Don't Tell a Soul

by M. William Phelps

  While she yelled obscenities at him, she picked up the items in the living room, pictures in frames, knickknacks, whatever was in reaching distance, and hurled them at Forrest. It was your typical Kim Cargill rant. She had turned into the beast she would become whenever someone questioned her and one of her many, many lies was exposed.

  Forrest wasn’t putting up with it. He walked out of the house and did not call her.

  Kim called three days later. “Listen, I need to tell you about [Travis.]” He wasn’t dead, after all, Kim explained. “His father is rich. He paid off a judge and turned [Travis] against me. So that is why I said he was dead to me.”

  When Forrest realized Kim was lying about the child (assuming she was probably lying about her mother, too), he wanted to know why. Regarding the time they dated, Forrest said later, “It wasn’t bad. It was just basically a normal . . . ,” but he stopped himself there. “You know, like I said, we really didn’t live together, so it was more of like a dating relationship,” he amended.

  “Why would you tell me your mother is dead?” Forrest wanted to know. Relationships, from where Forrest came from, were based on trust, acceptance and honesty.

  “She was such a bad mother, Forrest, she’s dead to me,” Kim explained.

  This incident when he found out about Travis took place before Forrest and Kim were married. For some it might have been the last red flag in a field of them, though Forrest said later, “Love is blind . . . I guess. I don’t know.” He decided to give Kim the benefit of the doubt. People lost their tempers. He had opened a touchy subject and she had snapped. The lies about her mom and Travis, well, she was expressing her desire not to talk about subjects that upset her. When it comes to love, denial is part of the territory.

  “I cannot get pregnant,” Kim assured Forrest time and again.

  Seven months into the relationship: “I’m pregnant.”

  * * *

  In April 2005, pregnant and now married, Kim moved in with Forrest. He rented an apartment behind a Home Depot store. The fact that she became pregnant, Forrest later said, was a big deal for him. He wasn’t about to let a woman, pregnant with his child, fend for herself. That was not how Forrest Garner had been raised.

  From the day they met, life for Forrest Garner would never be the same. It started with the phone calls.

  “Are you mad at me?” Kim would call and ask.

  “No.”

  A half hour later, “Are you sure you’re not mad at me?”

  “Kim, come on.”

  Forrest would be at work. “And the phone calls,” he explained, “just started really, really getting excessive and excessive.”

  Obsessive might be more like it. She called and called and called—about the silliest, most inconsequential things. Her insecurity became a disease growing out of control.

  I cannot do this anymore, Forrest would think after hanging up for the fifth time in a day. Kim would ask (repeatedly): “Do you love me? Do you hate me? Are you mad at me? Why are you mad? You seemed mad when you left this morning—are you?”

  “I need to break up with you,” Forrest told Kim at one point. He’d agonized over the decision. “This is not working out.”

  She said no.

  “No?”

  “Not happening.”

  Forrest went home to the apartment they shared. “You need to leave,” he told Kim. This was about two weeks before she announced she was pregnant. She must have known she was pregnant then, but she wasn’t sharing the fact with him. Kim was holding on to her trump card. Knowing Forrest was a man’s man, a guy who had morals and integrity and would take care of his child, she was waiting for just the right moment to unload this big news, and use it to her advantage.

  “You need to get out,” Forrest said. He tried to “physically get her out” of the apartment, but couldn’t. She would not listen. She could not take rejection. Forrest didn’t want to hurt Kim; he just wanted her out of his apartment.

  “Kim, you need to leave.”

  At that point Kim clamped herself to Forrest like a child to her mother’s leg. She would not let go.

  “I was trying to get her out and she had, like, this grip on me . . . ,” he recalled. “I couldn’t get her off of me.”

  Human Velcro.

  Forrest had a son, Martin (pseudonym), who was five at the time. He lived there with them and had been with Forrest since the boy could walk. After breaking free of Kim, Forrest took his child and went to his mother’s house, telling Kim she needed to be gone when he came back the following day. It was over. If she could not leave right then, Forrest made clear, he would stay at his mother’s until Kim got the message and moved out.

  Before sunup the next morning, Forrest was awoken by his stepfather. “Hey, Forrest . . . get up. You need to get up.” It was too early to go anywhere or do the lawn or help the old man around the house.

  Something was going on.

  Something important.

  Something tragic.

  “What’s wrong?” Forrest asked.

  42

  FORREST LOOKED AT HIS STEPFATHER.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s the phone,” he said. “Forrest, get up—it’s for you.”

  “Hello?” Forrest said.

  It was the fire marshal telling Forrest his apartment “had been burned up.” Forrest was still half asleep. He wasn’t able to comprehend what was being explained to him.

  “What?”

  “Your apartment caught fire and burned up.”

  Kim. She was the last one inside the apartment. Though it was never proven that she lit the fire, it seemed obvious to everyone that she was getting Forrest back for running out on her and wanting to end the relationship.

  After getting dressed and rushing over to the apartment, Forrest called Kim.

  “What happened at your apartment?” Kim asked right away.

  “What do you mean? Why are you asking me that?” How could she know? Did she sit and watch it burn from the parking lot?

  “Well [the fire marshal] told me,” Kim said.

  “She had dated the city marshal,” Forrest explained later, “[and he] lived right across the parking lot from where my apartment was.”

  Continuing, Kim added, “He called me and told me that something had happened in your apartment, Forrest.”

  In the end Forrest had his “doubts,” he said, about Kim. The fire marshal told him that the door into his apartment was locked. However, Kim had a key. Nothing had been cooking; no candles burning; there was no apparent reason for the fire. Moreover, Kim had none of her belongings inside Forrest’s apartment at the time of the fire. On top of that, where the fire started was suspicious.

  The fire originated in the bedroom (where they had been arguing when Forrest walked out). Apparently, Forrest’s mattress spontaneously combusted, because the mattress caught fire and was put out after smoke was reported and the fire department arrived. Still, everything inside the apartment was trashed because of the black soot caused by all the smoke damage.

  Forrest had kept a photograph of him, his boy and his nephews in his room. They were smiling and having fun at the zoo. It was a picture dear to his heart—Kim knew this. When he went back to salvage what he could out of the apartment, he noticed that when he picked up anything in the room, there was a clean space underneath. All around, the item had been covered in black soot from the smoke; but when you picked the item up, it left an outline of the soot, or imprint of the item’s outline. Forrest couldn’t find that favorite photo at first. Then he walked over into the corner of the room and there it was: on the floor, facedown. He determined that the firemen could not have put it there because after picking it up, he saw an outline of the picture in black soot. So it had to have been placed facedown before the fire started. He remembered, specifically, before leaving during that argument with Kim, that the picture was where he had always kept it. There could be only one explanation, Forrest knew, for the scenario.


  Forrest did not have insurance for fire damage. He lost all of his clothes and his large collection of cowboy hats. Anything made of fabric had to be tossed. Many photos of his son had melted and were gone forever. The TV was a blob of plastic on the stand, as was anything else in the room made out of material that would melt.

  “You know, Kim, I left there mad,” Forrest said when things calmed down and he spoke to her, “the next thing I know, my apartment is on fire?”

  “Listen, Forrest, I would never, ever do anything like that to you. I love you.”

  Her sincerity felt real, honest, Forrest later said. “She was so convincing,” Forrest added. “If it would have happened after we got married, there would have been no question in my mind.” Meaning, he would have known Kim torched the place, because after they married, Kim revealed her true, horrible colors to him.

  This was that superficial charm all sociopaths exhibit—when at the top of their game, most could talk the Devil out of hell.

  Forrest thought about it. There’s no way that people do that kind of stuff to other people, he considered. It was unbelievable to him that a woman he loved, a woman who seemed genuine at times and even lovable at others, could love him and burn his apartment down.

  * * *

  Kim worked hard at gaining his trust and his love back. She pulled out all the stops. She put on her best behavior.

  Forrest bought Kim an engagement ring from a pawnshop. He was proud of the purchase. It was a nice ring. He’d “saved a lot” for it. The apartment complex gave Forrest a new apartment, the same layout, and he moved all of his stuff into it. Kim began staying with him again. They’d worked things out. They still argued and fought, but in the end Forrest always went back to believing in love.

  “What is this?” Kim said, staring at the ring.

  “Let’s get married,” Forrest said.

  Kim took the ring, looked up at Forrest, who thought she might throw her arms around him and jump for joy. Instead, Kim walked over to the sliding glass door leading out to the balcony, stepped out onto the deck and tossed the ring over the railing.

  The ring landed in the parking lot below.

  Forrest couldn’t believe it. How could she hurt him so profoundly, so impulsively? How could things go from a moment of great joy and celebration to absolute darkness?

  He ran downstairs and searched for the ring, locating it sometime later. If Kim wanted to get married, she’d have to accept the ring.

  Forrest Garner was not offering to buy another one.

  43

  FORREST WAS DRIVING, KIM SITTING shotgun. They were on their way to a clinic on Houston Street. Kim was in her third trimester. She was pushing forty, so they needed to run some tests on the fetus to see how things were going.

  At the clinic, the doctor explained that Kim would have to go to Baylor, a bit of a drive, so she could get an amniocentesis, an amniotic fluid test to determine if there are any fetal abnormalities. Usually, doctors insert a large needle in through the belly and extract a sample of the fluid.

  “I’ll take the day off,” Forrest said, “and drive you up there.”

  Kim said that would be fine.

  When the day came, they got into Forrest’s truck and headed out. It was early morning. Before getting on Gentry Parkway 69, Forrest had stopped, as he generally did, at the Starbucks down the block from the apartment to pick up hot coffees.

  As they drank their coffee and drove toward the test, Kim “started talking about” Forrest’s mother. Kim thought it was silly that Forrest’s mother had been upset that he had lived with her when they weren’t married. Kim would always encourage Forrest to stop talking to his mother. She wanted him to become estranged from his mother, just as she had done with her own.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m going to take you to [Baylor] and do all that stuff. Don’t bring up my mother’s name again today.”

  Kim looked at Forrest and, obviously, didn’t like what he said; she stripped the lid off her coffee and tossed the hot beverage all over his face and body.

  Forrest was overwhelmed with pain. He pulled over.

  After cleaning himself off, he got back into the truck, turned it around and headed back home.

  He got dressed when they returned, sat down in the living room and didn’t say anything.

  Hours went by, and Kim acted like nothing had happened.

  “[We] got back in the [truck], and I drove her,” Forrest recalled.

  * * *

  Kim gave birth to Timmy on November 11, 2005, seven months after they were married. Not four months later, Kim and Forrest were talking divorce. At the time Kim’s third husband was driving back and forth from where they lived outside Tyler to San Antonio for a company he worked for. The gig was three times a week. Forrest worked every other day, so he was around the apartment a lot, especially when the boys came home from school. On one of those days he was off, Forrest decided to make them all some sandwiches and have some chips and soda ready for them when they got out of school and walked through the door. A nice bonding experience. They’d appreciate it, Forrest knew. Kim was out. They could have some quiet father-son time together.

  The boys came home and were ecstatic. Forrest had made them this great early supper and there they were, sitting at the table, eating and talking and enjoying one another’s company, much like a normal family. On top of that, Forrest had taken the stress out of dinner for Kim, who had her hands full with a newborn baby. She didn’t have to worry about feeding those hungry mouths. She could come home from wherever she had gone off to and take it easy the rest of the night.

  When Kim walked in through the front door, Forrest was in another room doing something. Blake was in the kitchen, sitting, smiling and eating out of a bag of chips. He was a boy doing what boys do.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Kim screamed at the kid after walking into the kitchen. “Why are you eating chips?” She was livid. When Kim screamed, the walls shook, glass panes vibrated and the neighbors knew.

  Forrest heard her shouting at Blake and came running into the kitchen. “What’s going on? What’s wrong, Kim?”

  “He’s eating these chips!”

  “I told him he could have them, Kim. Calm down.”

  Forrest moved into the living room, away from Blake. He knew this was going to be a meltdown. He knew that look on Kim’s face. She meant business. She was in the mood to go at it.

  “She started hitting me in the face, like all over,” Forrest later explained. “I mean, just like hitting a punching bag—in the face, chest, everything.” With Kim, Forrest explained, there was never any slapping; she used her fists when she hit her men or the kids. These were not girl punches, either. Kim could throw a jab like a man.

  The kids walked into the living room to see what was happening. Kim was going crazy on Forrest as the kids looked on in horror. Blake was in one doorway, scared, yelling at his mother to stop.

  Forrest’s son, Martin, couldn’t take watching it. He ran toward his father and soon stood in between them. “Stop it! Stop it!” Martin told Kim.

  Kim cocked her arm back and swung a fist at Forrest’s son as hard as she could. “She hit him in the face and knocked him all the way across the living room,” Forrest said.

  The boy was five years old.

  This made Forrest turn into somebody he was not. She had hit the boy as hard as anyone would hit an adult in a fight. The kid was on the ground, crying, holding his face, a red welt swelling into a shiner.

  Without thinking about it, Forrest picked Kim up off the ground and shoved her across the room and into the fireplace. He’d had enough. This was the last time she would hurt a child in front of him.

  Forrest walked over and grabbed Martin, picked him up gently, patting the child on the back, then walked outside and away from Kim.

  Pacing outside, Forrest called his mother. He didn’t know what else to do.

  “And she called 911,” Forrest said later, meaning his m
other.

  Kim ran out of the apartment and left.

  The cops showed up. Forrest filed a report. His son’s face was swollen as though he’d been stung by a swarm of bees. His little eyelids were closing into slits.

  After the police left, Kim called.

  “You bastard,” she seethed. Of course, it was all Forrest’s fault. He’d instigated the trouble. If he could have just shut his mouth and not said anything about her disciplining her child, the entire incident could have been avoided. “I’m in the emergency room,” Kim continued. “You hit me and broke my jaw in two places.”

  “Whatever, Kim.” Forrest knew she was lying. If he had actually hit her, with his catcher’s-mitt-size hands, he would have knocked her unconscious and probably would have broken all the bones in her face.

  Before this incident Kim had had Forrest arrested on several occasions for what turned out to be one felony and two misdemeanors. She’d go off on a rant, throw stuff or try to get violent with Forrest or the kids; he would be forced to defend himself or the kids, and she would call the cops and say he hit her. This was a pattern with Kim. She was the aggressor—always. Yet, she turned it around anytime she involved the police. In the end it wound up costing Forrest close to $30,000, just about the same as Matt Robinson before him, to defend himself against the chaos and character assassination and lies and violence that made up Kim Cargill.

  Forrest Garner was able to plead down the felony and admit guilt on the two misdemeanors. He cut his losses and settled for two years’ probation.

  After Kim struck his son in the face, there was no coming back for Forrest. He moved in with his mother. Kim called three days later—right on schedule—but no one at Forrest’s mother’s house answered when she called. Kim was relentless. “Over and over and over and over,” Forrest said. “And we never answered the phone.”

  Kim would leave messages in a voice that was disturbing and eerie—a menacing, creepy whisper: “If you do not talk to me, something bad is going to happen.” They had heard that threat numerous times.