04.Die.My.Love.2007 (15 page)

That spring, the Jepson School had a new dean, Ken Ruscio, who’d come from Washington and Lee University, where he’d been a professor in the School of Commerce, Econom-ics, and Politics. Despite what must have been his bitter disappointment, Fred was helpful, guiding Ruscio through the transition. Perhaps it was all for the best, he told a friend.

Now, after all that had happened, he knew he needed more time for the children. Increasingly, the children were becoming Fred’s world.

Still, there was no way to completely end the struggle, to excise Piper from his life. After all, they had been married for nearly two decades, and they had the three children, a bond that Fred could never completely break.

In May, Piper showed up at Byrd Middle School and demanded that Jocelyn be released to leave with her. She was furious when the school, following the court orders they’d been supplied, refused. That afternoon, when she was supposed to pick up Jocelyn for visitation, Piper showed up forty minutes late and then, again, didn’t take her to ballet class.

When school let out for the summer, Piper had her fi rst job since the divorce, as an art counselor at a Girl Scout camp. In e-mails she offered to bring the children with her.

Despite all that had happened, it would later seem that Fred was still willing to include her in their children’s lives. He agreed, but before it would take place, Piper had quit.

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The push and pull of visitation went on throughout the summer, as they negotiated how and when the children would see their mother. Everything became a battle of the e-mails, from setting up summer tutoring to the children’s report cards. Although he didn’t need her permission, Fred consistently advised Piper of his plans; uniformly, she disagreed, as if attempting to retain some control of her children’s lives. When Fred asked her for information, Piper simply didn’t answer, leaving him and the children uncertain.

By then many on Hearthglow Lane were noticing the toll the divorce was taking on the Jablin children. They’d become quieter, more reticent to play with friends, withdrawn.

“Our hearts just went out to them,” says a neighbor. “We knew all three were suffering.”

On July 15, Fred and Piper were again in court, this time to discuss her offensive e-mail. In his petition, Fred had asked the judge to order her to give him the names of all those she’d e-mailed it to and to ban her from sending it to anyone else. At the hearing, Piper, who’d gone through fi ve attorneys, represented herself. “All through the divorce, Piper had been acting crazy with Fred, then showing up in the courtroom controlled and acting like a lawyer,” says Melody. “Once Piper sent that e-mail, the judge had an indication of what was really going on.”

The divorce and custody still

weren’t final, and Fred

wanted the judge to rule an end to what had been more than a year-long court battle.

On the stand that day, Shilling walked Fred through the e-mail, asking if the allegations of violence and psychological abuses were true. “No,” he answered. What bothered him as much as anything were the ste reo types in the e-mail about Jews. “It says we have a hereditary predisposition, a gene tic predisposition, or some type of complex, or whatever that her hack sister . . . perpetuated, and this woman is DIE, MY LOVE / 111

spreading. My children are, in fact, part Jewish, your honor.”

As he said “this woman,” Fred pointed at Piper in disgust.

That Jocelyn was anorexic or suicidal flew in the face of what her therapist had testified to in front of the judge. Fred pointed out, “He said she was doing well.”

“I object,” Piper said.

“She is not anorexic,” Fred shouted, characterizing the e-mail as “close to a hate crime.”

That day a strange event would take place, as Piper, acting as her own attorney, questioned Fred on the stand. As if not realizing everything she’d put him through over the past two years, she produced the loving e-mail he’d sent her soon after they’d separated, in which he begged her for another chance to save their marriage and family.

“You still loved me. What changed?” she asked.

Fred answered, “I am no longer willing to stay together for the sake of the children . . . you’ve been involved in an adulterous relationship . . . for an extended period of time.”

“So you think that because of these incidents you’re alleging, my judgment regarding the children is impaired?”

“Yes,” he answered.

With that, Piper attacked him about such matters as the children no longer taking piano lessons. He countered that they couldn’t, that she’d moved the piano out of the house.

“Have you asked if they want to continue tennis lessons?”

she asked.

“You took all their tennis rackets,” he answered.

That day on the witness stand, with Shilling asking the questions, Piper repeated her mantra, invoking the phrase

“for the benefit of the children” and saying “the children need their mother.”

“Specific provisions need to be provided to ensure that the children have access to me as much as possible,” Piper said. When the judge said distributing the e-mail had not been in the best interest of the Jablin children, Piper replied: 112 / Kathryn Casey

“I have been terrified for myself and for the sake of the children. My concern is the welfare of the children.”

With that, Susanne Shilling sat down and asked no more questions.

Tina was there supporting Piper, as she had throughout the divorce. They were two sisters fighting the system and one soon to be ex-husband, whom they both passionately hated.

“Did Piper condone the report?” Shilling asked.

“It’s my report,” Tina answered.

“Are you saying you feel you knew more than the court knew when it made the order?”

“Absolutely.”

With that, Piper asked for an increase in support payments. Although she wasn’t the one supporting the children, Fred was, she pleaded, “The children and I are in desperate need of help and support . . . the children need to be given a chance to be heard.”

As that painful day in court drew to a close, Shilling, on Fred’s behalf, asked the judge to end the drama with a fi nal ruling of divorce. The issue of money still remained, await-ing a report from the court-appointed commissioner on the best way to divide assets. But that would wait for another day. This day, Judge Hammond did as Fred requested:

“You’ve got it. I’ve signed the order,” the judge said. “You’re divorced.”

On the stand, Fred had made another request—that the joint custody decree be vacated and that he be granted full permanent custody of the children.

“I cannot trust Piper’s judgment,” he said. “This e-mail shows a person who does not know right from wrong, has no moral standards, will lie and spread hatred. She does not have the welfare of the children at heart.”

Before adjourning, Judge Hammond issued one more ruling: She limited Piper’s visitation to the children to DIE, MY LOVE / 113

twice-monthly weekends, holidays, and three weeks every summer. And she granted Fred’s petition, awarding him sole custody of all three children.

Not long after, Piper told a friend: “Fred torched my vil-lage.”

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Piper hated Fred for taking the children away,” says a friend. “She saw herself as the victim, and he was punishing her for the affair.”

Bitter custody battles forever wound parents and children.

For many mothers and fathers, losing custody is akin to a death, a loss so raw it tears a hole in the heart. For Piper Rountree, a woman who based her self-worth on being an exceptional mother, it cut so deep that friends feared she could never recover. Piper blamed everyone but herself for the decision: Fred, the judge, her lawyers, and the Virginia legal system, contending the state didn’t “protect mothers and children.”

Even those who believed Piper saw the children more as her reflections than as individuals with their own wants and needs wouldn’t deny that she’d made Jocelyn, Paxton, and Callie the center of her world. “I am a mother fi rst, everything else second,” Piper would later say. Yet, it was also easy to see that she used the children as an excuse for her failures. At one point Judge Hammond had asked why she’d quit her job with the Girl Scouts, the only one Piper had held since moving out of Hearthglow. Even though the children lived with Fred not her, she answered: “Taking care of our children is a full-time job.”

There was also another matter that made the judge’s decision a disappointment for Piper: If she’d won custody, Fred DIE, MY LOVE / 115

would have had to pay her child support. Now that he had permanent custody, that prospect evaporated. In little more than a year her entire world had changed. She was still seeing Dr. Gable, but she told friends that the relationship had cooled. She hadn’t truly worked since leaving Texas, and, with nannies and cleaning ladies, for the past eight years she’d been free to play tennis, paint, hike, and rollerblade with the children, and drink wine and relax with friends.

Now the children were rarely with her and she had to pay her own bills. Working wasn’t something Piper had a natural inclination toward. Later, her contention that she’d applied for scores of jobs would seem questionable. “Piper could have found a job in Richmond,” says Mel. “She just didn’t want one.”

Having used up the $7,000 in prepaid moving expenses circulating from house to apartment to house in Richmond, and citing her inability to find work, a month after the custody decision Piper packed her possessions in a rented trailer and attached it to the back of her 1994 Chrysler Voyager to move to Houston. Steve Byrum, a tall, rugged-looking man with a dark beard, who’d met her through their sons’ Cub Scout troop, helped her load the furniture and boxes. Curi-ous about what had happened in the divorce, at one point he came right out and asked: “Why didn’t you get custody of the kids?”

Piper’s eyes filled with hate. “Because Fred’s an asshole,”

she hissed.

As usual, Piper hadn’t kept Fred informed of her plans. He learned of the move through the children, and he expressed misgivings, both about the children traveling to Texas for visitations and Piper being so close to Tina. “They feed on each other,” Fred told Ciulla at work one day. Then he commented that the past two years had left him feeling trapped in a Kaf-kaesque novel, in which his wife had morphed into a troubled, vengeful woman: “She’s just not the woman I married.”

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Days later, Fred filed a complaint with the court, charging that Piper had violated court orders by not informing him of her plans and where she’d have the children during visitations. By then, in Texas, Piper didn’t show up at the hearing.

In Houston, Piper moved her possessions into storage, then stayed briefly at Terry Wichelhaus’s house, to care for her children for a week while Terry was out of town. Terry, whose house was decorated year-round with all manner of fairies, says that with Piper’s petite athletic body, she reminded her of Peter Pan: “She was almost fairy-like. Her face just lit up when you talked with her.”

Still, Terry thought it unusual when one of her friends cornered her after she’d spent time with Piper. “Did you know that Piper believes she’s a Druid priestess?” the friend asked.

In Irish and Welsh legends, Druids were sorcerers and prophets, members of an ancient Celtic society of priests who worshipped the moon and the natural world. They made potions and believed in reincarnation. Perhaps Piper felt a kinship with the Druids because legend said they carried staffs of rowan wood, the tree that gave the Rountree family its name. The revelation of Piper’s belief was news to Terry, but not shocking. “Piper thinks she has magical powers of some sort, and Tina thinks Piper has magical powers of some sort,” Terry would say later.

When it came to Fred, Piper left no doubt how she felt about him. “She hated Fred for taking the children and for trying to prove she was crazy,” says Terry. “Her family hated him, too. It was a huge topic of conversation; everyone in the Rountree family was talking about how Fred had screwed Piper. Drug addicts and prostitutes lose their kids, not good moms like Piper.”

Something that happened the week Piper babysat, however, changed Terry’s view of Piper as a mom. As with her DIE, MY LOVE / 117

own children, Piper was a playmate to Terry’s, rollerblading and going out for ice cream, acting like a kid herself. But then, while babysitting, Piper brought a young doctor she’d met to Terry’s

house, and he stayed overnight. “I never would have let her stay with my kids again,” says Terry.

“She should have known better.”

After the week at Terry’s, Piper moved into Tina’s gray Victorian corner cottage with the graceful porch overlooking the street. As the months passed, Tina would try to comfort Piper, who cried, yearning for her children. At times, she was nearly inconsolable. With anyone willing to listen, Tina made no secret of her disdain for her now ex- brother-in-law. Fred, she said, her voice thick with anger, was manipulative and evil, abusive and cruel. “Tina absolutely hated Fred’s guts,” says a friend. “She held him in complete contempt.”

At the time, Tina’s boyfriend, Claude “Mac” McClennahan, a six-foot, blue-eyed disc jockey, lived with her. Since the seventies, Mac, who’d grown up in the Texas Hill Country, had worked on radio stations throughout central Texas and Houston, mostly playing rock and roll. In his mid-forties, he looked the part of an aging rocker, plump, with a gray- streaked beard and mustache, and a receding hairline that fanned out into shoulder-length dark brown hair.

Before becoming a DJ, Mac had worked as a cook and a restaurant manager, once even steam-cleaning egg trucks.

He played drums in a band, and had a penchant for tennis shoes and rumpled jeans. “I’m a generally nice guy,” he’s said, and others thought of him that way as well. A computer junkie, Mac linked up with Tina in 2000, through the Internet dating site Match.com. In some ways, friends say he brought structure to her life. At the time he was between radio jobs, and he took over the management of the clinic, overseeing the business end she hated. Years later Tina would describe Mac as “a nurturing kind of guy who watched out 118 / Kathryn Casey