Beverly Jean Ernst wants to prove to ‘them’ that ‘I’m not like how they say I am.’ : Mourning Her Twins, Mother Waits ‘Like Hermit’ for Trial

Sitting on her bed, humming to rock and roll coming from a clock radio, Beverly Jean Ernst rummaged through a large reclosable sandwich bag full of mementoes. She was searching for a poem she had written. But first she pulled out four plastic identification bracelets worn at birth by her children, some of their old birthday cards and locks of blond hair, one still summer-green from chlorine.

She also came across brochures from the Costa Mesa cemetery where her infant twins were buried last summer, a mourner’s kaddish with the 23rd Psalm printed on the reverse side, and letters that sympathetic strangers had sent to her while she was in jail.

She stopped singing. Her mind rested for a moment on what bothers her most about her recent past: explaining to her first two children what happened to her last two. She looked though small panes of smudged glass, past patches of yellow lawn to the street outside.

“When I die, I know I’ll go to heaven,” she said, “because on this earth I’ve already gone through hell.”

It’s been four months since the July morning she woke up with a friend in a Garden Grove shop and discovered her 3-month-old twins Adam and Ashley dead of heat stroke where she had left them--strapped in their car seats, locked inside an old Chevy, according to the court testimony of others. Ernst, 26, is scheduled to go to trial Feb. 9 on charges of involuntary manslaughter and felony child endangering.

“People don’t leave children in cars,” said Municipal Judge Dan C. Dutcher when he bound her over for trial. Dismissing her attorney’s contentions that her friend Scott Morrow promised to watch the twins and that he let Ernst oversleep, Dutcher called it “the grossest negligence” to leave babies unattended for such a long time.

Originally, Ernst told police it had been no longer than 20 minutes. Morrow testified that they had agreed to a “story”--that she had been inside the store only an hour. But other testimony at the six-day preliminary hearing revealed that the twins, still close to newborn weight because of their premature birth, had been in the car for five hours from 7 a.m. until slighly past noon--a point Ernst’s attorney said he will not contest. (Morrow has not been charged in the case.)

‘Sure She’ll Regret It’

The judge heard testimony that Ernst had left the twins in the car earlier that same day and on two other occasions for an unknown amount of time.

But the judge, indicating one disconcerting aspect of the case, said that Ernst, a single mother, divorced and unemployed, had cared well for her infants--up to her decision to leave them in the car while she napped. “I’m sure she’ll regret it the rest of her life,” he said. Independent observers of the case are split among those who feel that it was a tragedy and those who believe that Ernst should receive the maximum penalty (six years in prison), said her public defender, Dennis P. O’Connell. “There are no middle of the roaders,” he said. One reason the incident elicits strong reactions is that it “strikes close to home,” he said. “All parents have left their kids out of their view. . . . A lot have left kids in the driveway while they went in to grab something or left them in the care of someone else, maybe a young girl who spent the afternoon on the phone with her boyfriend.

“Obviously, she’s responsible for the children. But not everything that happens is gross negligence.”

Now living “like a hermit” at her widowed mother’s Anaheim home, Ernst said she doesn’t like to think about that day, and O’Connell has advised her not to discuss the events of July 20.

But some thoughts refuse to be capped over. The other night she dreamed that a friend who is pregnant with twins was going to give birth to Adam and Ashley. She said she woke up screaming.

Tall, Frail, Scrappy

Though she said she also tries not to think about the negative things said about her in court, she does want to prove to “them” that “I’m not like how they say I am,” she said.

At 5 feet, 10 inches and 100 pounds, Ernst is frail and scrappy--a person whose life resembles a winsome country-Western song arranged to a dissonant score. Her feuds with her mother and brother have brought the police. She can put together car engines as easily as dolls and clothes she makes for her daughter. In her purse she carries an Old Testament with her four children’s photos--and a knife for protection.

Every week, she takes the bus or asks someone to drive her to the cemetery where she leaves fresh flowers on the twins’ unmarked graves, Ernst said. If she could, she said, she would go every day. At least once a week she writes or calls her son and daughter, Kenneth Edward, 6, and Sarah Beth, 5, now staying with her former parents-in-law in Illinois.

“All I look forward to in my life is my kids,” she said.

She prides herself that her children could count to 10 and write their names by the time they were 2, that she has not depended on welfare, that--if she wanted to--she could make it to the state border with only 20 cents in her pocket.

Ernst said she was adopted by a military couple when she was 2 months old and grew up in Stanton, idolizing her father and his ability to fix things. The neighborhood was so rough, she recalled, that her best friend was stabbed when she was 10. She said she ran away several times.

She said she liked school, always did her homework and “never got anything below a C.” Ernst’s mother said Ernst did not graduate from Loara High School. Ernst said that at one point she took a class in auto mechanics and welding at Fullerton College.

She never had many close friends. “There are very few women I can talk to. They’re either too gossipy or two prissy,” she said.

“The whole time I was growing up, I had mostly male friends. I was like a tomboy,” she said. “I rode motorcycles. I’ve been in accidents. I liked to go camping.” Other girls, she said, “felt like I was taking their boyfriends away, but we were just friends.”

She said that when she found out she was adopted, “that changed everything. . . . It made me feel like, why didn’t my mom want me? I felt like I was left on a doorstep.”

Ernst said she left home to follow Kenneth Holt, a Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton whom she had met at a Christmas party. A faded snapshot in her wallet shows her on her wedding day, in a flowered dress, flowers held on a pregnant belly, beaming at her handsome husband. She said the marriage fell apart the day she came home early with the children and discovered her husband in bed with another woman.

“I had some pretty nasty things to say to her,” Ernst said. She took the children next door, returned to the bedroom where the pair were scrambling to get dressed and threatened to kill herself with a Samurai sword and a hari-kari knife they had in the apartment, she said. “I said, ‘How will you explain this to the kids?’ ”

Then she threw the woman’s clothes out the window onto the roof next door, she said. “I made her leave with a sheet on,” Ernst said with a wry smile, staring into the smoke from her cigarette. It was then that she learned, she said, that if she acts crazy enough she can make people be nice to her or leave her alone.

She said Holt left with the woman and didn’t call her for a month. (Holt, now on leave, could not be reached for comment.)

In the days before the death of her twins, Ernst said, she was desperately lonely.

She said she had felt “lost” ever since her husband left three years ago. She said she did not date for a year; her days were too full with housework, child care arrangements and finding odd jobs from housecleaning to deliveries to mechanics’ helper.

“It was hard on the kids,” but they comforted her, she said. “It’s amazing what little kids say. Kenny said, ‘I’ll be the man of the house. I’ll take care of you.’ Sarah said she would help with the laundry.

“They are really good kids. They cleaned up their room and never argued with me. I never had to discipline them.”

Two months after she started dating a man she met while living in San Clemente, she became pregnant, Ernst said. She “couldn’t believe” that it was twins.

“I’m against having abortions,” said Ernst, who belongs to Jews for Jesus, an organization of Jewish converts to Christianity. “I did talk about adopting them out at a family planning place, but I decided against it. I’ve had kids before and everything.” Besides, she said, she had always felt “second rate” as a result of being adopted herself.

“I thought, gosh, I don’t want this to happen to them.”

Her lover drove a delivery truck and worked at a doughnut shop, she said. He wanted to marry her, but she told him, “Maybe later.”

“I wanted to make sure it was the right thing to do. He said I didn’t care about anyone but me and my kids.”

That and the day she said she found her husband in bed with another woman were the only two times she has ever been angry in her life, Ernst said. She spit on her lover and probably “scared him away,” she said.

Her children, she said, “always came first. He couldn’t understand.”

Ernst said the twins were born 2 1/2 months prematurely at UCI Medical Center. After two months of intensive care at the Medical Center of La Mirada, she said, she took Adam and Ashley and went to stay with a friend in Garden Grove. Ernst said she had nowhere else to go.

Soon afterward, she sent Kenneth and Sarah to vacation with their grandparents in Illinois, Ernst said.

She said she had been fighting with the twins’ father and that he soon moved out of state. And she fought with her mother who she said didn’t want her to bring the babies back to live at her house. “The situation was I could not handle four kids every day,” said Mildred Ernst, her mother. Then Ernst had a falling out with her friend in Garden Grove, a misunderstanding over money, she said.

“It seemed like everyone was against me,” she said. “ ‘You’re stupid. You shouldn’t have gotten pregnant.’ I felt like nobody wanted us. I couldn’t understand why people would say anything like that about something so precious. I felt so out of place,” she said, her lips trembling.

Friend’s Late Visit

Ernst said that she met Morrow--whom she was visiting when the twins died--through Leonard Wosic, an old high school friend who owned the supply shop where Morrow worked. Morrow was not her lover, she said. Unlike men she said she met at a Christian singles club, she said, “Scott was not out to get me to have sex. He was just someone to talk to. He didn’t expect anything.”

Early in the morning of July 20, Greg Alfadley stopped by the supply shop to see Morrow. At 3 a.m., the twins were in Ernst’s car and she and Morrow appeared to be asleep on a fold-out couch inside the shop, Alfadley testified at the preliminary hearing. He woke them, and they left the shop to have coffee in an Anaheim restaurant, taking the twins with them, he said. Ernst took the babies inside the restaurant and fed them formula while the three adults talked for about three hours, according to Morrow’s testimony.

They returned to the supply shop at 7 a.m. Ernst had planned to leave then, but Morrow coaxed her into staying, according to Alfadley’s testimony.

From then until noon, the temperature could have risen to 120 degrees inside the car, which had only one window cracked open, according to fire officials. When Ernst and Morrow discovered the twins were dead just after noon, they tried in vain to revive them while Wosic called paramedics. Ernst was arrested and booked into Orange County jail that afternoon.

She was held for six days while prosecutors debated whether to file charges.

Autopsies were performed on the twins before they were buried. That was particularly difficult emotionally, Ernst said. “In the Jewish religion,” she said, “we usually bury them right away. At once.”

On a court-imposed condition, she lives with her mother and brother. But she said she spends most of her time alone in her dimly lit room with its translucent Indian print bedspread stretched over the stucco ceiling as decoration. Two framed portraits of the twins, in oversized sleepers, wide-eyed and stretching, hang on the wall along with school portraits of her other children.

These days, Ernst said, she has a hard time concentrating. She feels that her friends have deserted her. “Sometimes, it takes something horrible to find out who your true friends are.”

She said her ex-husband is “more supportive than anyone. It makes me feel really good.”

As she has done for years, whenever she has no one to talk to or feels “uncomfortable,” Ernst writes. “I write all the time. Sometimes I don’t realize what I write until I go back and read it.” It may be song lyrics, snatches recalled from a comedian’s routine or her own poetry.

Poem Written on Release

Searching through her souvenir bag, she finally found the poem she wrote after she was released from jail. Penciled on pink stationery, with the i’s carefully topped with round circles, it read in part:

How could anything that was once so happy, so fulfilling so beautiful now be so blue, so empty so ugly. I’m alone--Without the few I love. I’m hurting.

Longing for the moments with them one more time. My heart wants to--has to relive them; yet my mind knows the impossibilities. The days, they pass rather quickly. Just as I know they did before. But these days that pass--do not go by with happiness and fulfillment, yet with sadness and emptyness (sic).

She also brought out the dozen letters she saved from supportive strangers. One read, “We’ve all made mistakes in trying to raise our children. God bless you and help you love and care for your two. . . .”

Another woman wrote: “I am a single mother. . . . I know you never intended to hurt your babies. I think people are too quick to make judgments against someone who may not ‘fit’ in our society. What happened to you could easily have happened to a middle-class housewife from Anaheim Hills in a Mercedes station wagon. . . .”

And from the bag, she also pulled out her workbook from a home study program in basic English.

“I want to go back to college and take child psychology and development,” she said. “I just want to take the course. It’s just something I’m interested in. Always have been.”