On Oct. 24, 2010, 19-year-old Jennifer Mee was arrested on charges of first-degree murder. The case — most likely a typical, if unbearably tragic, robbery gone wrong — would have gone largely unnoticed by the media but for one factor.
Hiccups.
Three years prior, Mee had achieved national notoriety as “Hiccup Girl,” whose five-week bout of unstoppable hiccups made her a media darling. She made numerous appearances on the “Today” show and was relentlessly pursued by media outlets throughout the country.
“One Breath Away,” by veteran true crime author M. William Phelps, ties the two events together, digging deep into Mee’s life to uncover all the things that went wrong and to show how her fame accelerated her downfall.
Mee was troubled prior to the hiccups and the crime, Phelps writes. She had been the victim of daily rapes by two men — unidentified in the book — for two years during her childhood. Living in St. Petersburg, Fla., the family had little money and Mee shared a bedroom with her four little sisters. She started dealing drugs, including crack, on the street at just 13, and her teenage boyfriend beat her viciously, even causing a miscarriage with a punch to the stomach. Later, she would be diagnosed with Tourette syndrome.
But viewers around the country knew none of this about the sweet 16-year-old known to them as Hiccup Girl.
Mee began hiccuping on Jan. 23, 2007. Accompanied by deep pains in her chest, the hiccups were relentless. Over the course of three weeks, she tried every folk remedy to no avail, and numerous doctors did what they could, but nothing worked. Mee, already prone to depression, sunk deeper, believing the hiccups would never end and that she’d never get to be married, have children or live a normal life.
Kids at school, meanwhile, thought she was faking for the attention and cruelly taunted her.
“Stop faking!”
“Are you drunk, bitch?”
“You pregnant?”
Mee told her mother, Rachel Robidoux, “I want to jump off the Sunshine Skyway.”
“It might have been idle talk,” Rachel said later, “but I knew then I had to do whatever I could to try to stop the hiccups.”
Having exhausted home remedies and conventional medicine, Robidoux turned to the media, hoping to appeal to someone — anyone — who might have a cure.
The Tampa Bay Times sent a reporter to speak with the family and to film a video for their website. The video went viral, and immediately, Jennifer Mee was a sensation.
Robidoux estimated they received “30 to 50 calls from media” hoping to interview Mee the next day, while bloggers accused the family of trying to make money off Mee’s illness.
The “Today” show offered to fly Mee and Robidoux to New York and have them appear with a medical expert who could suggest possible cures. The segment, however, which found them talking with Meredith Vieira, Matt Lauer, and gastroenterologist Dr. Roshini Rajapaksa, may have done more harm than good.
During the segment, Mee hiccuped repeatedly, except when she spoke. Lauer noticed, joking, “So there’s the solution right there. Don’t stop talking.” Despite the show’s earlier claim, Dr. Rajapaksa offered “no new remedies or any advice,” according to Phelps.
Because she had stopped hiccuping as she spoke, many around the country thought she was faking, and Internet trolls descended while the media frenzy grew. The family’s phone rang day and night, and “Good Morning America,” having been bested by rival “Today,” called Mee a reported 57 times in one day in an unsuccessful attempt to steal the story.
But while the pain was supposedly constant, the fame and perks went to Mee’s head, causing many to wonder if she really wanted the hiccups cured. (As time passed, they grew “louder and more animated.”)
The creator of a hiccup-curing invention called the Hic-Cup offered to fly from Pennsylvania for a day to see if it worked on Mee. But when she arrived, she found the family had blown her off to accept an amusement park’s offer of a free day of fun.
Mee’s hiccups were cured after five weeks, Phelps reports, by a hypnotist who worked with her for three hours and would later say that when she cured Mee, Robidoux’s reaction was strangely muted — almost disappointed. The hypnotist, Debbie Lane, would later say that while she didn’t think Mee had been faking, the hiccups had been “Jennifer’s way of getting that attention she had sought all her life.”
As the fame faded, Mee found that attention instead on the streets, Phelps writes, where she prided herself on being a hustler. She once again sold drugs, telling friends of her desire for a drug-selling empire. She began dating an aspiring rapper named Lamont Newton and arranged with Newton’s best friend, Laron Raiford — whom she was secretly sleeping with on the side — to set up robbery victims by making dates with them online.
The most likely scenario regarding the murder of 22-year-old Shannon Griffin — the scenario that caused the jury to find Mee guilty — was that Mee had met him online and either arranged a date or offered to sell him weed, with the intention that Newton and Raiford would rob him. Raiford brought a gun, and when the duo grabbed Griffin, he fought back. By the end of the ensuing fight, Griffin was dead, with five gunshots to the chest.
As the person who lured him, Mee was found guilty of first-degree murder, and sentenced to life without parole. After interviewing Mee just after the murder, the lead detective on the case wrote, at the end of his report, “It should be noted at no time did [she] hiccup.”