Whitney & Bobbi Kristina

by Ian Halperin

  “We were in the same class together a couple of times,” she recalls. “It’s a basic intro class. One time after the class we came here and started to chat. About two minutes into the conversation, she answered her cell. She told me she had to leave because her boyfriend needed her at home. She looked fine and happy until she got that call. After that she looked worried, her whole mind-set changed. It was strange.”

  The Starbucks staff told us both Nick and Bobbi were “regulars.” None of them had ever witnessed anything out of the ordinary. A twenty-something black customer, Trevor, overheard the conversation. He said he saw them there frequently.

  “They were always high on something,” he recalled. “I saw them in here a few days before the accident and they looked like they were on heroin, they both looked thin and frail. I was afraid Bobbi would end up like her mother, that’s the thought that went through my mind.”

  Another customer, Steve Toney, jumps in and informs us that he had seen them a few weeks earlier and witnessed what he described as a “verbal war” in the parking lot.

  “They came in, got their coffee, and on the way to their car started yelling and screaming at each other. It was ugly. Bobbi yelled at the top of her lungs at Nick, and then Nick yelled back at her with very abusive language. They both got in the car and slammed their doors before driving off.”

  Our last stop is Hooligans bar, also located in the mall. The manager tells us he saw them frequently. “They’d have the munchies at night and come in here,” he says. “But it was usually for take-out.”

  Outside, we run into a twenty-one-year-old girl named Ella who claims she knew Bobbi for years. She last saw her about a week before the incident.

  “Sad to say when I heard about it I wasn’t surprised,” Ella said. “The crowd she hung out with was out of control. Krissi used to hang out with a good crowd. The past couple years she hung out with a bunch of crazies, they were very wild and reckless. I used to meet her at parties; we had mutual friends. She was nice a few years ago. When I saw her before her accident she looked like she was on something. She looked like she got much thinner, looked like she was into heavy drugs. I felt sad because I don’t think Nick had her best interests at heart. Face it, if she didn’t have all that money from her mom I betcha Nick would have had nothing to do with her. He’s an opportunist, and he tried to manipulate Krissi. A girlfriend of mine hung out at their house with them a few times and said Nick would interrupt Krissi during conversations and twist it his way. He tried to not let her have her own voice. I hope and pray she gets better. And if she does I hope her family takes her far away from Nick and that gang.”

  So far, we haven’t learned much that we don’t already know, but Sheila has tracked down what she thinks is a significant lead. Nobody had been able to locate Max Lomas since the accident. But she located an address in her database, and it was only a few minutes away. We decide to head there and try our luck before the jeweler.

  When we arrive at the location, it turns out to be a gated community even more luxurious than the one where Bobbi lives. “That can’t be right,” she says. “There’s no way he could afford that.” Parked across the street, it’s like a TV stakeout, except we don’t know what we’re looking for, and there’s little chance we’ll have any better luck getting through these gates than the first ones that morning.

  As we wait, we notice the complex has two gates, one marked for visitors and one for residents. We notice a black SUV pull up at the visitor gate. Twenty minutes later, it is still there; the driver is speaking to a female security guard.

  I told Sheila I had an idea. “Drive up to the resident gate while the guard is distracted,” I suggested. She did. The guard turned away from the SUV and peered in our vehicle. Sheila flashed her badge. The guard smiled and said, “Good to see you,” as if she recognized Sheila, then raised the gate and let us in. It took us a while to find the address and we could see the guard looking at us suspiciously as we made a U-turn. Finally, we found the place: a huge detached house, almost a mansion.

  An elderly woman answered the door. When Sheila flashes her badge, asks to see Max, and tells her why we’re there, she stammers and looks around as if wondering how we got through while searching for security to toss us out. “He’s not talking to anybody,” she informs us. At that moment, I can see a tall fellow standing around the corner of the vestibule. Before I can shout out, she slams the door in our faces.

  “That’s where he’s hiding out,” Sheila concludes, guessing the woman is his grandmother.

  We then headed for the Kay Jewelers at the North Point Mall where the fitness center VP told us Nick had bought the engagement ring when she worked there last year. When we got there, we spoke to an employee behind the counter, Kau Hawkers, who remembered Bobbi coming in with Nick in January, not long before the incident.

  “He had put the ring in for repair in January,” she recalled. “The center stone was falling out. They brought it in together actually in January. She was in the store as well. And then last month [February] he came to pick it up. He was nice. He was always nice.”

  Then the store manager approached and introduced herself as Alisha Williams. Sheila flashed her badge and told her why we were there. She said she remembered when the couple came in earlier in the winter.

  “I spoke to them a couple of times and the last time they brought their ring in,” she recalled. “Actually he just came in and picked it up a couple of weeks ago because it was in here when she went to the hospital. It was in two pieces like the stone was actually out. It’s weird how that happened. The last two times before that they were both in here together.”

  Sheila asked how they seemed.

  “They seemed a little all over the place,” she recalled. “Kind of like they were on something. She was talkative, but they were kind of moving fast. They had a younger guy with them who they said was like their bodyguard. It was the guy we seen on TV after she was found, the young guy with the blond hair.”

  “Was it Max?”

  “Yeah, I think so. They were like, ‘This is our bodyguard.’ They were all over the place. Real fast talking. They were bubbly, probably on something. She looked real frail every time I seen her. The last time they both had sunglasses on and didn’t take them off the whole time. I remember because they had a Sunglass Hut bag and had probably just bought the glasses. There’s one here in the mall, up the elevators.”

  I wondered who paid for it, but she told me the ring was under warranty and it was under [Nick’s name]. “He always filled out the ticket,” she remembered. “That’s why he was able to pick it up without her.”

  Sheila asked about the heart-shaped charm necklace that the fitness woman told us about. “We can look up Nick Gordon’s name and see if he bought something,” she offered.

  A few minutes later, she came back and informed us of a discovery. “Actually, we still have a ring that he bought that’s in our repair room that has ‘Nick Gordon’ on there. It’s like sterling silver, kind of a guy’s ring with a diamond in it. He never picked it up. He probably forgot about it.”

  She assumed that it was his engagement ring “because that’s what we usually use them for.”

  “The first time I ever met him he came in by himself,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Oh, my wife is going to kill me if she knew I lost the ring. I think he was looking for this ring, he just probably didn’t know where it was and he didn’t realize we had it here and I guess we didn’t realize it either. Other than that, the very next time he came in he came in with her.

  “It was under Nick’s name, the claim slip. It was always under his name. He always paid cash. When he bought it he paid cash. He carried lots of cash. The designer of the ring was Neil Lane. The last time he was in here was a couple weeks ago when he picked up the ring. He was in here with his mother. They came in to pick up the ring.

  “She acted just like her mom. You know how you see on TV. Happy, bubbly, all over the place, and then watching her
on her reality show. She looked like her dad but acted just like her mom. It was eerie, weird to see her like that. And this was after she died but I said, ‘I just met Whitney Houston, but it was Bobbi Kristina.’ I just treated her regular; I never let her know that I knew who she was. He never had any attitude. He was nice.”

  We were more interested in Nick’s most recent visit when he came to pick up the ring. She looked up the details for us.

  “We received it in the store on December 13, 2014,” she said. “He picked it up February something, I can’t make it out. Here, it says we called on January 6 to tell them to come get it but he only picked it up after she was in the hospital.”

  She sent an assistant to retrieve the pickup slip from the February box. While we waited, Alisha told us that she always wanted to be a private investigator and asked Sheila questions about her job. Sheila told her it’s not as glamorous as it’s made out to be on TV. The manager said she is always able to figure out who did it in the movies before they reveal the killer.

  “Let me keep your card,” she said. “One day I might want to make a career change.” Then, as if to show us that she would make a good gumshoe, she offered her opinions on the case.

  “What I think happened, and this is what I tell my husband: They probably got into a fight before and I think she probably tried to commit suicide. It seemed like he left, they had a fight right before he left with his friends and she said, ‘I’m done. I’m tired.’ The anniversary was coming up so she was probably depressed. And then he just happened to come in and all the things happened so it kind of seemed like he had something to do with it. He wouldn’t benefit in trying to kill her. They weren’t married. He was benefiting more from her being alive because he could spend her money that way. Now he doesn’t have anything so why would he try to kill her? She could have been on drugs and had a lapse or something. But I don’t think he intentionally killed her. He was living the life, spending, shopping sprees, now he’s out in the cold.”

  She noted that Nick always paid with cash, including the nearly $9,000 he paid for Bobbi’s engagement ring. “And you know whose money that was. So why would he kill her?”

  She told us a store clerk named Claire Graham served them the first time they came in. And she also served Nick the last time he came in to pick up his ring when he was there with his mom. It was Graham’s day off, but Alisha offered to call her at home and let us talk to her. When we reached Graham, she confirmed that Nick came in with his mother a couple weeks earlier to pick up the ring.

  “I thought it was strange that he picked up the ring so soon after the accident,” recalled Graham. “He said he wanted her to have it when she wakes up. He was with his mom. He didn’t really look distraught or anything out of the ordinary. When I saw [Bobbi and Nick] together previously, they always looked like they were on something. He was always loving and affectionate with her. She was affectionate back. My true feeling was that they were in love.”

  Although it didn’t seem significant at the time, Graham’s revelation that Nick was with his mom when he picked up the ring would come back to me after I watched the Dr. Phil episode a couple of days later.

  The way the show presented it, they had flown in Michelle Gordon from Orlando unbeknownst to Nick for a surprise intervention. When he saw her and threw his arms around her, the producers implied that they hadn’t seen each other in a very long time. Michelle herself repeatedly talked only about her phone conversations with her son since the incident. Never once did she mention she had actually seen him since Bobbi was hospitalized, though she did tell Dr. Phil at one point, “I have Krissi’s engagement ring. He wants me to hold it,” without furnishing any explanation.

  Now the revelation that she was with him in Atlanta a few days before the show was taped—and that he didn’t seem at all distraught—makes me wonder whether the entire broadcast was simply an elaborate PR stunt designed to drum up sympathy for him. To be fair, nobody actually lied, but I felt misled and wondered what else we weren’t being told.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  As the wedding approached, the media couldn’t seem to decide what to make of the unlikely pairing. Aside from the note of skepticism sounded by countless publications because of Whitney’s long-rumored lesbianism, other media suggested that wasn’t the image she sought to clean up. Rather, it was her credibility in the black community that needed burnishing.

  “Whitney’s gone through a real rough spot with her black base,” the president of MCA’s ‘Black Division’ told Vanity Fair. “She wants to ‘cross-black.’ Being married to Bobby Brown might help her with that.” For his part, Brown assured the black press, “Whitney is a real Black woman.”

  The bride-to-be did a round of press interviews seemingly designed to convince the skeptical public and press that their love was genuine. Many wondered why she had never before showed any interest in a serious romantic relationship.

  “I just never wanted to be married,” she told one reporter. “I had an independence that didn’t include marriage. I always thought men were full of shit. I did. For the most part, they used to talk shit to me all the time. They always had a rap. And I had two brothers, so they all told me what the deal was. They would tell me about the girls they did and they used to say, ‘Do you want to be a whore?’ ‘Do you want to be a slut?’ ‘Do you want to be treated like shit?’ They made me feel guilty for being a girl.”

  Whitney was worth considerably more than her husband-to-be at the time of the engagement. Jeffery Bowman pegs her net worth in 1992 as more than $30 million, while Brown was worth around $5 million. And despite the boundless skepticism about the marriage, the couple assured anybody who would listen that their love was so sincere that they weren’t going to sign the prenuptial agreement that most celebrities enter into to protect their assets in case of divorce.

  “If I can’t trust my own husband, then who can I trust?” Bowman quotes a friend of Whitney’s. But Bobby later let the cat out of the bag, revealing to Jet in August 1992 that they had indeed signed a prenup.

  “If anything ever happens in this relationship, we both want to be protected,” he explained. But he was certain they wouldn’t need it. “I’m going to be with this woman for the rest of my life.” According to her biographer Mark Bego, the agreement was signed “at the insistence of Whitney’s lawyer and her family.”

  According to Whitney’s former bodyguard Kevin Ammons, who at the time was dating her publicist Regina Brown, Robyn had not come to terms with her friend’s new liaison. “If Whitney goes through with the marriage,” she allegedly told Ammons along with Brown and her father, “I’ll hold a press conference and tell everyone I’m Whitney’s lover, that we’ve been lovers for years, then I’ll kill myself.”

  Nevertheless, despite any supposed lingering resentment, Robyn was front and center as maid of honor when the reported wedding took place at Whitney’s New Jersey estate on July 18, 1992, attended by eight hundred family members and celebrity friends, including Aretha Franklin, Dick Clark, and Donald Trump.

  Unconfirmed reports circulated that Brown burst into tears during the ceremony and kept interrupting the reverend with shouts of “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross provided the entertainment at the lavish $1 million reception after the bride and groom tied the knot both dressed in white. Whitney’s gown was said to have cost $50,000. As the minister pronounced them husband and wife, seven doves were released overhead in a ceremony Jet likened to the first wedding of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. In lieu of gifts, guests were asked to donate to Whitney’s foundation, which raised more than $250,000 that day.

  At the conclusion of the ceremony, Robyn left the estate in a black Porsche given to her that day by Whitney as a token of their friendship. Ammons claims the gift was “to ensure she would be in a good mood and not cause a scene or embarass her at the wedding.” The bride and groom jetted off to a European honeymoon given to them as a wedding present by Clive Da
vis, which included a week aboard a $10,000-a-day yacht cruising the French Riviera.

  After photos of the honeymoon were leaked, Robyn suspected Whitney’s publicist Regina Brown was the source and let her suspicions be known to Whitney, who refused to believe her longtime employee would betray her like that. Years later, Ammons claimed that Brown had indeed been the source of the leaked photos, and had sold a tabloid the location of the honeymoon. Not long afterward, Brown was fired from Nippy Inc.

  Meanwhile, whatever the skeptics believed about the new union, the honeymoon appeared to be a romantic one, because it wasn’t long after they returned to New York that the couple revealed that Whitney was once again pregnant, though the dates would later suggest that she was already with child at the time of the wedding.

  Although filming of The Bodyguard had concluded before the wedding, Whitney headed into the studio to record the music that would be an integral part of the film. Whitney was no actress. Her previous roles had been confined to a couple of soft drink commercials and small guest spots on the sitcoms Gimme a Break and Silver Spoons. From the outset, the studio worried about her lack of acting experience and had brought in a coach to provide instruction. But it was Whitney’s musical abilities that they knew would make the film, and the screenplay had been altered to let her character deliver several musical numbers onscreen.

  As the film’s co-producer, Clive Davis was once again heavily involved in the musical selections, which he hoped would help reignite Whitney’s career as a singer at the same time as it transformed her into a full-fledged movie star.

  But when he heard that Costner had chosen as the film’s closing number the Dolly Parton song “I Will Always Love You,” his reaction was less than enthusiastic. Seven years earlier, Davis had almost vetoed the choice of “Greatest Love of All,” which would end up being one of the most successful songs of Whitney’s career. Now he questioned the choice of a country ballad that had already been used once before in the soundtrack of Parton’s film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. If Whitney was going to reestablish her credibility in the black community, was a white-bread country tune really the way to achieve that goal?