04.Die.My.Love.2007 (10 page)

“Tina and Piper were exceptionally close for sisters,” says Terry Wichelhaus, a tall, dark-haired former model. Wichelhaus had just moved to Houston with her then-husband, a doctor, and was in the process of building a mansion near the Medical Center when she met Tina at a party. Of all the doctors’ wives there that eve ning, Tina was the only one to go out of her way to befriend Wichelhaus. “Tina came across as really caring, and I was grateful for that,” she says. “Both Tina and Piper were that way, really showing a lot of concern for other people. They were charismatic and intelligent.

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There were things about both of them that made them stand out in a crowd.”

When asked about each other, both Tina and Piper gush with praise. Tina describes Piper as “brilliant, gifted, and artistic.” Piper describes Tina as “inspirational, a woman who makes a tremendous difference in many people’s lives, and a healer of women. She’s courageous. She gets in trouble sometimes, but it’s because she’s not afraid to grab the status quo by the horns.”

Where Piper was petite and dark, Tina, eight years older, was taller, more shapely and blond. Piper was always reed thin, while Tina had to watch her waistline. When it came to their personalities, too, they seemed opposites. Piper was flamboyant and often flighty, at gatherings bubbly and fun, while Tina was intense. Like Piper, Tina had a presence, but hers was a serious demeanor, a take-charge, motherly attitude. The connection between the two sisters was strong.

Those who knew them say that Tina had a power over her younger sister, that when Tina spoke, Piper listened.

In Houston, Tina, a nurse practitioner, owned and ran the Village Women’s Clinic in an eclectic neighborhood not far from Rice University. With a master’s degree in women’s medicine, and under the supervision of a physician, Texas law allowed Tina, who’d begun her career with a nursing degree from UT, to oversee patient care much as a general practitioner would, giving examinations, doing procedures, and prescribing medications.

In an old converted house on Bissonnet, a busy street in a neighborhood of older homes in what’s often referred to as Houston’s Rice Village, Tina and her staff dispensed medical care and counseled patients. By her own admission, the business side of the clinic, filling out forms and paying bills, held little interest for her. It was patient care that she loved.

In turn, many were devoted to her. “She’s this really amazing woman, who you just know cares about you as a person,”

72 / Kathryn Casey

says one patient, who has been with her for many years.

“Tina has a heart of gold.”

The Village Women’s Clinic didn’t accept insurance, and many of the patients who went there didn’t have any. Out front a large sign with a picture of a smiling Tina in a white medical jacket with a stethoscope around her neck listed her specialties: well-woman and school exams, weight counseling, emergency contraception for the morning- after pills she prescribed, and natural menopause counseling. Inside, the clinic was warm and inviting, decorated in antiques and Asian rugs.

Tina lived just blocks away, in an old gray Victorian cottage, on a corner lot on Albans Street not far from the acres of hospitals that comprise the Texas Medical Center and Houston’s downtown business district. In the past decade, homes in the neighborhood had been sold and demolished, leveled to yield lots on which the upwardly mobile built imposing two-story homes. So much square footage on such small lots often left only borders of trees and small patches of grass. In contrast, Tina’s yard was large and overgrown with vegetation. Wicker furniture waited on an inviting front porch, and in the living room she had a grand piano. Through the years, Tina gained a reputation for being an eccentric neighbor. When she complained that tree trimming companies charged too much, she climbed the thick, dark branches of her yard’s live oak trees with a saw. When Tina didn’t like streetlights the city installed, legend had it that she took a gun and shot the bulbs out. “When she digs in her heels she really digs in her heels,” says a man she dated. “You can’t tell what will set her off or why, but when she gets stubborn, Tina can be famously stubborn.”

At Christmas she gave parties that included horse-drawn carriage rides through the streets of Houston. Up to one hundred people packed her house, as her German shepherd meandered through the crowd. All the while, Tina drank DIE, MY LOVE / 73

amaretto and circulated, pinning down guests for intimate conversations. She had a strong intellectual curiosity and often psychoanalyzed those around her. She was habitually late, even for patient appointments at the clinic, but when she arrived, she entered a room like a whirlwind. And those who knew her would say that like Piper, Tina Rountree knew how to live life to the fullest, to suck the pleasure out of every moment.

Later, Tina would say that when Piper arrived in December 2000, she and Callie were both ill and exhausted.

“The first seventy-two hours, Piper slept,” Tina says.

She nursed them, she contends, weaning them back to health. Piper told her about what had happened at the doctor’s offi ce the day before, describing the injection she’d received as Valium to treat a migraine. She said Fred had been furious, that he’d ripped her clothes off and put her to bed, calling her an embarrassment. Fred, she charged, had been behind the entire incident, claiming, as she had the night before to Linda Purcell, that he’d drugged her.

A troubled marriage was a subject it could certainly be expected that Tina would identify with. Her first marriage to an attorney yielded two sons and ended in divorce. Only two months later she married Dr. Praver, the Houston gynecologist she’d later claim had dispensed Prozac to Fred Jablin.

Praver’s marriage of thirty-four years to his wife, Maureen, had ended abruptly about the same time Tina’s had. “We had an Ozzie-and-Harriet-style family,” says Praver’s daughter, Janet. “All of a sudden, Tina was in the picture and our lives as we knew them were over.”

On July 1, 1990, one week after Dr. Praver walked out on Maureen, she committed suicide. Their oldest son, Rick, was so incensed he sued his father. During the height of the family chaos, in 1992, Tina wrote a letter to Rick. In it, she psychoanalyzed the Praver children, chastising them for not accepting her in their lives. “It’s like you’re all stuck at three 74 / Kathryn Casey

years old,” she wrote. “Someone takes your toy away and you either hit the kid back or just withdraw from the big mean thing that took your toy away.” She never acknowl-edged that what they had lost wasn’t a mere toy, but their mother. She closed by writing: “At least have the guts to tell me to my face you think I’m a blond bimbette after your dad’s $.”

The lawsuits were dropped after Rick, too, committed suicide.

Howard Praver married Tina Rountree Gano in August 1990. Friends say that he called her “Sunshine” and had their towels embroidered with yellow suns. Yet the marriage ended after five years. Their parting was bitter. She claimed in court papers that he’d been physically and psychologically abusive. “Never happened,” he’d say years later. Again playing psychiatrist, she wrote to the court, “I was concerned for his mental condition.”

Three years after the marriage to Praver ended in divorce, Tina Rountree Gano Praver was dating Grant Heatzig, a geologist who ran a small oil-related company. A tall, good-looking English transplant, Heatzig had been diagnosed with leukemia years earlier but appeared to be in remission.

He and Tina dated for months and then broke up. Friends say that when he suffered a stroke and was diagnosed with a brain tumor, she came back into his life.

In October 1999, eight days after brain surgery, Heatzig would later contend, Tina invited him to Las Vegas. When they arrived, he learned that she’d asked her family and friends to meet them there, to witness their wedding at the posh Bellagio Hotel and Casino. He’d claim he knew nothing of the plan, but that he cared about Tina and decided to go through with the ceremony. Terry Wichelhaus had only two hours notice to get on the airplane for Las Vegas to be at the wedding. “Grant was brilliant, a supreme human being, but he was so ill,” she remembers. “We all knew he was dy-DIE, MY LOVE / 75

ing. We thought maybe the marriage would be good for him.

Tina was a nurse and she could take care of him.”

It didn’t turn out that way. Tina hired caregivers to watch over her husband, day and often into the night. He grew lonely and angry, and six months after they married, in March 2000, filed for an annulment. Tina countered and filed for a divorce. In his annulment application Heatzig wrote: “It is my opinion that Tina induced me into the civil marriage ceremony in Las Vegas solely for the purpose of attaining financial gain for herself without any real intent of acting as my wife.”

If Tina had hoped to cash in on Heatzig’s wealth, in excess of a million dollars, that didn’t happen. In the end she received little, just $50,000 and his membership at the Houstonian, the stylish hotel and athletic club in Houston’s posh Galleria shopping district, whose members are success-driven young professionals and Houston’s movers and shak-ers. It was a Houstonian hotel room that the fi rst President George Bush listed as his official Texas address during his years in the White House.

The way the marriage ended, Terry and others sided with Heatzig, and their view of Tina changed. Instead of a caring woman, they thought they saw another side of her, that of a calculating woman willing to take advantage of a dying man.

“Grant was bitter about Tina,” says Wichelhaus. “It was so cold, making his last year so troubled.”

Six months after the marriage officially ended, in December 2000, Heatzig died. That same month, Piper arrived on Tina’s doorstep. “I wasn’t just her sister, I was Piper’s best friend,” says Tina flatly. “Of course, I took her in.”

Perhaps it was as much for the children as her sister. “Tina didn’t have any girls, so Callie and Jocelyn were extra special to her,” says Glenda King, a close friend. “Tina thought of herself as more than an aunt.”

The way Tina would later tell it, Callie ran a low-grade 76 / Kathryn Casey

fever during the beginning of the visit. She’d diagnose it as a minor influenza. And Piper was suffering from exhaustion and more. “Her spirit had been beaten down,” says Tina.

“She was so dependent on Fred, by his design, she couldn’t do anything. I worked with her, told her she was strong and inde pen dent, that she needed to get out of the situation. Before long the old Piper returned, the spunky Piper. Fred was undermining her self- esteem.”

After his week at Disney World with Jocelyn and Paxton, Fred flew to Piper in Texas—as he had seventeen years earlier when he flew to Germany to convince her to return to him. He brought both the older children with him, in his bid to reclaim his youngest daughter and his wife and re unite his family.

Days later he and Piper returned to Virginia, Fred would say later, with the agreement that he would find a teaching position that would bring them back to Texas. That winter he did, in fact, apply for a position at UT, in the communications department where he’d once worked with Daly. Perhaps Piper intended to do the same, to make changes and to try to keep their family together. Later the evidence would suggest otherwise, and that what was on her mind that winter was money.

Months earlier Fred had taken nearly all Piper’s credit cards away, but that December she maneuvered to get them back. When Fred’s Purdue MasterCard disappeared, he reported it lost. Later he’d charge that Piper then intercepted the replacement card in the mail, along with a new CitiBank card she ordered on his account. In less than thirty days Piper would charge more than $9,000 in cash advances and purchases of $10,454.77 on Fred’s credit cards, along with transferring $3,000 from his paycheck into an individual account she opened at a Wachovia bank. What Piper bought on the cards would later make it seem that she was building DIE, MY LOVE / 77

a nest egg for her future, including clothes, tennis equipment, three years’ worth of prepaid hair salon services, and $7,000 in prepaid moving services, more than enough to move her home to Texas.

It would be nearly a month before Fred would learn of the new debt, but the strained marriage still barely lasted through the holidays. To Fred’s great sadness, just after the New Year, on January 6, 2001, Piper packed her bags and moved out of the Hearthglow house. By then her friend Loni was in the midst of a divorce. Piper took advantage of having a refuge to flee to and moved in with Loni.

For the next few months it seemed Piper wasn’t sure what she would do, as she moved back and forth between Loni’s home and the house on Hearthglow Lane. Loni would recall that period as great fun, saying that she worked while Piper stayed home and kept the house and cooked dinners. During the week, Fred had the children, but on weekends they joined Piper at Loni’s. On her days off, she and Piper took the children to Richmond’s Maymont, a parklike setting on the James River, with Japanese and Italian gardens, a Victorian mansion, and a petting zoo. There, they picnicked, the children played, and Piper painted. In the eve nings the women drank wine and talked. “We did bubbles, putting the kids in the tub together,” says Loni. “It was fun, and everyone got along. It was a wonderful time.”

When Piper circulated back home with Fred, the scene wasn’t as tranquil. Instead, on January 11, Piper called the police, complaining that during an argument Fred pushed her into a wall. She did, in fact, have a small cut on one hand. Yet when the officer asked if it was from the argument, Piper said she didn’t think so.

Later, Fred, who’d grown so thin he appeared only slightly larger than his diminutive wife, would tell others that Piper had pushed him, and that it had shocked him that she could be 78 / Kathryn Casey

physically aggressive. But that day, to the police, he described the argument as purely verbal. Looking for the truth, the police questioned the Jablin children, who’d been there throughout the confrontation. They agreed with their father, that there’d been no physical violence. On their forms, the police noted that there were no signs of physical abuse.