Body Parts (11 page)

In June 1996, Elizabeth decided she couldn’t take all of this anymore, so she and the baby moved upstairs to her mother’s apartment for a week.

Wayne pleaded with her, promising that things would be different. But Elizabeth was starting to build up her own life—and her confidence. She was working with her mother in a catering company, and in just a matter of days, she had the car insured and was able to put Max in child care. Wayne called it “baby prison,” but he didn’t object to it enough to take care of Max himself. In fact, she later said, he never seemed to take much interest in their baby at all. He would never bathe or feed Max and he rarely changed his diaper.

Finally, Elizabeth gave Wayne an ultimatum: he had two weeks to prove that he could change.

“The way you live is not right and I am going to work,” she told him, referring to his previous opposition to her getting a job. She also told him that he wasn’t going to have his meals on the table whenever he wanted, because she had other things to do.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I’m not going to live like this,” she said.

Wayne tried to meet her demands for a day or two, but once he saw that she was serious about working, and not being his domestic slave, he went back to acting depressed.

On July 4, 1996, Wayne and Elizabeth went to a party at the top of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino, and two days later, she left him for good.

Elizabeth moved in with her mother because she didn’t have enough money for a down payment on her own apartment. The following month, she met a man and went to stay at his place in Green Valley.

“I mean, here I am with a six-month-old baby and I’m thinking nobody’s ever going to want me again,” she recalled later.

Her father disapproved of her new living arrangement. So in October, she and Max moved in with him.

At that point, Wayne had Rodney and Gene pick him up in a motor home and take him back to California, towing his broken-down Jeep behind them. Wayne lived with his father in Napa for a few months before he moved south.

Wayne was working for a karaoke company when he met a woman at the Blue Rock Inn in Vallejo. After they dated for a couple of months, he moved into her trailer in the waterfront community of Benicia, which is next to the Carquinez Strait, and is part of the San Francisco Bay.

While they were living together, Wayne told the woman that his ex-wife “destroyed their family” when she left him for another man. He talked about wanting to kill Elizabeth and often told her, “I know I’m going to hell,” but he didn’t elaborate.

He lived with the woman, whom he slapped once during sex, until he moved to his grandmother’s house in Eureka in September 1997. After that, they began dating long-distance.

One night in January 1998, the woman’s nephew got “pretty wasted” with Wayne on rum and Coke, and Wayne said he “hated women, that his wife took his kid away from him, and that he wanted to ‘cut them up,’ ‘dismember’ them and ‘hide everything that would identify them.’”

The nephew later admitted that he’d been intoxicated at the time, so he wasn’t sure if Wayne was talking about what he wanted to do to women, or if he was confessing about something he’d already done. Nonetheless, he subsequently told his aunt that Wayne was evil and she should stop seeing him.

The woman ended the relationship during a visit to Eureka the following month, when Wayne told her that he was in love with her twenty-year-old daughter and wanted to have a child with her.

Two months later, Wayne showed up in Benicia and argued with the woman at the trailer. She never heard from him again.

Sometime after his split with Elizabeth, Wayne started calling his mother, who was now going by her new married name, Arora. After moving back and forth to India, Brigitte was living in Austin, Texas.

Wayne always called pretty late at night. According to Brigitte, the first conversation went like this:

“I’m sorry, Mom, I’m calling you so late,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you called. How are you and what are you doing?”

Over the next ninety minutes, Brigitte said, the two of them cried as they talked about his feelings that she didn’t love him and that she had “deserted him.”

“Wayne, I love you,” she said. “I’m sorry that I didn’t show it more.”

“You abandoned me,” he said.

“Wayne, you’re the one who wanted to leave. I didn’t want you to leave,” she said. “I don’t even remember how we came to that. I love you.”

“Really?” he said. “You never told me.”

“Maybe I didn’t and I’m sorry. I just assumed you would know.”

Wayne told her how lonely he was and how people were hurting him.

“Whenever I open my heart,” he said, “whenever I’m honest with people, whenever I more or less reach out to them, they stab me.”

Brigitte could see that he was feeling sorry for himself, but she didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to scare him off after their estrangement. She wondered whether he was having a psychological breakdown.

Brigitte had just started a new job and couldn’t leave town, so she asked if he wanted to come visit her for a few days.

“No, Mom, I can’t,” he said.

“Why?”

“I just can’t.”

Brigitte told Wayne he could call her collect again, anytime. She also tried calling him, but nobody ever answered.

It was several months before she heard from Wayne again. Just like the first time, it was at midnight or 1:00
A.M.
, and Wayne was crying.

This time, Wayne said he was angry that people were persecuting him, but he wouldn’t give any specifics. He complained again that he was lonely without a girlfriend.

“Mom, I really want a family,” he said.

“Wayne, you have to go out there and make friends,” she said. “There are nice people out there and it doesn’t particularly have to be a girlfriend. Just go out and meet people. There’s a girl out there for you.”

Looking back later, Brigitte realized she may have sounded idiotic to Wayne, but she had no idea where his mind had taken him.

In December 1996, Wayne returned to Las Vegas with some relatives to see Max for his birthday, saying he was proud that the two of them shared a birthday in the same week.

Wayne brought Max a tricycle with a big helmet, which Elizabeth thought was ridiculous, considering their son was only a year old and could barely walk.

Elizabeth felt torn. When she called Wayne to encourage him to take part in his son’s life, all he wanted to talk about was getting back together.

“Max doesn’t have a mommy and daddy anymore,” Wayne would tell her.

“Yeah, he does,” she’d reply. “It’s just that you have to make an effort to be in his life, that’s all.”

“It just shouldn’t be like this,” he’d say.

“Well, it is and you just have to make sense of that, instead of trying to go back, ’cause that’ll just never happen.”

Wayne always blamed Elizabeth for his not being in Max’s life, reminding her that she was the one who left.

“So he frickin’ moves to California and makes it completely impossible to have a normal relationship,” she said later.

At some point in 1997, Wayne called to tell Elizabeth that he was coming to Las Vegas to see Max. So they came up with a plan for Elizabeth to drop Max off at the child care center, where Wayne could spend some supervised time with his son. She always feared that Wayne might abduct the boy.

Elizabeth had hoped to avoid running into Wayne, but he was there when she arrived with Max, so she suggested they get something to eat at a nearby McDonald’s while Max got used to being with his father.

Wayne’s eyes welled up with tears as they sat in the restaurant. “I just miss you,” he said.

Elizabeth didn’t want to get into it, and since Max seemed fine with Wayne, she told him to go ahead and take Max for the day, then drop him off later at child care.

Later on, Elizabeth went for sushi with her boyfriend, then called the center to make sure that Wayne had already come and gone.

“Did Adam drop Max off?” she asked.

“Yeah, but Max didn’t want to stay, so [Wayne is still] here,” they told her.

Eventually, Wayne left Max inside, but he sat outside in his car, ruminating, for quite some time.

On October 14, 1997, Elizabeth and Max met up with Wayne in Arroyo Grande, just south of San Luis Obispo, so that father and son could have a visit mediated by Wayne’s friends Scott and Linda Hayes.

The three of them took a trip with the Hayes family to the pumpkin patch known as Avila Barn, then spent the afternoon at Avila Beach, where Wayne and Max went for a half-hour stroll along the shore.

Scott thought Wayne seemed excited to see his son, and although Wayne was cordial to Elizabeth, he could see Wayne’s lingering disappointment about the separation. Wayne also told him he wasn’t happy that Elizabeth had shaved Max’s head bald.

Wayne left in a funk after the six-hour visit with the family he’d lost. But no one would know just how much the visit upset him until more than a year later.

PART II

CHAPTER 8

“T
ORSO
G
IRL
”

The coastline of Humboldt County curves northwest into the Pacific Ocean and back again, ending about fifty miles below Oregon. The economy of this rural region depends on seasonal fishing, lumber, and the tourists who flock there to see the famous redwood forests. More artists live in Humboldt, per capita, than anywhere else in the state.

The greater Eureka area, which has more than forty-two thousand residents, is the largest metropolis for three hours in any direction. A network of tributaries, which flow through and around the city, is fed with salt water by the tides and freshwater by the rain. Known as sloughs, they run from the bay inland, creating a brackish environment that supports fish, shrimp, and crabs.

In 1997, Wayne was working three days a week at Arcata Readimix, a cement and gravel-mining plant on the Mad River, seven miles north of Eureka. Because he was also working in Vallejo with a karaoke company, he lived part-time on his father’s property in Napa and part-time with his aunt Doris and other Ford family members in Eureka.

At the Ford family homestead, Wayne’s cousin Robert Johnson tried to engage Wayne in conversation, but it was hit-and-miss. As long as they were discussing race cars, it was fine. But, Robert said, “If you tried to talk about any other subject, family or whatever, he just kind of wouldn’t say anything, or get up and walk out of the room.”

One day, for example, Robert saw Wayne sitting in his room, staring at a ceramic slab imprinted with a child’s hand and the name “Max.”

“What’s that?” Robert asked.

Wayne looked up with a lost expression, then closed the door without a word.

“What’s wrong with Wayne?” Robert asked his mother, who was also living there.

“I have no idea,” she said.

Another time, Robert went to Wayne’s room to get him for dinner.

“I’ll be right there,” Wayne said.

It was fifteen minutes before he joined them in the kitchen.

“What took you so long?” Robert joked.

Wayne gave him a strange look, ate his dinner quietly, went outside to smoke a cigarette, then retreated to his room.

Wayne and his relatives used to go out together to bars, where Wayne liked to drink and sing karaoke. He also used to enjoy playing his guitar and singing to them at the house, but he gradually stopped performing, even when Robert asked him to.

Wayne went out one night with his cousin Leslie and met her friend Candy, a schoolteacher.

He came home afterward, laid his head on his aunt Ginger’s lap, and told her about his immediate attachment to Candy.

“Aunt Ginger, I really love her,” he said as she stroked his hair. “I want to go out with her.”

Ginger, who used to babysit Wayne and Rodney, felt Wayne’s mother never gave him the upbringing she should have, hiding him away in the house with the shades drawn all day. Ginger thought that Wayne had always felt different and needed attention. He wanted so badly to fit in.

Wayne’s aunt Vickie also thought Karen had seemed peculiar, sleeping around with other men while she was married to Gene. Vickie later said she thought Wayne resented his mother because of these other men and for abandoning him as a teenager. His ex-wife Elizabeth reminded Vickie of Wayne’s mother.

Vickie would later recall how Wayne used to walk around the house in a silk robe, like Hugh Hefner. He also would walk around downtown with a briefcase, dressed in a suit and tie for no reason in particular.

As a result of his continued remarks about “needing space,” his aunt Doris suggested that he buy her trailer and move into it somewhere private. He accepted her offer that July and moved into the Town & Country Trailer Park in Arcata.

Arcata has a fluctuating population that expands to twenty thousand when Humboldt State University is in session. It gets about forty inches of rain, mostly between November and April.