He thought he’d seen it all. Apparently not.
Kim jumped out of the car. Blake was on the concrete ground, crying. He’d gotten pretty banged up. Kim walked over and fumed, “Get up! Get the hell up off the ground!” She grabbed Blake by the arm and jerked him up and started walking. Matt followed, holding his eye, wondering what in the hell was going on.
She must have taken off running, however. The darkness of the night swallowed Kim and Blake up and Matt couldn’t see them.
Matt went back to the car and drove slowly around the neighborhood. He searched carefully, thinking Kim had gone off into a tizzy and would calm down sooner or later, hop back into the car and maybe even say she was sorry.
About “three or four streets over” from where Matt’s sister lived, he saw Kim with Blake, thumping her way down the road.
There would be no apologies from KC this night.
Matt pulled up alongside. “Come on, get in.” He was terrified of what she might do to Blake once she got him home, in private, or if she took off and spent the night with Blake somewhere other than home. Matt needed to get the child into the car, get him somewhere away from her so she could get control of herself and Matt could keep an eye on him.
“Please, Kim, please, I’m begging you here.... Get. In. The. Car.” Matt stared at Blake. The child had a look of absolute terror on his face. “Like he always did,” Matt commented later, adding, “I wasn’t really worried about her. I was trying to get [Blake] home.”
Kim’s Initial Application document, which was said to outline her entire life of so-called trauma and ill treatment by those in her life, contained no mention of this incident. In fact, in a section titled, “Despite Assertions to the Contrary, There Was a Positive and Compassionate Side to Kimberly Cargill,” one quote made the claim: All Kimberly ever wanted was a “normal life,” as wife and mother. Further, it stated that she “loved” being a mom and “took good care” of her children. She was “fun to be around” and had a “sweet personality.” Kim “got along well with others.” Another quote made the erroneous, even laughable assertion that her children “enjoyed” being around their mother and that she “loved [them] very much” and they were “physically affectionate.”
These comments, supported by personal affidavits submitted to the court, came from “friends” of Kim’s—old high-school mates and former coworkers and people she had (supposedly) known throughout her life. All of it, however, fundamentally contradicted later courtroom testimony by those—including her own children—who lived with Kim and knew firsthand what she was capable of and what she had done.
This incident was the final straw for Matt Robinson. Matt was horrified by the visions of what she might do to Blake in his absence, but he could do little about it. He could not be a part of Kim’s world any longer.
So Matt left.
* * *
About three weeks after Matt walked out on her, Kim called.
“What is it, Kim?” He wanted nothing to do with her anymore. There was nothing she could do or say to change his mind. The woman was toxic. Absolute poison.
“I’m pregnant,” Kim said. There was almost an “I win” tone in her voice. (“Aha! You bastard—you thought you could walk out on me?”)
“Yeah, sure,” Matt responded. “Nice try, Kim.” He wasn’t so much doubting that Kim was going to have a baby more than the notion that he was the father.
“She had this friend that she was always hanging out with,” Matt commented later. “And she would leave and go do stuff with him.” Matt assumed Kim was sleeping with the guy on the side and he was the father. She had been spiteful in every other way; why should Matt believe that she was faithful? If Matt was the father, it meant he would now be tied to her for the rest of his life, or at least the next eighteen years. The thought made Matt ill.
Matt couldn’t accept it. They weren’t a couple when she called. They had not been living together and he had rarely spoken to KC since walking out. This call was just another of her attempts to be the center of attention, another manifestation of her inherent narcissistic nature, and her desire to always do things her way.
Kim had told Matt from the first occasion they started sleeping together that she couldn’t get pregnant. She had lied to him about something that would make him feel at ease when they had intercourse. She’d tricked him. She’d manipulated the situation.
Kim would later deny all this, of course. She would play, once again, her woe-is-me card—from a seemingly endless deck she kept in her pocketbook. She was great at using the everyone-is-against-me role of being the victim in any situation that did not favor her, especially with people whom she had just met. Yet, every aspect of her romantic and parental life proved that Kim Cargill was what many doctors over the years treating her had claimed she was: an absolute, nonconforming sociopath, to which one could add “pathological liar” at this point.
“An individual with antisocial traits has difficulty following the rules and will engage in behavior that subjects them to arrest,” one of Kim’s doctors said. “There is deceit, manipulation, lying and impulsivity. . . .”
Kim felt perpetually entitled. She had grandiose opinions of herself and impossible fantasies about what her life should be. Kim Cargill’s behavior displayed textbook antisocial personality disorder. A person like Kim “exploits others for personal gain,” a doctor analyzing her had testified.
Kim gave birth to her third child in 1999, each of her children now fathered by a different man. Matt Robinson was not there for the birth of Brian because, Matt later explained, he didn’t know it was his child at the time. Later, after the proof came in that Matt was, indeed, Brian’s father, he stepped up—which was when the real trouble for Matt Robinson began.
40
IF MATT ROBINSON THOUGHT DEALING with Kim Cargill was a nightmare while he was living with her, as this new phase of his life began, Matt was about to learn that she was, at her core, evil. The woman spewed venomous hatred the same way others showed love.
As the first few years of his son Brian’s life passed, Matt lived under a constant and unremitting fear that Kim would severely harm the boy. Matt had seen what Kim could do to her own flesh and blood with Blake. As Matt put it later in court, “I found out a lot of information that was going on [with Kim], which I knew he was being abused.”
Some of the mistreatment Matt uncovered included a report that Brian, in diapers, was wandering aimlessly “out on the street . . . walking down the road” by himself one night. What’s more, Matt heard Kim was being evicted from where she was living. Matt feared his son would not have a roof over his head, not to mention three square meals, medical care and the attention he needed during his formative years. There was no telling what Kim would do if she were tossed out on the street. Someone would have to pay for that failure, for sure—and Matt knew from experience that it was not going to be Kim. If she had no man around to beat up, the kids were next in her line of fire. Matt had to do something for the sake of his child.
In the Initial Application document Kim brought in an old friend who was “around Kimberly from 1996 to 1998,” a tumultuous time in her life, to say that she was a “normal” and “friendly” person, whose behavior during “custody situations” was never “out of the realm of a normal level of intensity.” This same “friend” signed an affidavit to the effect that he knew Kimberly took “good care of her second son, [Blake],” and he did not see “any kind of abuse or neglect.”
Contrary to the fairy tale Kim later scripted about her life (and managed to get others to not only believe, but even back up with signed affidavits to the court), Matt felt he could do nothing to protect his son but take desperate measures and deal with the fallout later on. Matt decided to pick the child up one day for a visit and not return him. There was no way Kim would allow Matt to take the child for an extended period of time, or even in the interim while she found new housing and worked out the specifics of her disordered, chaotic life. To do so
would mean she had to admit defeat, admit failure and admit that she could not handle being a single mother.
“I made a decision to keep him and take her to court,” Matt explained later.
Of course, this did not sit well with Kim. She had Matt arrested and charged with kidnapping. Matt was brought up on those charges, a serious felony with major time in prison if convicted. He had to hire a lawyer (spending $27,000 in total) and fight the charges in court, but he was able to eventually get the entire case dismissed.
It felt like a win. However, it wasn’t.
Kim got to keep her child.
If there was a silver lining for Matt in all of this, it was that he had not married Kim. At an arm’s length, he could monitor the situation, talk to Brian and gauge how the child was managing. He could find out how Kim was treating Brian and Blake, then decide the right course of action to take against Kim as each situation presented itself.
* * *
What would Kim do next? Anything was possible, if you ask those who truly knew her and interacted with her during this period of her life (early 2000s). Kim’s first and foremost goal, however, was to find another man. Kim needed to have a whipping boy, someone to soak up the negative energy she discharged. This was important to her neurosis—and, actually, probably a good thing for the children. Without a man in her life Kim’s entire focus would be on the kids, and history already had proven that was dangerous.
41
HE WAS SHOOTING POOL AND having a few laughs. He was a good ol’ boy enjoying some country fun. Forrest Garner had gone to Clicks Pool Hall near his mother’s house to enjoy a night out. It was a quiet evening in September 2004, calm and cool, the dry wind blowing in from the east with a mellow hint of humid, late-summer air hanging on behind it. It was the kind of night, with the stars as bright and far as the eye can see, with the sky a perfect dome, that Texans like to brag about.
Forrest took a break from his pool game and did a lighthouse look around the bar, to see what kind of crowd was hanging out. A few times before, he had seen the woman with the long, flowing blond hair and wayward smile, who stood by the bar. There was something about her. She drew attention to herself. Forrest Garner decided to approach her, say hello and introduce himself.
“Kimberly,” she said. “Kimberly Cargill.”
“Forrest Garner—nice to meet you, Kimberly.”
Forrest was impressed. He was a big guy, who favored ten-gallon cowboy hats to go with his black goatee. Kim was good-looking and had a nice shape. She seemed cordial, charming and articulate. Kim seemed to be someone who, like him, wasn’t afraid to laugh and tell things the way they were.
They talked. There was chemistry.
“You want to play a game of pool?” Forrest asked. As time would tell, he might as well have asked: “You want a bite of this apple?” Kim beat Forrest in pool that night and this Texan thought, Well, this is mighty embarrassing, doggone it—but in a good way. Forrest wasn’t about to let this one slip out of his hands.
They started dating.
Throughout the past few years Kim had gone through a long list of men, many of whom had seen her violent and alarming ways and had run as far away as they could. She was a woman with three kids, two failed marriages behind her (and a host of additional relationships, both long and short), though that’s not what she always said while out “man shopping.” Yet, none of this, Kim would later insist, had anything to do with the person she was or could be for the right man.
If you took Kim Cargill at her word, her marriage to Mike West had poisoned her way of thinking, feeling and her future romantic, emotional well-being. Mike was the person to blame for the way she was; he was the bad guy who started it all. Kim called that marriage “tumultuous.” She said it was consistently combative and unsustainable. She claimed that the divorce from Mike was “acrimonious,” and the “subsequent loss of custody of her first son” sent her into a “deep depression and further undermined her sense of security and self-worth.” All of it was Mike’s fault. All those years in which she sparred with Mike over their child, Travis, set her up for future failures. Mike was an easy target.
* * *
Later, though, Kim would blame “sexual abuse” by an extended family member for sending her down a path of discontentment and violence. However, that purported sexual abuse existed only as a “self-report,” one of her doctors later testified in court. Therefore, it should be taken with a “grain of salt.” Why? Because the doctor was “factoring in that [Kim Cargill] is deceitful, lies, manipulates.”
With no outside or second-/third-party corroboration—medical reports, police reports, charges, an admission by the alleged perpetrator—supporting Kim’s claim, it was hard to believe anything she said, especially since the allegations were coming thirty-plus years after the event.
“The only credibility I put in it,” said that doctor while testifying about the alleged sexual abuse, “is that it’s consistent with individuals with borderline personality disorder. I don’t know whether it happened or didn’t happen.”
Kim described the abuse as having taken place when she was “eleven or twelve years old.” She said she was staying at someone’s house one night. She was asleep. She woke up to him “touching her breasts and her vagina.” She said she “pretended to be asleep and he went away.” It never happened again. Yet, she said, that one instance of alleged sexual abuse set her up for a lifetime’s worth of emotional pain.
* * *
As Kim and Forrest dated, Kim shared her life story, telling Forrest she had two sons. Forrest had no idea during the first few months of the courtship that Travis existed.
As Brian grew and went to school, according to one of his classmates’ mothers, Kim was the perfect suburban parent whenever the classmate’s mother ran into her. Kim could be “warm and open to others,” said an affidavit written by Kim’s friend and filed with the Initial Application. This particular parent claimed she had often seen Kim when she was with Brian and her other child and she “was not rough with them.” The document purported: In fact, [Kim] was the opposite of rough.... There was not ever anything amiss and . . . Kimberly [was] responsible and conscientious.
Kim could certainly lay on the charm and put on a mask of a loving parental custodian when she needed to impress—as she was now doing with Forrest. It was an act. Kim knew how to display her best self to anyone around her; she worked hard at it. A mere eight months into their relationship, whatever Kool-Aid Kim Cargill was serving to Forrest Garner, he liked the taste of it: Kim had herself her third husband fewer than four months before the year anniversary of meeting and dating him. Forrest and Kim were married on April 30, 2005. Even though Forrest said later that the relationship was only good for the first three months, he went ahead, anyway, with the nuptials. Kim’s mother, Rachel, wasn’t on hand for the wedding. Kim and Rachael had been “estranged” since 2001, a fallout between them that would last six years.
No sooner were they living together (Forrest said later he did not live with Kim until after they married), did Kim begin to tear down her former marriages and the fathers of her children. Whenever she and Forrest got to talking about previous relationships, Matt Robinson being the most recent, Kim went after him: “He’s an asshole!”
“Come on, Kim.”
“He’s a bad father and a bad influence on [Brian].”
For anyone that spent any amount of time with Kim, when they went back and looked at this comment later, it was beyond laughable. The idea that Kim could call anyone a bad influence on her children showed the sheer arrogance of this woman.
“Kim . . . ,” Forrest said. “Come on. . . .” Forrest was not the type to fall for Kim’s nonsense just because it came out of her mouth.
“I want you to kick his ass for me, Forrest. First chance you get.”
“No, Kim.” (Later, Matt and Forrest—along with James Cargill—would become acquaintances.)
“He’s a very good guy,” Forrest said of Matt Robins
on. In fact, all of Kim’s children got together once when Rachel Wilson, Kim’s mother, hosted a Fourth of July cookout and invited the dads with their kids. All the dads talked while the boys, having not all been together at once since who knows when, “were in heaven,” Forrest later explained.
* * *
As they got to know each other while dating, Forrest later recalled, he asked Kim about her mother. He wanted to know why Kim never mentioned Rachel, or never asked him to take her to see her.
It would have been easy for Kim to explain that they did not get along, saw the world differently and hadn’t talked for years. But Kim felt the need to lie, instead. “She’s dead,” Kim told Forrest.
Forrest had only met Blake and Brian. He queried Kim one day about a possible third child. It seemed she had another child, but she hardly even mentioned him. Forrest wanted to know why.
“He’s dead,” Kim said.
“I’m so sorry, Kim.”
The worst-possible thing ever: a mother losing a child. Forrest was overcome with empathy and sympathy for his girlfriend. She had gone through what no parent wanted to think about. Forrest was under the impression the child died at a young age—that is, until they were moving one day and Forrest was preparing some boxes to load from the apartment into his truck.
As he grabbed an overstuffed box overflowing with various personal items, some photos fell out and onto the floor.
He picked up a photo of Blake with another boy—a much older kid. Didn’t make sense. If her youngest boy had died, who was this older child in the photo?
“Who is this?” Forrest asked Kim. He pointed to the older boy.
Kim walked over and grabbed the photo from Forrest’s hand. “Give. Me. That.” She then “flipped” out, Forrest said.
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