After ten long minutes of holding me captive as his rag doll, he let me go when Crystal came running downstairs screaming for her mommy.
“MOMMY, MOMMY, WHAT…?”
William cut her off and told her to go back upstairs.
“…mommy, I’m calling 911!”
By this time, pieces were fitting together in my head. William was pissed at me because there were no leftovers. But it didn’t make sense. Nobody in their right mind, I thought, turns into maniac because of food. There was plenty of food in the house and William knew that.
I called to my daughter. “Mommy is okay.” I tried to slow my breathing. “BABY PLEASE…GO BACK UPSTAIRS.”
William backed away from me like he didn’t know me. I pulled myself together, and then moved slowly toward my daughter. We embraced without saying a word, at first. Then she tried to whisper in my ear, but it was loud enough for William to hear as he started upstairs.
“We gotta call 911, Mommy!”
“No, baby,” I assured my child. “We’ll just go to Nana’s.
Crystal and I arrived at my mother’s with just one bag packed; she had her school uniform and I had a dress and shoes to wear to work the next day. I didn’t even bother to bring my curlers and a scarf. At that point in time, the last thing that was on my mind was caring about how my hair looked.
But OMG!
Before Crystal and I escaped from the monster’s house, I had gone into the bedroom that I hadn’t shared with William for nearly six months. I looked over at him. Then I did a double- take to be sure that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.
YES!
I saw him sitting on the edge of the bed. He looked like he was in a trance.
He didn’t even hear me enter the room, and if he did, he didn’t bother to look at me.
There was a white towel partially covering his left hand.
I looked closer. I saw to the black barrel of the .38 gun we owned. It was under the towel.
My mind froze on the image of the gun in William’s hand.
What was he doing with the gun?
Was he going to kill himself?
How about me and our daughter?
Has he lost his mind?
OMG!!
I hurried and got the shoes and left without a word.
OMG!!!
Darkness was everywhere.
It was in my head.
It was in the bedroom that I didn’t share with my husband.
It was in the moment of mania that seemed to come out of nowhere.
It was in all the nights William had disappeared for hours.
It was in my past. It was smeared all over everything like wallpaper.
But— Praise the Lord for the darkness!
What I didn’t know at the time of my beat down was that William had already killed with the gun he held underneath a white towel. I would only be able to put the pieces together more than a decade and a half later— during his trial. I guess he knew that if the police came, they might take the gun and know, from ballistics, that it had been used in a recent murder.
What would he have done if the police came?
Was he going to be Jesse James and take them out?
Did he think about killing himself?
OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!!!!!
The next day, Crystal and I returned to the only home we thought belonged to us as well as to the Monster who claimed total and unmitigated sovereignty. But it was difficult for me to feel like I was free of the nightmare I had been in less than twenty-four hours earlier. I hadn’t thought about anything except what I was going to do to get me and my daughter away from William, the monster, permanently. There was no doubt in my mind about what was best for us.
I sent Crystal upstairs to do her homework. I went into the kitchen, the recent scene of my abuse, and I started to prepare dinner. I had a new frame of mind—I wasn’t going to be a rag doll ever, ever again.
Later that night—
“Honeyboo,” William called to me softly.
I looked up enough to see my husband from the chest down. The night before, the night that an untamed violence had sat down next to me, was over. But even the thought of looking at him face to face made me scared. I wasn’t scared because he had dragged the shit out of me, or even that it could happen again. But I was scared because for the first time in my life, I actually thought about how I WOULD KILL WILLIAM if he came at me again like some kind of maniac.
“I’m sorry Honeyboo.” He paused. “I’m so sorry.”
OMG.
Then I looked up to see William’s eyes. Damn! They were just as sad as they were when he went to his grandmother’s funeral. I couldn’t speak because I didn’t know what to say. All I knew is that if he had changed on me again, it was going to be ugly for the both of us. I had already thought about how I would cook grits that I could scald him with if he turned on me or Crystal before I could get us to safety.
I boiled the water repeatedly in my head. 10,000°.
I put in a nice chunk of real butter and some salt.
Maybe I would throw in some bacon grease; it would be good for seasoning.
I thought about how long it would take the water to boil and I imagined that it would coincide with a shift in my husband’s personality, or a sign that he might turn on me or Crystal.
At that time, I wasn’t thinking about revenge or anything like that. I was thinking about me and my daughter’s survival. That’s all!
One morning, about a week after William had scared the lights out of me, I awoke to him staring me in my face. He had come silently into the room where Crystal and I were sleeping.
“I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, Honeyboo,” he professed.
This was the second time I heard those words so clearly. The first time he had promised that he would do better. I believed him and Crystal and I moved back with William to be a family again. This was after our first separation.
OMG!!! How could I have believed that man?
He loves or he loves me not— IT DIDN’T MATTER; IT WAS MUCH, MUCH TOO LATE.
Less than a week after Mr. Hyde had broke loose on me, I called the same realtor in Piedmont that I had contacted a few months earlier. This was when I was convinced that I should leave William for good. The house had gone on the market and was up for a few days before William managed to convince me that he was going to change— again.
He didn’t!
He got worse.
He kept going out at night with a gun in his coat pocket. And he refused to tell me where he was going. A couple of those nights, I loaded up Crystal in the car and we went out looking for William. We drove all over the neighborhood. I went downtown Oakland and to Jack London Square. We went to the nice places. But all we had to do was go where the prostitutes were. What did we know? But I never thought to drive down San Pablo where he had been arrested with a loaded gun in the car.
The house sold in 2 ½ days at two thousand dollars less than the asking price; we still make a sixty-thousand dollar profit and that was good in 1988. A young white couple purchased the house. I wished them well, but in my heart, I felt that the house was cursed. I wouldn’t miss the cold spaciousness of the house with the “Amityville Horror” window in the attic.
32
Self-Doubt- the Other Monster in My Life
I STRUGGLED WITH MY OWN IDENTITY WHEN I WAS WITH WILLIAM.
It has taken me years and years to figure out that I could never accurately discover who I was, nor could I maintain a single identity with William because he was too busy trying to make me something I was not— a wife and a resident slave and sometimes his acting prostitute. But I had no clue at the time what he was doing or trying to do with me. He would buy these boots for me that came up to my thighs.
OMG! I have a moment every time I think about this.
“Who are these for?” I asked.
“YOU! Put them on for me.” William would ask politely.
I went along with his request.
He would stand back and look at me as if I were a beautiful Christmas tree.
The next time, I got diamond earrings. For my birthday, he purchased a Gucci purse and a matching watch. These weren’t things that I had asked for, nor were they things that I fancied. He got excited when women could get acrylic nails. He made my appointments every two weeks and was excited to see the long artificial nails painted redder than blood. And he loved to take me to the beauty parlor. When I dyed my hair cooperish-blond, he thought the color was perfect for me.
Then, on one shopping trip, William purchased a lavender puff coat for me. It’s still in my mind. I didn’t know what to make of it. It was not my style and I believe that I only wore it once to satisfy William. What I know now is that these were the coats prostitutes wore to keep warm while they were trying to pick up Johns/tricks all times of the wintry nights.
When William took a fancy to weight lifting, I felt like I needed to lose weight. He begged me to keep the weight on because he thought it was sexy. He once told me he didn’t like skinny girls.
“Why?” I asked.
“BECAUSE THEY LOOK LIKE THEY WOULD STINK IF THEY TOOK THEIR CLOTHES.”
I thought that was the craziest thing I ever heard. But no matter what I did, it seemed that what I really wanted was to look any way except the way William desired. There was also a time when I didn’t even want to look feminine. I wanted to wear men’s blazers, jeans and crispy white shirts on the weekends. When that phase faded, I would go back to being as feminine as I could, but I would keep my hair cut really short. When William would express that he loved my short hair, I would let it grow out again. I went back and forth this way for years. My mother couldn’t understand it and I couldn’t explain, at the time, what I was doing because I simply didn’t know. I think my goal was to try not to appeal to the part of William that was stirred by the way I looked. I didn’t want any sexual attention from him at all.
But over the years, William would gently push me to join him in his sick little sexual world, although I can’t be sure whether he thought he was doing anything wrong in the beginning of our relationship.
‘WEAR A BLINDFOLD FOR ME?’
‘Not!!!’
And when he saw that I wasn’t going to get with the sick sexual program he proposed, I speculate that this must have been the time when he began really frequenting prostitutes, who, for money, would grant his every sexual wish.
I must be nothing to him! I thought that when William asked me if I would agree to participate in a wife-swapping party.
“WHAT?!”
“YOU KNOW!” He said it again.
“YOU WANT ME TO HAVE SEX WITH ANOTHER MAN?” I must have closed my eyes to wash the image of my husband out of my head. I heard what I heard, but I didn’t want to believe it.
“Don’t be so close-minded,” he chided.
“F**K NO, I AIN’T DOING THAT!” I tried to catch the ugly words before they came out of my mouth. I couldn’t. “Don’t ask me any shit like that again.”
But he continued to ask me for oral sex even though I think he knew what my response would be. And when he showed me a pair of handcuffs, much like the ones I was asked by the prosecution to identify during William’s trial, I thought he had lost his damned mind. It became clear to me, too late, that I was losing my mental footing the whole time I was in a relationship with William. There were so many odd occurrences that I tried to put behind me, and I never knew that this hiding of things was taking root somewhere deep down in me. I didn’t know that I was slowly beginning to hate my life and myself.
And then…
Whatever was working its evil into William’s life started spilling over on me.
On one of the rare nights when William was in a good mood, he asked me to go with him to The Dock of the Bay. It was a very popular jazz club situated in the Berkeley Marina. It sounded like a good idea, but I was reluctant to invest in the thought that the outing would somehow set our lives back on a good trail because things between us were so strained. William had recoiled into a life of silence, secrecy and weirdness. Then, after much thought, I tried to welcome a new reality— if only for one night.
He cleaned up and looked like the old William I believed I loved at some time in our relationship. I wondered where he had gotten the energy to flip himself from looking like a pauper to looking like a real prince. It was a striking contrast that made me scratch my head for a minute. Don’t dwell on it. Just go with it, I told myself.
Before we got out of the car to walk up to the club, William held a tiny brown bottle up to my eyes.
“What’s this?” I asked.
He was smiling. “JUST TAKE A SNIFF.”
“BOY…WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH—”
“Honeyboo,” William cut me off and started right in on using his coaxing voice. “DO THIS FOR ME JUST THIS ONE TIME.”
“HELL NO!”
“Why? I don’t ask for much from you.”
I looked my husband in the eyes to see someone I hadn’t seen in a long time. He was smiling. His face was cleanly shaven and he was dressed too clean to be the mangy man I had been living with the last few months.
“ARE YOU DEALING DRUGS AGAIN?” I wouldn’t let him answer… “You promised!”
“Hell no…Honeyboo, no…this was something left over.”
Something possessed me. Just this one time. What could it hurt? William pulled me close. I did the rest.
“HARDER BOO, and hold it in when you inhale.”
It felt like an elevator had shot to the top of my brain and froze everything in my head. I felt strange and then—
“One more hit,” William said pushing the vile up to my nose.
I was spinning from my head to my toes during what seemed like an eternal walk up to the club. “NO!”
Once inside the club, William ordered me a drink, and when I refused, he seemed to get upset even more than when I refused to hit the cocaine again.
“You want a cigarette then?”
“A what?!” I looked at my husband with resentful eyes. What in the hell is this about? Trying to kill me? “I thought you hated it when I tried to smoke? You know it makes me sick.”
He was still smiling. He acted like the night couldn’t have been more beautiful.
“I think you look cute.” His eyes lit up.
I was shocked. “I look cute like what? — A crackhead?”
He laughed. William seemed more relaxed than he had been in months.
I had always believed that my former spouse cared about me even though he did things to betray me and our marriage. But as I sat quietly in my numbness, a tunnel of doubt began to swirl behind my eyes.
How could he truly care about me if he was encouraging me to do something that was potentially addictive?
Who else could he care so much about that he needed to corrupt them?
William never asked me to snort cocaine again— but, I did it by myself for nearly THIRTY DAYS IN A ROW. I found the little vial that I believed to be the last of the stash William said was leftover from his days of dealing. It started out so innocently because my first intention was to pour it down the toilet so there would be no more. He could not get high and he would not be able to ever sell to anyone as he had promised me. We could start our lives like normal, honest people.
OMG!
Something got a hold of me. One sniiiiiiiiiiiiff… I closed my eyes. I hoped that I could prevent my heart from beating really fast like it did the first time I tried cocaine. Then the other nose… sniiiiiiiiiiiiff… The numbness came. I went downstairs to write in my journal. The clean white pages reminded me of a cool sheet of snow. But my hands were numb too. I couldn’t write. I could barely think past the single idea of being free of the unknown, or the things that haunted me and made me crazy-angry. But, I slept well that night.
All day long at work, I thought about the cocaine. I thought about how it would make me feel.
Two sniffs, one right after the other. I fe
lt numb again, but I liked it. I thought about my life feeling a little better for a little while because it seemed like I was elevated above the pain.
After some days, it came to be that I needed that new kind of feeling that the cocaine gave me. It was the feeling of not feeling. I would wait until I tucked my daughter into bed with a nice chunk of a novel we were reading together and then we had prayer. And every night, without fail, William would disappear with his trench coat and his gun. Then, it would just be me and the little bottle of cocaine.
After around the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth day, I started wondering what I was going to do when it was all gone. I had stopped throwing dishes. I had stopped crying without a real good reason. And I didn’t care that my husband was watching pornography that was both obscene and dramatically violent against women.
OMG!!!
When the cocaine was almost gone, nearly a month had passed. Every day, I held the little spoon up to my nostrils like a dope fiend in training. I would tell myself that I wasn’t high…that I was just above the drama of my own life and that this was where I needed to be if I was to survive in the times where I thought I would lose my mind.
On the last day that I got high, I remembered thinking that I was going to be hooked if I didn’t stop. This is how it happens—this is how people lose everything they work for- this is how good people turn into monsters that rob and steal and sell their bodies for the next…
I realized that the cocaine had become an integral part of my liberated persona; one that I could only live during the evenings and nights in secrecy. It’s not real. It will never last.
Shake it off.
Shake it off.
Shake it off and move on… Something said to me.
The words kept coming into my head. I thought about my younger brother and sister being on drugs. I hated it so when I had to go and see them in rehab and then a few days after their release, they were back with the drugs again. Drugs owned them.
That can’t be me! I told myself. I had a child who I would die for.
Conquering Darkness Memoir of the Serial Killer's Wife Page 13