COLUMBIA, Mo.—Lauren St. Pierre had the adorable toddler, the successful husband and a new house by the Army base where he worked. Surgeries bestowed the hourglass figure she had always wanted.
On a summer day in 2010, Lauren discovered something she wanted more.
She was on a neighbor’s back deck, sipping wine and smoking cigarettes. Lauren admired her neighbor, another military wife, who displayed such boundless energy, raising two teenagers in a spotless house, well-known for her volunteer work. “I don’t understand how you do it,” Lauren told her.
The woman led Lauren into the kitchen and poured a small pile of methamphetamine powder onto the countertop. With a credit card and a practiced hand, she arranged the drug into lines. Lauren, 24 years old, took a drinking straw cut short at an angle, plunged one end into her nostril and inhaled.
Her sinuses burned. The space behind her eyeballs hurt. “Why would anybody do this?” she recalled thinking.
Soon, though, she felt a surge of energy race through her body. That night, she hit the bars with friends in her mommy group. She guzzled cranberry-and-vodka cocktails. At 4 a.m., Lauren cleaned the baseboards of her house and imagined her next hit.
Meth delivered a feeling Lauren would pursue again and again, through tragedy and despair, a sensation that reduced to an afterthought her son, her husband, her health, her freedom and everything else that had once mattered.
In 2010, the year Lauren first tried methamphetamine, at the time manufactured largely in makeshift labs, the drug killed 1,388 people in the U.S., either used alone or in conjunction with other drugs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its toll has grown 20-fold in the years since, driven by Mexican cartels producing meth on an industrial scale.
Last year, about 33,000 Americans died from overdoses of meth or other psychostimulants, alone or with other drugs, the CDC reported. Only opioids, largely fentanyl, killed more people, a record 71,000 last year. In 2020, 2.5 million Americans ages 12 and older reported using meth in the previous year, according to the CDC.
What set Lauren apart was the swiftness of her descent from a middle-class life into a sordid underworld of crime, poverty, degradation and abuse—and her long, painful and improbable path to redemption.
This account is based on interviews with Lauren and her family, friends, lovers and acquaintances, and from court papers, police reports and her journals.
Transformed
In high school, Lauren was 5 feet 11 inches, flat-chested and 245 pounds. She hated her body and cast her anger at those around her, including her family.
Lauren’s older brother, Derrick Jensen, was a popular high-school athlete. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2001 and later served three combat tours in Iraq. Their mother, Tracy della Vecchia, started a charity called Marine Parents in 2003 to comfort mothers and fathers of those serving in Iraq.
Lauren resented how Marine Parents absorbed her mother’s attention, and while her brother fought his way to Baghdad, she dropped out of school.
She was 17 when she met her first boyfriend online. David St. Pierre was a 24-year-old Army respiratory therapist at Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks. She moved in with him, and her mother wasn’t sorry to see her go.
David was a videogame enthusiast, and Lauren became a gamer. He was a New England Patriots fan, so she cheered for them, too. “I just wanted someone to love me,” she said.
They married in 2006, and David’s military insurance covered Lauren’s gastric-bypass weight-loss surgery. Their son, Ethan, was born in 2008.
Lauren and other military wives in her mommy group socialized and complained about their husbands. They went to bars, strip clubs and at-home margarita parties where Lauren sold Mary Kay cosmetics and skin-care products.
One day, Lauren waited until her husband was napping to call the bank and increase their credit limit: She wanted $25,000 for liposuction and breast-enlargement surgery. Following her makeover, Lauren became obsessed with her new ability to turn heads and attract wolf whistles.
After first snorting meth in July 2010, Lauren soon learned that smoking it gave a more intense high. She would feel 10 feet tall and bulletproof.
Lauren had been using the drug for a couple of months when she sat her husband, David, on the couch and announced she was leaving him. “I’m not happy,” she said.
Only meth delivered the feeling she had been missing in her life.
Twice trapped
In October, with help from David and her mother, Lauren bought a small house across from an elementary school in Columbia, hours away from her husband and their 18-month-old son.
She found work as a driver for her meth dealer. Every few days, around midnight, Lauren drove the dealer to a supplier in Kansas City, Mo. She got paid with an eighth-ounce bag of the drug.
Other meth users congregated around Lauren that winter, squatting in the basement of her house. One of them asked Lauren to bail out David Palmer, a small-time drug dealer nicknamed Biggalo. Lauren didn’t know him. But she wanted to be liked in her new circle and secured the $75,000 bond with $1,200 in cash and the title to her Ford Explorer.
Freed from custody, Biggalo joined Lauren and the meth dealer on the trip to the Kansas City supplier on Feb. 2, 2011. From the start, she knew something was amiss.
In Kansas City, a stranger joined them—tall with a scraggly beard and neck tattoos. On the dealer’s instructions, Lauren drove the group to a hotel and went inside alone with the stranger.
From the hotel room, Lauren texted the dealer in the car: This isn’t right. You need to come back right now. She was still clutching the phone when the stranger raped her. She thought about her husband and son. For a moment, she regretted her plastic surgery and wished she were ugly.
Afterward, Biggalo and the dealer came to the hotel room. Biggalo helped her dress. The dealer heaped meth on the bathroom vanity for her.
Lauren later learned the dealer had used her to cover a drug debt. “He sold me,” she said.
Once back home, Lauren demanded Biggalo give her an injection of the drug. She wanted the biggest escape possible. He mixed meth with water on a spoon and drew the liquid into a syringe. She closed her eyes as he plunged the needle into a vein inside her elbow. Her heart raced, and she blacked out.
Biggalo gave her another shot in the morning. Lauren passed out and woke up in the passenger seat of her car, Biggalo at the wheel. He drove for hours to a friend’s apartment across the state line. Once there, she sat against a wall, and Biggalo injected her again.
Lauren had been working for her mother at Marine Parents, and Tracy sent a text asking why she hadn’t shown up. “I don’t know where I’m at,” Lauren wrote back. “I’m somewhere in Kansas.”
Tracy had suspected Lauren was using drugs, and now she knew. She fired her daughter over the phone.
Lauren and Biggalo drove back to Columbia and spent the rest of the month high on the drug.
One day, Lauren’s estranged husband, David, came looking for her. She awoke to find Biggalo and David at the kitchen table. Biggalo told David that Lauren was an addict and asked for $500 to buy enough meth to wean her off the drug.
David instead drove Lauren to his house near Fort Leonard Wood. On the way, Lauren told David about using meth and the rape. “This is what’s wrong with me,” she said.
Lauren sobbed when she saw Ethan, who had turned 2. She also felt an urge to hide from her little boy and walked to the neighbor’s house to get high.
After a week, David drove her back to Columbia. She told him she was going to get clean. David asked what meth felt like, and Lauren described its euphoria. She offered to help him try it.
“I’m going to do everything I can to protect Ethan from you,” he said.
Small business
In March 2011, Lauren was in court accompanying a friend, who pointed out a lean man with a shaved head and gallery of tattoos.
He was Lee Phillippe and had the reputation of being the best methamphetamine cook in Boone County. “If you’re going to be in the dope game,” the friend said, “that’s the motherf—er you should know.”
Lee had a comfortable childhood until he turned 9 and his parents told him he was adopted. He ran away at 13. At 15, he was in a group home. At 16, he was pulled from school. He drank and used drugs, and he once escaped a group home in a stolen car. U.S. marshals caught him in Arizona.
By the time Lee met Lauren, he was 38 and had been in and out of prison throughout his adult life. Lee taught himself to manufacture methamphetamine in Arkansas in the early 2000s, finally finding something he did well.
Lee was now living in a halfway home for recently released convicts. He had been drug-free for a year and intended to stay that way. Soon after their meeting, he called Lauren for a ride.
Lauren poured out her troubles to him. She was jobless and couldn’t pay her bills. Lee decided to rescue her the best way he knew how. Eleven days after his release from prison, they turned off the highway in Millersburg, Mo., drove a mile down the road and stopped at a mobile home guarded by two pit bulls. A dealer advanced Lee a supply of meth. Lee and Lauren spent the afternoon cruising Columbia’s meth hangouts, selling the drugs.
By day’s end, they had more than $4,000, enough to cover Lauren’s bills. They were now in business together. In the meth world—clannish and patriarchal—she belonged to Lee. “As soon as me and Lauren got together,” he said, “she was an extension of me.”
A simple life
Soon, Lee was again using meth and making it. Their life together was simple: Cook dope, sell dope, shoot dope.
Lauren lived on peanut butter and Mountain Dew, a drink favored among meth addicts. She shrank to size 4 pants. Before her gastric-bypass surgery, she wore a 26.
Lauren’s Explorer, used as collateral, was seized by the bondsman after Biggalo failed to appear for a court date. Lauren, who hadn’t talked to her mother in weeks, called asking for money to get the car back. Tracy refused.
Tracy took over Lauren’s child-care duties, splitting Ethan’s time with David. She took down all but one of Lauren’s photos and discouraged her grandson from thinking too much about his mother.
Headed to work each morning, though, Tracy detoured to drive past her daughter’s house. Lauren waited by the window and watched for her mother’s red Chrysler. Tracy later swapped it for a tan Honda. Lauren, who didn’t know about the new car, still looked for the Chrysler. She thought her mother had given up on her.
Constant meth use triggered paranoia. Lauren and Lee would bury Mason jars of money and drugs in the school soccer field across from the house and then forget exactly where they were hidden.
Arguments between Lee and Lauren escalated into fist fights, and he once broke one of her teeth. After a quarrel in the summer of 2011, Lauren emptied a bottle of aspirin on the dresser and swallowed the pills one by one. She stopped counting at 54. Twenty minutes later, she started convulsing. Lee carried her to a friend’s car and drove to the emergency room.
Lauren called David from the car. “Did you want to die?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Lauren answered.
Season’s greetings
In December 2011, Tracy invited Lauren to spend Christmas with Ethan. The visit quickly turned combative. Lauren said she was taking Ethan to spend Christmas Eve at a motel, and Tracy called the sheriff’s department.
Sheriff’s Deputy Mark Nardoni came to the house and offered to drive her. “Don’t you want to stop?” the deputy asked Lauren on the ride.
“I don’t think anything will make me stop,” she said.
She and Lee got a room that night at a Motel 8. During a routine motel check, police noticed Lee’s name on the register. Lauren woke up surrounded by officers and medics. She saw a syringe of meth on the nightstand. Her first instinct was to protect Lee. “That’s mine,” she told the police.
At 3 a.m. on Christmas morning, she called Lee from jail. He promised to bail her out but fell asleep. Her parents refused to help. “We realized,” said her father, Larry Jensen, that confinement “was the only thing that was going to save her.”
Lee found an addict willing to put her car up as collateral for bail in exchange for drugs. He got Lauren out around dinnertime on Christmas Day. They celebrated with meth and Mountain Dew.
“Homeless, jobless, been arrested, spent Christmas in jail, 3 felony, no car, no nothing,” Lauren texted the former neighbor who introduced her to meth.
In February 2012, police raided Lauren’s house and found components of Lee’s drug lab. Officers tracked the couple to a Travelodge and arrested Lauren on suspicion of manufacturing drugs near a school. Lee escaped from the back of a patrol car, slithering through a window, still in handcuffs.
The arrest report listed Lauren’s occupation as “meth cook.” Tracy, Lauren’s mother, refused to bail her out, and Lauren spent more than seven months in jail awaiting trial.
Deputies listened in on the jailhouse calls, hoping Lauren would give away Lee’s whereabouts. Sometimes after Tracy hung up, Deputy Britt Shea would phone to discourage her from posting bail, saying Lauren needed more time away from meth.
“How can I be so terrible that nobody wants me?” Lauren wrote in her jailhouse journal.
After a couple of months, Lauren finally called Lee’s hideout. The authorities were eavesdropping. Officers found Lee in a farmhouse in Glasgow, Mo., hiding shirtless and barefoot in a crawl space under the floorboards.
Lauren’s public defender suggested she would likely get probation if she pleaded guilty. After her guilty plea, the judge instead ordered concurrent prison sentences: 10 years for manufacturing meth near a school, eight years for manufacturing the drug in a hotel room and three years for possession of the loaded syringe.
Lauren was hysterical as she walked past Lee, who was in the courthouse holding cell for his own hearing. He reached through the bars to touch her. “I’m really sorry, Lauren,” he said.
Guards delivered her to the state prison in Vandalia, Mo.
The judge gave Lauren an escape route, however. If she completed a 120-day drug program in prison, she could be freed on probation.
Lauren made it through 33 days before she got kicked out of the program. Instead of another two months in rehab, she faced a decade in prison.
She had been clean for nearly a year.
Behind bars
Lauren steered clear of the meth smuggled into Vandalia prison. It was easy to spot users. They were the ones up at 3 a.m. arguing over who got to use the broom.
On visiting days, Lauren could hold her son, Ethan. Tracy would buy Lauren hot dogs, and the boy got powdered-sugar doughnuts from vending machines. The prison had an outdoor playground with a dinosaur slide and swings.
“I just love this place,” Ethan told Tracy. “It’s my favorite place in the world. I get to see my mommy.”
Lauren learned about the prison lifers, who had nothing to lose and were quick to fight. One, whose nickname was “Lady Killer,” had colluded with two other women to torture and kill a woman to prevent her from testifying in a murder case. Another prisoner had murdered her boyfriend with a baseball bat. She would wryly show off her swing during prison-yard softball games.
Then there was Alyssa Bustamante. Her crime was so notorious that every few months the prisoners could watch its grisly re-enactment on the TV show “Killer Kids.”
A friend thought Lauren, then 27, and Alyssa, 18, might like each other and set up a meeting after a jigsaw-puzzle competition. Lauren was open to dating a woman, and they soon became a couple.
Early on, Alyssa raised the unavoidable. “You do know why I’m here?” she asked Lauren.
Alyssa, who grew up with her grandparents in St. Martins, Mo., had struggled with depression and slit her wrists at age 13. Her diary in 2009 was filled with romantic urges and homicidal fantasies. “I can’t talk to people about depression and rage,” she wrote. “If I don’t talk about it, I bottle it up. And then I explode. And if I explode someone’s gonna die.”
On Oct. 21, 2009, Alyssa, then 15, led 9-year-old Elizabeth Olten into the woods, strangled her, slashed her throat and stabbed her in the chest. Alyssa buried Elizabeth in a shallow grave.
It didn’t take long for authorities to zero in on Alyssa. Neighbors reported that she was known to bury dead animals in the woods.
During police questioning, Alyssa confessed. She was charged as an adult and sentenced to life in prison.
Lauren later recalled asking herself, “How do I care so much about somebody who has done something so horrible?”
The two women spent hours circling the track in the prison yard, Alyssa asking what it was like to drive a car, hold a job, fall in love or have a baby. Lauren found her curiosity endearing. “She didn’t want to use me for anything,” Lauren said. “She just wanted somebody else to talk to.”
Few of Alyssa’s relatives would visit. Lauren’s parents visited regularly and, over time, Lauren came to realize how badly she had let them down. “It was me learning to be grateful,” she said.
Lauren helped Alyssa rehearse her legal appeals. Alyssa accompanied Lauren to her full-immersion baptism in the prison chapel. They watched softball games and had parts in a prison production of “The Wizard of Oz.” They kissed out of sight of surveillance cameras.
The women got jobs on the 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. kitchen shift to be together. They posed in a photo booth. On the back of one picture, Alyssa wrote, “You make me so happy and give me hope—when I need it most. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without you.” She signed it, “Your wife.”
Absolution
Lauren was nervous when she first told her mother about Alyssa. “Please don’t Google her,” she said.
Tracy couldn’t fathom the pain that Elizabeth’s family must have felt, and she believed Alyssa deserved punishment.
Yet over the months, Tracy saw Alyssa differently, as a damaged child who had done a terrible thing, not a monster beyond redemption. She also saw a sharp change in Lauren. Her daughter smiled and laughed more during their Sunday visits.
“Alyssa accepted Lauren no-holds-barred,” Tracy said. “That emphatic acceptance, no matter what their past was, made Lauren realize she really was a lovable person. I think it made Alyssa realize she could be loved, too.”
Looming over the couple was the knowledge that Alyssa was a lifer and Lauren would be paroled. Their secret journals looked ahead to the day they would be separated. “I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like without you physically here,” Alyssa wrote to Lauren in February 2014.
That May, Lauren transferred to Chillicothe Correctional Center for a final round of drug rehabilitation before her parole. She had been off drugs for more than two years.
At Chillicothe, Lauren crossed off the passing days on a homemade calendar. “I’m scared right now,” she wrote in her journal on July 19, 2014. “I’m so afraid of myself, my thoughts, the demons inside me.”
Shortly before her release date, a parole officer visited Tracy’s house to see it was suitable for a recovering addict.
“She’s going to fail,” the officer told Tracy. “They all do.”
“You don’t know my daughter,” Tracy said.
Tracy drew up a list of rules: No locked doors. No arguments in front of Ethan, who was almost 6. Tracy was free to search Lauren’s belongings and inspect Lauren’s arms for needle marks.
“I will turn you in for any infraction,” Tracy wrote on the rules list. She would rather see Lauren in prison than back on the street, she wrote. “You’ll never get another chance like this one.”
On Aug. 1, 2014, Lauren walked out of Chillicothe. Tracy waited in the parking lot. They stopped at McDonald’s, and Lauren changed into a dress her mother had brought. That night, they curled up in Lauren’s childhood room.
Lauren said she left prison free of the desire to use meth. She described her newfound sobriety on social media in 2015 and got a response from Charlie Brandkamp. She had held hands with Charlie in first grade and had last seen him when he was drunk at a high-school party. Charlie had been in and out of prison in the years since but was now sober and had a daughter.
Charlie invited Lauren to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They became a couple, had two boys, and they bought Lauren’s childhood home.
“Thinking about turning back to meth makes my stomach sick,” Lauren said. “I can’t imagine losing everything I have worked so hard for now, or missing out on my kids and family.”
Tracy rehired Lauren at Marine Parents.
“There are not many moms that can say their addict daughter is their hero,” Tracy wrote to Lauren’s parole officer in 2017. “But that is who Lauren is to me. She won, hands down, despite all that was stacked against her in beating an addiction. She did it.”
A year ago, a judge granted Lauren’s petition to wipe her criminal record, restoring her right to visit inmates in Missouri prisons.
The day after Thanksgiving, Lauren brought leftovers to Alyssa. The guards know Lauren. She visits the prison twice a month, grateful she is free to enter and free to leave.
