Cover Story: Lethally Blonde

Long before she was accused of robbing and murdering a Mexican man and his 9-year-old daughter in the Arizona desert, exposing the modern American Minuteman movement to accusations of racial warfare; and long before she told her followers that, as a white woman, she saw brown-skinned immigrants as filthy, lowly lawbreakers, Shawna Forde was climbing into a car in Seattle to allegedly have illegal sex with a man named Rodriguez.

Then known as Shawna Breitgham, the 17-year-old future border vigilante had worked the city's strolls for at least two years, long enough to know that if a customer introduces himself by groping you, he's probably not a cop (undercover officers are generally bound by no-touch rules). So on that October evening in 1985, after getting into a car on Pike Street and riding to an unlit spot, the shapely blonde teen prostitute picked up the driver's hand and rubbed it against her breasts. Then she reached over and fondled his crotch.

After agreeing to a $50 blow job, a reassured Shawna said: "Take off your pants." She began undoing the driver's fly.

That's when he took it out. His badge, that is.

"Seattle Police!" said vice officer Rodriguez, whose first name, due to old and incomplete records, is lost to history.

It was Shawna's fifth bust since age 11, a run of convictions that included burglary, theft, and prostitution. According to prosecutors, public records, and her family, she has spent a good deal of her life testing how far the law will stretch before it snaps back— something she would, Fagin-like, impart to her own children, says her half-brother Merrill Metzger.

"She taught them both how to shoplift," Metzger says, referring to Shawna's teen daughter, but especially to her 19-year-old son, who just went off to prison on a burglary rap. "Shawna also used them to distract people while she shoplifted."

Shawna shrugged it all off, and would later run for city council in her hometown of Everett with a shoplifting charge hanging over her. It was a law-and-order campaign of sorts: During the same period, her son was convicted of assaulting the owner of a beauty salon where she worked.

Given up for adoption as a child, Shawna was raised partly in foster homes and left school early on. She wed as a teen and would blaze through three other marriages, four name changes, more court scrapes, and a zigzagging procession of career choices—self-proclaimed Seattle grunge-rock promoter, hairdresser, Boeing worker, youth counselor, cosmetologist, and T-shirt maker—before, according to her brother, going over the inevitable edge and staging crimes, including her own rape.

And not to Metzger's surprise, last month yet another cop took out his badge—for perhaps Shawna's final arrest.

She was now Shawna Forde, the place was Arizona, and she had allegedly stretched the statutes to their ultimate limit: double homicide in a border-town trailer home. The law has snapped back hard; her fate could be the death penalty.

Forde today is being held at Pima County Adult Detention Center in Tucson. Along with two others, including 34-year-old white supremacist Jason "Gunny" Bush of Wenatchee, she's charged with first-degree murder in a plot to steal drugs and money and kill any witnesses. Prosecutors say Forde's motive was to finance her self-anointed border-patrol group, Minutemen American Defense, an anti-immigration posse known as MAD.

Prosecutors and family say the woman who just eight years ago was leading a beauty-school protest in Everett had morphed into the leader of a small outlaw band, prowling the Mexican border for illegals and drug dealers to rob. In debt after a recent divorce from a man who was the target of an Everett murder attempt, she embarked on an armed crime spree to finance a grandiose scheme: She would buy those back-40 desert acres she often talked about and grow her tiny team into a Blackwater-style international force that would battle border jumpers and drug cartels and rescue kidnapped Americans in other countries.

"She sat here on my couch and told me she planned to start an underground militia," Metzger says from his home in Redding, Calif. "She said she would rob Mexican drug dealers, steal their money and their drugs. She talked about a store near her in Arizona that kept 40 grand under the counter to cash illegals' checks, and she was going to rob that."

She was also allegedly involved in the recent burglary of her brother's home and the robbery of a family friend's place, Metzger says, where $12,000 was taken at gunpoint. California authorities recently told reporters they're investigating those break-ins in connection with the Arizona robbery and shootings.

"We didn't know whether to believe her or not when she talked about her plans," says Metzger. "She had a habit of lying, of exaggerating. We shrugged it off at first. Then we told police. They were already on to her when the [Arizona] shootings happened. She talked about not only robbing drug dealers, but starting a revolution against the government."

Now a hard-looking 41, Forde is said to be what a witness called the "fat white woman" who at 1 a.m. on May 30 emerged in an armored vest and Border Patrol garb from a gun battle in a southwest Arizona town called Arivaca, an hour down I-19 from Tucson. Raul "Junior" Flores, 29, a suspected drug dealer, and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia were left dead on the floor of their trailer home. The intruders were after Flores' rumored $4,000 drug-money stash, Pima County prosecutors stated at a press conference and in court records. Flores' 31-year-old wife, Gina Gonzalez, though wounded three times, survived the shooting and returned fire, slightly wounding alleged gunman Bush as he and the others fled.