Background
Jill was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota.
Jill was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota.
Because the facility barred people from living in the units, Jill’s parents avoided suspicion by refusing to let the children out during the day, even to attend school, and forbade them from speaking to people outside the family. A feature article about Jill in Marie Claire described the family’s “bizarre” living arrangement:
With wood pilfered from construction sites, (Jill’s father) built a sleeping loft. Foreign a toilet, everyone used the same bucket, emptied only once a day in a nearby ditch.
To bathe, they filled another bucket from a spigot in the parking lot.
A propane heater kept the temperature just above freezing. Jill is the author of Tours for Free California and Tours for Free: Colorado.
In 2004, Los Angeles Magazine called Tours for Free California the year’s “Best Offbeat Guide to Los Angeles”
Jill writes a daily, Los Angeles-based celebrity column published at Examiner.com. According to a November 2010 report in AdAge, she had become the top-earning reporter at Examiner, with an annual income of nearly $100,000.
She also writes a weekly "Brain Baffler" puzzle for the Fence Post.