04.Die.My.Love.2007 (13 page)

Fred thought for a minute and admitted, “Probably not.”

The first courtroom custody battle was scheduled for August, and both Piper and Fred enlisted family and neighbors to be witnesses. Piper asked Annie Williams, who refused.

She couldn’t forget the glazed look she’d seen on Piper’s face, and she worried that perhaps her friend was taking drugs. By then Piper was threatening to also charge adultery in the divorce, although she offered no evidence that Fred had been unfaithful. In her e-mails to friends, she fumed, angry at the turn her life had taken. It seemed apparent that she hadn’t envisioned the divorce turning out as it had thus far, that she’d have little money and that Fred would be pushing for custody of the children.

“My life is a mess,” she wrote. “Generally, I am screwed.”

Although Piper had written two résumés, one touting herself as an artist and the other as an attorney, she had yet to find a job. Fred told many that she wasn’t truly looking, and a sentence in one of her e-mails suggested he was right.

“If I take a job during the summer while the kids are out of school it will be held against me,” she wrote, regarding custody. She’d offered to give art lessons to the neighborhood children in Kingsley, many her own children’s friends, but at $350 a week per child. “It was insane,” says one neighbor.

“Why would she think any of us would be willing to do that?”

On the flyer she distributed to drum up students for her art classes, Piper wrote: “It’s about nurturing. It’s about needs. It’s about soul and spirit. It’s about color, light, and love.” Meanwhile, on the Internet, she put her artwork up for sale on a Yahoo website she named Light Worker Galleries.

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When someone asked, she defined a light worker as a type of mystic, someone who acted as an intermediary between the physical and the spiritual worlds.

Each time Jocelyn, Paxton, and Callie went with their mother, Fred stewed, worried about what could happen.

When she took the children out in a boat without life pre-servers, he called it more proof of her bad judgment. “Why would a mother do that? Why?” he asked everyone who’d listen. Incensed, he redoubled his efforts to gain sole legal custody, filing more motions against her, using more of her own e-mails as evidence, including the tawdry comment about the joystick.

In Austin, when Margaret Surratt, who worked in the UT

office, heard about the divorce, she felt sorry for Piper, remembering how single-minded Fred could be. She had no doubt that he would be a tenacious opponent in a divorce.

“Putting those two personalities together over time had to be volatile,” she says. “Piper was a butterfly, and Fred was a bloodhound.”

In Harlingen, meanwhile, rumors circulated about Piper’s divorce, especially whispers questioning why a mother would lose custody of her children. Old high school friends heard the gossip: that Piper had a physician lover who’d offered her the world, and all that stood in the way was Fred, who refused to let her have the children. “The entire Rountree family was up in arms about it,” says a friend. “They saw it as unfathomable that Piper, who was this wonderful mother, would lose custody.”

The custody hearing on August 6 was contentious throughout. Tina and Piper posed poster- sized photos of the children with Piper and other members of their family in the gallery seats, a way of displaying for the judge the happy family the children enjoyed with the Rountrees. On the stand, two of Piper’s friends testified that she was a good mother, the kind who cheered for her children on the sidelines during soccer 96 / Kathryn Casey

games. But others testified otherwise. Melody had struggled with whether she’d take the stand on Fred’s behalf. She thought back to her own experiences as a mother and felt a sense of compassion for Piper, whom she’d once considered a friend. Despite everything, she knew that Piper, in her own way, loved the children more than life itself. All mothers make mistakes. Was she being too hard on Piper? she wondered.

And there was something else: She asked Fred if he thought testifying could put her and her family in danger.

She’d grown to believe Piper was ill, and she didn’t know what she might do.

“I can’t tell you that you’ll be safe from Piper. I don’t know what she’ll do anymore,” he answered, his brow knot-ted in worry. “I fear that someday she might do something that unintentionally hurts the children. Every time they go with her, my heart is in my throat.”

In his darkest thoughts, he admitted, he feared that in one of her depressions she might kill herself and, not willing to leave them behind, the children.

In the end Melody decided that despite the risks, helping Fred keep custody was the right thing to do.

In the courtroom, before the hearing, Piper approached her saying, “I’m glad you’re here, Mel. Now you can help straighten this mess up,” as if she didn’t realize Melody was Fred’s witness, not hers.

On the stand, Melody told the judge everything she’d observed, including Piper’s inattention to the children and her erratic behavior. She could feel Piper’s eyes on her. “I kept my eyes straight ahead,” she says. “I didn’t look at her. The children worshipped Piper, and she was a lot of things to those children, but she wasn’t a good mother.”

When it was his turn on the witness stand, Fred told of the uncertainty in his life since the separation. That same night he had another example, when it appeared that Piper had DIE, MY LOVE / 97

again entered the Hearthglow house. After taking the children out for dinner and a movie, Fred returned home to fi nd his mail not in the mailbox, but inside the house on a table.

He made a note of the event on his computer, adding it to a long list of Piper’s transgressions: “Entered house and went through mail.” Each day, he meticulously recorded her sins and omissions: the birthday cake she promised to but never baked for one of the children, the days when she had custody and refused to take them to their therapy sessions, dance lessons, and soccer practices.

The following day brought more bedlam, when Tina showed up at the Hearthglow house unannounced and stormed into the front yard. The nanny, Ana, was outside with Paxton and Callie, and when Ana confronted her, Tina pushed past her and went upstairs to see Jocelyn. Ana called Fred, who talked to Tina on the telephone, ordering her to leave. Tina hung up on him. He rushed home, but by the time he arrived, Tina was gone, leaving the children in disarray. Jocelyn was sobbing, Callie appeared confused, and Paxton, upset, spent the rest of the eve ning in his room.

At the University of Richmond, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer James MacGregor Burns joined the Jepson School as a se nior fellow, and Fred, as acting dean, welcomed him aboard. Meanwhile, Piper fired her second divorce attorney, one of the finest in Richmond, and wrote terse letters to Fred’s attorney, Susanne Shilling, claiming she was holding improper conversations with the judge and offering her instructions on how to be ethical. When Fred dropped the children off that weekend, Piper again called the police, this time claiming Fred had pushed an envelope at her, hitting her stomach. She showed no signs of injury, and the magistrate refused to issue a warrant or protective order.

In September, when Judge Hammond’s decision came down, she continued the temporary joint custody arrangement, yet again gave Fred physical custody. She also took 98 / Kathryn Casey

another action: At Fred’s request, Hammond limited Piper’s phone calls to the children to between 7:00 and 7:30 p.m.

Fred would later say that Piper never lived by the judge’s order, calling at all hours, especially after he had put the children to bed. Judge Hammond did one more thing: She hired Dr. Sherman Master, a psychiatrist, to evaluate both Piper and Fred, to advise her on their suitability for raising the children.

That fall, no matter where Fred turned, Piper was there, interjecting herself into the lives of the children. She was at The Jack and Jill School, where Callie was in prekindergar-ten, eating a snack with the children, when Fred arrived to pick up the five-year-old. When Fred told Callie to come to him, Piper clung to the child. When Piper finally left, she squealed the tires on her van as she pulled from the parking lot as the teachers and children watched.

At Pinchbeck Elementary, Piper showed up often to eat lunch with Paxton, something she’d rarely done before her actions had come under scrutiny of the divorce court. She even signed on as the nine-year-old’s room mother. When Jocelyn’s Girl Scout troop toured Monument Avenue, Piper volunteered to help chaperone. The eve ning Fred worked with Paxton on his pinewood derby car in the Cub Scout leader’s garage, while Jocelyn and Callie played nearby, Fred looked up and saw Piper in her car in the street, staring at them. He asked her to leave, but Piper remained, watching her children and her soon to be ex-husband, the family that once was hers.

Throughout 2001, Ciulla observed Fred Jablin, wondering how he was bearing up under the strain. She’d heard such bizarre stories about Piper’s behavior. She knew he was worried. He talked often of Tina and her infl uence on Piper, speculating that Tina could be behind some of Piper’s behavior. Oddly enough, what she saw was that rather than DIE, MY LOVE / 99

interfering with his teaching, Fred was becoming more in tune with his students. “All he was going through seemed to humanize him,” says Ciulla. “He’d been this rigorous, tough scholar, who demanded the best from his students. Now he was more aware of them as individuals. He understood that sometimes life interfered.”

In November, Susanne Shilling deposed Piper on the stand, while Piper’s fourth divorce attorney, Robert L. Harris Jr., listened. That afternoon, Piper portrayed herself as an exceptional mother and an exceptional attorney, one who’d done landmark work in school law in Texas. Through personal study, she said she was qualified as a master chef, a mineralogist, a nutritionist, and that she’d taken a correspondence course from England’s Cambridge University and earned a designation called Bard, qualifying her as a storyteller and poet. She claimed to be working toward a Druid designation. “The druid level is a wider spectrum of application,” she testified. “My name Rountree is an Irish name that means sacred holder of the knowledge of the tree.” That day, she talked of angels, and said she’d once written a pamphlet for tennis students she’d entitled “Tennis and the Inner Light.” She even claimed to be a master scuba diver who’d once supervised the training of a group of Navy SEALs. When asked if she’d looked for work, Piper said her background “was in raising my children . . .

that is full-time employment.”

On the stand, Piper’s mantra was “for the children.” When Shilling inquired about all the credit card bills she’d run up, including purchasing seven tennis rackets, Piper replied,

“The kids went through a lot of rackets.” When she asked about the $705.40 she’d charged for future services at the Beyond the Fringe hair salon, Piper said, “It was for the children.”

Others testifi ed at that hearing, including an employment 100 / Kathryn Casey

specialist who questioned Piper’s contention that she’d been unable to find a job. Even as a paralegal, a job for which she was in demand and amply qualified, Piper could have earned up to $40,000 a year.

That fall and winter the e-mails between Fred and Piper were cordial if cool. They concerned Callie’s birthday party at Skate Nation, dropping off and picking up the children from visitation, the children’s grades, and the distribution of their income tax refund. At times Fred seemed exasperated, trying to pin down Piper on simple issues, like when the kids would be arriving or leaving, or where they’d be staying when she took them to Texas for Christmas that year. In response, Piper chastised him, acting as if he had that information, and saying, “People often get forgetful in times of crisis.” She went on to say it frightened the children when he didn’t remember things. “PLEASE do not scare the children,” she wrote.

Fred forwarded the e-mails to Shilling with his own comment written in the margin: “Very emotional response with numerous fabrications . . . worries me a lot.”

Meanwhile, the divorce proceeded.

After the first of the year, January 2002, a flurry of activity began regarding the psychological reports Judge Hammond had ordered, including faxes to the court from the psychiatrist, Dr. Master, and Leigh Hagan, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist Master had asked to consult on the case. When it came time to distribute Hagan’s actual report, Piper barred the psychologist from giving it to Fred and his attorney, but Dr. Welton’s subpoenaed rec ords from his two years treating Piper went into the divorce record.

On January 7, 2002, nearly a year after Fred had fi rst fi led for divorce, Hagan testified in Hammond’s courtroom. He recounted his assessments, saying he’d given both Piper and Fred a variety of psychological tests. People who scored like Piper did, Hagan said, tended to be suspicious and place DIE, MY LOVE / 101

blame on others, they had difficulty with personal account-ability and

were quick to anger. In Hagan’s assessment, Piper was recklessly impulsive and had diffi culty dealing with change. “They find loopholes and work around them when they feel corralled by somebody else’s regulations.”

That day on the stand, Hagan speculated on fi ve possible diagnoses for Piper: ADD, bipolar disorder, disassociative disorder (in the past called multiple-personality disorder), substance abuse, or a character disorder. All suggested that Piper might be hyperemotional and have impaired judgment. “I found a greater weight of a theory of disassociative disorder,” Hagan said, pegging a likely reason as Piper’s father’s alcoholism and stroke.

“She was not able to rule out for me the possibility of having been sexually victimized in her childhood,” he testifi ed.

When Hagan talked of Fred, he had nothing damaging to report. In fact, he said Fred had high moral aspirations and that people who answered as he did on the tests tended to

“go along to get along. Tend to be peacemakers and tranquil, and didn’t have a hair trigger temper.” Fred, he said, was a man who would rarely anger and would rely on tact and di-plomacy, not being “a bull in a china shop.”