Fatal Romance: A True Story of Obsession and Murder

by Lisa Pulitzer

In March 1998, Jim decided to quit his job and move to the Capital City to be closer to his mentor—and to help her in her difficult relationship with her husband.

  Nancy was excited about her friend’s arrival, and invited him to stay with the family in their home on Reservoir Road. Jeremy was out of town on an assignment the week that Jim pulled up in front of the stately two-story brick colonial. The chemical company, Monsanto, had hired him, and his new assignment had him traveling back and forth to Louisiana. Zeb and Isabelle liked their mother’s new visitor. They found him easy-going, fun, and interested in their hobbies and activities.

  When Jeremy returned, Nancy passed her new house-guest off as the son of a romance writer friend, and said that he would be staying with them for a few weeks until he found a place to live. At first, Jeremy accepted Jim into his home, even inviting him to jog on his daily runs. But as the days passed, he grew increasingly suspicious of his houseguest, and at one point even asked him if he was involved with Nancy. “Are you f—king my wife?” he demanded to know.

  “No, frankly, she’s too old for me,” the “poet king” responded.

  The response seemed to appease Jeremy, and Jim continued to stay with the family while he looked for work and an apartment. In subsequent conversations with Nancy’s husband, Jim detailed his stormy relationship with his ex-wife and confided that he intended to exert complete control over the next woman who came into his life.

  But while the Akerses’ younger children were enthusiastic about having Jim around the house, the connection between Jeremy and Nancy grew increasingly strained. Nancy told Jim that she was growing more and more frightened of her husband. Even Jim’s mother, whom he regularly called, believed from his reports that something in the house was amiss. He always telephoned her before he went jogging with Jeremy to make sure that she was aware of his whereabouts in case she heard he had suddenly gone “missing.”

  Soon after his arrival, Jim secured a job as a truck driver for Coca-Cola, and with Nancy’s help, found a small one-bedroom apartment in the basement of a nondescript five-story building just down the street, within walking distance of the Akers house. Its residents were mostly blue-collar folk, but the building had more than its share of problems. Over the years, the police had been called to the location to investigate accusations of drug possession and dealing by its renters. Jim continued to spend time with Nancy, Jeremy, and the kids after he moved out. He even continued jogging with Jeremy.

  But the relationship between Nancy and Jeremy seemed to worsen by the day. Jim’s mother would later reveal that Nancy complained to her online about being physically abused by her husband. The three of them—Jim, Nancy, and Jim’s mother—often chatted online simultaneously using AOL’s “Instant Message” service. One evening, Nancy Lemke was online with her son when Nancy Akers joined the two of them to chat. It had been a few days since Mrs. Lemke had last talked to Nancy, who had been ill with the flu. Jim’s mother immediately asked Nancy how she was feeling and was glad to learn that she was on the mend. But after a short while, Nancy suddenly announced that she had to go because Jeremy was worrying about her and wanted her to get back into bed to rest. “That’s funny that he’s worried about now,” Nancy typed. “He is probably trying to make up for throwing me up against the bathroom door last week.”

  In April, Jim accompanied Nancy to the Washington Romance Writers Retreat in Harpers Ferry. Nancy was scheduled to present a workshop entitled “Character vs. Action—The Salable Synopsis.” The year before, she had given a talk on “How Unpublished Authors Sabotage Their Manuscripts,” and had participated in a panel discussion along with her friend Kathy Seidel. But unlike the previous year, Nancy did not come to West Virginia for the entire weekend. Instead, she showed up at the Hilltop House a few hours before she was scheduled to speak on Sunday with her young friend Jim in tow. Many of the writers found it strange that Nancy introduced the young man with the thin mustache simply as her “protector.”

  “Oh, he’s my bodyguard,” Nancy told author Mary Kilchenstein after she spotted Jim standing in a doorway, watching Nancy make a presentation. Mary had no idea what to make of Nancy’s comment, or why in the world she would ever need a bodyguard.

  As he stood in the doorway admiring Nancy from a distance, Jim turned to Mary and asked: “Isn’t she just the most wonderful, brilliant person you’ve ever seen?” From his comment, it was clear to Mary that the man was something more than simply a bodyguard to Nancy.

  But Mary never had a chance to ask her close friend what was going on because Nancy and Jim left right after the lecture ended. Mary could only wonder about her friend’s bizarre statement, and the comment the young man in the faded blue jeans and worn cowboy boots had made.

  Several of the writers who were in attendance that weekend recall that Nancy and Jim toured the grounds of the historic hotel together before taking off for Washington. Others remember Nancy mentioning that she and her friend had been staying at a hotel down the road.

  As the weeks passed, Jeremy grew even more suspicious. Once again, he confronted Jim about his relationship with Nancy. This time the twenty-six-year-old told him that Nancy had never made a pass at him, but that, if she ever did, he would find it hard to turn her down. The comment infuriated Jeremy, who had been wary of the young man for some time. When he subsequently confronted his wife, Nancy continued to maintain that her relationship with Jim was platonic. It was a story that she would tell even her closest confidantes.

  But Jeremy remained suspicious—and continued to question his wife and several of her close friends about her ongoing friendship with the out-of-towner. By June, he had all but lost interest in his legal practice. Convinced that there was more to his wife’s friendship than she was letting on, Jeremy began to watch Nancy closely, taking on the role of investigator as he followed them around town recording their movements in an attempt to prove his suspicion of adultery.

  In spite of her denials, even Nancy’s friends began to suspect that the two were having an affair, a fact that was confirmed for her friend Emily one night when Isabelle called shortly before 9 p.m. to ask if her mother was still there doing the family’s laundry. The young girl’s phone call caught her completely off guard. While Nancy had been coming over to use Emily’s machine on a regular basis, because her own dryer had been breaking down, that was not the case the night that Isabelle called. In fact, Emily did not know where the girl’s mother was, and was left wondering how her friend could leave her two young children home alone at that hour.

  The situation worsened when Jeremy returned home from a business trip and discovered what a friend said was evidence that his wife and Jim had been making love in the family residence. Infuriated, he reportedly confronted Nancy with his suspicions. She insisted that nothing was going on, but friends say he was unconvinced and lashed out at her, badly bruising her eye. Jeremy later confided that he had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that he had lost his temper, and struck his wife. In an emotional encounter, he subsequently described the battle to friends, sought forgiveness, and struggled to come up with some way to apologize for what he had done. He insisted that it was the only time he had ever raised a hand to his wife. His friends believed he was sincere, but said that, as devout Catholics, they could not condone his violent behavior. Later, they would learn that Jeremy did have a tendency to be verbally abusive, and in the last several years, might have actually shoved his wife during disagreements and arguments at the family home. Her face battered and swollen from the blow she had sustained, Nancy began to tell her friends that Jeremy had been physically abusive and cruel to her for much of their marriage.

  Even before the incident, friends say that Nancy and Jeremy slept in separate bedrooms. Friends reported that at Nancy’s suggestion, the couple bought a new dining room table to keep in their bedroom to be used as Jeremy’s new workspace. Her feeling was that it was preferable for him to dump his papers there, out of sight. Once it was installed, however, she claimed
that the clutter was too much for her and that it prompted her to start sleeping on the couch in the spare room upstairs. She also moved her own desk out of her first-floor office—to Jim’s house—claiming that she couldn’t get any writing done at home.

  In August, Jim’s mother drove from Chicago to Washington to spend a week visiting with her son. Jeremy was out of town, and Nancy was home with Isabelle. Zeb had gone down to Alabama to stay with his grandparents, and Isabelle had an airplane reservation to join him there later that week. Jim excitedly introduced his mother to the author he had moved to the District to be near. Already, the two women had one thing in common—their age! They were both born in 1951.

  Nancy Lemke found the romance writer prettier and even more intelligent than her son had described, and the heavy-set woman grew to like her even better after her whirlwind tour of the Capital. With Nancy Akers playing tour guide, they visited the White House, the Capitol building, and various museums, taking special care to avoid the city’s seedier neighborhoods. The expedition left Nancy Lemke breathless, and gushing about how smart her son’s friend was. She was even treated to a visit to the author’s comfortable residence, which she found to be well-appointed and full of exquisite antiques.

  While Nancy Lemke was in town, Nancy Akers, strangely, opted to take Isabelle to sleep in Jim’s modest one-bedroom apartment, rather than having everyone stay in her spacious home. But friends of the author deny that Nancy ever permitted Isabelle to spend the night in Jim’s apartment. During the visit, Mrs. Lemke took an intense liking to Isabelle, and laughed as Jim and Nancy joked about the little girl’s loquaciousness.

  Later that week, Nancy put Isabelle on a flight to Alabama, and waved Jim’s mother a farewell. Days later, she phoned Jeremy, who had joined the children in Sheffield, to say that she would be moving out. Stunned, Jeremy offered to leave the kids in Alabama with his parents, enroll them in school there, and fly back to Washington to try to work things out with his wife. But Nancy rebuffed his offer. She decided instead to take the advice of a close friend and insist that Jeremy and the children return to the District. She was convinced that her friend was right in saying that Zeb and Isabelle would be better off with their parents, even though Nancy seemed poised to ask for a divorce. She feared that if she allowed the children to remain in Alabama with Jeremy’s family, she could lose them for good.

  Bewildered, Jeremy telephoned one of Nancy’s friends and pleaded with her to give him some insight into what was going on. He was uncertain of exactly what had gone wrong, and wondered if his wife’s decision to leave was fueled by a hormonal imbalance triggered by menopause. He admitted to the woman that he had not always been faithful, and that he had not always been there for his wife, but vowed to do whatever he could to make the relationship work.

  When the children returned to Washington, and learned that their mother had moved in with Jim, they were confused. At first, Zeb turned on his father and blamed him for his mother’s departure. The ten-year-old boy had grown extremely fond of Jim since his arrival in the District five months before. He felt that he found a friend in the young truck driver and it pleased him to see his mother so happy whenever Jim was around. For young Isabelle, the situation was more complicated. Like her brother, she liked and admired Jim. But she was upset when she saw how devastated her father was over the departure of her mother and did what she could to comfort him.

  Finny, too, had a difficult time understanding what had happened. Growing up, he had always believed that his parents had been happy. When he finally realized that his mother was disenchanted with her marriage, he thought it was just another problem that his parents would work out. He was aware of his mother’s frustration over his father’s chronic procrastination, and the idiosyncrasies that set him apart from the rest of the world, but he thought of his father’s quirkiness as a quality that made him unique.

  But his hope that his parents would resurrect their marriage was dashed when Nancy moved out of the house. Nevertheless, Finny was encouraged when his father continued to persuade Nancy to stay in close contact with him and the younger children, inviting her to come over to the house on a daily basis to help send them off to school in the morning and to assist them with their homework at night. Jeremy’s only condition was that Nancy keep the children away from Jim. He asked that she not bring her lover into the family home, and forbade her to take Zeb and Isabelle to Jim’s apartment.

  Jeremy was not alone in his expectations of Nancy. Her best friend Emily also let her know that her lover was not welcome in her house because of the unwholesome example it would present to her children.

  But Jeremy’s pleadings fell on deaf ears. At one point Nancy tried to take Zeb and Isabelle to Jim’s apartment, but made it only as far as the building’s basement hallway before Isabelle went into a state of shock and fell screaming to the floor. Annoyed, Nancy tossed the kids back in the car and took them home. On the way, she told them that they had to come to grips with her decision and accept Jim.

  All the while, Jeremy seemed determined to change. The man whom many regarded as selfish and self-centered seemed genuinely determined to put his own needs aside in the interest of caring for his children—and possibly saving his marriage. Even his closest friends were surprised when he made his children’s welfare his top priority. He repeatedly asked his wife to come to the house and meet with him to talk through some of their problems for the sake of the children. But time after time, she wound up picking a fight with him and storming out in a huff, often in front of Zeb and Isabelle.

  For the first time in his life, Jeremy was confronted with a situation that was totally beyond his control, and that he could not seem to fix, no matter how hard he tried. Even his apologies and promises to change did not sway Nancy.

  Finny and his siblings were convinced that Jim was at the root of their mother’s odd behavior. The children suspected that Jim was controlling her actions and trying to drive a wedge between their mother and them. It was difficult for Finny to watch as his father telephoned his mother and pleaded with her to come over and talk it out. He could see how utterly destroyed he was at the prospect of losing his family. He was also surprised at how his father had changed after Nancy moved out. The gruff Marine corps mentality was gone, replaced by a new, gentler man who was open—indeed, desperate—to reconcile with his wife. To make matters worse, Finny could not understand his mother’s flat-out refusal to listen to his dad’s pleas and find it in her heart to give the man who had been her husband for the last twenty years one more chance.

  All at once, both his parents seemed like strangers to him. His father was uncharacteristically mournful and compliant, while his mother’s refusal to listen to reason was also out of character. It troubled the young man that his mother could be so black and white, seeing things from her perspective only and not in the gray tones of compromise. After all, Finny thought, she and his father had raised three children together, and they weren’t even grown yet! He wondered how any mother could overlook that important fact.

  Yet, while Finny was heartsick over what was going on at home, he did notice that something good had come from his mother’s decision to leave. The young man observed that Nancy seemed happier and more relaxed away from his dad. He was also surprised to learn that she had begun communicating with his grandmother, Susan Richards, after years of near silence between the two women.

  Roderick and Susan Richards barely even knew their two youngest grandchildren. But the news that Nancy had finally broken away from her husband caused her parents to rejoice. They listened with keen interest as she explained that her new friend, Jim, had been instrumental in helping her to find the courage to free herself from Jeremy. From the way their daughter spoke of her new friend, they were convinced that Jim was a knight in shining armor who had rescued their little princess from her mean and evil husband. They were so jubilant, in fact, that they even offered to help pay Zeb and Isabelle’s parochial school tuition.

  Meanwhile
, Jeremy was struggling to come to terms with the new man in Nancy’s life. He had thought for certain that his wife would come to her senses, once she realized how inadequate her young lover was in comparison to both him and the other substantial men she knew. Not only was Jim Lemke less than half his age, he was the exact opposite of everything that Jeremy Akers stood for. Jeremy was appalled at how out of shape Jim was, that he wore one earring, that he was uneducated, and earned a living at the wheel of a heavy truck. He wondered how his wife could possibly fall for such a person. But his real concern was the message that her relationship with this man was sending to his children.

  He did not want his children in contact with this man, and vowed to do whatever he could to protect them from Jim. To Jeremy, under no circumstances would his children live under the same roof as Jim. He repeatedly offered to give Nancy custody of Zeb and Isabelle—if she would move out of Jim’s apartment and into a place of her own, that he would pay for. He even offered to pay her other household expenses. But Nancy, who so often had been forced to take on extra work to pay the family’s bills, refused.

  On Wednesday, October 7, 1998, Nancy’s last novel, So Wild a Kiss, was shipped to bookstores across the country. In it, she thanked the “poet king”—Jim Lemke.

  To all those women down through Irish history who have aided the Queen on her way to Freedom, especially to the memory of those whose lives inspired this work: Eleanor, Countess of Desmond; Eibhlin Dhubh ní Chonaill; Lady Wilde, Maud Gonne; Mairead Farrell; and Constance Markievicz.

  To the centuries of poets, who, in daring to open their hearts and souls, have preserved moments in time too precious to be forgotten, and especially, to the poet king.

  Acknowledging Jim in her novel was quite a statement for Nancy, who had not dedicated any of her books to her husband (although a character in one of her earlier novels had been an Earl named Jeremy).