Suicide’s Letters Tell a Story of Frustration

For months before Mary Jo Jansen shot herself to death in front of a classroom full of children, the Cowan Heights woman agonized over what she believed were people plotting against her and doctors ignoring her medical ailments, according to letters she wrote.

Some, according to Jansen’s letters, believed that she was in need of psychiatric treatment. Indeed, the 44-year-old woman wrote that she had sought treatment at a “psychological care center.”

Jansen, in February, provided The Times with copies of the letters, which she said she had written to an attorney, in a bid to gain publicity.

Jansen wrote that doctors and insurance companies had conspired against her, denying her treatment and benefits.

“As new complaints arose, I had been intimidated by my doctors to the point that I didn’t dare tell them another problem,” she wrote in October.

Jansen complained of many medical ailments, including injuries stemming from a fall when she slipped at work on Feb. 24, 1986.

Jansen said she suffered a back injury in the fall that, her son said after her suicide, resulted in a battle with her employer’s insurance company.

The letters, which were written from Aug. 13, 1986, to Feb. 24 of this year, grew increasingly frantic.

“I am wondering if everyone involved in my case is hoping I will die, while I am trying desperately not to,” she wrote.

Jansen even produced a letter she said she wrote to President Reagan on Oct. 7, 1986, asking him to help her obtain state disability and Social Security benefits. She also wrote of asking her son to take her to a “psychological care center” where, after a tour of the facility, she decided to leave.

But Jansen wrote that she was forcibly kept at the facility and recalled people discussing “setting my house on fire or causing an automobile accident by tinkering with my son’s car. . . .”

“Considering all I have been through,” she added, “and all the drugs I had been given, I could not swear that I was not hallucinating, but it seemed real. . . .”

After being treated by a psychiatrist, Jansen said, she wrote an attorney seeking help in pursuing insurance benefits.

“It may be only that I often feel that I don’t want to live very long,” Jansen wrote.

“I do not object to a psychiatrist,” she wrote. “I resign to accusation that I am emotionally ill, but I will not resign to being mentally ill, unless they are one (and) the same.”

In another letter Jansen wrote, “There is no doubt that the medical profession is desperately trying to make me appear mental (sic) incompetent.”

In her Feb. 24, 1987, letter--the most recent of those provided to The Times--Jansen wrote: “Isn’t there someone in this country who will help me get well and treat me? I am begging for help from somewhere. . . .”