Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  Murphy said, “Of all of the women I’ve been with—Paula, I loved the most! I really believe she is my soul mate. Even today.” He still frequently dreamed about her, even though they had been apart for years.

  Chapter 15

  Group Sex

  According to Paula, she and Murphy broke up when he became verbally abusive and threatened physical violence against the children and toward her. She said that Murphy had an inadequate-type personality. There had been an incident, she said, in which Murphy requested to watch her having sex with another man—and that, in fact, did occur.

  Murphy admitted that it was true. “I had a strange obsession,” he said. “I needed to see my wife with another man. So after years of coercion, I finally persuaded her to do so. Eventually we did two threesomes, with an extra guy. And we did one foursome, with another husband and wife.”

  Murphy found these group-sex scenes very exciting, but he came nowhere close to living out his most extreme sexual fantasies. “My swinging was on the low-key amateur level,” he said. “Usually we would discuss each other’s likes and dislikes and go from there.”

  He was always looking for new opportunities to bring fresh people into his marriage bed. He also convinced Paula that they should have an “open marriage”; that is, they were each allowed to have lovers on the side. So Murphy regularly found himself in bed with other women. Only once, however, did he tell Paula about it. “I told her before the encounter what I was going to do and who I was going to be with. Then, when I got home, I told her all about it. Paula seemed happy for me.”

  Open marriages are most often a precursor to separation, and that was the case here. The sex-on-the-side scenario caused the marriage to come to a “bad conclusion.”

  The beginning of the end came about eight months after he left Clippercraft. One day, as he was completing a haircut at Regis, he glanced up toward the reception area. He noticed a woman there, and she was holding a large manila envelope. She placed the envelope on the front desk and walked out. He completed the haircut and walked his client to the front of the shop and took her money. While there, he looked at the manila envelope and was surprised to see it labeled: Elton Murphy: Personal and Confidential. He opened the envelope right there in front of everyone; inside were fifty photographs of his wife and another man he didn’t know. They were fully clothed, but they were kissing in one photo. The photos were taken in various locations, surveillance style. One location he recognized was outside the Legends Gym, where Paula worked out. Murphy was unnerved by the photos and found it difficult to concentrate on his work as he finished his shift. Even though he and Paula had an open relationship, she had never—as far as he knew—previously acted upon it.

  That night he confronted his wife, saying, “Paula, how are things going at the gym?”

  “Good!” she replied happily.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “I work out there. Why? What do you think I’m doing there?”

  He said nothing, just handed her the manila envelope. Looking at the photos, she was flabbergasted.

  “Where did you get these?” she asked.

  “At Regis today,” he replied. “So, who’s the guy?”

  “That’s Bobby Bill (pseudonym), my personal trainer,” she replied. “We’re not up to anything. We’re just friends. Who took these photos?”

  Murphy admitted he didn’t know. “So there’s nothing going on between you two?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Well, somebody thinks there is, or they would not have taken these photos. Somebody takes you two seriously.”

  Paula insisted that whoever thought that was wrong. Murphy was cool with that and decided to let the matter slide. About a month later, Murphy came home early from the salon and was completely overwhelmed by what he saw.

  “I saw nothing! All of the furniture was gone,” he recalled. “I didn’t even have a bed!” He walked from room to room in disbelief; then he sat down on the living-room floor and began to cry. He couldn’t remember ever being so upset, before or since.

  About an hour later the phone rang. It was Paula.

  “I called you at work and they said you left early. As you can see, I’ve left you. I’m sorry you found out the way you did, but I wanted to avoid a conflict with you.”

  Murphy was devastated.

  Chapter 16

  Psychological Haze

  A few days later he returned home and there was a message on the answering machine from “some crazed girl” who claimed to be Bobby Bill’s girlfriend. She was “carrying on” about finding Bobby Bill and Paula having sex in a car parked behind the gym. She called Paula “a whore.” Murphy later learned that the woman on the message was named Cindy. She had been living with Bobby Bill until Paula intervened and caused them to break up.

  According to Paula, after they broke up, the children showed no interest in talking to their estranged father, who appeared to be laboring in some sort of fugue state. Murphy, as we’ll see, had fonder memories of fatherhood.

  Murphy admitted he was hurting. “I had the wind knocked out of me” was how he put it. “I was wounded merchandise for quite a while.”

  He was so hurt that, about a year later, spur of the moment, he decided he could no longer live in the same town as Paula—so he packed a few things and left Tallahassee. He wanted to put some distance between himself and his ex-wife and kids. It hurt so much. He couldn’t live with the fact that she didn’t want him.

  Murphy left Tallahassee in 1996. “I was in a psychological haze again,” he said. “I think the chemical imbalance fluids were working!”

  He drove to Tampa to his mother’s home. She agreed to let him stay with her for a while, until he could get back on his feet again. The next day Murphy gussied himself up in his finest clothes and made the rounds of Regis Hair Salons in the area, looking for work. He got a job at the one in the Brandon Town Center, Brandon being a town right next to Tampa. They needed a hairstylist badly and he was hired immediately. He both cut hair himself and taught a class in hairstyling techniques. His manager there was a woman named Sylvie Tarlton.

  The Brandon Regis gig was the best job ever. The mall was really nice and was crowded. Business was brisk. “In my first two weeks I doubled what I’d been making in Tallahassee,” he said. He was excited. He felt as if he was finally being paid what he was worth. The salon was nice and the atmosphere was electric. He was a member of the Regis President’s Club for several years, which was the honor the Regis chain gave to its biggest moneymakers.

  “It was upscale. And while there, I had an overabundant amount of beautiful women to build the type of clientele I had always dreamed of,” he said nostalgically.

  In 1997, Murphy met a woman named Jane Wingate.

  Chapter 17

  Jane

  Murphy met Jane through her daughter, Allie. He cut the daughter’s hair and she wanted him to meet her mom. Hey, no problem. He didn’t even have to go anywhere.

  The daughter brought her mom in, in order to get her hair cut. Jane and Murphy immediately hit it off—just as Allie had predicted. He got Jane’s phone number and called her a week later and asked her out. A few weeks after that, he moved in with Jane and Allie. For a while there, at the beginning of their relationship, it was almost like a contest between the two of them: who could send whom the most flowers at work. The game made the girls at the Regis jealous.

  Murphy, Jane, and Allie lived together in River-view, in a three-bedroom mobile home. He and Jane had an open policy sexually. “We both had outside affairs, but it was me mostly,” Murphy said.

  During that era one of his hottest sideline girlfriends was named Deborah—she of the plentiful, super-sexy pubic hair.

  “Jane, Deborah, and I almost had a threesome,” Murphy recalled.

  The three were all on a couch together. Jane watched as Murphy felt up Deborah. Deborah was all set to be with Jane. Jane and Murphy had discussed having a threesome with Deborah earlier, an
d she said she would like to. Jane chickened out when the moment arrived. According to Murphy, Jane gave him and Deborah her blessing and split.

  Murphy remembered Jane as a woman with a very pleasant personality. They were about the same age. Her mother was from England. She was also exceptional with Murphy’s kids when they came to visit.

  They found ways to surprise one another. One time he told her to get in the car, and then he took her on a surprise trip to a bed-and-breakfast.

  “One Christmas, she lavished me with expensive gifts over a few days. She gave me a Web TV unit, a Washburn guitar, a black-onyx gold ring, and a Sony video camera.” She then treated him to a room at the Don CeSar, a huge, fancy resort hotel on St. Petersburg Beach, known for its rows of palm trees and the twin cupolas on its roof.

  He lived with Jane and Allie for about two years.

  Their visions of the future were incompatible.

  Jane wanted to stay flexible, mobile.

  Murphy was ready to plant roots, settle down.

  Murphy had gone so far as to buy a plot of land in Ruskin, a town in Hillsborough County, along the eastern coast of Tampa Bay, and purchased a mobile home to put on it.

  Murphy thought the move would please Jane. Trouble was, she had just finished a job in Ruskin, had no pleasant memories of Ruskin, and the last thing she wanted was to move there. So, instead, Murphy moved into the new mobile home by himself—and he was single again.

  The last that Murphy heard about Jane Wingate, she was working at the Office of Property Management in Washington, D.C.

  Chapter 18

  New Home, New Life

  “New home, new life,” he said. He loved the new place. So quiet, twenty-two miles from his job, yet close to Tampa Bay and a river. He fished frequently. He bought a kayak and negotiated the river in it. “When I was away from my job, I felt really away,” he explained.

  He purchased a used immersion-baptismal font, which he converted into a hot tub. He put it in his mobile home and decorated the area around it to look like an ancient ship. “I called it the pool room,” he said. It was great for entertaining; his kids spent hours in it.

  In 1999, not long after he moved to Ruskin, when Elton Brutus Murphy was forty-two, a neighbor found his mom unconscious on the kitchen floor of her Town ’n’ Country home in Tampa. How she got unconscious was a matter of opinion.

  Murphy remembered, “The doctor in the emergency room made the mistake of saying someone must have pushed my mother and she banged her head, resulting in a brain hemorrhage. The way he diagnosed what happened, it sounded like my mom had been thrown down or something, and that this blow—this thing to her head—could not have happened without some sort of force being used, and that was what started the snowball to hell on that incident. We had my mother pulled off life support after three days of being brain dead. They said there was no hope for her.” Betty Jo was sixty.

  Because of the emergency room (ER) doctor’s opinion, and the fact that Brutus was one of the last people to see his mother alive, life was complicated for a few days. He said, “I was under suspicion by law enforcement that I might have been the one to cause her death. Thank God, the autopsy ruled it was an accident.”

  The main guy pushing the “Brutus did it” theory was his brother, Dean. Dean already didn’t trust him. They had been apart for years.

  Murphy felt that a pair of siblings not communicating much with each other was genetic. His father had been the same way—never talked to his brother. “He disassociated himself from everyone.”

  All of that suspicion squelched Murphy’s ability to mourn properly. He and his mom were close; her death hit him hard.

  During November 1999, Murphy met Elizabeth. Like Jane before her, he met her while cutting her hair. He subsequently asked her out. Elizabeth was a physical therapist—and a thirty-four-year-old virgin. They considered getting married.

  Murphy might have grown sexually bored with Elizabeth if it hadn’t been for some kinky games he was playing on the side. While he was dating Elizabeth, he cut the hair of a man who, as Murphy explained it, “wanted me to do his wife while he watched. The wife was twenty-six and beautiful, and they both seemed to enjoy it as much as I did.” Being the third for couples that wanted to swing was nothing new for Murphy. He did it more than a few times, dating back to 1984 when, at age twenty-seven, he provided the sexual entertainment for a couple in their forties, John and Doris.

  The monkey wrench in those works wasn’t Elizabeth’s sexual inexperience, it was her fifteen-year-old adopted son, who was a disciplinary problem. The kid had been raised in foster homes and had a terrible temper. Murphy lasted until February 2000; then he broke it off. He’d just given her a bracelet for Valentine’s Day. He didn’t ask for it back; he told her to keep it.

  Chapter 19

  Best Year Ever

  At the end of 1999—maybe the start of 2000—Murphy purchased a short stack of books about the stock market and day trading. He studied extensively and opened two accounts, one with Datek Online, another with Ameritrade.

  He worked at Regis during the afternoon and evening shifts, so he had all morning to play at trading stocks. He didn’t try to be too eclectic. He focused on—and dealt exclusively in—Nasdaq penny stocks.

  “I got to where I was getting pretty good at it,” he recalled. There were several mornings when he made a quick few hundred dollars. For a time he was making more money trading stocks on his computer than he did cutting hair.

  Brimming with confidence, Murphy quit Regis so he could trade full-time. All day long he traded, five days a week. For a while there, he was having a lot of fun. Nothing got his adrenaline pumping like buy, sell, buy, sell.

  He’d stayed Hollywood hot for about six months, and then his luck ran out. Broke, he was forced to return to Regis. He tried trading part-time again, but the thrill was gone. His luck never returned.

  When he filed his tax return in April 2001, he reported $483,000 in trades for the previous year. In retrospect he considered that phase of his life to be a good experience. However, he recalled enjoying the renewed comfort of being on safe financial ground at Regis.

  During those black-ink days, Murphy made room in his schedule for his kids, too. Despite Paula’s diagnosis that he was in a “fugue state,” Murphy recalled being an active dad. In 2000 through 2001, he went on several trips with his kids, camping in the northern mountains of Georgia, walking the Appalachian Trail to North Carolina, where Trevor and Darcie saw and played in snow for the first time.

  The granddaddy of all the trips, though, was the ten-day camping trip to Oregon and Washington. “We camped at a different place every day,” Murphy said—Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, the Snake River, the dunes of the coast of Oregon.

  Closer, but more frequent, were family outings to Ginnie Springs near Lake City, Florida. Even though Murphy and his kids lived a four-and-a-half-hour drive apart, Murphy insisted they were close and they “loved spending time together.” Despite this, they never saw each other more than “several times a year.” Murphy remembered quality time, trips to Florida amusement parks: Disney, Universal, SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, etc.

  The year 2001 was Murphy’s best ever. It was his best as a hairstylist, and the best all around. With a pair of scissors in his hand, filled with confidence, he peaked as a hairstylist. He serviced the shop’s largest list of clientele. His specialty was hair color and highlighting. He loved doing the fancy updos at prom time for countless teenaged girls.

  Everything was going well. He was content. He was happy with his mobile home in Ruskin, even though he spent many hours remodeling the interior again and again: new floors, new TV, the works. His tastes would change and—bam—he would change his home’s ambiance to suit himself.

  Yes, 2001 was great, and 2002 started out positively as well.

  Even as his life soared, his lack of control over himself still came around to bite him in the ass. The thing that he couldn’t control was h
is spending. He spent more than he earned—simple as that—by a lot. He was going out nightclubbing, drinking too much. He was $38,000 in debt; he was forced to file for bankruptcy.

  During this time he had a hairstyling friend named Tammy Burkhart. He’d meet her at bars two or three times a week. One of their favorites was Barnacles, on Providence Road in Brandon, a place that changed dramatically depending on what hour a client was there. During the day it was a family-friendly sports bar. There were 450 TVs! At night it was a meat market—that is, a pickup joint—for truckers, bikers, and rural folk. They also enjoyed spending time in the Green Iguana in Ybor City, where patrons could get burgers and live music seven days a week.

  They would drink and laugh together for hours, often till the lights flashed and the proprietor started putting up the chairs.

  “I never laughed so much in my life as when I was with Tammy,” Murphy remembered. “She was a real joy to be around.”

  Even though she was good-looking—he thought she resembled Calista Flockhart, popular at the time on the TV show Ally McBeal—they never did anything sexual together.

  “I certainly didn’t mind being seen with her in public, though,” Murphy admitted.

  Chapter 20

  A Not-So-Beautiful Mind

  “Then one morning in February, my whole life began to change before my unbelieving eyes,” Murphy said. “I became immersed in a psychological nightmare. No matter how hard I tried, there was no escape.” The only thing he could compare it to was A Beautiful Mind, the movie that was popular at the time. He would urge anyone who hadn’t seen that movie to do so immediately. He also saw a lot of himself in the patients and their delusions in Ken Kesey’s book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.