This is part 2 of my previous post about my former roommate photographer John Tessier, aka Jack McCullough, who’s been convicted for the murder of Maria Ridulph.

Ana, the model above, was John’s Muse. She was a ballerina with a remarkably thin strong body. She was a tad short for the modeling world at 5’6″, but pursued it along with her acting career. Her dance background gave her an elegance and poise that made her remarkable in front of the camera. She knew where her body was, and how to give John the curves and movement he needed to create  his compositions. The three of us created images off and on for nearly a decade. Images that I’ve always been very proud of… until now. Now I see things with a different perspective, a perspective that clearly disturbs me.

When I first met Ana, her hair color was light brown with golden highlights.  However, John felt she would look better with darker hair, and to this day, that’s how she wears it. When I’d found the images online of John’s victim, Maria Ridulph, I gasped. Even at age 7 she bore a striking resemblance to Ana, with her porcelain skin and dark eyes and hair. I now see Ana as the grown up version of Maria.

Is this why John was obsessed with photographing Ana over and over again through out the years? Was it truly art we were making, or was it something much deeper and darker. Once I became aware of Maria’s story, and that John had been convicted for her murder, I contacted Ana via facebook and brought it to her attention. Unfortunately, we’ve never actually talked about it, and it makes me wonder if there was a dark side to their relationship that I know nothing about. For Ana’s sake, I hope not. It’s hard to know where I stand in the bigger narrative of John’s life. Did I unknowingly participate in his obsession?

As artistic director of Lewis Fox Salon, I brought many teenage girls from the salon to his studio to be photographed. The models were never left alone with John as a matter of professionalism. Everything was on the up and up, at least on my end.  I don’t ever recall any type of inappropriate behavior, but now I’m questioning everything. Even the first image above, with Ana’s hands framing her neck, takes on a whole new meaning. That was the image that John chose from the proof sheet at the very top, not me, not Ana, but John.  There were plenty of great images to print… were we unknowingly seeing into the psyche of a killer? I also recall John talking about how much he loved the saturated black against the bright white in his black and white photos. He wasn’t much good with color, but truly excelled in this medium. Maybe the starkness of black and white was how he saw the world, a world with no room for the nuances of grey.

After reading the articles online about his conviction, I contacted the detectives who were responsible for prosecuting John Tessier, aka John McCullough, and gave them my contact information. Reports indicate that they’re still looking at cases of missing women from the areas that John lived in, with hopes of tying him to their disappearances. To answer my own question in the previous post, can monsters also be artists, I simply have to remind myself of Adolf Hitler. It’s so tragic to discover that someone I held in such high esteem, could turn out to be such a flawed and horrible human being.

July 6, 2016…

I just learned that Jack McCullough, aka John Tessier, has been exonerated of all charges in the murder of Maria Ridulph in April of this year. 

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…..