Zero to Life

Lisl Auman had met Matthaeus Jaehnig only that morning. By day's end, he and a cop were dead--and her life was over.

Comments (0) By Juliet Wittman Thursday, Apr 15 1999

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Looking back, Froemel struggles to describe the atmosphere at the lodge. It was a crazy period, she says: "For some reason, everybody was going through a massive personality change, the whole group of friends. We were doing things that were deteriorating our morals: too much partying, drinking, being very preoccupied with the wrong things." She herself was a "fierce emotional monster" at the time. As for her friend: "In hindsight, she was perfectly chaotic, perfectly out of her mind, perfectly not Lisl."

Although she vacillated for a time, within a month Lisl came to understand the self-destructive nature of her relationship with Cheever. It came home full force when he left for Denver to celebrate his birthday without her, after she'd bought him an expensive snowboard as a gift. She was left alone at the lodge, with half her possessions locked in Cheever's room.

She became desperate to move out. At separate times in the week preceding November 12, both Colleen and Don offered to help, but Lisl was embarrassed at the idea of her parents meeting the rough-edged, gap-toothed Cheever. And she was estranged from her closest friends since leaving the house she'd shared with them. It was then that she thought of Demetria Soriano.

Lisl had known Deme, as everyone calls her, for years. For a time they were very close. Once, before a Grateful Dead performance, they had danced in the parking lot in a lashing rainstorm and seen a man get hit by lightning. As the medics hustled him away, Soriano remembers, he was still waving his ticket and insisting he had to go to the concert.

When Lisl graduated from high school, Colleen had bought both girls tickets to San Francisco and arranged for them to stay with her sister there. Lisl and Soriano visited Haight-Ashbury and Chinatown. They rode the ferry to Alcatraz, played on the beach and leapt into the cold waters of the sea. "It was the first time I ever saw the sun set into the ocean," Soriano recalls.

But there had also been periods of estrangement. One of these had occurred some time before Lisl's move to the mountains. Lisl and Soriano had just begun tentative attempts at rapprochement a week or so before Lisl decided to leave Cheever.

That year, Deme Soriano had been going through a transformation of her own. The man she'd loved for a long time had left her early in the summer, and she was despondent and insecure, partying, drinking, smoking dope. She rented a room in her condo at the Monaco Place apartment complex to a friend from junior high, Dion Gerze; two months after he moved in, she became his girlfriend. "I was still trying to sew my heart back together," she says now.

Michael Jackson, an old friend of both Lisl's and Soriano's, visited Deme during this time. He noted that the apartment had changed. Soriano's tie-dye and tapestries were gone, and in their place were a case full of medieval torture instruments, a Confederate flag, a gun lying on the table.

Soriano introduced him to Gerze and to Gerze's friend Matthaeus Jaehnig. "I shook Jaehnig's hand," says Jackson, who is black. "There was a swastika tattooed on his arm. They acted perfectly pleasant, but I got out fast."

Soriano, with her dark, tumbling hair and olive skin, defines herself as Indian, Spanish, Irish, English and Filipino. Jaehnig was a friend, she says, one she liked and admired.

The only time Lisl visited, about a week before she decided to leave Cheever, Jaehnig wasn't at the apartment. On that occasion, Gerze and Soriano got into a fight. With Lisl in the next room, Gerze choked Soriano until she blacked out.

But when Lisl called November 11, distraught, Soriano told her to come right over. Lisl did, bringing her dog, Gene, with her. The two young women spent the evening demolishing a bottle of sake and planning their future. They would retrieve Lisl's possessions, get rid of their no-good boyfriends and live together, they decided. "It was just, Lisl, you and me are back together," Soriano remembers, in her slightly hoarse, throaty voice. "We'll have fun with our lives again."

There was some conversation between the two women and Gerze about helping Lisl move and enlisting the aid of Gerze's friends. Who said exactly what is still unclear. Everyone agrees on one thing, however: At no point did Lisl use the word "revenge" or appear angry and vindictive toward Cheever. Gerze--who otherwise shows no particular inclination to protect Lisl--was very clear about this during his police interview, despite intense and persistent questioning.

"Was she mad at him?" asks the interviewer on the videotape.
"No. She was just sad. I don't think she was mad at all."
"Spiteful?"
"I don't think so. I think she just fucking felt like a piece of shit."

"You know we've talked to Lisl...Are you sure that you did not hear anyone talk about punishing Shawn?"

"No. No. Bullshit, no. No punishment. We went there to get her stuff. Her fucking clothes."

"Any conversation before you went or while you were there: I'm gonna get that son of a bitch?"