Homewrecker

Ben Hofseth long ago learned the hard way never to be surprised by his ex-wife. Yet he didn't realize exactly what she was capable of until one chilly day, March 20, 1988.

Jesse Lenz

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• Neil Dubey
• Ben Hofseth
• Janell Littlejohn
• Jessica Carde
• Cameron Truesdell

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It's a Friday afternoon and Hofseth has just gotten off of work. As a case manager at a work-release program, he spends his time on the clock dealing with criminals: murderers, rapists, and white-collar frauds.

Driving in the late-winter Minnesota gloom, Hofseth steers his Volkswagen through the gates of a tony subdivision in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis, pulls up to the curb next to a handsome rambler, puts the car in park, and gets out. The home belongs to his ex, Juanita, who has since remarried and taken her new husband's last name, Lammer. Hofseth and Lammer had once been in love, impulsively detouring to Las Vegas during a road trip to the Grand Canyon so that they could get hitched. Now they are in something like the opposite: the fourth year of an ugly, protracted custody battle.

Sitting in the middle of the fight are Hofseth and Lammer's two sons: 8-year-old Jesse and 5-year-old Nick. They are the ones Hofseth has come to see, and the ones he's been fighting to keep seeing this whole time. As he walks toward the front door of his ex-wife's new home, Hofseth unwittingly steps toward something like an end to his old life. The rules are about to change on him. Again.

Shortly after their divorce, the former couple had joint custody of the boys. Then Lammer started telling the courts that Jesse and Nick were coming home from weekends with Dad complaining that Hofseth had touched them while he bathed and changed them. Hofseth denied the allegations, submitted to a battery of psychological tests, and jumped through every imaginable hoop to prove his innocence. For nearly a year, his only contact with the boys came during chaperoned play dates in a sterile government office that spoke to many things, none of them familial warmth. Now, as he reaches Lammer's front door, he's hopeful that the worst of the fight is behind him. The judge assigned to his case is just beginning to see through Lammer's act. In another month, he may very well have the kids all to himself, happily careening through the bedroom he's rigged in the upper floor of a friend's house, his new, temporary crash pad. But he doesn't have another month.

Hofseth knocks. There's no answer. He rings the doorbell. Silence still. Then he leans over and looks through the picture window and into the living room. All that's left inside are the drapes. Half-stumbling to the house next door, Hofseth can't quite get his mind around what he's told next.

"They left last Sunday," the neighbor says. "Just packed up and went in the middle of the night."

Hofseth races to the police station, unaware that, no matter how fast he drives, it will make no difference. Lammer is already hundreds of miles away. The next time he'll see her, she'll be explaining why she kidnapped her kids to a sympathetic interviewer on 60 Minutes. The next time he'll see his boys in the flesh, they'll be a year older, 2,000 miles away in Washington, and wary of the man claiming to be their real father. But of all the things Hofseth is unable to anticipate this day, one of the worst of his life, there's this: More than 20 years later he'll get a call from a reporter asking him if he was once married to a woman named Juanita Lammer.

"Yes, I was," he'll say, following immediately with a question of his own: "What's she done now?"

The answer, he'll find out, is a lot.

According to her alleged victims, Lammer—now going by the name Jessica Carde—has left a wake of destruction in both Snohomish and King County. Years after a 14-month, cross-country fugitive flight from justice first brought her to Washington, victims say that they fell prey to an incredibly charming woman willing to say or do whatever it takes to get what she wants, and to intimidate and threaten anyone who stands in her way. Carde's purported modus operandi, according to her alleged victims, is to present herself as a buyer of their million-dollar homes, sign a lease even though she can't come up with the money to close, and then squat without paying rent for months—sometimes more than a year. Six homeowners over four years claim to have come under her spell. Court documents and interviews paint a picture of a manipulator who with the help of a background in hypnotherapy, some victims say, literally hypnotized them. Irate home-owners, one of whom is accused of threatening to kill Carde, claim she's cost them (and one elderly stroke survivor) hundreds of thousands of dollars, their homes and businesses, and in one case their will to live.

"I have a lot of mental issues because of this woman, and attempted to take my life," says Kevin Roberts, a builder in Snohomish County for 35 years who claims he filed for bankruptcy and lost five homes to foreclosure because of his failed business relationship with Carde. "You gotta trust me, man—she destroyed me."