After rounds of their sparring in court, Rachel came up with a solution to resolve the spiteful conflict between her and Charlie. She knew Charlie did not want to pay child support—it was one of the more contentious issues he had been fighting.
“I’ll drop the child support claim, [Charlie],” Rachel told her soon-to-be ex-husband one day during a lull when they were speaking civilly, “if you relinquish rights to Kimberly and allow [Cal] to adopt her.” Rachel explained further that as soon as Charlie signed off on their divorce, she was heading to the altar with Cal. There was nothing Charlie could do or say to stop the new union. Their life together was over. A new chapter in Rachel’s young life was beginning.
What Charlie did next would shock everyone involved.
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RACHEL GAVE CHARLIE A CHOICE: Allow her to live her new life—the way she wanted with Calvin—and not pay her child support. Or he could give her a hassle and be expected to hand over part of his paycheck for the next sixteen years. (Kim was two years old by now.)
“Okay,” Charlie agreed. “Go ahead.”
He cut his losses in love and moved on.
Rachel and Cal married; Cal adopted Kim, just as he promised he would. The Initial Application report contended that Charlie lost touch with his daughter. Charlie’s mother stayed in contact with Rachel’s mother and even taught Kim’s Sunday-school class; however, Kim never knew who the woman was. It was the beginning, some would later point out, of a series of detachments Kim would experience regarding those closest to her.
Rachel and Cal had their own child before Kim turned three (April, Kim’s half sister). Growing up together, Kim and her new sibling never really connected. Around this time, or shortly thereafter (if we are to accept the statements in the Initial Application report, a document that is based on affidavits from some of those—not all parties—involved), Rachel made Kim feel as though she did not approve of her or anything she did. Through that, Kim claimed, she “never felt good enough.” As kids, according to Kim, she and her half sister were treated differently by their parents.
When Kim was nine years old, she approached her mother. She had only recalled seeing Cal around the house. She called him her dad.
“Why don’t I look like [Cal]?” Kim asked her mom.
According to Kim, Rachel explained to her “in a casual manner” that Cal had adopted her. It was a “revelation,” Kim argued later in that document, which affected her “significantly.”
Rachel would see things differently. She said Kim had a “normal” life up until the time KC was about twelve. “She was a good student and very outgoing, very personable, and played sports . . . a little cheerleader!” As for Kim’s relationship with Cal, Rachel added, “It was great. They were close.”
* * *
There were conflicting versions of her upbringing and childhood: one that Kim later described in that Initial Application document (backed up by selected sources) and another that her mother, Rachel Wilson, testified to in a court of law.
As a child Kim felt unwanted within the family “because of their biological differences,” claimed the Initial Application.
A gulf between Kim and Rachel grew as each year passed. In that same document Kim’s lawyers submitted to the court (in 2014) on her behalf, Kim would accuse her mother of being “physically abusive.”
“She hits me,” Kim would tell friends. Some of them submitted signed affidavits of support on her behalf, detailing the alleged abuse.
In that report Kim explained how she showed one particular friend a bruise one day, making the claim that her mother had given it to her with a belt buckle.
[Her friend] saw the imprint of the round metal part from a belt on Kimberly’s body and head, said the report.
One late afternoon, when Kim and her friend were at Kim’s house, with her friend upstairs, waiting for Kim inside Kim’s bedroom, something happened. As she sat on Kim’s bed, the friend “heard Rachel choking and smacking” KC “in the next room.”
The sounds were so horrifying that Kim’s friend covered her ears, afraid to do anything.
When Kim walked into the room, she was crying.
There was another time with another friend when Rachel and Kim started fighting. “You did not mop the floor correctly,” the friend heard Rachel scream at Kim. According to the friend’s later recollection in an affidavit accompanying the Initial Application, Rachel was “hitting” KC with a “hairbrush.”
* * *
As her home life spiraled out of control, Kim’s personal health crashed. When Kim was twelve, about the time the family moved from Mississippi to the Dallas area to Richardson, Texas, Rachel took a call one afternoon from Kim’s softball coach. She needed to come right away.
“She’s . . . not feeling well. She’s feverish, clammy and vomiting.”
Rachel went and got her.
Kim had come down with meningitis (according to the Initial Application report). She was rushed to the local emergency room and the ER doctors performed a spinal tap. They quarantined Kim and she spent “several weeks” in the hospital.
You’d think a hospital would be a safe place to get well. Not for Kim. According to that same report (though it was not supported by any medical documents I could locate), she contracted the mumps while there, which turned into tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears. From that, Kim lost the hearing in one of her ears. It took her a full year before she felt normal again, or accepted what had now become her new normal.
Her health crises weren’t over. A year or so after she recuperated from the meningitis and tinnitus, she lost the feeling in her “lower extremities” and found herself back at the ER. Doctors had no idea what had happened. The cause was undetermined. The only result was that Kim now had trouble sitting down because of a pain in her tailbone.
One note about this time period that Kim’s mother later made in court was that Rachel had never noticed any “temper” or irrational behavior on Kim’s part as a child or even into her early high-school years. That explosive temper that Kim had later in life, which she seemed to take out on her own children, did not arrive until Kim became a young adult.
In high school Kim took to the social scene, where friends recalled her as “popular” and “well-liked.” She didn’t seem to exhibit any major social flaws or psychiatric episodes at this point. Still, it seemed Kim could not escape a shadow of hardship that followed her. One night a “group of male classmates” approached her, and, according to Kim, “a traumatic event,” involving “something sexual” (she never elaborated), took place afterward at a boy’s home. Kim told her parents about it and they threatened, according to “rumors” working their way through the high-school hallways, to press charges, but nothing was done.
Ultimately, Kimberly’s parents refused to acknowledge that an assault had been committed against [her], claimed the Initial Application. Rachel Wilson never commented on this episode of Kim’s life.
With her head spinning from all that had happened before she was old enough to move out on her own, Kim decided one day that she needed to do something about her life or, rather, her history. She sought out her mother, Rachel, to inquire about something that had been on her mind lately.
“I want to meet my father,” Kim supposedly said.
Kim went off to Mississippi to meet Charlie and his new wife. All agreed that Kim should spend some time there, so Charlie filed for legal guardianship so that Kim could stay permanently. Kim was about the same age as her mother when she and Charlie had eloped and had Kim.
Kim could not get over the fact that she had been adopted by Calvin and that no one had told her until she asked. It was as though they had all conspired to hide her identity from her. (This was another contention that Rachel Wilson never agreed or disagreed with.) This put a tremendous strain on Kim’s heart and the feelings she had for Charlie. Why hadn’t he fought for her? Why had he not tried to contact her? Why had he left? She couldn’t get over it. Soon it drove a wedge
between her and Charlie. They could not get along the way Kim had envisioned when she set out to start a relationship with the father she had never known. There was no connection. She had wanted to stay in Mississippi and get to know her father, but it wasn’t going to be in the cards. She left “much earlier than expected” and went back home to Texas—to Rachel and Calvin and her half sister, April.
As she graduated from high school and entered college, Kim’s life took on another significant change—one, she would soon learn, that was perhaps far worse than anything that had happened before.
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IT WAS SAID TO HAVE started in high school for Kim, a routine display of “unstable and irrational” behavior—though Rachel Wilson later disagreed, claiming that Kim’s temper and her being “easily provoked” began later, when she left college and entered adulthood. Regardless of the exact timeline, all of those emotions Kim was said to have been bottling up since childhood were now stewing, just waiting for the opportunity to explode into rage.
Soon after she started community college classes—“RN prerequisites and general studies” were Kim’s focus—she began to blow off classes, sleeping late and spending her days in bed, a sure (and classic) sign of depression. It wasn’t as if she were a lazy teenager, looking to sleep in and hitting the snooze button one too many times. Kim was spending days in bed, with shades drawn, door locked, withdrawn from the world. Antisocialism was now a core part of her personality.
When Cal found that Kim had skipped classes once again in favor of sleep, he blew a gasket. It wasn’t going to be this way for Kim if she wanted to live in the family house and go to school. She was an adult now. She needed to start acting like one. Sleeping all day, walking around as though the world was about to end, developing a chip on her shoulder, it all had to stop. Kim needed to grow up and get a life.
* * *
Leaving community college, Kim took a secretarial position at a local law firm. It was a job she had viewed back then as nothing more than passing her time. This wasn’t what she wanted to do—but, more or less, what she had to do.
Through that first job out of college, Kim met Mike West, a young man Kim’s mother, Rachel, viewed as “polished and well-educated.” Kim worked at the same law firm Mike’s father used and the two were introduced. The relationship moved fast. Kim was so fond of Mike, who was obviously smitten by her, that they took off and got married in Hawaii.
Mike seemed to be that all-around perfect guy. Raised from good stock, good-looking, he had a solid disposition regarding work and family, and he had been successful in his own right.
According to friends, Kim thought “if she married Mike, she could prove to her mother that she had value as a person and was worthy of being loved.” She believed that if she married a man with money, a good family and a prosperous future, maybe Rachel Wilson would see that her daughter was a valuable human being.
They got married in June 1988. Kim was twenty-one, Mike not much older. They argued all the time, according to various statements and reports. It was tumultuous, volatile and even violent right from the start. Both were young and immature and full of angst. They agreed later that when they argued, they both became “mutually physical”; the police were called on a number of occasions.
Mike once threw Kimberly into a wall and left the imprint of her body in the sheetrock, said an affidavit Kim filed with the court—though Mike was never charged or convicted of any crime in relation to this matter.
What’s important about that accusation is what was left out. Mike later testified in court about tossing Kim into the wall, adding how she had first violently hit him with a can of hairspray and cut him open. He described Kim’s temper as “volatile,” even during those first few months of knowing her. “In my experience,” Mike explained, “you could never judge how she might react.”
Kim tried to get pregnant immediately, but she had issues with fertility. Then, after some treatment, Kim took a look at a pregnancy test one morning and saw that she was going to have a baby. Within a marriage that had, only two years in, seen extreme lows and not many highs, Kim thought maybe this would calm the storm, remove the anxiety and lift the resentful dynamic between them. She was “ecstatic” after Travis was born on July 16, 1990. She believed the newborn would “fix the problems in her marriage.” Even those who had close contact with Kim saw a sudden change in the right direction. She seemed happy and “in heaven” as she finished school and began her life as a nurse and raised a young child, still very much in love with Mike.
Kimberly was finally where she wanted to be in life, said the Initial Application.
Mike saw a different person emerge as their marriage hit a new stride and a child was part of their daily existence. Kim became explosive and would often get angry at minor things that Mike did. Her behavior, he said, got “progressively worse.” It appeared that those issues that had been between them in the beginning had not gone away at all, but they might have just simmered after Kim had the child.
“She was quick to anger and had a volatile temper,” Mike later said. Kim began to throw things at Mike: “Glasses, knives, whatever she could find.”
One day Kim got extremely mad at Mike for something he said. It was so insignificant he could not recall what it had been. After she finished screaming and yelling at him, she hopped into the car.
He followed.
“What are you doing?” Mike asked as Kim started the car. It was parked in the garage. She revved the engine.
“Kim?”
She then drove the vehicle and rammed it into his workbench. “[It] was attached to [the] wall and shifted the wall about three or four inches,” he later stated. This incident showed what Kim was capable of.
* * *
When later asked about his childhood, Travis could recall only vague parts of it. When asked in court about his “mother,” Travis said he could not call Kim his mother. He could only call her Kimberly. And he did not consider her to be his mother. Asked to describe Kimberly in just one sentence, Travis responded: “Scary and abusive.” Moreover, Travis said his dad, Mike West, was never abusive at all, but that Kimberly had choked him routinely.
Kim sought help from a psychiatrist. The marriage seemed to be doomed. Mike sat down with the clinician and explained what was happening inside the house.
It appeared that Kim seemed “attracted to danger” and precarious situations “without fear of the consequences,” said two individuals who later prosecuted Kim. She did not care what people thought, especially Mike or her children. More than that, she had a low tolerance for frustration, a short fuse that Kim’s mother described as ever-present.
A psychiatrist’s report submitted to the court by a doctor that Kim had seen reads like a page out of an abuser’s handbook, with the emotional bottom falling out on Kim seemingly the moment she entered into this relationship with Mike. In October 1992, as her marriage to Mike crumbled into bits and pieces, Kim was diagnosed with a “not otherwise specified” (NOS) anxiety disorder, major depression and intermittent explosive disorder. These are serious mind disorders. Kim had been severely depressed and acting irrationally near this time. She was admitted into a psychiatric hospital and there was a question of whether she could care for her child any longer. Her doctors, during the hospitalization period, saw a mild “improvement in her functioning.” When Kim was discharged, she was diagnosed with yet another condition, this one even more severe and dangerous to those around her: borderline personality disorder (BPD). Her doctors diagnosed Kim’s BPD as “indicative of chronic and severe maladjustment in interpersonal functioning.”
She was a mess. She couldn’t get along with anyone. She had to have things her way all the time. If she didn’t get her way, Kim would explode in a fit of unchecked rage, screaming vulgarities and cussing and threatening and hitting. The idea that her child could someday be removed from under her care and taken away infuriated Kim.
From reading her psych report, it’s clear that Kim Car
gill was unfit not only to be a wife, but also a mother. Her doctors were greatly concerned for the welfare of Travis.
“I have always been [Travis’s] primary caretaker, and as his mother I should have primary custody,” Kim told her doctors. Travis was two years old. He needed mothering and solid parental supervision at such a pivotal time in his development. He needed stability, especially where a mother and father were concerned, Kim argued.
“Michael is worse off than me,” Kim tried convincing her doctors, meaning his emotional state. Why? “Because he has not sought treatment.”
The blame game. Kim used this tactic routinely. She thought she could win any argument, legal or otherwise, by simply placing the onus of a situation on the opposing party.
Her doctors asked Kim if she would acknowledge some of her past behaviors, which had gotten her to this place she was now in—the past being a good indication of future behavior, where emotional instability is the matter at hand. If she was going to blame others, her doctors seemed to suggest with their questions, where in that scenario did she see herself?
Kim reluctantly admitted, “I [am] damaged property. . . but I have not hurt anyone. And I would never harm [Travis].”
Travis would beg to differ. One day, while Kim was getting him ready for his school pictures, she was combing the kid’s hair with a large hairbrush, the type with the bristles and hard-plastic handle. Travis was fidgeting and wasn’t interested in his mother making sure his hair was spit-shine perfect. Kim kept telling him to sit still, but Travis kept moving around. So Kim hauled off and “hit me over the head with the hairbrush a few times,” Travis later recalled—something that happened to Kim, if she is to be believed, when she was a child. Then, after he still wouldn’t sit still and allow her to comb his hair, Kim placed her hands around Travis’s small, fragile neck and choked him, leaving a red mark.
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