"The Same, Yet Not the Same"

Kristy and Jennifer Lancaster.

THE SAME, YET NOT THE SAME

JUNE 2010

The Lancaster twins, Kristy Lynn and Jennifer Dene, first came to public attention via page 4 of the Feb. 28, 1974, edition of The Cheechako News. Occasionally, in the intervening 36 years one twin or the other has made news again—sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad—but this much can certainly be said: Kristy and Jennifer were probably never more identical than they were in the beginning, for time and circumstance have wrought significant change.

The news began when Dr. Peter O. Hansen of Kenai delivered Kristy Lancaster (now Kristy Leslie) at 7:29 p.m. on Feb. 7, 1974. She weighed six pounds, five ounces and measured 20 inches long. Just 15 minutes later, at 7:44, Dr. Hansen delivered Jennifer Lancaster (now Jennifer Lancaster-Jackson). She weighed six pounds, one-half ounce and measured 19½ inches long.



Part of the announcement that the first twins had been born at Central Peninsula Hospital.

They were the first twins to be born at Central Peninsula General Hospital in Soldotna, and before their parents, Ken and Lani Lancaster, took the girls home, a Cheechako staffer traveled to the hospital and snapped a black-and-photo of the four Lancasters—each parent hefting one of the swaddled infants and smiling at each other across their tiny daughters. Three weeks after their birth, a grainy facsimile of this photograph appeared in the weekly paper to announce the Lancasters’ achievement.

Fifteen months later, the twins once again showed up in print.

In May 1975, Lani Lancaster enrolled her daughters in the Peninsula Double Delights, a newly minted club that The Peninsula Clarion said was “formed especially for mothers of multiple births.” Club members planned to meet once a month to share ideas and help each other with problems involved in raising twins, triplets, or even more.

Announcement for the "Double Delights" club.

Above the brief article was a black-and-white photograph depicting five sets of twins: Kristy and Jennifer Lancaster, Cristy and Shelly Pierro, Georgina and Angela Dukowitz, Tony and Katie Panken, and Amy Jo and Angela Taylor. All of the children pictured seem very young, and few of them appear very happy to be sitting still for a photo session.

Then on Dec. 10, 1977—two years and seven months after becoming club members—the twins’ names appeared in at least three different newspapers at once. And the occasion this time was grim.

On Dec. 8, Lani Lancaster was driving her 1975 four-door Chevrolet Monte Carlo toward Soldotna on the icy Sterling Highway when disaster struck. According to the report from the Alaska State Troopers, at Mile 89, near Longmere Lake, Lancaster’s car left behind a 275-foot skidmark as she apparently tried to take some sort of evasive action. In so doing, her car crossed over the center line and rammed head-on into a 1977 four-door Ford Thunderbird being driven by 17-year-old Sam Renny of Sterling.

Renny and his two teen-age passengers all were injured but survived.

Lancaster, who was 30 years old and wearing no seatbelt, was probably killed instantly. On the front passenger seat beside her was her eight-year-old daughter, Tammy Jo, who sustained multiple chest and head injuries and died after being transported to the hospital in Soldotna.

Sitting in the backseat and surviving the accident were Jennifer and Kristy Lancaster, just two months shy of their fourth birthday. Kristy suffered internal injuries requiring surgery and was also cut in several places by flying glass. Jennifer, on the other hand, escaped with only minor bumps and bruises.

Jennifer today says she remembers nothing from the accident and knows only what she has been told or has read. Kristy claims to have vivid memories of the accident, although some of them contradict the police report. One of her clearest memories, she says, involves trying to communicate with her mother immediately after the collision.

Clippings from Lancaster scrapbook.

“I remember I tugged on my mom’s shoulder and said, ‘Mommy, Mommy, wake up!’ Two times, and she didn’t wake up,” Kristy said.

A few days after the accident, the girls’ names appeared in print again, listed as survivors in the dual-obituary for their mother and older sister.

Both twins said that they wet the bed and experienced nightmares for many years after the accident. Kristy said that her nightmares were mostly about the wreck itself, whereas Jennifer said she doesn’t remember dreaming about the accident but about “falling into a black hole, and just falling and falling.” Kristy said she frequently woke from these nightmares screaming or crying.

To this day, Kristy still bears scars from the accident—a long one across her abdomen, smaller ones on her knees, another long one along the outside of her left thigh. She also has a smaller scar just under the right side of her chin, and she said that when they were younger, some relatives used to feel under her chin to figure out which twin was which.

Just less than two months after the accident, and one week before their fourth birthday, their father remarried. Ken Lancaster wedded Barbara “Bobbie” Goodson, who was divorced and had three children of her own—a boy known as “Peanut” and two girls, Pam and Paulla. Lancaster adopted her kids, and she adopted his, and suddenly the Lancasters were a family of seven.

Peanut and Pam were several years older than the twins, but Paulla was just six months younger, and all three of them would go through public school in the same grade. And as they grew from little girls to young women, Paulla and Jennifer grew closer as sisters, while Kristy began to drift slightly away.

Meanwhile, said the twins, they both began working young—Kristy when she was in eighth grade—and eventually they were expected to buy their own school clothes. As the years went by, both girls worked in the Sizzler steakhouse—Jennifer cooking in back because she preferred to stay away from the public, and Kristy waitressing because she liked it out where the action was.

While Kristy stayed with Sizzler for 3½ years, Jennifer moved around, working as a maid for the King Salmon Motel, and also putting in shorter stints at the Bunkhouse and Michael’s restaurants.

In high school, Kristy was the better student. “I went to school and got my shit done and went to work,” Kristy said. “I was always on the honor roll. A’s. Put no effort into it. Just did my work.” Jennifer was less interested in her education: “I just wanted to graduate,” she said.

But there was more to the story:

Ken and Bobbie divorced while the twins were in high school. Although they got back together temporarily, the relationship was ending and adding stress to the family situation.

Jennifer as high school senior.

Meanwhile, the twins became deeply interested in boys.

When Kristy was 17, she ran away from home to live in a house owned by her boyfriend, Terry Speakman, whom she would marry many years later. On the day Jennifer turned 18, she asked her father if she could move out of his house, and with his blessing she moved in an apartment with her boyfriend.

Despite these moves, the twins and Paulla graduated on time from Skyview High School in 1992. Besides Kristy’s honor roll listings, the graduation story marked the twins’ first appearance in the newspapers in more than a decade.

Graduation, however, would signal a stronger parting of the ways for the twins, whose lives were about to take more disparate turns.

Early in life, Kristy and Jennifer had seemed to do nearly everything in tandem. They were typically photographed together, they were dressed alike (Kristy often in blue, Jennifer in green), and they attended public school together—usually in separate classrooms to make it easier for teachers to tell them apart.

Kristy as high school senior.

Once, when they were in fourth grade, they swapped classrooms on April Fool’s Day, but when Kristy’s teacher, Mr. Dover, sent Jennifer to the chalkboard and noticed a scar on her hand where Kristy had no scar, he promptly spilled the beans to Jennifer’s teacher, Ms. Jelacic, who was none too pleased at having been duped.

And it was easy to confuse the two—both with full heads of brunette hair that fell past their shoulders, with green eyes set in oval faces, and with the same lean body type—one always within five pounds and half an inch of the other.

As they grew, they even exhibited some of the same behavior, good and bad: Both began smoking cigarettes before they were teen-agers. Paradoxically, both also enjoyed running and participated in cross country in the years before high school. While Jennifer also played softball for several years, Kristy focused more on running, participating in the junior Mount Marathon race in 1986, 1987 and 1989, and finishing fifth overall in her final attempt.

However—despite their many similarities—by May 1992, when they crossed the stage in the Skyview High School gymnasium to collect their diplomas, they had already begun to exhibit important differences as well.

Jennifer, who had enjoyed watching her truck-driver father perform maintenance on the family snowmachines and three-wheelers, decided that she wanted to work on engines, too. Seven months after leaving high school, she enrolled in Diesel Mechanics at AVTEC in Seward and in 1993 became only the third female in the school’s then-24-year history to graduate from that program.

“My teacher there said I was mechanically inclined,” she said. “I think it was just in me, I do. It was something I went for. I got all straight A’s. I rebuilt three engines. I enjoyed it.” Afterward, she worked for a few months at Buddy’s Garage off Kalifornsky Beach Road, but then returned to her previous job as a maid at the King Salmon Motel until just before the birth of her daughter, Jessica, in January 1995.

Lancaster twins, age 2.

Jennifer’s boyfriend at the time (and now her husband) was Jon Jackson, a 1986 graduate of Kenai Central High School. They had gotten together when Jennifer was 19 and married when she was 27, just after the birth of their second child, Jacob.

Kristy, on the other hand, continued to work and to live with the boyfriend she had moved in with during high school. Like Jennifer and Jon, Kristy and Terry Speakman would live together for many years before getting married, and would also produce two children—in this case two boys.

But a dark side also began to emerge in Kristy. Even as she worked at various jobs—Sizzler and Save-U-More, among others—she soon began a dangerous slide into alcohol and substance abuse that frequently landed her name in the local newspaper’s police and court reports, and resulted in numerous arrests, nine overdoses, six long stints in treatment programs, lost trust among family and friends, and eventually a broken marriage and the loss of custody of her sons.

After her first son was born 12 years ago, she said, she suffered from postpartum depression and began to cope by popping pills. “I don’t like to blame it there,” Kristy said. “I mean, I’m a big girl. I made my own choice. But I had postpartum, and I started getting hooked on pills to begin with, and then it was just a ripple effect. I started blacking out, breaking the law, 86’d from every doctor’s office. I was doing those oxy’s, buying those off the street, shooting those up. I was living in jails and treatment.”

Rehab was effective intermittently—a few months here, nearly two years there—and then she would begin drinking again, and the drugs would follow. At her worst, Kristy indulged in cocaine and even crystal meth. She also stole money, even from friends and family members, to buy more drugs. She raided their medicine cabinets and their hidden stashes of medication.

Jennifer running her way back to good health.

Meanwhile, Jennifer was dealing with a crisis of her own—the fear that nearly two decades of smoking was killing her, and that she could not stop. In May 2003, however, she received inspiration in the form of tragedy: An older friend from the neighborhood was diagnosed with lung cancer and given three months to live. On June 26 of that year, Jennifer quit cigarettes cold turkey, and last weekend marked her seventh year of being nicotine free.

“But I gained weight,” she said. “I gained so much—heavier than being pregnant with the kids.” She didn’t like the extra weight but believed that putting on the pounds was just the price she had to pay in order to stay smoke-free.

Then one day in January 2006, as Jennifer watched her children swim at the Soldotna High School pool, another mother approached her with the suggestion that they start swimming, too. At first Jennifer dreaded the thought. To begin with, she didn’t know how to swim, and she loathed the image of herself in a swimsuit. But the other mother was persistent and talked her into it.

She donned a “huge” suit and some flippers and entered the water, telling herself that somehow she was never going to look like this again. Soon she was taking private swimming lessons from a girl who babysat her children. The swimming began to slim her down, and she decided to return to running.

Now, only four years later, she runs three marathons a year, as well as several other shorter races, and she weighs 60 pounds less than she did before those first tentative steps into the pool.

While Jennifer was triumphing physically, however, the bad times continued for Kristy. Fresh after completing 17½ months of rehab, she suffered an accident on Feb. 25, 2004, that nearly required an amputation of her left leg. As she attempted to dig in and turn her Ski-Doo 800 back uphill after high-marking in the mountains south of Crescent Lake, her lower leg was caught beneath the track. The force shattered her ankle and six inches of her tibia, fractured her heel, and snapped her fibula in half.

It took several hours to get her out of the mountains and back into town, where she at first refused to go to the hospital until her friend (and now husband) Alan Leslie could no longer stand her “whining and screaming.” A week later, an orthopedic surgeon installed a rod and seven screws in her leg, and she spent much of the next eight months in a wheelchair.



Kristy tends to her garden.

She used a cane for a while, but found walking difficult and painful. A second doctor pressed her into more intensive physical therapy and later removed the hardware. She responded well and soon began to walk normally, but her sobriety was ending along with her lengthy convalescence. She began drinking and moved on to drugs again.

As recently as April 4, 2009, she was arrested on charges of criminal mischief, but since April 20, 2009, she has been clean and sober. And she intends, finally, to stay that way. On the line is her health, her freedom, and perhaps partial custody of her sons.



“I pray that I am (able to stay clean),” she said. “Time will tell. But I believe I am. I think I’ve used all my nine lives up. I really do. I think if I break the law again or do anything else, there’ll be no other chance.”

Today Kristy believes that her life has renewed meaning: She has her writing (which functions mostly as a catharsis these days), her home and her husband, her garden and her houseplants, cooking and canning and giving away her prize-winning jams and jellies, and sponsoring and counseling others who are wrestling with the devil of addiction.

“I’m not where I could be,” Kristy said. “I have my ups and downs, but I am going to get there. It’s okay to be in my own skin today.”

Jennifer, meanwhile, also appreciates her own healthier lifestyle. “I’m a self-motivated person in everything I do. What keeps me going, though, are the goals I set, the little goals,” she said. “Now I am a very open and outgoing person that inspires people in everything I do. And I only got this outgoing because of the life I lead now. It brought me out of a shell, I guess. I enjoy very much inspiring others and motivating them.

 “I believe there is a reason we survived the accident, and we as survivors need to find purpose and meaning in life.”

Jennifer and Kristy in 2010.