Deadly Vows
Page 16
Ever the faithful and obedient spouse, Sean’s first wife withdrew more and more from the public face of the marriage while Sean doted on the younger Joy. So it had struck me as odd weeks earlier when Sean had told me he was going to have to “get rid” of Joy.
“Why?” I had asked at the time. “What’s wrong?”
“She’s lazy, Leif,” he had said. Sean always made a point to use your name when he was talking to you, an old psychological trick, he had told me, that makes the listener feel indebted to the speaker, increasing their openness to whatever the speaker is saying. “She leaves dishes in the sink, she won’t help around the house, she’s not a good mother, and I think she might have hit (our youngest son).”
All of this was news to me. By all indications, Joy was a doting mother who loved her children more than anything else. She had told me numerous times how happy she was that her mother, Gwen, had gotten to see her first son shortly before Gwen had passed away unexpectedly the next day.
“I’m so happy God let her see [my first son],” Joy had said to me. “I miss her, but I know that she was happy when she died.”
That feeling of Joy’s great love for her sons clashed with Sean’s description of her poor mothering but I figured Sean was in a much better position than me to observe her parenting. Maybe Joy had been a negligent mother who hid her apathy toward her children under a façade of lies, I thought, as I listened to Sean talk about how she just wasn’t working out as a wife and mother.
Now that Joy had gone, the question in my mind remained unasked as Sean told me a divorce was likely imminent: how would Joy leaving affect Sean’s standing in Patriarchal Christianity? One of the movement’s key tenets was that monogamy led to divorce, which the patriarchals called “serial monogamy.” Sean, a well-respected member of the movement who was often sought for advice, would be putting to lie the notion that polygamous marriage was the solution for the divorce epidemic that had swept America over the preceding decades.
Would he be ostracized for having divorced one of his wives? Would the loss of Joy deflate the exalted standing he had enjoyed among the polygamist community? Would he even tell them she was gone? The idea that he might not was a distinct possibility.
But those questions remained in my head. I had rebuilt our fractured friendship by accepting his polygamous lifestyle and the questions seemed too contemptuous to ask politely, especially as he was clearly grieving the departure of his favorite wife.
His first wife, he said, was overwhelmed by caring for all three boys full-time. She missed Joy almost as much as he did. I had seen Sean’s first wife and Joy adjust to the strange marriage slowly. At first, though they all claimed everything was peachy keen, there had been jealousy and tension. One friend told me Sean had even been forced to break up a physical fight between the two women early on, with one choking the other. But as time had passed, they seemed to have ironed out most of the kinks and there were times when it seemed like Sean’s first wife and Joy enjoyed each other’s company more than either enjoyed being around Sean.
“He’s okay,” Joy had said in 2002. “But I have to get onto him when he messes with her.”
Now, however, Sean’s first wife was left alone to mother three children while Joy galavanted around the country with some old flame. And Sean had become stressed and exhausted by trying to play full-time daddy and full-time breadwinner for a family that had lost an integral part of the machinery.
“Wait,” I said. “Joy left without her kids?”
“She’s so irresponsible,” Sean responded. “She only cares about running off with that guy; no one else matters.”
It was difficult to believe but I had no reason to suspect my best friend, with whom I had spent the majority of the preceding fifteen years, of foul play. Hindsight, as they say, has twenty/twenty vision and the story seemed too pat, even though by the time he told it to me, Sean had already adjusted his narrative to account for Joy’s lack of a passport to include Europe “or something” among her possible destinations with the alleged boyfriend.
It turned out that “or something” was a pile of rocks in the Arizona desert just a short trip north of Mexico, where Joy’s body was already disintegrating under the onslaught of the elements as time was ticking on the plan Sean had made to get away with her murder.
Joy’s friends had also started asking Sean what was going on, because Sean was always the guy with the answers; he was in complete control of his family and he certainly would know what was happening with Joy.
Only this time, his answers didn’t seem to make sense. Joy, he said, had never been able to get over Simon Greene, the guy she had messed around with at Morris Cerullo World Evangelism when she was still lying and telling everyone that she and Sean and his first wife were just roommates. Apparently, he had contacted her again, Sean said, and Joy, who was tired of living the domestic life, had run off with Simon, who was now “rich,” to backpack across Europe, something she had always wanted to do.
But she hadn’t mentioned any such thing to her friends and even though Sean had been hinting around for a while that Joy seemed like she might just pack up and leave without warning, none of them had known her to be that kind of woman. They kept asking questions, because it seemed like Sean knew more than he was telling.
And that’s when, five days after she was killed, “Joy” e-mailed one of her friends.
“Hi Sugarsmacks,” the message began. Joy often used nicknames with her friends instead of their real names. It was one of the endearing qualities everyone loved about her. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you the complete details, but I’ve been so rushed and there are a hundred people wanting to know who, what, when, where, etc., and my family is madder than I ever thought they could be and making me feel so guilty about everything. I know you’ll understand, but I just need some time away without any demands, calls or anything.”
That didn’t sound like the Joy her friends knew. She was the kind of woman who told her friends everything, and when she needed advice, she leaned on them to help her out.
“I really can’t talk to [another friend] right now either because I know she’ll be against my decisions, and I really can’t deal with that for a while,” the e-mail continued. But it was strange, too, because her friends would be all for any “decision” Joy made to leave Sean. They thought the arrangement was weird and creepy but they supported Joy, so they didn’t pressure her to leave. If she had left on her own, they certainly weren’t going to give her grief about it. And Joy, who had confided to a friend that she wanted a way out, would have known that. If it really had been Joy sending the message, that is. “I’ve picked up the phone a few times to call you, but I keep putting it back down. Please just give me some time, okay?”
The red flags were flying up all over the place but they were about to get even redder:
“I love you, but I’ve got to get all my emotional baggage in check concerning Sean, my Dad and my boys before I can focus on my friendships,” the e-mail continued. Her friends weren’t buying it. They were the sounding boards she had used already to get any “emotional baggage” about Sean or her dad or her children straightened out. Why would she now cut them off without so much as an explanation? It didn’t make sense. “I’m going to put off school and go to Europe with Simon. Remember, he’s the guy Sean caught me e-mailing a few months back. I kept in touch with him, and when I found out on my dad’s recent visit that he was too much of a pussy to help me get out on my own, Simon made me an offer I’ve been mulling over since to come out here, go to Europe and then decide what I wanted to do with my life.”
Mulling? Joy? It wasn’t a word they were even sure she knew, much less would use. And putting off school to traipse around Europe? Without her kids? One of Joy’s big reasons for wanting to get out of the marriage was to go to school so she could take care of her kids. Now, all of a sudden she was ditching both school and kids so she could run off on a fling? It was making less sense by the minute.
“I never talked to her after she left MCWE,” Simon told me. “I hadn’t talked to her in years.”
But Sean couldn’t get Simon out of his mind, and he seemed a convenient scapegoat. Maybe Joy had been caught e-mailing Simon, but Simon didn’t seem to remember it if it had happened.
The message to her friend was just the beginning of Joy’s postmortem communications.
On October 6, “Joy” e-mailed two more friends. “I’m safe and sound and there’s nothing for you to worry about,” it read. “I have been super busy getting things arranged for my trip to Europe...hopefully you’ll get this e-mail before I leave to England to start my trip...I was bored to death living with this family as a wife and mother and doing the things a mother and wife has to do. I got so sick of it that I could not stand it anymore, and I couldn’t stand the thought of an office job either.”
The office job part was true, at least. Everyone knew Joy hated the mindless work in offices. But being sick of being a mother? Or a wife? Well, Joy had told her friends she was sick of being Sean’s wife, but never that she was sick of being a mother. Her boys were everything to her, and her friends started really wondering what was up when “Joy” started mentioning in the e-mails how her children were tying her down.
“You know it’s not like I left the boys in a crack house,” the message said. “They are going to be fine until I can see them again.”
Really? That didn’t sound like Joy, the doting mother, the woman whose pride and joy were those two boys, who reminded Joy every day that her mother was looking down from heaven, proud of her and the children she was raising.
“I’m sorry I haven’t called,” the e-mail continued. “I have just not been able to deal with hearing everyone’s voices and the emotions that it brings back to me.”
While Joy’s friends were receiving fake e-mails from Joy, Sean was too. He even misspelled words that a writer as gifted as himself would never have misspelled. It was intended to be a magnum opus of deception, but Sean seemed uncharacteristically off his game. As an author who had been paid handsomely to impersonate televangelists in print, Sean was adept at assuming the voice of someone else and writing like them. But the e-mails from Joy didn’t sound like Joy at all. They were dour, choppy and juvenile, all three things unlike Joy.
“Sean, I know you are sad and that the kids are missing me,” “Joy” wrote just a week after Sean killed her. “I have to get out of the house and experience the world around me...I know you’ve heard all this a thousand times and it’s a lot of regamaro (Sean intentionally misspelled rigamarole) to you, but it’s really how I feel.”
That a doting mother could abandon her beloved children so callously for such a flimsy reason strained credulity, but likely, expanding the cover story was never part of Sean’s original plan. He had hoped people would just accept the story of Joy running away, shake their heads and move on with their lives.
But as her friends remained persistent and the police got involved, Sean had to make rapid adjustments to his story—adjustments that didn’t receive the benefit of his usual careful planning process, so they felt rough, rushed and half-baked. The police were asking pointed questions and in response, Sean wrote something bizarre while still posing as Joy. He mentioned an apparent deal that had been made before she “left,” where she would be allowed to call Sean after a year to discuss visitation with the children she had left behind so heartlessly. In the same e-mail, she went out of her way to tell Sean that, of all people, her father, with whom she had only recently been communicating, would probably attempt to talk Sean into trying to track her down, but that he shouldn’t, because she just needed to have some time to herself.
It all sounded to police a lot like someone trying to close holes in a story rather than the happy-go-lucky woman who was planning a big future and who had told friends she would stay in a marriage she no longer wanted to be in because she didn’t want to leave her sons.
And the year-long period for having no contact with him? Seemed kind of convenient.
Sean responded.
“I am so sorry I could not make you happy,” he wrote, again uncharacteristic for Sean. Admitting that it was his fault Joy had wanted to leave? Unthinkable for a man whose own unpublished book had preached the virtue of the godly man who had too much to give for one woman to receive it all. “As long as you want to see [the children], you’ll e-mail me at least every three months and let me know how things are.”
It just seemed like the kind of conversation someone in a children’s book would have, not one between two people who had recently gone through the polygamist equivalent of divorce, and an acrimonious one at that. Every three months? It didn’t make sense. Why not every week to check up on the children? An agreement to check in every three months sounded more like a convenient reason to not have to fabricate more e-mails than a legitimate visitation plan. After three months of expected silence, most people would have moved on with their lives and probably would have lost interest in where Joy had run off to. At least, that’s what Sean was likely hoping.
Sean, an excellent writer, was not putting his best work into this exchange, which may signal that the pressure was starting to get to him. He was frantically looking for ways to cover up what he had done, and his mind was traveling down too many avenues to give his full concentration to any one.
“Joy” replied that she would try to e-mail every three months, but she might not be able to when she was back-packing across Europe—again, more like a convenient excuse for Sean than a legitimate statement from a mother who would have already been missing her two young sons and desiring ways to contact them as quickly and often as possible. Besides, Joy didn’t even have a passport.
In early October, Sean e-mailed “Joy” again, perhaps because police had contacted him and wanted to know what was up with her.
“Hi, Joy,” he wrote. “I sold the bed like you asked. BTW, there’s about $4800 in your saving account including some that you drew from your credit card. Please do something with this money...so you can take care of the bills you have. Also, please write me back because [a friend] even called the police to write a missing person’s report on you and they came in the middle of the night to ask questions. This kind of stuff really has to stop. I’m not trying to be mean, but I’m trying to provide a stable environment for the kids. Please take care of your friends, okay?”
With all his might, Sean was trying to build a case that he was the jilted husband, the forlorn lover whose wife had left him for a past paramour.
“Joy” responded that she had e-mailed her friends and mentioned Sean selling her car later so she could buy a new one “when I get back to the states.” And then, in a chilling touch, Sean signed Joy’s message with a nickname she had used with her children: “Kiss the boys and tell them Dhavi loves them.” Dhavi is a Sanskrit word shortened to mean “daughter of David.” David was a king in the Bible, and the father of Solomon, whose moniker Sean had assumed when he began posting in polygamy forums online. As Solomon’s wife, she would be considered the daughter of David, a title she no longer would have borne if she had been divorced, as Sean was telling people.
After that e-mail exchange didn’t produce the desired results of turning down the heat from Joy’s friends, Sean began to plead with Joy in the messages: “Come home for a little while. I know [a friend] will let you stay with her. I’m trying to work and pay the bills, but it’s so hard. Please do something for us. You don’t have to be here for me. Just for them.”
But the e-mails weren’t working. Joy’s friends weren’t buying it and neither were police, who had started to investigate Joy’s disappearance and were on the precipice of calling in homicide detectives.
Chapter 16
“PRAY FOR ME”
On October 20, 2003, I got a call f
rom Sean. I was working in my home office at my house in Muskogee, Oklahoma, banging out lessons about Bible prophecy for insertion into a televangelist’s upcoming video. The televangelist was widely touted to be an expert on Bible prophecy, so when I had written the script, I had left a hole in the middle for him to riff on the subject. When time came to film the video, however, he had balked, asking where his lines were, so I had to feverishly crank some out for him.
I always found it jarring that so many people around the world were listening to the things I was writing, even though I certainly wouldn’t have considered myself an expert on any of the subjects I was writing about. Somehow, I had been pigeonholed by certain ministers as a Bible prophecy expert, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I had very little interest in Bible prophecy, but it paid the bills, so I wrote it when they asked me to.
I was quickly throwing together everything I knew about the subject of the televangelist’s video: the war that most fundamentalist Christians were expecting to erupt in Israel between the Jewish state and its hostile neighbors. The war in Iraq had just begun (and supposedly ended) but tensions were still at an all-time high, so everyone was atwitter about the possibility that the war would boil over the border and engulf Israel, one of the Bible prophecies that many were clinging to as a sign that the “end times” had truly arrived. My personal beliefs were more metaphorical concerning such prophecies, but metaphor and even-headed reasonableness didn’t pay the bills, so I wrote what they wanted to hear, even when that writing was incendiary toward the people of the Middle East. I was engrossed in that when the phone rang.