacy] laws.… There are thousands of missing persons lists and they are not connected. What are the chances of getting someone on the correct list?”
According to Schwartz, AJ had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which Schwartz described as “schizophrenia with a side of bipolar.” In AJ’s case, she believed she was engaged to Radnor, who followed her around and left signs only she could see. She also thought she was on reality TV, like in the movie The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is filmed without him knowing it. This created paranoia, as there was no way for her to halt the filming or to know who was in on it. Was her mother really her mother, or an actor? What could AJ trust when everything she saw might be a Hollywood façade?
Occasionally, she lashed out. She was briefly hospitalized for attacking a girl who tried to help her. At another point, in 2018, while walking in Valencia, a neighborhood in Santa Clarita, she saw a sign on a door that read, “Come In, Don’t Knock.” The owners of the house had put up the note to keep visitors from waking a sleeping baby. AJ thought it was for her and went inside. When the owners insisted she leave, she refused and was arrested for burglary.
Schwartz sent me a series of voicemails of AJ ranting while in a delusion. It was shocking to hear. She sounds much older than 40, her voice roughened by rapidly cycling emotions, shifting from outrage to tremulous fear and confusion within seconds. She talks about being stuck in the reality show and demands that her mother stop “participating” with the production crew. She repeats that she isn’t “interested in another surprise wedding or a surprise engagement” to Radnor, because in the past when they happened, “I say, ‘That felt like a dream.’ And people say, ‘What are you talking about? That was a dream.’ And then I get shit [from the delusion] for not believing it was real.”
With proper care, schizoaffective disorder can be treated, says Cooper Stone, a psychiatrist in Philadelphia who’s familiar with treating the disorder. “While oftentimes the delusions and hallucinations may continue to persist, they’re heavily attenuated and allow patients to live a productive, fulfilling life,” he said. But good psychiatric care is expensive and hard to find. AJ was on Medi-Cal, government health insurance for low-income patients. The doctors she encountered weren’t equipped to handle the severity of her illness. Schwartz said, “Seems all they did was prescribe medication. And the more drugs they prescribed, the worse off she was.” AJ was given over 20 medications, including Norco, Soma, Xanax, Ritalin, and Adderall.
Eventually, AJ found a doctor she trusted, William Vicary, who she believed allowed Radnor to listen to their sessions in the next room. In a strange twist, Vicary was the psychiatric expert who lied in the Menendez brothers’ murder case in 1993, rewriting clinical notes and eliminating information related to the trial. In 2019, Vicary lost his medical license because of “repeated negligent acts, prescribing without an appropriate exam, excessive prescribing and inadequate record keeping,” according to the Los Angeles Times. AJ was one of his patients at the time.
By 2019, AJ was alternating between living with her mother in a trailer and staying with friends like Saner, whom she seemed to trust. Saner shared texts that AJ had sent him right before she disappeared. After hearing her ranting, I was pleasantly surprised to see the messages of an intelligent person who was reckoning with her health problems.
“I am looking for a way and the courage to be honest about the sudden, debilitating, embarrassing physical and mental symptoms I experience,” AJ wrote. “Although I have been fairly good at covering up for a lot of it, some subconsciously, I am realizing the toll this is taking on my body, mind, and soul.”
“The truth is that I am not certain of the truth,” she continued. “I cannot claim to know exactly what caused any of this.… I am not a neurologist nor mental health expert.… I know only that I need to be honest with myself and others so I can get the care I need.” But, she said, she didn’t know how to do that. “My head is very heavy, literally and I’ve had little sleep and too many people trying to talk to me.”
AJ felt trapped by the financial stress caused by her mental illness, which rendered it impossible to think, let alone work. She was running low on money. Schwartz asked her to contribute to paying the bills, so AJ felt that living with her was expensive. “I keep wanting her to be a mom and she’s never going to be loving like that,” AJ wrote to Saner. “I am trying to accept that and find somewhere else to stay instead of arguing for peace.” She hoped to “have a place or destination by mid January.”
Then she stopped replying. On January 28, 2020, Saner wrote that his son had turned one the day before. “How are you?”
February 10, he sent a smiley emoji.
February 15, he wrote, “I hope you’re okay.”
November 26: “Happy Thanksgiving!”
December 25: “Merry Christmas.”
On January 7, 2021, he texted, “R.I.P.”
AJ drove away in her Honda CRV on January 10, 2020. In March, her friend Eric Ford, whom she’d been staying with in Southern California, received a bill from a mental health hospital in Columbus, Ohio. She was on an involuntary psychiatric hold for two weeks, January 25 to February 6, then left the facility in a taxi.
Radnor is from Bexley, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. AJ had gone there believing she was going to marry him. “She thought she was following Josh Radnor’s dad up his driveway,” Schwartz wrote. “Maybe it was his dad.” The police were called, and AJ was sent to River-Vista Behavioral Health.
According to hospital records, staff found AJ anxious and paranoid, with illogical delusions and impaired memories. She refused medication and repeated that she had to be prepared “for the wedding.” At one point, she was wearing extra clothes to see “what it feels like to be pregnant.”
However, when AJ gave in and took medication, the notes changed, and staff perceived her as calm and compliant. On February 6, she was discharged. To Schwartz, this was a huge mistake. “RiverVista released a young, delusional, illogical woman, with no money, who was 3,000 miles from home and could not keep her thoughts straight,” she wrote on GoFundMe. “RiverVista released her out on the street to die. And she did, she died. January 6, 2021, she died.”
What happened to AJ between the time she left the mental health hospital in Ohio and her death in Waterville, Maine, 11 months later? Waterville is a half hour from Augusta, along Interstate 95, which runs from Florida to Canada. An internet search for Home Place Inn, where she was found, brings up news stories of drug deals and shootings. Images reveal two seedy gray dwellings sharing a lot, one with a labyrinth of porches and balconies. Between these structures lie a pair of strip motel buildings backed against a stand of shadowy trees. As a Yelp review puts it, “Sucks. No phone. No info. Can’t find. Not really a motel. If you find yourself here—you are lost.”
AJ died on a foam mattress in one of the apartments. There were two men with her, one known only as Marc. The other, Roger Whitehead, moved to Citrus Heights, California, in May, according to his Facebook page, four months after AJ died. He didn’t respond to attempts to interview him.
Whitehead has at least eight Facebook accounts. In one, the cover photo is a teenage girl’s torso wearing striped underpants trimmed with pink lace. Whitehead’s X account is mostly him replying to sex workers and bots, telling each they are “absolutely gorgeous.” To me, he looks like a man most women would want to avoid. It’s not just that he’s got a scraggly beard. It’s his eyes, which are limpid and baby-like in his grizzled face. They give me the creeps.
The police didn’t seem to question Whitehead’s story. According to their report, on January 3, AJ approached the men, shivering, and said she “needed a place to stay for a few nights.” She told them that her name was Lee or Leah and that she had an appointment at city hall to get housing. The men took her to their apartment, as “they wanted to be nice because they knew she was cold.”
Once there, AJ read the Bible, then fell asleep, covering her face. She slept all the next day. That night, on January 6, they heard her snoring. But at 4 a.m., one of them noticed on the way to the bathroom that she was “not breathing and…cold and stiff.” She had no belongings with her, not her childhood teddy bears, not her diamond rings, not even her ID. When the police mailed her things to Schwartz, she received an unfamiliar pair of pants and boots far too big for AJ.
“The police said there was nothing in her pocket,” Schwartz told me. “This girl wrote everything down, and she saved every receipt.”
The cause of death was a heart attack provoked by bronchitis. Surprisingly, there’s a link between the two. Bronchitis causes the airways to become inflamed and full of mucus, making it harder to breathe. This can stress the heart as it works to produce enough oxygen for the body to function. On top of this, AJ was a smoker, which can aggravate respiratory illnesses. In the end, her heart couldn’t stand the strain.
It takes so much effort to keep women safe. Sometimes I think about how far my mom went to protect me when I was a teenager. She would, for example, allow me to walk around the mall with a friend, but she would follow at a distance to make sure nothing happened to us. I didn’t know she did this until she told me when I was an adult. This hypervigilance bled into how I live now. As a rule, I don’t make eye contact with men on the street. I’m rarely alone in public, and when I am, I’m acutely aware of my surroundings. It’s not that I’m afraid, and I generally think the best of people, but as a woman, you never know when things will turn hostile. You’ll be walking down the street, and some guy will yell, “Hey lady, I want to talk to you.” All you can do is continue straight ahead, pretending not to hear and hoping he doesn’t follow.
Whenever I write about missing people, I’m struck by how some women are treated as disposable, tossed like garbage into ditches or onto the side of the road. Often when a woman is killed, she’s breaking the rules of how she’s supposed to act. She’s drinking alone in a bar or traveling around or getting into a car with a stranger, and the worst happens to her. Or she’s fleeing one abuser and ends up with another. Or she’s homeless because of a mental health crisis, and someone takes advantage.
And yet, there’s a cost to safety. As an adult, I carry a vague dissatisfaction, as if I should have more excitement in my life. When I examine why I feel this way—I do fun things all the time—I suspect it’s because my soul is chafing against the limits my gender puts on me. It’s as if years of security have dulled something. I’m like a caged animal who won’t go outside even though the door is open. But I’m still here.
AJ appears in the background of one movie, American Pie 2. Released in August 2001, it’s the sequel to the 1999 teen sex comedy. As usual, she was difficult to find. I scanned every face, wondering whether I would recognize her after all those years. Then, in a party scene where everyone is dancing, the actor Tara Reid flails to the side, and suddenly, there’s AJ. She’s wearing jean shorts and an orange tank top, dancing to Sum 41’s song “In Too Deep.”
She looks the same as in high school, only perhaps her face is more oblong and less lovely in this setting of professional beautiful people. However, her breasts look magnificent, and she leads with them as she moves, arching her back, gyrating, then leaning toward her partner. For an instant, AJ is the focus as she confidently moves to a boppy tune in this time capsule of a movie. As the camera pans away, she dances to the lyrics: “ ’Cause I’m in too deep, and I’m trying to keep up above in my head, instead of going under, instead of going under, instead of going under again.”•
Joy Lanzendorfer’s first novel, Right Back Where We Started From, was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Raritan, the Atlantic, and Ploughshares as well as on NPR and for the Poetry Foundation, among others.
