She brought happiness and joy and didn't even realize it"
Tanya Gould grew up with her mom, dad and older brother on Lake Adelle. She's remembered as having had a knack for fitting in with just about any crowd. She got along well with the "down home" country folks of Jefferson County as well as the people a bit rougher around the edges. She flourished for several years in the upper middle class St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood, too.
Curtis Bollinger, who has lived off and on at Lake Drive for a decade, says Gould mocked the local tweakers to their faces, but did so in a way so sly that they laughed along and didn't know they were being made fun of. One time, outside Bollinger's house, a shirtless Lake Adelle man who was high on meth climbed the utility pole carrying a screwdriver, intent on restarting his cable service. Gould happened to be driving by. She slowed and rolled down the window. "Hey, Charter guy," she yelled. "The company can't spring for a ladder?"
Daisha Lipp, who now lives in St. Louis, met Gould fifteen years ago when Lipp transferred to Grandview High School in tiny Ware, Missouri. Lipp described the school as "real country" and "a total culture shock" compared to where she'd gone before. She felt like an outcast. But Gould went out of her way to welcome Lipp to the school, and the two quickly became best friends.
Lipp describes Gould as a "total hippie" who loved painting and music. "She was one of those people that just anywhere she went, she brought happiness and joy," Lipp says. "And she didn't even realize it."
Gould's joy was often in stark contrast to her family life, which was defined by adversity and loss. Lipp recalls a day in high school when she and Gould were driving down a country road and Gould stopped to pick up a homeless woman. The two girls gave her a ride and then the woman stole everything from the back of Gould's car. It was only later that Lipp realized the woman was Gould's mom, Cindy, who was dealing with drug addiction and had been kicked out of the family house.
Later in high school, Lipp spent the night at Gould's house, and when they woke up, Cindy made the family pancakes. She had gotten sober and rejoined the family.
Tragedy first struck Gould's family in 2007 when she, age seventeen at the time, and her parents went on a cruise. They came back to find her older brother Daniel dead of an overdose. It was Gould who discovered his body.
Around 2010, when Gould was in her early twenties, she met Bob Wiggins, who was seven years older and whom Gould quickly identified as her kindred spirit. "I have never seen two people who are so happy and so in love," Lipp says. About a year into their relationship, Gould and Wiggins moved to Kirkwood, where Gould found work as an administrative assistant at a printing company. They got engaged. But in 2016, Wiggins died unexpectedly from a heart attack.
Grief stricken, Gould moved back in with her mom and dad at Lake Adelle. Gould had always had a habit of belting out Janis Joplin songs, Lipp says, but after her fiancé's death, "Me and Bobby McGee," a tune Gould sang often, held a special importance to her.
"She stayed positive still. She always tried to stay positive," Lipp says. "But she just couldn't find happiness. I think that Anthony saw that in her and used that."
In Lipp's assessment, Legens took advantage of the fact that Gould wanted so badly to find the type of love she'd had with her former fiancé. Legens had been a friend of Gould's brother and grew up across the lake from Gould, her backyard facing his on opposite shores. The lake is not particularly large, less than a tenth of a mile across, and on a quiet day, two people speaking loudly can have a conversation across the water. Gould and Legens hadn't grown up friends, exactly, but they grew up knowing each other.
At some point in 2019, the two started dating. Legens' family had also endured a series of tragedies. In 2013, his father passed away in his early 50s from COPD. His mother, Donna, died in 2017 when an armored car struck a car she was riding in. Legens was in prison for assault and felonious restraint when his mother died, and by the time he was released, he had inherited the family's house on Lake Adelle as well as a chunk of life insurance and settlement money from the accident.
Lipp says she visited Legens' house once when Gould first began dating him. "It was just scary," she says. "He was a very scary person. Just passing him in the yard didn't feel good."
After Gould moved in with Legens, she'd typically call Lipp on Facetime even though Gould knew Lipp hated video chat. Soon Lipp realized Legens was paranoid about Gould texting with other men, and using Facetime was her way to appease him.
At some point in 2019, Legens went back to jail for about eight months. His criminal history is lengthy, and it's hard to know for sure if, during this specific stretch, he was in jail on a pending DWI case or because he violated probation for the assault conviction. Either way, Gould took care of Legens' house during that time.
In December 2020, after Legens was released, Gould sent messages to one of his relatives whom she knew from her time taking care of the house. The text messages included graphic photos of her beaten face. In the messages, she referred to Legens as "a woman beater, a liar, a thief." She described his house as "scarier than anywhere else."
"I look like an alien," she said in a text message, referring to the bruises.
The relative encouraged Gould to go to the police, stay away from Legens and only go back to get her things from his house if she was accompanied by a police officer. Legens' relative took Gould's photos to the sheriff's office.
"The sheriff's department knew exactly who [Legens] was. They knew everything about him," the relative says. "I showed them the pictures of Tanya and I said, 'I'm scared for her life. He held her hostage for three days. He beat her.'"
She says deputies told her they couldn't do anything unless Gould pressed charges.
Then, four months later, in April, this same relative of Legens contacted Dana Crew after her son was reported missing. "I contacted [Crew] and I told her, 'Listen, I got tons of text messages from this woman. I'm scared. I think something bad is gonna happen.'"
In the early days of the investigation into Jerry Crew's disappearance, the detectives began speaking with Cindy Gould, who told them her daughter had suffered a long history of domestic abuse at the hands of Legens. At some point in the weeks after Crew went missing, Gould briefly left Legens and stayed at her mother's house on the other side of the lake. Deputies went to ask Gould about Crew. Gould said she wanted a lawyer.
Crew's family members are adamant they have no animosity toward Gould and understand she herself was a captive of Legens.
Daisha Lipp, Gould's friend of fifteen years, sums up the dynamic between Legens and Gould this way: "It's just as a matter of survival when you're in that situation. You're not thinking about the big picture. You're always just thinking, 'What can I do right now to stay safe to keep him happy?' You can't think that far ahead, to actually get a plan to get away. It's so difficult to even make that plan. You're always thinking only about your very next move."
