04.Die.My.Love.2007 (14 page)

On the stand, Dr. Master would disagree with Hagan about Piper, discounting a possible diagnosis of disassociative disorder, which could result in periods of forgetfulness and feelings of being “outside of themselves.” He labeled Hagan’s assessment as “a theory, that’s all.” Perhaps Piper didn’t tell Master what she’d tell others: that at times she lay in bed and imagined transporting herself out of her body, across the miles, into her children’s bedrooms while they slept.

“She said she whispered in their ears that she loved them,”

says a friend.

Contrary to Hagan’s assessment, Master’s diagnosis for Piper was ADD and an adjustment disorder that mixed anxiety and depression. He blamed it on her limited access to 102 / Kathryn Casey

her children. “I don’t know that her disorder would cause her to be incompetent as a mother,” he testified. When questioned by Shilling, Master said that Piper had been on stimulants for her ADD, as well as antianxiety and antidepression medication, since 1994. Under questioning by Berkeley, the guardian
ad litem
appointed by the judge to represent the children’s best interests, Master testified that to manage Piper’s condition would take long-term therapy.

“If she got consistent help, she would be all right,” he said.

When it came to Fred, Dr. Master said that Piper’s husband saw himself as blameless in the conflict, although “it takes two to tango.” And he speculated that Fred could, under stress, overreact.

Something else came out that day under questioning by the judge: Master said that Piper had told him she’d begun the affair with Gable in February 2001, before the divorce was filed. “That is a specifi c date she gave me and she even put it in writing,” he said. That date was important, since Fred’s grounds for the divorce were adultery.

On the stand that day, Ana, the children’s nanny, also testified. She recounted a day Piper had broken a window to get into the house. Ana walked in and found Piper washing her clothes in the washing machine and cleaning up the glass. “I don’t want the kids to see it,” she told Ana, who’d called Fred immediately to report the break-in.

“The children already know,” Ana told Piper, describing her as agitated.

Also before the judge, Fred’s attorney placed letters from the children’s therapists, dance and music teachers, and athletic coaches, documenting that Piper didn’t take them to their activities, or even counseling sessions intended to help them through the emotional barrage of the divorce. Perhaps the saddest moment was when Jocelyn’s therapist testifi ed how deeply depressed the twelve-year-old was.

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On the stand, Dr. Gable, Piper’s lover, testified on her behalf. She was a good mother, he said, and he described Fred as an absent father. The physician, appearing nervous and wringing his hands, contended that Fred put undue pressure on the children, citing a day Gable and Piper were taking Jocelyn to an art lecture. Fred had refused to let her go, wanting her to study because she’d failed a math test. Jocelyn had sobbed, crying, “What do I do?” over and over.

When Shilling took over the questioning, another picture of the physician emerged, as she listed events the children had missed while they were allegedly with him and Piper.

The doctor insisted he knew nothing of the children missing doctors’ appointments and soccer practice. Under questioning, he did, however, admit kissing Piper in front of the children. And there was something else, something many had speculated about for months. “Finally, sir, let me ask you this, can you tell me why you prescribed drugs for Ms.

Rountree?” Shilling asked.

After a pause, he answered: “I did it on a few occasions, as a favor.”

“I have learned what my children like to eat for breakfast,”

Fred began when he testified at a February custody hearing.

He talked of waiting at the school bus stop and taking Callie to preschool, playtime and bedtime reading, tucking them into bed and kissing them good-night. This was a new Fred Jablin, one who baked a cake for Paxton’s class and bought Jocelyn’s first bra. For the judge, Fred described each child: Joce and Callie were happy children, doing well, while Paxton, who’d been closest to his mother, was having the worst time of the divorce.

The children, he said, were suffering from the chaos Piper brought into their lives. He talked of the Sunday night he was cooking dinner after picking the children up at Piper’s, when Joce handed him a note. “Why are you holding us 104 / Kathryn Casey

hostage?” it read. He didn’t believe she’d written it willingly, but that Piper had dictated it to her.

That night, Fred sat with the children, trying to explain the intricacies of divorce. He wasn’t the one who would decide if they lived with their mother or with him, he said, that decision rested with the judge. The children cried, upset and confused.

Yet, despite all they’d been through, Fred insisted he didn’t want to push Piper out of the children’s lives. “I value the time my wife spends with my children. I have a tremendous amount of compassion for my wife, and I know that she loves my children very much,” he testified. That understood, he said he wanted Piper to abide by the rules, not to interfere with their lives. Fred insisted he’d been functioning as a single parent for a long time, and that Piper was periodically so dysfunctional that she sat and literally stared at the walls.

That wasn’t all, he said. His ex-wife frightened him.

Piper glared at him when he looked up and saw her at Paxton’s soccer games. And there was something else, something he found very troubling: Piper had taken the children to Richmond’s historic Hollywood Cemetery, a gracious, rolling landscape with views of the James River and the downtown skyline. It wasn’t where they’d gone that bothered him. The cemetery was a pop ular tourist destination and a beautiful place, where history came alive. There, U.S.

Presidents James Monroe and John Tyler, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis are all buried, along with 18,000

Confederate soldiers.

It was what Piper had done with the children while they were there that Fred found distressing.

Amidst the stained, aging headstones, the sculptures of angels that looked toward the heavens, and solitary women who leaned forlornly against crosses, Piper had posed the three children for ghostly photographs, their eyes blackened and their faces solemn.

DIE, MY LOVE / 105

“It was frightening,” Fred told the judge.

Others testified that day, including Tina, who portrayed Piper as a good mother. She described Fred, on the other hand, as insulting to the children, highly critical and hurt-ful. As an illustration, Tina said Fred had once called Joce

“stupid” for spilling milk. Rather than Piper, she said Fred suffered from depression, and she testified under oath to what her ex-husband, Dr. Howard Praver, would later label as a lie: that he gave Fred a prescription for Prozac.

On cross exam, Shilling suggested Tina’s testimony was a

“fabrication.”

All was not going well for Piper’s side that day in the courtroom, which should have been obvious when the judge told her attorney: “Your client’s credibility is an issue, because I have three columns of things here that she told me at different times that are not consistent.” Still, the following month Piper submitted her suggested custody plan to the court, a joint arrangement where she and Fred alternated weeks.

At a convention that year, Fred sat with Daly, Miller, and other colleagues, old friends all, and told them of the tragedy of his marriage, the slow, painful unraveling that was consuming his life, costly both in attorney’s fees and emotional aching. “How could a mother do these things to her own children?” he asked. “Why would she?”

Although Fred found no real answers to his questions, which he’d repeat over and over throughout the ordeal, in the courts the case was nearing a conclusion, at least regarding custody.

In a letter dated March 5, 2002, Judge Hammond mailed her decision to all those involved. Both parties, she said, loved their children, but the animosity between them was potentially detrimental to the children. “Dr. Jablin is more of a peacemaker, more able to bend,” she wrote. In the letter, the judge singled out the testimony of Jocelyn’s psychiatrist, 106 / Kathryn Casey

who’d testified that she’d improved during the time Fred had custody. For those reasons and others, Hammond ruled that while Piper and Fred would continue to share joint legal custody, Fred would have permanent physical custody of all three children.

When the decision came down, Piper was inconsolable.

She cried on the telephone with friends. When they asked why the decision had gone against her, she didn’t talk of her adultery or her bizarre behavior, but of Fred. He was a master of manipulation, she said, and he’d connived to foil her in the courtroom, using his mastery in communication. But for her it all boiled down to one defeat:

“I’m going to lose my babies,” she told Annie Williams.

Three days after the judge’s decision came down, Piper retaliated.

Although Tina was not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, the previous November she had written a psychological profi le of Fred. The result was far from fl attering.

Now, with the judge’s decision against her, Piper e-mailed it to friends, family, and neighbors. Attached to an e-mail from Piper’s [email protected] account, the report was referenced as “Jablin Psychological Profi le”

and marked: “Relevant if you have children he supervises.”

Although the forty-two-page treatise had nothing to do with the court case, Piper introduced it by writing: “After serious consideration of the wider implications of the attached
court
report,
I am forwarding it to you.”

From page one, Tina got right to the point: “I am writing this letter out of grave concern for the current and future welfare of the children who have been placed under the care of Fred Jablin.” She began by presenting her credentials.

Some of it was blatantly untrue, as when she described her clinic as in the “heart of the Texas Medical Center.” In truth, DIE, MY LOVE / 107

the clinic wasn’t located within the acres of skyscrapers and hospitals that comprised the Medical Center at all, much less at its center. Tina also claimed to hold an honorary position as a professor at the University of Texas for her “exper-tise in pediatrics and women’s health issues.” Later, a UT

spokesperson would find no record of Tina having ever fi lled any such position at the school.

From that point on the paper was a direct assault on Fred Jablin’s character, morals, and ethics. Tina labeled Fred a narcissist, who cared about no one but himself, and said that he had no empathy for others, including Piper or their children. “I am HIGHLY ALARMED that the children, Jocelyn, Paxton, and Callie have been turned over to Fred,”

she wrote. She accused him of “violent and dangerous out-bursts” and a “calculated pattern of intentional neglect.”

He should never have influence over small children, she wrote, underlining the passage for emphasis. She claimed Fred regularly smoked marijuana and had physically and sexually assaulted Piper, and deprived her of money and affection. Tina contended that Fred suffered from a “pervasive pattern of grandiosity . . . a need for admiration and a lack of empathy.” When they were with him, she said, the children were “at a high risk for psychological abuse.”

“Fred Jablin actively oppresses any student [sic] (or child’s) needs which are contrary to his viewpoint,” she wrote.

The headings shouted out: “Suicide and Dr. Jablin’s Psychological Manipulation of his Children,” and “Expectations of ‘Entitlement’ of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”

Fred had been so excited about Jocelyn’s birth he’d shown the video to his friends, yet Tina wrote that he had only disdain for children and had never wanted them. And she again made the claim she’d made in the courtroom, one that her ex-husband would vehemently deny: that Dr. Praver treated Fred. “After seeing for himself several alarming incidents of 108 / Kathryn Casey

Fred’s rage and stress reaction when he felt out of control, Howard discussed with him the merits of dealing with his stress with the medication Prozac. Thereafter my husband wrote him a prescription for Prozac for years.”

Tina went on to assert, despite Jocelyn’s psychiatrist testifying to the contrary, that in Fred’s care “Jocelyn has been bordering on anorexia and suicide for months.” She said that Fred had beaten Paxton, and she even took a swipe at Fred’s religion, saying that Jews had a persecution complex.

After it arrived on her computer, Melody forwarded the e-mail to Fred. It was a blind e-mail, and there was no way to tell who else had received it. It hit Fred hard. He called friends and colleagues, anyone he thought might have it, to try to explain that the report wasn’t a court document. “It’s a miserable creation of her sister, Tina Rountree,” Fred e-mailed to Paxton’s Cub Scout leader, one of the many who received it. One recipient was connected to the University of Richmond. That week, Fred withdrew his name from consideration for the deanship of the leadership school.

In hindsight, that e-mail would have a chilling effect on what was already a deteriorating situation.

With no idea who had or hadn’t received the e-mail, Fred acted as if anyone he met, anyone he dealt with, could have read Tina’s damning psychobabble. He cornered people at work, at the children’s schools, friends in the grocery store, and neighbors on the street to ask if they’d received anything odd from Piper that pretended to be a court document.

At a school event, he approached one parent, asking her if she’d received the e-mail, trying to explain. She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, unable to understand why Fred would appear so out of control.

Two days after receiving the e-mail, Fred sent one to Piper:

“The defaming messages and attachments you have been broadcasting via e-mail and attachments are detrimental to DIE, MY LOVE / 109

the children’s welfare.” Angry and hurt, he then rescinded an invitation he’d extended to Piper to come to the Hearthglow house for Paxton’s birthday party that weekend. On the thirteenth, he took more serious action, filing a formal petition with Judge Hammond for an emergency hearing on custody, asking for fewer visitations for Piper, because of the “psychological problems underlying the defendant’s conduct.”