Imagine my surprise last year when I google searched my former roommate photographer John Tessier, aka Jack McCullough, and discovered that he was a convicted killer. I was stunned. How could this be… was this really the same man I’d worked with for nearly a decade, and who was also my first roommate?
The initial story I’d found was a CNN news article that headlined for over a week on their web site. As I dug deeper, reading everything I could find, I discovered they’d done an entire series on him… It was one of the nations longest and most notorious unsolved cold cases, until his mother implicated him on her deathbed in the 1957 slaying of Maria Ridulph. It was his half sister Janet who then went to the police and tried to get the case reopened, which took years. As I watched the police interview videos of John McCullough, aka John Tessier, it sparked memories that confirmed he was indeed the same man. But how do I bridge the gap from denial to acceptance, that someone I thought I knew could be both an artist and a convicted killer. Can monsters also be artists?
I first met John when I was hired as a hair dresser at Seattle’s Carolyn Hansen Fashion College in the early 1980’s. Apparently Carolyn Hansen had been a model in her younger years, and her daughter Patti Hansen famously followed in her footsteps. The school was shoddy at best, but those 6 months completely changed my life and the trajectory of my career. John Tessier was their staff photographer and we hit it off remarkably well. I was looking for my first apartment away from home, and being roommates with John was an affordable option. I didn’t mind that he was 20 years older, he was a retired cop (little did I know he’d actually been fired for inappropriate behavior) and was an achieved mentor in my eyes. If I recall correctly, we were roommates for about a year, and our working relationship continued for nearly a decade afterwards. As Artistic Director of the Lewis Fox Salon in Bellevue Washington, I recruited John to be our photographer for advertising campaigns, and also to inspire our salon stylists creativity.
The photographs above are some of my favorite photos from those years. We fancied ourselves as Avedon and Richardson, photographer and make up artist/hairdresser, creating high art. I was a bit stunned when the police reports I’d read referred to Tessier’s brief stint as a photographer as a ‘hack’. Was he really a hack I asked myself? Those images we’d created launched my career as a celebrity hairdresser, catapulting me ahead of the local pack of stylists with aspirations for Hollywood. I drove to my storage locker and dug out those images I’d been saving for over 20 years. I dusted them off, and began pouring over them. What makes cops authorities on photography I wondered. They’d found his archives which included many of our artful nudes, which were always tasteful in my opinion, and chalked it up as trash.
Looking back, I’m still very proud of what we created, and I never felt the least bit unsafe around John for those hundreds of hours we spent making art. But that begs the question, do you really ever know someone? Maria Ridulph’s death certainly wasn’t accidental. And from what I gathered during my hours of reading about Tessier/McCullough, was that the FBI might still be investigating him for other unsolved murders in Washington State.
To be continued…..
