Anchorage Daily News

PALMER -- Early in his career, it took Frank Adams a year or two to destroy the women who made the mistake of loving him. This much was clear from testimony at his murder trial. But over time he got more efficient at it. In just four months he put Stacey Johnston in a grave and devastated her family.

Click to enlarge

Stacey Lane Curlee as a high school senior and homecoming princess in the 1983 Chugiak High School yearbook.

Click to enlarge

Stacey Johnston during Thanksgiving in 2006. She had yet to meet Frank Adams.

Click to enlarge

Frank Adams

Story tools

Comments (0)

E-mail a friend

Print

Share on Facebook

Digg this

Seed Newsvine

Send link via AIM

Follow on Twitter

Font size : A | A | A

Before Johnston caught his eye, she'd been in a hospital only once, according to her father. And that was to give birth to her daughter.

After she started dating Adams in the spring of 2007, during that stretch when new romances are typically in best-behavior mode, she sought treatment from four different hospitals and medical centers in Anchorage and Fairbanks -- for a concussion, for a broken ankle, for a festering wound, for cuts on her hand requiring surgery after Adams pulled a knife on her and she grabbed it.

She learned to live with the black eyes, bruises and broken nose.

This was a horsewoman and a barrel racer, a woman friends say had a great sense of humor and a real spark of life. But Adams slowly smothered that spark.

Jolene Brown, who befriended Stacey in the last few months of her life, said it was like a dimmer switch turned down a little more each time she saw her.

On Thursday, a Valley jury convicted Adams of first-degree murder for beating Stacey to death in July 2007. He faces up to 99 years in prison.

Jerry and Martha Curlee tried hard to save their daughter. They'd take her calls in the middle of the night when Adams was on a drunken rampage. They'd dial 911. They'd drive to the Valley to try to rescue her.

There wasn't much more they could do. Kidnapping is a crime. And you can't ground a 42-year-old.

Why didn't Stacey leave early on, when Adams first took his rage out on her truck, pummeling it with a club? Or after the first time he decked her, turning her eye the color of a prune?

According to trial testimony, Adams threatened to kill Stacey's daughter and her parents and burn their house down. Stacey knew he meant it. Her family believes she sacrificed herself to save them.

When Stacey died, she had no job, no money and was living with Adams in a tiny cabin in Chickaloon with no electricity, no running water, no phone, and for a stretch, no car.

She lived like a prisoner.

This was about as far from the life she was born into as it gets.

PROM QUEEN DAYS

Stacey was born in Louisiana and went to school in Oklahoma and Texas before moving to Alaska, where she graduated from Chugiak High School in 1983. According to Debbie Pratt, one of her best friends in high school, she was on the drill team, never got in trouble and got good grades.

She was prom queen her senior year.

"I don't think anybody disliked Stacey," Pratt said in an e-mail. "She was very kind and always had a big smile on her face."

"She was loved and cherished by her parents," said Greg Broderick, her high school boyfriend, now a real estate agent and father of two in Bend, Ore. "Definitely a stable family. There were no red flags at all."

After graduation, Stacey attended San Angelo State University in Texas. She later became a flight attendant for Reeve Aleutian Airways. She loved country music and dancing -- dogs, and horses even more. Carey Marshall who met Stacey in Fairbanks while she was down and out, watched in awe once as a corralled horse came running and whinnying up to her as if the two spoke a secret language.

In 1991, Stacey married David Johnston, a handsome rodeo bull rider and fireman, who was honored recently for pulling an unconscious child out of a burning house. The couple had a daughter, now a teenager.

How Stacey went from prom queen to death-spiral isn't clear. Her parents, drained from the murder trial, didn't want to talk about it. Whatever switch got flipped, by the time Stacey's divorce was final in 2004, she had some serious troubles, including a few brushes with the law, mostly minor stuff like shoplifting. But nothing compared with what was coming.

Broderick, who'd heard things weren't going well for his old high-school friend, was nevertheless stunned when he heard of her murder. Then he heard who did it.

Broderick knew Frank Adams from their school days. His sister did too. In class one day, Adams set fire to the back of her shirt.

"By the time we got out of high school, Frank was just a bad memory to this community," he said.

That's because Adams went away for a few years in juvenile lockup, convicted of a murder he committed at 16. Not the kind where you stand back and pull a trigger: the up-close-and-personal kind, the beat-the-man-with-a-tire-iron-then-slash-his-throat kind. The kind where you're close enough to hear the dying man take his last breath.

The night police caught up with Adams and found Stacey's body in the back of his car, he refused to get out of the vehicle. That he reached for a tire iron did not go unnoticed.

DOWNWARD SPIRAL

Stacey and Adams started dating in spring 2007. Only a few weeks later, she filed for a protective order against him.

What happened, she told authorities, was that Adams wanted her to take him to Birchwood so he could score some drugs. She didn't want to. Drunk and fuming, he punched her in the face in the car. She got out, ran across a field, hid in some woods, then showed up on a stranger's doorstep around 2:30 in the morning, battered and barefoot.

Pepper Thiede heard someone knocking, got out of bed, peeked out a window and let her in. Stacey had a huge swollen knot on her right cheek and bloody feet.

They called 911, and Stacey phoned her parents in Eagle River. She told them Adams was headed their way, that he'd threatened to kill her daughter, to kill them and to burn their house down.

Stacey got the restraining order the next day, and her parents found a safe place for her to stay. If only that had been the end of it.

Not long after, Stacey ended up in Fairbanks with Adams, looking for work. When they got caught leaving the Wayside Campground without paying, Adams was arrested for violating the restraining order.

That's when Carey Mitchell crossed paths with Stacey at a Fred Meyer. Adams was in jail and Stacey, on crutches, was living alone in a tent in what seemed to Mitchell a sketchy part of town. Mitchell, who was in Fairbanks with her husband for the summer, took Stacey to her RV, to church and to get some decent secondhand clothes. They did a lot of talking.

The couple's drug and alcohol problems came up a lot during the murder trial, but Mitchell never saw any sign of either in the week she spent with Stacey.

When Adams got out of jail, things got tense and weird. Mitchell says she offered to drive Stacey to Anchorage if she'd leave him. She wouldn't. When the two women said goodbye, Mitchell told Stacey to call any time she needed help. That call never came.

SCARS AND SECRETS

Police responded to a number of calls during the four-month relationship.

There was the time they were called to an airplane hangar in Wasilla twice in 12 hours. They got conflicting reports of threats with a knife, then a gun, then both changed their stories. And the night they were called to the same Eagle River house three times before Adams was finally arrested.

He'd punched Stacey in the face in front of a teenage girl, then got into a scuffle when her brother tried to get him to go away.

The cabin tucked away in the woods in Chickaloon was the perfect place for Adams. It's hard to call 911 without a phone.

Jolene Brown was about as close as Stacey had to a friend toward the end, by the time Adams took full control. And they barely knew each other because Adams wouldn't let Stacey out of his sight, Brown said.

Brown met Stacey when she and Adams came into the King Mountain Lodge where she works. At first, they seemed like any new couple, all lovey. But that didn't last.

Once Stacey motioned for Brown to meet her in the ladies room, and showed her the bruises up and down her arms. When Adams realized they were in there talking, he came barreling in to fetch her so fast the door banged against the wall.

Before leaving, Stacey slipped Brown a note with the cabin's milepost number and her parents' names and number. "In case of emergency," it said.

During a visit later in the summer, Stacey slipped Brown another note, this one written inside a matchbook.

"If I come here will you hide me?"

In the rare moments they had alone, Jolene pleaded with Stacey.

"What are you doing? Get away from him. Slit his throat in his sleep if you have to. He's going to kill you." But she seemed to Brown like a frightened puppy.

The last time she saw Stacey, Brown loaned Adams a splitting maul for a day or two, but only reluctantly, fearing she'd never get it back. And she never did.

A few weeks later, he used its handle to beat Stacey to death. It's now in a blue plastic evidence bag with Stacey's blood and hair all over it.

The day Stacey died, surveillance cameras spotted her at the Fred Meyer liquor store in Palmer at 12:40 p.m. Around 3:30 or 4, Jodi Granholm and Larry Hill were working on a guardrail at a construction site up the Glenn Highway near Hicks Creek. Adams drove by, and as he did, Stacey leaned out the window and winged a beer can at them. Granholm had to duck to keep from getting clocked.

Maybe a half hour later, they came on Stacey sitting alone in the car, and Granholm let her know what she did wasn't cool. Stacey was wearing these huge, 1970s, old-lady style sunglasses. She apologized profusely, and as she did, she flipped them to the top of her head, revealing two big black eyes.

No one reports seeing Stacey alive after that.

Like everyone, Brown wonders what more could have been done to help her friend.

"I would love to get inside her head and understand why she stayed," she said by phone during Adams' trial for murder. "It's like someone who's never had a drink trying to understand alcoholism. It's beyond the ability to understand."

Find Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/mckinney.

ADVERTISEMENT