PDA

View Full Version : Relative of Hannah Anderson breaks her silence in new book to brand the kidnap victim's behavior 'downright disturbing' since her mother and brother's brutal double-murder



Teh One Who Knocks
10-23-2013, 11:16 AM
By Laura Collins - The Daily Mail


Her conduct in the months since her rescue from the family friend who kidnapped her and allegedly murdered her mother and brother has been the subject of intense scrutiny.

Now, MailOnline can reveal, members of Hannah Anderson’s own family are confused by the 16-year-old’s behaviour in the aftermath of the brutal double murder and her kidnap, with one branding it, ‘downright disturbing.’

Jennifer Willis, Hannah’s great-aunt, has broken her silence in a soon to be published book, ‘The River of No Return: On the Trail of Hannah Anderson and Jim DiMaggio.’

http://i.imgur.com/lej2yQM.png

Speaking to author and criminal profiler, Chelsea Hoffman, Mrs Willis admitted: ‘We haven’t seen her grieve at all.

‘It’s not the Hannah we know. It’s downright disturbing.’

Mrs Willis was so close to her niece Christina that the women were, she said, ‘more like sisters.’ Revealing her own profound pain in the aftermath of Christina and Ethan’s killings she said: ‘I can hardly breathe most of the time.’

http://i.imgur.com/DtzxY3C.png

She and several other relatives admitted to being deeply troubled by Hannah’s apparent lack of grief and string of outlandish, often sexually precocious, postings on social media, according to Hoffman.

On the day of her mother and brother’s funeral she tweeted pictures of herself and a friend, fingers posed like guns, with the hastag ‘true-thugs’.

http://i.imgur.com/tSeZwbb.png

And the very day that the teenager spoke fully for the first time, reliving the ordeal of being forced to play Russian Roulette while hearing her brother crying from another room - on the Today show, she posted images of herself with a male friend, pouting, giggling and ‘twerking’ her New York hotel room.

While Hannah was there, she excitedly posted pictures on her Instagram account, including several close-ups of Miley Cyrus' live performance.

Two days ago she boasted online that her grandmother, with whom Hannah now lives, allowed her boyfriend to sleep over and pictured him shirtless and making her scrambled eggs for breakfast.

http://i.imgur.com/S4gOLzK.png

Speaking to MailOnline Miss Hoffman, 29, said: ‘It is very clear from the family members I’ve spoken with that this is not a family united in their shared grief at all. It’s sad but it’s a family very much at odds with itself.’

Only last week Hannah tweeted: ‘My family still can’t get along. Wtf?!’

According to Mrs Willis there were often tensions between Christina’s side of the family and that of Hannah’s father, Brett.

But in a poignant admission she revealed that Christina, who was estranged from her husband, at the time of her death, had harbored hopes of a reconciliation and of ‘having her family back together again.’

Instead all hopes ended in a scene of utter devastation.

http://i.imgur.com/a65pyOV.png

In her book Miss Hoffman examines Hannah’s own account of the events that lead up to that day and its aftermath and the book points to what Miss Hoffman considers to be a myriad of inconsistencies and unanswered questions by which some of Hannah’s own relatives admit to being troubled.

The burned bodies of Christina Anderson, 44, Ethan, 8, and the family dog were found by fire-fighters in the charred remains of family friend Jim DiMaggio’s burned out home in Boulevard, California on 4 August.

Christina’s mouth and neck was wrapped tightly with duct tape and her ankles bound with plastic cable. She had been viciously bludgeoned to death.

Investigators were not able to determine Ethan’s cause of death as his body was almost completely consumed by fire. But what little remained suggested extreme suffering and violence.

The grim discoveries marked the beginning of a massive FBI manhunt as it quickly transpired that DiMaggio, believed to have time devices to ignite at his home, had abducted Hannah.

Seven days later DiMaggio and Hannah were traced to a riverside in a stretch of Idaho wilderness called No Return when four horseback riders who had encountered them on the trail returned and raised the alarm.

http://i.imgur.com/LLXW30x.png

DiMaggio was gunned down by six snipers in the rescue that followed.

By then a disturbing portrait had emerged of the family friend, as a 40-year-old man with inappropriate sexual feelings for the teenage Hannah. DiMaggio was Hannah’s father, Brett’s, best friend and had known the teen all her life. According to Hannah in the weeks before her abduction, DiMaggio had admitted to having a ‘crush’ on her.

The public instinct was to embrace Hannah as a teenager who had survived an unimaginable trauma only to be told that the mother and brother she thought were waiting for her, were dead.

But as investigators worked to establish the nature of Hannah’s relationship with her abductor troubling details began to emerge which sparked a change in public opinion.

Authorities have been adamant in their assertion that Hannah is ‘a victim in every sense of the word.'

But many have struggled to square the teenager’s online persona and postings with this tag.

Hannah and DiMaggio exchanged 13 phonecalls on the day of the killings before both phones were switched off simultaneously.

In addition to this officers executing a search warrant at DiMaggio’s home found letters written from the teenager to DiMaggio in which she shared grievances about her mother with whom she was not getting along.

http://i.imgur.com/dCGxe7b.png

It was revealed that the pair took trips together. One eye-brow raising tweet posted just weeks before the abduction, showed Hannah on one such trip. The picture, taken from behind, shows Hannah in cut-off denim shorts.

It was taken by DiMaggio and was tagged by Hannah ‘when you got the world in your hands nobody can stop you …#bye #Hollywood #bye #Malibu #hello #river’

http://i.imgur.com/XzEBmSA.png

In relating how it was that DiMaggio overpowered her Hannah has said that he gave her a pill she now believes to be Ambien. She has said she was unconscious from that moment until waking in Idaho and has no recollection of even being put in his car.

But video released from security checkpoints on the route shows Hannah, apparently wide awake and seated in the passenger seat next to DiMaggio, according to Hoffman.

The author also focusses on how Hannah has claimed that she hurt her left knee during days of gruelling hiking through inhospitable terrain, during which she carried two 50lbs backpacks for DiMaggio and tweeted pictures showing her heavily strapped leg.

Pictures taken later the same day show the leg brace on her right leg. When online commentators picked up on the strange switch Hannah initially claimed the pictures were taken on different days.

When it emerged that they were taken on the same day she retorted that one knee had been injured in Idaho and the other had arthritis due to an old sporting injury.

Miss Hoffman said: ‘There are so many unanswered questions in this case that it’s my sincere hope it is reopened. What happened was so shocking and what’s come after it is just very sad.

‘Hannah is letting off steam through social media and has cut herself off from some of the people who care for her and who are going through their own profound grief.

‘Jennifer is one of them. She sees the way Hannah is behaving and she just doesn’t understand what’s going on – this Hannah is not the little girl she helped raise.'

A spokesman for Hannah and her father, Brett, declined to comment.