Fatal Romance: A True Story of Obsession and Murder

by Lisa Pulitzer

  With the new information that Farish had given him, the sergeant searched the darkness, scouring the park for anyone fitting the dispatcher’s description. Navigating the motorbike along the cement sidewalk that led to the Lincoln Memorial traffic circle, he made one last check and then headed south onto Constitution Avenue, rounded the 1900 block, and steered his scooter up onto the grassy area around Constitution Gardens. As he motored along, the single beam of his scooter’s headlight illuminating tiny stretches of parkland, he was only vaguely aware of the pungent floral aroma that permeated the night air.

  Guadioso hurried across the grassy expanse of parkland in the direction of The Wall. As he moved deliberately around the perimeter of the expansive granite monument, the sergeant instinctively fingered the cool metal handle of the German-made 9mm Glock that was holstered in his gun belt.

  “We’ve located the suspect’s vehicle,” a familiar voice blared over Guadioso’s radio. Slowing his scooter, the sergeant could hear his colleague, Sgt. Mike Russo, advising the operator that he had spotted a Mercury Mountaineer with Alabama tags #20CM895 on the twenty-first block of Constitution Avenue NW.

  Guadioso paid close attention as Russo relayed how he had found the vehicle unoccupied and parked in a regular space on the south side of the lot. Directing his scooter toward the curb, he listened to Russo saying that he would station his cruiser near the vehicle and wait for the driver to return.

  Checking his watch again, Sgt. Guadioso noted that it was now 12:50 a.m., thirty-four minutes since he was first alerted to a gunman on the loose. He parked his scooter on the east side of the Vietnam Vet’s Memorial, and grabbing his flashlight, continued into the park on foot, firmly gripping the handle of his gun as he proceeded along the grass toward the impressive monument.

  As he made his way around to the south side of The Wall, he observed movement in the shadows just up the hill from where he was standing. Shining his flashlight in that direction, he illuminated the figure of a man seated on the grass, just beyond the apex of the monument. He observed that the man was facing the memorial and that he had a shotgun positioned between his legs, the muzzle of the weapon pointing upward toward his mouth.

  He could feel the adrenaline coursing through his veins as his eyes reflexively scanned the area, his attention immediately drawn to a small cluster of tourists milling about on the pathway on the south side of The Wall. Moving swiftly toward the group, he instinctively placed his body between them and the gunman.

  “Let’s get out of here!” he shouted, motioning them to run for cover. “There’s a man with a gun!”

  With an air of authority, he ushered the group to safety, and then radioed for backup. Before two words had escaped his mouth, he heard the deafening blast of gunfire echoing into the night. Pulling his weapon from its holster, he shouted into the radio strapped to his shoulder and rushed toward the suspect, gasping as he viewed the grisly sight—a dead man, his eyes wide open, his face grotesquely disfigured by the blast that had taken his life.

  * * *

  “I think we’ve got your guy,” the US Park Police sergeant reported to Farish over the sergeant’s cell phone.

  Farish had been about to fax out the photograph of Jeremy Akers that he had just obtained when Guadioso’s call came in. He and the other officers on Reservoir Road had been finishing up the processing of the crime scene, wrapping up an intense three-hour investigation.

  Motioning to Detective Dwayne Partman, for whom this event marked his first time on a murder–suicide, Farish headed for his car. He knew that it was his responsibility to ID the suicide victim, and take over the homicide investigation from the Park Police.

  When the officers arrived at the National Mall, they found crime scene tape encircling parts of the Memorial, and the prostate body of Jeremy Akers on the knoll behind it. He saw that the Mobile Crime Scene unit had already arrived, the same crew that had just finished up at Reservoir Road. As Farish strode toward the body, the sergeant noticed that Detective Partman seemed hesitant. The thirty-nine-year-old officer had never been so close to a dead body. And neither had Sergeant Guadioso, who had remained on the scene to wait for the coroner’s van to arrive.

  Farish followed all the steps of police procedure, waiting as members of the crime scene unit snapped photographs and collected evidence. He watched as the men carefully wrapped the Mossberge 12-gauge shotgun with the 20” barrel and marked it as evidence, and as they collected the shotgun shell casing, as well as six shells they recovered from the gun’s chamber.

  Once the team had completed its job, Sergeant Farish rolled Jeremy’s body over, and lifted up his blue fleece, zip-front pullover. Holstered in the small of his back was the .38 caliber pistol that he had used to kill his wife. In the front pocket of his blue jeans was the magazine clip and extra cartridges for the handgun.

  As he viewed the body, Farish thought, “This is the only courageous thing this guy has done.”

  The sergeant helped the team load Jeremy’s body into the black body bag and left it on the scene for the Medical Examiner.

  When the coroner’s van arrived, and the back doors were opened, Farish could see that there was another body on the truck. The sergeant knew immediately whose it was. With the help of Guadioso, the veteran homicide sergeant hoisted Jeremy’s body onto the van, laying it carefully beside Nancy’s.

  EPILOGUE

  The police continued to search for Jim Lemke, but their hunt did not yield any results until early the following morning. More than twelve hours after Nancy’s murder, Sergeant Michael Farish received word that his officers had located the twenty-six-year-old truck driver. Jim’s mother recalled her son telling her that when his lover failed to return home that night, he had gone out to look for her.

  “What happened?” Jim quizzed the two uniformed policemen who approached him on the street outside of his apartment building. “Did her husband beat her up again?”

  It was nearly ten a.m. when the men related to Jim that his girlfriend was murdered, shot to death by her estranged husband as she sat outside the family home in her red Jeep Wrangler.

  Dissolving into uncontrollable sobs, Jim told the police he was too distraught to answer their questions. But the officers were irritated and admonished him to pull himself together for the sake of the children. They insisted that Jim assist them in sorting out the details of his girlfriend’s life.

  As police continued their investigation, Isabelle and Zeb remained at the home of their next-door neighbor. By early morning, Finny and his girlfriend had reached the District, having driven all night from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. When they arrived at his home on Reservoir Road, Finny noticed that a uniformed officer stood watch at the front door. Inside, police were conducting a thorough search of the premises, confiscating the camping equipment that Jeremy had used on his trip with Zeb and Isabelle the week before, and the note that he had scrawled on the back of an envelope.

  Officers on the scene informed the Akerses’ oldest son of his mother’s death, and of his father’s suicide. Although they understood his devastation, Finny was then tasked with the chore of telling his younger brother and sister what had happened to their parents, as friends and relatives from around the country descended on Washington, DC.

  Nancy’s mother, meanwhile, did not learn of her daughter’s death until the following morning. After returning home with her family from church the following morning, Nancy’s best friend, Emily, telephoned Susan Richards in Savannah, Georgia to offer her condolences. But it was immediately apparent to Emily that the elder woman had no idea what had happened. Upon hearing Emily’s voice, Susan greeted her with a warm hello and the question, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this phone call?” The heartbreaking task of breaking the news to the victim’s mother fell on Emily’s shoulders. The memory of the scream with which Nancy’s mother responded to the news still haunts Emily today.

  Sensing that something was terribly wrong, Nancy’s father, Roderick, got on t
he phone with Emily and tearfully explained that she was due to come for a visit in two weeks, a much-anticipated reconciliation that both parents could hardly wait for.

  As the hours passed, and family members gathered, it was becoming increasingly clear that neither Nancy nor Jeremy had made any provisions for their minor children. There was no life insurance policy, no bank account, and no will. The only thing that police had turned up in their search of the family home was the handwritten note left by Jeremy. Minutes before his confrontation with Nancy, he had stuffed the envelope with several thousand dollars in cash, and then scribbled a monetary breakdown of the contents and how he had intended it to be divided among his three children.

  In the weeks following the murder, friends of the couple set up an education trust for the children, and asked that donations be sent in care of their Washington, DC law firm. Barbara Deane, owner of barbsbestbooks.com, an online bookstore that specializes in romance novels, ran a contest on her company’s Website and raised $250 to donate to the fund.

  The absence of any last will and testament left the question of custody to be decided by family members. It was clear that Susan and Roderick Richards and Gladys and William Akers were too old to take on the responsibility of raising two young children. Nancy’s brothers, John and Rod Richards, agreed that other family members might make better choices as parents for Zeb and Isabelle.

  That left Jeremy’s two siblings, Carolyn and T, as the only likely choices. Without hesitation, T and his wife, who is also named Carolyn, moved to take custody of Zeb and Isabelle. For Nancy and Jeremy, T would have been the ideal choice. Friends of the couple agreed that both Nancy and Jeremy loved and admired Jeremy’s younger brother and his wife, and without question would have wanted their children in their custody. Not only was T intimately familiar with the youngsters from their countless visits to the South, both he and his wife were successful, upstanding members of their Florence, Alabama, community, and had raised several children of their own.

  Ironically, one of Jeremy’s friends recalled how Jeremy never really wanted his children growing up in the big city, which he perceived to be dangerous and riddled with crime. On more than one occasion, he had voiced his desire to take the kids to Alabama and raise them in the country the way he had been raised.

  When Susan and Roderick Richards arrived in town, Nancy’s mother immediately took over the funeral arrangements being made for Nancy and Jeremy. Her husband was elderly and infirm, struggling with the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

  In spite of his frail health, he had accompanied his wife to Washington, and to the morgue to identify the body of his beloved daughter. News of her death devastated him. But he retained his composure, and once at the morgue, he immediately noticed that police had copied her birth date from her driver’s license incorrectly, and the coroner’s office had catalogued her as three years younger than her actual age. The error was corrected on her death certificate, but was reported erroneously in the local newspapers.

  Susan Richards’ suggestion that the families hold a joint memorial service at the church where Zeb and Isabelle attended parochial school was met with raised eyebrows by friends and relatives of the deceased couple. But once Nancy’s mother explained that she believed a single service would be best for the children, everybody rallied around her in support of the plan.

  Many of Nancy’s friends did not learn the disturbing news of her death until the following morning when they opened their Monday editions of The Washington Post. Right there on the front page was an article detailing the horrific events. “Romance Novelist Is Slain, Police Say Husband Killed Writer, Self,” the headline read.

  To many, the story was remarkable—and incomprehensible.

  Alan Soschin, the lawyer handling Nancy’s divorce case, read the article in disbelief. As he skimmed the story, he ran to dial the Metropolitan Police Department for more details. Bewildered, he listened as the officer on the other end of the line explained what had happened.

  He would later tell reporters, “I have a sense here that my client may have underestimated the emotional instability of her husband.… She was willing to try to work on the divorce. There was no reason for this to happen.”

  But as he sat behind the heavy wooden desk in his downtown office, recounting his conversations with Nancy Akers, he found himself completely shaken by her murder. In his twenty-six years practicing law, he had handled numerous cases in which he deemed it necessary to obtain a restraining order to protect a client whom he believed to be in danger. Yet, from all that Nancy had told him, and from the way that she acted during their meetings, he had no reason to believe that she was at risk. And he was certain that Jeremy’s deadly attack had caught her completely off-guard.

  News of Nancy’s murder, and her husband’s subsequent suicide, was carried in newspapers throughout the country, and around the world. Ray Walker learned of his friend’s fate from someone in Sheffield who called to alert him after reading about the murder–suicide in their hometown gazette. Members of the Sheffield community were saddened and mournful upon learning of the death of their hometown hero.

  As the days passed, published accounts alleged that Nancy had been abused by Jeremy, and the stories were bolstered with quotes pulled from emails that Nancy had written to several of her friends. The articles infuriated Finny, who maintained that his mother’s electronic accusations were just not true. Other friends corroborated Finny’s assertions.

  Even close friends of the couple were puzzled, and many said that they had no knowledge of Jeremy physically abusing Nancy. Some speculated that her allegations of abuse were crafted to bolster her fight for custody of the children. One person who was very close to Nancy believed that she was “embellishing” on the truth to deflect attention from her abandonment of the children, and her extramarital affair with a man half her age.

  In the weeks that followed Nancy’s murder, articles continued to appear in newspapers and on the World Wide Web, many painting Nancy as a battered woman, and drawing parallels between her murder and those of two other women in the romance community. One was a Silhouette Desires Series author named Pamela Macaluso who was killed in 1997 by her husband, Joseph. The Air Force missile specialist shot the author and their two teenage sons before taking his own life in the family’s home at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County. The other woman, Ann Wassall, was a college professor who taught courses in romance novels, who was murdered by her husband in 1996.

  The stories alarmed authors of the romance community, who worried about the inference that romance writers were somehow targets of domestic abuse, and that the three deaths signaled a chilling trend.

  At first, a mass was planned for the morning of June 8, and was to be primarily for members of the parochial school’s community. But, after many of Nancy’s and Jeremy’s friends expressed interest in attending, the service was rescheduled for the evening of June 9, at Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church, and was open to anyone who wished to attend.

  The day before the memorial service was to take place, thirty members of the WRW met at the home of Kathy Seidel. Seated on comfortable chairs and couches in Kathy’s airy living room, the authors remembered their friend, telling stories of their times with Nancy and mourning her death. They sipped tea and coffee from porcelain cups, and snacked on sandwiches and cookies that had been arranged and garnished in Nancy’s elegant entertaining style.

  The following evening, several of the authors attended the memorial service at Our Lady of Victory. To a standing-room-only crowd of mourners, Reverend William Foley delivered a eulogy that was strangely absent of any mention of the murder or suicide. He referred to the dead couple as “Our Brother Jeremy” and “Our Sister Nancy” and did not even allude to the fact that they were in the midst of divorce proceedings.

  In the front row of the gracious stone chapel were Zeb, Isabelle, and Finny, who sat shoulder to shoulder with their grandparents, aunts, and uncles. The little
girl kept her head down, her face hidden behind locks of her silky, blonde hair, as friends and relatives remembered her parents.

  Nancy’s brother, John Richards, read a letter to his sister, and talked about her many books. Jeremy’s old Marine pal, Jonathan Blackmer, re-created snapshots of Vietnam by reading his friend’s Silver Star Citation, hoping to share with the mourners a glimpse of the “real” Jeremy Akers.

  Next, Nancy’s divorce lawyer, Alan Soschin, infused a dose of reality into the service, explaining at what point the couple had been in the divorce process and talking about what was to follow. He directed many of his comments to the couple’s children, alluding to letters that Nancy had written to him detailing how much she loved them.

  Attired in an elegant black dress, her thick blonde hair catching the last rays of light that streamed in through the stained-glass windows, Jeremy’s longtime friend, socialite Patricia Duff, and another elegantly dressed woman took the podium.

  Her voice cracked as she spoke of her final correspondence with Nancy. “Only twenty minutes before I heard the news, I was reading her last email. She was looking forward to spending two weeks with her children in Georgia.”

  Patricia had grown close to Nancy as both women tried to deal with the difficult men in their lives. Duff, everybody knew, was in the middle of a vicious custody battle with her estranged husband, Revlon billionaire Ron Perelman, at the same time that Nancy struggled to break her ties with her husband of twenty years.

  About ten minutes into the service, one of Jeremy’s friends noticed James Lemke quietly slip in through a rear door. “You’re lucky to be alive,” he whispered as Lemke stood with his back pressed up against the rear wall of the cathedral.