Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder

by McEvoy, Colin

  But Denise had trust issues due to the way her ex-husband had treated her, Marilyn said, and she took it out on Ballard. One night, while Ballard was hanging out with Marilyn’s husband, Denise became convinced that Ballard was cheating on her, sleeping around with “little hood-rats,” as she called them. When Ballard returned home that night, Marilyn watched as Denise scratched and punched him in a fit of jealous rage.

  After that fight, Marilyn actually encouraged Ballard to leave Denise, believing she was going to drive him to violate his parole if things continued as they were.

  “I told him Denise was going to get him thrown back in jail,” Marilyn said later. “She would take things out on him because of her first husband. I said to her, ‘You’re taking it out on this poor man.’ Little did I know…”

  Ballard and Denise briefly broke up after that fight, but it wasn’t long before they were back together. Denise continued to have her jealousy spells and erratic mood swings, but Ballard adored her anyway. That December, Ballard hung icicle Christmas lights outside Denise’s house. It was the kind of family tradition that so many people take for granted but that he’d never had growing up, and he loved it.

  Also around that time, while Denise and the children were getting their photos taken with Santa Claus at the mall, Ballard snuck away—Denise didn’t like letting him out of her sight—and went to Kay Jewelers to buy her a diamond necklace as a gift.

  “It felt great,” Ballard later said about that period of his life. “The year before, I had walked out of prison with $177 and nothing but sweatpants. Now I was buying my girl diamonds.”

  Denise and Ballard even had a mock wedding ceremony together. Alone beneath the shade of a tree—a romantic setting that Ballard compared to a similar wedding scene in the film Braveheart—they pledged their love to each other and exchanged rings. Although it was not a legally binding ceremony by any means—Forensic Treatment Services certainly would not have allowed one—Denise still called Ballard her husband, and he considered her to be his wife.

  “It was, ‘Damn the world if they won’t let us, because this is how we feel,’” Ballard later said. “Back then, each one of us was just a half of a whole.”

  But everything about the relationship between Ballard and Denise drastically changed when Ballard was accused of sexually assaulting a minor, Marilyn said.

  The Northampton Police Department investigated the allegations and questioned the juvenile girl, who was known to both Denise and Marilyn. Marilyn said they tested the bedsheets where the assault had allegedly taken place. For a time, the trust both Denise and Marilyn felt toward Ballard was shattered, and neither would let him anywhere near their children.

  However, according to Northampton Police Chief Ronald Morey, the alleged victim was unable to specifically articulate exactly what had happened to her. The tests on the sheets turned up nothing, according to Marilyn, who began to have her own doubts as to Ballard’s guilt.

  Ultimately, the police found there wasn’t enough evidence to press charges against Ballard, and soon both Denise and Marilyn felt comfortable being around him again.

  But by April 2008, Michael Ballard was back in prison on a parole violation. The official reason given was that Ballard had failed to attend Forensic Treatment Services’ required anger management classes and was “not amenable to treatment.” But according to Ballard, he had only missed two appointments in the past thirteen months.

  Ballard, Denise, and Marilyn each vehemently believed the sexual assault allegations were the real reason for his re-imprisonment, as well as the fact that Ballard had continued dating Denise behind the counselors’ backs.

  It was a very difficult time for Ballard. He felt he had attained everything he wanted—stability, a family, a normal life—only to have it taken away and be back in prison on charges he insisted were false.

  In September 2008, just a few months after he was incarcerated again, Ballard was discovered in his cell with a bedsheet tied around his neck. He received medical attention and his life was saved, and Ballard later insisted he had not been trying to attempt suicide.

  As difficult as it was, Ballard and Denise at first remained devoted to each other, despite his return to prison. The first day Ballard was back in jail, and Denise was left at home without him, she collapsed to the ground and cried out so loudly that Trystan heard her from upstairs and ran down to check on her. The two embraced each other as Denise cried hysterically. She later told Ballard that, at that moment, she felt she didn’t want to go on living if he wasn’t there with her.

  Ballard was forbidden to have any contact with Denise, but they snuck around those restrictions every way they could. Ballard knew that the prison was monitoring his mail, so he would write letters to Marilyn and other friends, and they would in turn pass them on to Denise. Likewise, Ballard would make his allotted phone calls to Marilyn, who then secretly passed the phone over to Denise.

  Denise and the children would make scrapbooks with photos of the three of them and send them to Ballard. He recalled one specific photo Denise sent from a July 4 celebration without him, where the three of them were smiling and holding hands. On the back of that photo, Denise wrote that “one hand was missing” from the photo.

  “You’re still my Superman, my husband,” Denise wrote to him.

  Nevertheless, as time passed, Ballard got the sense that the two were starting to drift apart. He once confided these fears to Marilyn in a letter to her, where he wrote that he feared the relationship was going to fall apart.

  His fears were not without merit. Denise started seeing other people and, eventually, she again became engaged to Brian Miller, the man she had left Ballard for in the first place. She had not been in touch with Brian after their split until December 2009, when he visited the Dominican Republic on a business trip. Knowing Denise spoke Spanish from her time living in Puerto Rico, he sent her a text message with a half joke that she should accompany him as his translator. In later court testimony, he admitted to still harboring some romantic feelings for her.

  Denise did not go on the trip with Brian, but they met up two days after he returned. They rekindled their relationship, he moved back into her house, and they made plans to marry in August 2010.

  Nevertheless, Denise continued writing letters to Ballard for weeks as if nothing had changed, never mentioning Brian and insisting she still only loved Ballard.

  Then, in December 2009, after about a year and a half in prison, Ballard was granted parole once again, with a release date scheduled for the subsequent April. With Ballard’s release now fast approaching, Denise realized she could no longer keep her engagement to Brian a secret. Over Marilyn’s objections, she wrote a letter to Ballard telling him all about it.

  The letter came as a complete shock to Ballard, who was livid with feelings of betrayal. In her letter, Ballard felt like she was trying to play off this engagement as if it were something that had just sprung up within the last week, like it surprised her as much as it did him, but he could tell right away that was not the case.

  Incarcerated or not, he still considered Denise his wife, considered her house to be his home. Up to this point, serving this latest stretch of prison time hadn’t felt difficult to Ballard because he felt his family was waiting for him when he got out. He would spend his time imagining what he’d be doing if he were back home with Denise: mowing the lawn, taking Trystan out on the four-wheeler, taking the family to the beach.

  Every memory I have that is not prison is that family, Ballard thought at the time. And now? Now I’m just empty.

  Ballard and Denise had previously made arrangements for Denise to pick him up from prison the day of his release. She was going to drive a friend’s car, since he was still not supposed to be seeing Denise at all. But Ballard notified the prison that the car no longer had permission to pick him up. He ended all contact with Denise, refusing to respond to her letters or make any more calls to her.

  Ballard received letters from his f
ather and a cousin telling him that ending the relationship with Denise was the right thing to do. They both insisted that Ballard was asking for nothing but trouble if he stayed with that woman. Denise continued writing to Ballard, desperately trying to continue the communication. When Ballard still refused, she became angry, trying to shame him into writing her back, but he did not relent.

  “If this is how you feel, then your love was just a farce to begin with,” she wrote in one letter.

  Denise learned that now, with nobody to pick him up, Ballard would be dropped off at an Allentown bus stop the day of his release. She knew Ballard didn’t want her there, but she was concerned about him getting off the bus alone and considered going anyway. Marilyn encouraged her to do it, believing that Denise would hate herself if she didn’t, and hoping that it would give her closure and allow her to move on from Ballard once and for all.

  When the day arrived, Marilyn and Denise’s friend Nicole drove Denise to the bus stop. As the bus approached, Denise stepped outside while her friends waited inside the van. Ballard descended from the bus stairs, and as soon as he saw Denise he turned and walked away from her. It was clear from the look on his face, Marilyn said, that he didn’t want anything to do with Denise.

  Marilyn waited and watched as Denise spoke to a silent and brooding Ballard for a full forty-five minutes before he finally agreed to get in the van so they could take him to the Allentown Community Corrections Center, the halfway house where he would be staying.

  Within a day of Ballard’s release, Denise had once again broken off her engagement with Brian to return to Ballard.

  “I don’t think I ever really decided to let her go,” Ballard later said.

  He was still forbidden from seeing Denise by Forensic Treatment Services, but they continued their relationship in secret. Few knew that they were back together, according to Marilyn, not even Denise’s own children.

  Ballard wanted to adopt Denise’s kids, move with her to Arkansas, have a baby of their own, and live as a family, and Marilyn knew his feelings were sincere. Denise even shared fleeting thoughts with Marilyn of leaving her children behind and running off with Ballard, though Marilyn knew it was something Denise would never really do.

  It was all just part of Denise’s obsessive personality, Marilyn claimed, which stemmed from her bipolar disorder. When Denise did something, she threw her whole self into it, and she truly believed Ballard was the one true love of her life.

  But once again, the relationship would not last. Marilyn wasn’t sure exactly what went wrong this time, but she suspected it was a combination of things.

  It was difficult for Ballard and Denise to hide their relationship from both their loved ones and the law. Ballard could only sign out of the halfway house for two hours a day, so they had a very limited amount of time together before having to separate again, and they both hated that arrangement.

  There were also the sexual assault allegations, which still made Denise a bit uncomfortable. Denise insisted she believed Ballard was innocent, but some of her friends and family members did not, and the accusation loomed like a cloud during all the time they spent together.

  And for his part, Ballard never truly got over his jealousy over Denise getting engaged while he was back in prison. His trust in Denise had been permanently shaken, and they were fighting more often. He found himself becoming more suspicious about what she was doing all the time, and the more he questioned her, the more defensive she became.

  “Everything I was fighting for, everything I had loved and was falling in love with, it was all a façade,” Ballard later said. “It was all bullshit. It was gone.”

  All these factors kept building up until Denise could no longer take it. She not only left Ballard, Marilyn said, but entered into a phase where she had multiple flings with various men, none of which was particularly meaningful or long lasting.

  “She kind of went crazy and she had sex with a lot of people,” Marilyn said. “It was a little too much for me. She had this thing where she went very promiscuous and I was like, ‘Okay then…’”

  Ballard later claimed that Denise confessed multiple infidelities to him. He was convinced that Denise was going out to clubs or having sex with strangers every night. Denise barely even drank when they’d first started dating. Now, Ballard believed, she was out drinking and smoking pot on an almost-nightly basis.

  They fought all the time now about Denise’s alleged cheating. During one of those fights, Ballard spit in Denise’s face and walked away from her.

  That brought them to June 25, 2010—the day before the murders. As Marilyn explained to Trooper Judge, Ballard had called Marilyn’s cell phone that day to talk about Denise. He had considered Marilyn a friend and often confided in her, so the phone call itself didn’t strike her as unusual.

  Marilyn was home when she received a call from the Allentown Community Corrections Center. She didn’t think she was up to speaking to Ballard at that moment, so she ignored the call. But then he called a second time. And a third. By then, Marilyn figured it might be important, so she answered.

  Ballard tried to engage Marilyn in small talk at first, asking how she was doing and how the kids were. But it was painfully obvious that he had called to talk about Denise, and he quickly dropped the charade.

  She had stopped taking his calls, Ballard explained. He had called her repeatedly but she wouldn’t answer. Marilyn and Denise were actually fighting at the time so they weren’t speaking much, but Marilyn knew that Denise had taken Annikah down to the New Jersey shore to celebrate her daughter’s birthday.

  “Why isn’t she answering the phone?” Ballard asked.

  “Michael, I don’t know,” Marilyn said “I don’t know why she’s not answering the phone.”

  Ballard said he felt betrayed, as if Denise had broken the trust he thought they shared together. He had stopped wearing the ring she gave him.

  Marilyn was startled by Ballard’s tone. He was very quiet, very solemn, and obviously very distraught. To Marilyn, he sounded nothing like the Michael Ballard she knew.

  Ballard started referring to pictures of Denise he’d seen on her Facebook profile, which he’d viewed on the computer at the halfway house, Marilyn said. He was particularly angry about comments other men had made about Denise on those photos. The more he talked about it, the angrier his voice sounded.

  “How could she do this to me? I thought we were meant to be together forever,” Ballard said. “She broke my heart. I don’t know how I can get over this and I can’t live without her.”

  “You need to walk away,” Marilyn said. “This is it. You need to go. She’s not for you. You need to find somebody else for you.”

  Ballard mentioned a photo he had seen of Denise at a Philadelphia Phillies game from earlier in June, about three weeks before. Marilyn knew the one he was talking about. Denise had gone to the game with Peter Hoff, a forty-five-year-old man from Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, whom she had previously met on the dating website PlentyOfFish.com. While they had dated in the past, the thirty-mile distance made their relationship difficult so they called it off. Still, they got together for the occasional date now and then.

  Marilyn thought Peter was a very nice man who, she observed, looked exactly like Ballard.

  “I see she had a good time at the Phillies game with her mom,” Ballard said.

  “She didn’t go with her mom,” Marilyn replied instinctively.

  She immediately realized her mistake. Ballard demanded to know who Denise had gone to the game with, listing off the names of men that he knew she had known. Marilyn felt terrible, as if she had given away a secret.

  But she later realized that Ballard knew exactly what he had been doing. He had tricked her. Ballard knew Denise had gone to the game with a man, and he was fishing for more information.

  Going through his list of names, Ballard finally mentioned Peter Hoff. Marilyn started to say something, then stopped herself, but again it was too late.

&nb
sp; “That’s him, right?” Ballard asked.

  With a sigh, Marilyn decided to be honest.

  “Yes, Michael, that’s right,” she said. “But you need to talk about this with Denise.”

  “Oh my God,” Ballard said, sounding even more distressed than before.

  “I’m sorry,” Marilyn said. “I didn’t know that you didn’t know.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Mar. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  She tried to insist that this was something he had to talk over with Denise, not her, but Ballard just kept repeating himself.

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

  Then, abruptly, Ballard asked if he and Marilyn could get together the next morning for coffee. They had done that kind of thing before, so she normally wouldn’t think anything of it, but this time it felt different and she was hesitant.

  “Please, Mar,” he said.

  “Okay, Michael,” she said, deciding that Ballard just needed to vent a little bit more. “I’m not doing anything tomorrow. I can meet you for coffee.”

  They made plans for Marilyn to pick Ballard up at the halfway house around eleven o’clock the next morning. But when the next day came, Marilyn still didn’t feel very comfortable about the meeting, and one of her friends urged her not to go. He insisted she would only get depressed and that they should do something else instead.

  Marilyn decided her friend was right and she would not go. Ballard called Marilyn five times that day, but she missed most of the calls because her daughter had her phone. He finally did reach her, briefly, but Marilyn told him she would not be able to meet for coffee after all.

  “Would you come see me after I’m done with what I’m doing?” he asked. Marilyn didn’t know exactly what Ballard meant by that, but Ballard was very persistent, and she finally said that she would.