The storm clouds that shadowed Juliane Kellner for most of her 42 years seemed about to drift away.

The former Lee County resident had made a life in Las Vegas, had a bona fide job, friends and was dating, after leaving Southwest Florida and a tainted life behind in 2018.

"She was in a never-ending cycle here of drugs and arrests," said Jackie Winchester, who is guardian of the daughters her brother and Kellner had together. The couple never married.

The girls, 15-year-old twins Hope and Faith, were two of several reasons Kellner went west.

"The girls weren’t talking to her and said they wouldn’t until she got clean, so she went to Vegas," Winchester said.

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Despite doing that, and seemingly on an ever-upward bounce, the clouds came back with a vengeance on June 28 when her life ended with a gunshot to the chest in the apartment of a friend.

Officially, police in Henderson, Nevada, said the dark-blonde Kellner was the victim in a murder-suicide at the Palm Villas Apartments along Whitney Ranch Drive.

Making a welfare check at an apartment there July 10, police found Kellner with a fatal gunshot wound to the chest and Victor Crisan, 37, with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.

Henderson police said Monday that the case — the city's eighth homicide of 2019 —remains open and they are still investigating with no report available.

Hard life from start

There were a lot of hard left turns in Kellner's life.

She was the child of a 19-year-old mother in Germany, was sold into sexual slavery at age 3 and sent to the U.S. For most of her young life she was used and abused, beaten, underfed and passed from man to man.

At age 18 she was arrested in Lee County for marijuana possession and sales of a controlled substance, and would be arrested at least 13 more times in Lee, Collier and Charlotte counties over the next 22 years on drug charges, battery, prostitution and a multitude of lesser charges.

She gave birth to her oldest, Brandon Wilt, now 21, at about the same age. The man who fathered her oldest also beat her, one time breaking all the bones in her face.

"It left me feeling dirty and damaged ... I had no hope for the future," Kellner said in a church witness video she did for an organization called "She Speaks."

She recorded the video about her early life at a Las Vegas area church shortly before her death. It's her only voice now.

"I survived, but I didn't come out unscathed," she said in the video. "Violence was what I grew up with so violence was my normal. Addiction was a big part of my everyday life, so addiction became a huge part of my life as an adult."

She had fallen to the level where she had to get high to sell herself for sex so she could make the money to buy the drugs that took away the pain of selling herself for money.

"I traded bits and pieces of my soul for a few meager dollars so I could then race to a dealer and give him anything I had earned," she said. "As I contemplate this, my stomach turns. A vicious cycle, with no end in sight."

But she escaped. Briefly.

That she was doing better was evident in what she did and how friends and family here and in Las Vegas felt about her.

Dwight Goodwin, 67, met Kellner several years ago when he was an elder in a Lehigh Acres church. While looking for a roommate to help defray housing costs, he saw her ad on Craigslist looking for a place to live.

"There was something about her that was begging me to help her," he said. "We kinda bonded. She got involved in my church. She became a member (at Lehigh Congregational Church)."

Goodwin said that despite the religious attachment Kellner was constantly fighting against addiction, wanting to get out of the area to protect her kids from herself.

"She seemed very desperate," he said. "She couldn't shake her heroin addiction."

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Last arrest was a start

A 2017 arrest for drugs was a start, oddly enough, to her sweeping away the tumult of her life.

Goodwin, now retired from a career in social work, said he helped her parlay the arrest jail time into a chance to enter a drug recovery program for those dealing with sexual trauma.

Into the Jordan Ministries, a religious counseling and wellness program for trafficked and exploited adult women in Fort Myers or Cape Coral had found an opening for her in one such program, Refuge for Women, Goodwin said.

"The only opening they had was in Las Vegas,' he said. "But, she had to be clean 12 days."

Kellner was ready to be fully committed, he said, and he offered her a place to stay while she got clean, provided she stick to entering the program.

"She locked herself in a room for 12 days and detoxed herself," he said.

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In January 2018, a little more than four months after being released from Lee County Jail from her final arrest, she headed to Vegas, leaving Goodwin, her daughters and son, family, friends — and hopefully addiction — behind.

When she was killed, she had seemingly done just that.

"She was doing great out there," Goodwin said. "She was the No. 1 sales rep at Las Vegas Athletic Club, and got into motivational speaking."

Goodwin said Kellner clean and sober had unlimited potential.

"Anything she put her mind to, she could do," he said. "She was smart as a whip. A very intelligent lady. Her thinking paths just needed rewiring. She found the perfect path in Vegas."

She had made a return visit to Fort Myers in February, he said, something he didn't feel good about.

"I told her to stay there," he said. "Too many bad memories, too many bad places here."

But her daughters relished at the chance to reconnect with their mother.

"That really helped our relationship," Hope said.

Even in the times when her mother was caught in the cycle of arrests for drugs and crime, Hope said there was good in her.

"Even when she was not doing so hot," she said. "She was the most caring person."

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Helped by move

The high school student said her mother was definitely helped by the move to Vegas, as odd as the place called "Sin City" could be seen as a site of salvation.

"At first I was a little taken aback. Who goes to Vegas for rehabilitation?" Hope said, adding "I feel like going to Vegas helped her. She got her life back."

And, she said, it did both girls good to see her.

"I was happy for her," Hope said.

The girls were planning to visit their mom in Vegas after a member of Kellner's church purchased tickets for them.

"I was supposed to take them to the airport on July 5," Jackie Winchester said. "But (Kellner's roommate Dawn Griffin) called me July 3 and told me Julz was missing.

By all accounts, Kellner was excited for the planned week-long visit.

"Julz was really excited," Jackie Winchester said. "That was the last text I got from her, about how excited she was. It was in all caps and everything."

The girls' guardian said the plane ride was to have been the twins' first and was important in that regard.

"It would've been one of the firsts she was able to give them when I'd been giving them all their firsts for years," she said. "So I was happy for the three of them to at least have that little connection, even if she didn't buy the tickets herself."

Kellner had also found a church and apparently started dating.

'She reached out to Plenty of Fish," Goodwin said. "She was looking for companionship." The site is a free online dating service.

She was not so much as hiding that dating as just reluctant to delve into it, he said.

Her daughter said she was not aware of her mother's dating.

"I had no idea she was seeing anybody," Hope said, "until all this happened."

"Her roommate said she would disappear for a while," Goodwin said. "And wouldn't talk about it when she came back."

The Griffins, Dawn and Rhett, provided a room for Kellner rent-free, said they too had no idea about her dating partner.

"And she lived with us," Dawn Griffin said. "It was not uncommon for her to be gone all weekend."

She also said that Kellner was not one to talk about her outside activities.

Kellner had her own room with the Griffins, and paid for everything she needed outside of the house, a living arrangement that was linked to her participation in the Refuge for Women program.

The couple, members of Hilltop Church Las Vegas, host dinners once a month for women like Kellner.

"The intention was to give her a leg up," Dawn Griffin said.

"She was normal," added Rhett Griffin, who may have been the last one of her friends and supporters to see Kellner alive. "Regular Julz, going to work every day."

Kellner was also planning on moving out at the end of June, which was extended to July because of the impending visit by her daughters, Dawn Griffin said.

Despite the tragic outcome, Dawn Griffin says she still feels like Kellner's life story is one of redemption.

"I feel like God allowed this," she said. "He's all-knowing. He knows everybody's story from the beginning and from the end. Maybe he did this because she might have slipped up at some point."

Faith, Hope, Brandon and Goodwin will be flying out to Las Vegas in a few weeks to attend a memorial for Kellner planned by Church Las Vegas in Henderson on August 15. A local ceremony is in the works for Lovers Key at a future date.

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More about Juliane Kellner

♦ A Gofundme account has been set up for the 15-year-old twins of Juliane Kellner.

♦ A memorial service is scheduled at 3:30 p.m. Aug. 15 at The Church Las Vegas, 3051 West Horizon Ridge Parkway in Henderson, Nevada. A memorial service in Southwest Florida is in the planning stages.