A neighbor with a secret: Mom killed young son, hid out in L.A. apartment for a year, police say

At first, the woman didn’t think too much of the thumping coming from a nearby unit in her North Hollywood apartment building one night in March. She assumed it was a signal from her neighbor that she was being too loud.

But that didn’t make sense, she realized. The volume on her TV wasn’t up that high. She wasn’t walking around the apartment in heels or running noisy appliances, either.

The woman, who declined to be named because she feared for her safety, said her neighbor was using what appeared to be a broom to repeatedly smash the walls and ceiling. She also heard high-pitched chanting, as if someone were trying to summon something.

It seemed like her neighbor was having a mental health crisis, but she didn’t call the police because she worried that would make matters worse.

Little did she know that the police would have been very interested in the neighbor, Dejaune Anderson. That’s because Indiana authorities had been searching for Anderson for two years, ever since her 5-year-old son’s body was found in a suitcase in the woods.

Dejaune Ludie Anderson, shown in a Georgia Department of Motor Vehicles photo provided by the Indiana State Police.

(Associated Press)

Soon after the incident with the neighbor, police arrested Anderson at a train station in Arcadia.

She is now awaiting trial in Indiana on charges of murder, neglect of a dependent resulting in death and obstruction of justice, according to the Indiana State Police. A Washington County, Ind., judge has ordered an evaluation to determine whether she is competent to stand trial.

Authorities haven’t revealed how they tracked down Anderson; State Police Sgt. Carey Huls would only say a “concerned citizen” contacted them, ultimately leading to Anderson’s arrest.

Six months after her son, Cairo Jordan, was found, authorities issued an arrest warrant for Anderson and her friend, Dawn Coleman, whom police say helped Anderson dispose of Cairo’s body.

Coleman was arrested in San Francisco in October 2022; Washington County prosecutor Tara Coats Hunt said Coleman’s arrest led authorities to believe Anderson could also have been hiding out in California.

“Finding her after two years was the second step in finding justice for Cairo, the first being getting Coleman convicted,” Hunt said. “Finding the child’s mother is a great relief for our little community.”

California

Two years after child’s body found in suitcase, mother arrested in California

Dejaune L. Anderson was arrested two years after her son’s body was found by a man hunting mushrooms in Indiana.

March 18, 2024

Anderson wrote in court documents that her court-appointed attorney, Alex Ooley, is the “grandson of Joe Biden” and terminated him on April 8. Ooley hasn’t been released from the case, but the judge has allowed Anderson to file her own documents, according to court records. Ooley didn’t respond to The Times’ requests for comment.

Authorities in court records paint a troubled portrait of Anderson, alleging she believed her young son was actually a century-old demon who was trying to kill her.

But when she moved into the North Hollywood apartment complex, neighbors say she kept her beliefs largely under wraps, at least at first.

Anderson would talk about magic and conspiracy theories, but her neighbors didn’t think that was too unusual for Los Angeles. Anderson would often wave when someone walked by and had decorated her apartment’s walkway with plants and decals of colored birds.

The manager of the apartment building, who asked for anonymity because of safety concerns, met Anderson shortly after the 440-square-foot unit where she would stay was rented to a man going by the name of Eric Porter, according to a rental application reviewed by The Times.

After the prospective tenant, who appeared to be in his 50s or 60s, offered to put up a deposit equal to two months’ rent, the owner said, he approved his application.

The renter brought Anderson with him to pick up the keys, but she told the building manager her name was Olla, he said. He added that the renter told him she was his daughter and would be staying with him sometimes.

“You know this unit is just for your dad, right?” the manager recalled asking her.

She told him that she didn’t think her father would be there all the time, he said, and that she was 19.

That was strange, the manager thought. She looked like she was in her 30s, not a teenager. He decided not to say anything.

Over the next year, the manager and the apartment building’s owner said they tried to call the man they knew as Porter when there were issues with his plumbing or water heater, but Anderson picked up every time. She told them her dad got a new phone but was always losing it. She promised he’d call them back, but he never did.

Another sign that something might be amiss: She put black tint on her unit’s windows shortly after moving in, preventing anyone from peeking inside.

Although she struck some of her neighbors as friendly, she also behaved erratically at times. In early March, the manager said he and Anderson got into an argument because she had been smoking cigarettes and marijuana in her bathroom and the smell was wafting over to his unit. When he confronted her about it, she denied that the smoke was hers and threatened to kill him. When he told her that the security camera was pointed right at them, she said she didn’t care.

Things started coming to a head a week later. On March 9, the manager received a text from Anderson: “i got the neighbors upstairs ... trying to kill me because i reported them to the cartel that they killed this leader son girl and daughter and ate the baby. but i can’t reach them.”

“Oh my God, what can I do?” the manager texted back.

He got no response.

Photo taken April 8, 2024 of the North Hollywood apartment where Anderson stayed for about a year. (Summer Lin / Los Angeles Times)

Then, he said, he heard shrieking coming from her apartment. He also heard what sounded like a recording of a man praying.

He texted her again and told her to stop making noise. When she didn’t respond, he called her.

She sounded hysterical over the phone, saying that her upstairs neighbor was poisoning her food and leaving it all over her bathroom and ceiling, he said. She said a spirit was hiding in her closet and people had eaten a baby outside her apartment. She begged the manager to come over and see for himself.

“OK, let me call the cops,” he told her.

Suddenly, she quieted down and promised to stop, he said.

The manager told her that he was letting her go this time but that it couldn’t happen again.

“But why are you gonna call the cops?” the manager recalled her asking him.

She then told him that she worked for the CIA and was Donald Trump’s cousin, he said.

The next day, a neighbor noticed that two large, white circles had been drawn on Anderson’s window in chalk, and he heard something hit the window as he walked by. A few days later, he told the manager he was worried that something had happened to her; the manager and the building’s owner texted and called her but got no response.

Finally, on the morning of March 14, Anderson called the building owner back.

The owner said he explained to Anderson that she wasn’t a registered tenant and that he needed to speak with her father to add her to the lease.

“Either way, you can’t be making all of this noise and disturbing my tenants,” he recalled telling her, to which she replied, “You don’t know who I am. I’m Donald Trump’s first cousin. I saved him from an assassination attempt. You can call the White House.”

He realized that Anderson probably wasn’t mentally well, but still didn’t know what to do. He hadn’t heard from the man who said he was her father for almost a year.

Hours later, the owner said, he got a call from an L.A. police officer, asking if he recognized a phone number they’d been monitoring. The owner plugged the number into his phone and the name Porter popped up.

“That’s the number for one of my tenants, but I don’t talk to him anymore,” the owner said. “I talk to Olla, his daughter.”

“We think this woman is wanted for murder in Indiana,” the officer said.

Photo taken April 8, 2024 of the North Hollywood apartment where Anderson stayed for about a year. (Summer Lin / Los Angeles Times)

Stunned, the owner forwarded documents he had on the renter, in case it would aid police in their search, according to an email reviewed by The Times. He also gave permission to search the unit. Later that day, Anderson was apprehended at the Metro A line station in Arcadia.

When a Times reporter visited Anderson’s apartment shortly after her arrest, it had burned candles, tarot cards, books on psychic abilities and the occult and an unopened Amazon package addressed to a person named Eric Porter. Large strips of white paper scribbled with conspiracy theories in colored marker were taped to the walls. One of them read: “I am the rightful queen of Scotland.”

Anderson agreed to be extradited to Indiana and said she would represent herself at trial.

The whereabouts of the man who said he was Anderson’s father remain a mystery; police told the complex’s owner that they haven’t been able to reach him. A Times reporter visited an address listed for the man and left messages for him and several relatives identified in public records, but got no response.

The search for Anderson grew out of a grim discovery on April 16, 2022, when a man foraging for mushrooms in the woods in southern Indiana happened upon a brightly colored hard-shell suitcase.

Inside were the remains of a small child, whom police later identified as Cairo Jordan. The boy had been dead about a week when his body was found; his death was ruled a homicide, caused by electrolyte imbalance that most likely resulted from vomiting and diarrhea, authorities said.

Six months after his body was found, Coleman, 42, of Shreveport, La., was arrested and charged with aiding, inducing or causing murder, neglect of a dependent resulting in death and obstruction of justice.

Coleman took a plea deal and was sentenced in November to 30 years in prison, with five years suspended to probation. She will be required to testify against Anderson as part of the deal.

Coleman told police that she had known Anderson for about a year and that they had been living together in a house in Louisville, Ky., just across the Ohio River from Indiana, according to court records.

In April 2022, Coleman walked into the bedroom of the home to find Anderson sitting on top of Cairo, who was lying face down on the mattress, according to court records. Coleman told police that the boy was already dead by the time she got involved. Anderson then asked Coleman to help put the child’s body in the suitcase.

After the pair loaded the suitcase into the trunk of their car, Anderson told Coleman that she believed her son was “something really bad, that he was a 100-year-old soul or some old soul that wasn’t supposed to be there.”

Then they drove to the woods near Pekin, Ind., and disposed of the body.

Data from cellphone towers placed both women’s phones on April 14, 2022, in the area where the suitcase was found, authorities said in Coleman’s arrest affidavit. Their fingerprints were also found on the plastic bags that contained Cairo’s body.

Social media posts from Anderson and Coleman were replete with references to exorcism and demonic possession in the days leading up to Cairo’s death.

Four days before her son was discovered in the woods, Anderson had made a post to her account on X that tagged Father Vincent Lampert, a Catholic priest and exorcist of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

“I have survived the death attacks from my 5-year-old throughout the 5 years he has been alive,” she wrote. “I have been able to weaken his powers through our blood. I have his real name and he is 100 years old. Need assistance.”