Don't Tell a Soul

by M. William Phelps

  Another time, Travis later explained, Kim hit him with a baseball bat.

  Travis smiled in the photo taken on that day at school, but his expression was fake. He was twisted up inside and scared to death of what his mother might do next.

  In a letter Travis later wrote as a seven-year-old detailing one of the incidents, he revealed, I was at . . . home. One day my mom choked me. It felt like an alligator bit me on the neck.

  Mike told the doctors he had never seen her hurt their child. However, one of her doctors noted, “They disagree on whether she has hurt Mike.”

  “Five times,” Kim told her doctors, “Mike has hurt me.” She provided reports from the local police department to “prove” her allegations.

  Her doctors went through the reports, which told a different story. One report turned out to be “inconclusive,” because it failed to contain any statements from Mike, who was gone by the time the police arrived, so Kim was able to make up any accusations she wanted. What’s more, that same report did not have any “visual confirmation” as evidence by any of the on-scene police officers indicating Kim had been injured. It was her word alone.

  In all of the other reports where Kim had complained of being injured, there were “conflicting accounts” of how the “various (relatively) minor injuries” occurred, both Mike and Kim blaming each other, “justifying their own behavior as accidental or in self-defense.” No charges were ever filed against Mike. He had, in fact, reported an injury on his arm, a gash deep enough for him to need stitches—and the police officers involved concurred. The only clear conclusion one could draw from all of the documentation was that when these two argued, they went at it. Sometimes each of them got hurt, but Mike always worse than Kim.

  As Kim’s psychiatrists interviewed Mike and evaluated the situation, it became obvious that the two of them could not agree about who was at fault. Each blamed one another, charging that the other was a bad parenting example for Travis. Mike and Kim were headed to divorce court. There was no way this relationship could withstand such a barrage of insults, accusations, abuse and emotional uncertainty. If they stayed together, an already-volatile situation would get progressively worse and might have dire and long-lasting implications on the child, if it hadn’t already. Someone, sooner or later, was going to get badly hurt.

  Later, after being asked as a twenty-two-year-old man how he had dealt with everything that had happened back in his early life, Travis said, “A lot . . . of therapy.”

  * * *

  Within the report later filed by Kim’s psychiatrists, a budding sociopath rose to the surface as clear and present as a slow-moving, dangerous fog rolling in from the sea. Her doctors said Kim not only lacked “empathy and is extremely self-absorbed,” but she displayed an “overly authoritative” nature and became extremely “vindictive” and controlling whenever somebody challenged her. You look at the list of character defects these doctors checked off as Kim was closing in on twenty-six and you see a dangerous person materialize. The question became not would Kim ever act out on her abusive, unpredictable nature again, but when?

  In individual sessions Kimberly West presented as an intense and anxious woman, who felt victimized in all of her significant relationships (especially by her husband and his extended family and by her first family), wrote one doctor.

  Kim felt the entire world was against her. She blamed everyone but herself for the problems she faced in her life, and showed no real desire to seek treatment to make herself a better human being for her child. Whether she lost custody or not, didn’t Kim want to be a better mother for Travis?

  The psychiatrists Kim saw decided the next thing to do was to observe the child in each environment before making any firm recommendations. Their decision as to whether or not she kept her child was going to determine the outcome of many lives—either way, everyone involved knew.

  35

  TRAVIS WAS OUTSIDE PLAYING. IT was cold and wet, not the best day to be out of the house. An observer had shown up to watch and report how Kim interacted with her child. This was not by surprise; Kim had been given notice. She knew people would be watching her. Every move she made would be judged. Her chances of keeping her child were going to be based on her behavior.

  The ongoing battle between Kim and Mike was vicious, each saying the other was unfit to raise the child as sole conservator. The court had decided the only way to understand the situation was to investigate. Apparently, the reports Kim’s psychiatrists had handed in were not enough to convince a judge that she was unfit and unstable, even though the results stated, Her psychological testing . . . indicates a number of significant issues which can be expected to significantly interfere with parenting.

  The observer on this cold, wet day noticed that Travis’s nose was running, and Kim was not doing anything about it. Also, Travis had no jacket on. It was freezing cold—certainly not the type of weather to be wearing only a T-shirt outside.

  It got to the point where the observer could not allow the child to continue playing without a jacket. “Isn’t it too cold for him not to have a jacket?” the observer asked Kim. Travis was two years old.

  “I am warm-blooded, and so is [he],” she snapped back in the abrasive tone she used when addressing anyone who had authority over her or questioned her or did not comply with her suggestions and requests.

  She never did provide the child with a jacket and “was observed to wipe his nose only once” during the entire visit.

  Kim believed that her truth was the only truth; she felt she could control the evaluation simply with words spewing from her mouth. Yet, she seemed to have no idea she was losing this battle. She would challenge the observers and doctors when it was “unnecessary” and speak to them as if they were below her, and acted as if what they had to say did not matter in the grand scheme of her life.

  * * *

  There were times during her sessions with Dr. Sandra Craig, the clinical psychologist in charge of Kim’s final evaluation, when she’d admit she had issues. “My own bad temper has been a big cause of my troubles,” Kim told Dr. Craig one day. But then she was back to her normal, everyday routine of making demands and being unwilling to admit her faults and try to fix them. Her doctors had even given Kim the benefit of the doubt and some positive reinforcement to build upon.

  Kim . . . clearly loves her child, her psych report noted. In raising certain issues like child care, she sounds knowledgeable and competent. The doctor went on to say that she believed Kim would “promote” her son’s “safety from external dangers.” She added that Kim had “enthusiasm for athletics” and “concern for his medical treatment.” She “would promote his development of gross motor skills.” Still, in that same section of the report, the doctor went on to note that even within all the love Kim might have had for her child, her “narcissistic personality disorder” with its “histrionic features” would win out if she didn’t continue ongoing psychiatric treatment.

  As a profile of Kim’s emotional turmoil came into focus during that 1992 psychological evaluation, it was clear who was the best parent for Travis. Kim was seen as a person who gravitated toward “risk-taking excitement.” She tended to be “attracted,” Dr. Craig summarized in her final assessment, “to danger without regard for the consequences.”

  Kim brushed off such comments as if she had gotten mad one time, had an episode and was being judged on that alone.

  Perhaps the most dangerous of her emotional instabilities with regard to Travis was her “self-dramatizing style.” Kim exhibited an “extremely low tolerance for frustration.” She had a “tendency to think differently than others.” This was at the core of Kim’s psychosis, Craig wrote: Kimberly can be expected to explode or act out her feelings onto the environment.

  There was that word: “explode.”

  It would become a perfect description that followed Kim all of her life.

  Kim’s doctor ultimately determined that her behavior was “consistent” with what Mike had cl
aimed from the beginning: She initiated and provoked their physical interactions.

  Her doctors worried that Kim would hurt Travis if she were put in a perilous or difficult situation and unable to figure out the best way to handle it. Of serious concern were Kim’s “angry impulses.” There was no telling what she would do when faced with a situation in which she disagreed with someone and perhaps felt she had been wronged.

  Another of Kim’s behavioral problems was described as a “long-standing, maladaptive personality style.” This was characterized by “narcissistic and histrionic features.” Kim was viewed as an “overly self-absorbed” person who lacked empathy for anyone around her and behaved as if she “has no awareness of the problems her behavior creates for others.”

  Kim was perceived as a tried-and-true sociopath, someone that could easily turn violent—and become a vicious psychopath.

  Dr. Craig explained that meeting Travis’s needs would be “extra-ordinarily difficult” for Kim as time went on because she was “extremely needy emotionally herself.” The report even went so far as to project how Kim would react during a situation, sketching it out in a way that Kim would absolutely “challenge” the child while in the role of being Travis’s caretaker: In ways such as the flip “I hate you” . . . In other words, if Travis became upset and told his mother he hated her, as some kids might be prone to do, Kim would respond to it in kind, instead of taking control as the parent.

  * * *

  Kim had been feeling ill in the final months of her marriage to Mike West while she and Mike had still lived together. According to the Initial Application affidavit, Kim claimed it was about “two weeks after she was released from the hospital.” She had gone in with stomach pain and digestive issues and had been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. This was occurring while Mike filed for divorce, ready to fight for full custody of Travis.

  Mike had, in fact, taken Kim to court and sued her for custody because he felt she was unfit to parent the child. The summary portion of the recommendation by Dr. Sandra Craig recommended: [Mike] West be named sole managing conservator of [Travis]. After assessing the situation and interviewing Kim and Mike, Kim’s doctor believed: [Mike’s] psychological profile suggests he has the capacity to meet his son’s needs and that his capacity to do so is significantly greater than Kimberly West’s. Furthermore, in what must have been a devastating blow to Kim, on page eight of the evaluation, in a concluding paragraph, the doctor wrote, The profile generated in the evaluation . . . supports Mike West’s account of his concerns about her.

  Kim later complained that bringing in her mother, Rachel Wilson, to testify on her husband’s behalf allowed Mike the opportunity to convince the judge that Kim was unfit. She also made an allegation that her husband had “money and legal resources at his disposal” and she “did not.”

  In reality, however, Kim had nobody to blame but herself.

  Losing her child sent Kim spiraling into a “deep depression,” she later said. Not long after the decision came down, she checked herself into an outpatient mental health program, the Initial Application claimed. Kimberly did not want the marriage to end, said the Initial Application, and was overwhelmed by what was happening to her.

  Her present profile, Dr. Craig’s assessment concluded, indicates that she would have very great difficulty handling . . . challenges.

  This would become the understatement of Kim’s entire life.

  In her point of view Kim maintained that everyone was against her. As time went forward, and she learned to live without Travis and Mike, things would only get worse for those in Kim’s unpredictable, violent path of destruction.

  36

  MIKE WEST MET A WOMAN, Sonja. She moved into the house Kim had been forced to leave. By this time Kim had met James Cargill, a strong, good-looking chap. Still, in Kim’s eyes, Mike had kicked her out, replaced her and had gotten to keep their child to boot.

  She was beyond livid.

  By 1993, with their divorce finalized, Mike West knew he could not turn his back for one minute on Kim.

  “In my experience,” Mike said, “you never could judge how she might react.”

  Mike had been with Kim and she would, for no reason, pick up things “within an arm’s reach” and throw them as hard as she could at him, hoping to inflict as much pain and injury as possible. It was in her nature to destroy those who hurt her—or, rather, those she believed had hurt her. A favorite had been drinking glasses, the hard and heavy kind. He’d seen her just go off the handle for no apparent reason, scream vulgar, hard-core obscenities, then find a heavy glass and toss it. Her anger, Mike added, “was progressive.” As she got mad, her anger expanded like a water balloon.

  Years after the divorce Mike sat one day and studied Travis’s class photo. The child was eight at the time. There was something strange about the picture. Something off. Travis looked like a ghost.

  Mike recalled that Kim had had the boy on the day Travis had his photo taken.

  With a closer look Mike finally figured out what he was looking at. His son looked scared.

  He called Travis into the room and asked him what had happened on the day the photo had been taken.

  Travis told the story about the hairbrush.

  Mike wondered about the red marks, visible in the school photo, on Travis’s neck. Where in the hell did those red marks come from?

  Travis told his father that his mother had also choked him that morning before school.

  During divorce proceedings the court agreed to a visitation arrangement between Mike and Kim regarding Travis. Mike had sole custody. Kim could see the child on every “first, third and fifth weekend.”

  “I want you to write down everything you can remember about your visit with your mom,” Mike told Travis. He was referring to the day of the hairbrush and choking incident.

  Kim and Mike fought constantly. Mike’s new wife, Sonja, had a child who lived with them, too. By June 1994, Kim was hot and heavy with James Cargill and they got married. On November 16, 1994, Kim gave birth to her second child, another boy, Blake Cargill.

  When Kim was allowed only supervised visitation with Travis, the visits often took place at a neutral facility/location, and Kim had to pay any court costs or other expenses associated with the visits. Mike, Sonja or both were always there when the child was handed over to Kim and she was then allowed to take them.

  Kim fumed inside, every time she had to abide by Mike’s “rules” and was not allowed to do as she wanted.

  It was impossible for [Travis] to be natural, Kim’s later Initial Application claimed, and have a good time with Kimberly when someone was watching everything [they] said or did. Because of the so-called “fees” associated with “court costs for each visit,” Kim wound up seeing her eldest son “less and less.”

  Thus, according to Kim’s later assessment in her Initial Application, the reason why she did not see her boy as often as she might have wanted to became Mike West’s fault. Every problem of Kim’s life—from the time she had been a teenager causing her parents problems to her adult years, to when she would later fight Timmy’s dad for custody and blame losing that child on Cherry Walker’s potential testimony—was somebody else’s fault. Never was any of it a result of her own doing. Kim consistently blamed others for her own behaviors and failures and faults.

  Within the Initial Application account Kim made many accusations that were not supported (at the time the Application was filed) or backed up by under-oath, courtroom testimony. Among the charges Kim made in her report, she claimed Sonja and Mike conspired after they “created a new family together.” She alleged that they tried “to get their exes out of their lives.” While she involved herself in their lives, Kim contended in the Application that Sonja had lied about her ex regarding something having to do with the daughter Sonja brought into the marriage with Mike. The connection among Kim, Sonja and Mike was as fragile as a cobweb as this new family dynamic carried on throughout the next few years and Travis and
Blake grew.

  During that time Kim, apparently adopting the rule of war that encouraged keeping your enemies close, became friendly with Sonja’s ex-husband, Roy (pseudonym). It was clear within this relationship with Sonja’s ex that Kim had a premeditated plan.

  Kim stayed married to James Cargill for a little over a year before James decided to end the marriage. He had experienced the same turmoil and disquiet and conflict and violence that Mike West had endured before him—and any man stepping into Kim’s life would encounter in the future. It was December 19, 1995, when the divorce became finalized. Kim wound up with “joint managing custody” of Blake. If the past was even a half-accurate crystal ball, it was an arrangement James Cargill was going to live to regret.

  37

  KIM WAS AT HOME AND stewing about her ex and his second wife, Sonja. Though some years had passed, Kim had not let up with the constant bickering and insults against them. There was never a time when Mike or Sonja West could say that Kim was okay. With Kim Cargill, there was always a drama, always a reason to fight and spit venom at her exes. In her view she had been replaced—she would never look at it any other way. Mike had tossed her to the curb, found someone else, and they were raising her child.

  Rockwall Police Department (RPD) officer Brad Merritt was answering phones on July 25, 1997. Kim had been divorced from Mike West for about four years. Mike and Sonja lived in Rockwall, a Dallas area suburb within Rockwall County. It’s a quaint little town where people raise families in fine homes and send them to decent schools. According to the official Rockwall website, [It’s] the third wealthiest county in . . . Texas.