Deadly Vows Page 13

  We talked back and forth on my blog about which black star was prettier: Joy thought Tyra Banks was, Sean thought Naomi Campbell. I voted for Halle Berry. We talked about smoking marijuana; Sean was new at it. Joy and I were old hands and teased Sean about his lack of experience, though he proudly recounted his first contact high at a Bob Dylan concert, saying he couldn’t have avoided it if he had wanted to. Was it a sin to smoke pot? We all agreed it wasn’t. We talked about movies and music and, of course, their polygamy. But polygamy didn’t really take up much space in our discussions—at least on my blog. Our conversations were wide-ranging and frequent, with Joy and Sean visiting my blog daily and cracking jokes on posts, offering advice for other commenters and floating ideas for new posts on subjects that interested them.

  Joy complained about her inability to find a career path that kept her attention after she had left her job in San Francisco.

  “This isn’t a dress rehearsal folks,” she wrote. “This is your life (who said that?) so I owe it to myself to find something I really am hip to. I went to weirdjobs.com to see if I could find any ideas but I didn’t. So I’m back to the drawing board.”

  But that was as serious as Joy would let herself get. After that, it was back to the playful woman people described as always smiling: “I wonder if there is such a thing as a personal leg shaver. Not that I’d be one (that’s actually a really nasty thought) but I just wonder if that profession is out there.”

  Joy posted on Sean’s polygamy discussion board as well, throwing herself into discussions and debates while displaying a surprisingly deep knowledge of the Bible and of the mechanics of polygamous relationships.

  I had gained a lot of weight after I got married, but six years later, I had lost it all and started working out twice a day at a gym. I had gotten positively buff by the time I reconnected with Sean, who saw a picture of me on my personal website and in disbelief had shared it with Joy.

  “I call bullshit,” Joy, who had only ever seen me fat, had told Sean, laughingly. “I won’t believe it until I see him in person.”

  When I was out of town, I tended to eat at the only restaurant chain I knew that offered the vegetarian hamburgers I had taken to eating. Sean and I had agreed to meet at one in San Diego during one of my trips to work with Morris Cerullo, so when he showed up to the meeting, I was glad to see the surprised look on his face when he saw that I had indeed lost all the weight and buffed up in the years we hadn’t talked. Unbeknownst to me, Joy was in the car, staring in disbelief as well, because she thought I had Photoshopped the picture Sean had shown her of me. When I later found out about her spy mission to confirm my weight loss and subsequent muscle build-up, we all had a laugh about it and I teased her for being a peeping Tom at the restaurant.

  After dinner, Sean accompanied me to the hotel across the street from Morris Cerullo’s ministry headquarters, and we talked a long time about what had gone wrong in our friendship and how we could move forward without having the same problem re-present itself. He had a family to take care of now, he said, including two children with Joy, so he couldn’t have me messing up his life again.

  It was a point that reminded me of how meddling I had been and I assured him that there was no chance of that happening again. Our friendship fired back up almost immediately and we were back to our old habit: collaborating on moneymaking ideas, one of which turned out to be a book or movie that we would write together.

  We were both dissatisfied with the quality of what was available.

  “What would we write about?” I asked. Sean was always better at coming up with the ideas, and I was good at implementing them. We worked well as a team and I was glad for the opportunity to collaborate with him again.

  “How about a murder?” he said. I groaned. It was a tired subject. He, however, was adamant. “We could make it different. The perfect murder. We could make our guy know exactly how to keep the cops from figuring out that he did it and the cops, even though they think he did it, can’t catch him because he’s planned ahead.”

  Now there was an idea. A detective trying to catch a killer who had anticipated the detective’s moves ahead of time. Maybe not the most unique idea, but at least one we could lend some new angles to. He and I had just recently talked about how odd it was that TV shows were giving away all the police’s secrets on catching criminals. The O.J. Simpson murder trial had been watched by more than half of all Americans, and had lived up to its billing as “the trial of the century.” The trial had also brought into the American consciousness the work of forensic examiners, who were featured prominently in O.J. Simpson’s trial for the murders of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

  The show Forensic Files, then on the TLC cable network and now on truTV, had quickly picked up on the interest in such investigative techniques and had become a cultural phenomenon. The series was so popular that NBC began airing it in prime time in 2002, and that’s when it came to Sean’s attention.

  “Have you seen Forensic Files?” Sean asked. “It’s crazy. They show everything, like even how leaving hairs behind can get people caught.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “What about a killer who watches Forensic Files to get ideas on how to avoid leaving evidence? Like, he takes notes and learns from the shows so he can keep himself from leaving evidence.”

  Sean loved the idea.

  “It would work,” he said. “We can have the guy watching the shows and taking down notes, like ‘don’t leave hairs, don’t get your own blood on the scene, don’t brush up against any unusual plants. Only, he can’t write the notes down, I guess, because that could be used as evidence, too.”

  I laughed. It was a chilling idea, but most killers were caught by the evidence they either left behind or allowed to become attached to them, such as gunpowder residue on their hands. Our book could focus on a criminal who educated himself before he killed so there was absolutely no evidence left behind to convict him. As he progressed, we decided, the killer would get better with each kill as he watched and discovered new techniques the police might use to catch people like him. He would always be one step ahead of the police because he was turning their own techniques against them.

  “Would the killer dispose of the bodies or just leave them behind because he’s so confident he hasn’t left any evidence?” I asked.

  “No, he’s smarter than that,” Sean said. “He’s not cocky. He doesn’t taunt the cops; he makes sure the only trace of his kills is that the victim suddenly doesn’t show up at work anymore.”

  “Then that leaves a big problem,” I said. “Disposing of a human body has got to be a lot tougher than it seems. Especially if you’re not going to leave any evidence. I can’t think of a good way to do it. Maybe dumping them in the ocean, but you’d have to be sneaky and really weigh them down, because people tend to float.”

  Sean paused. He hadn’t thought of how to dispose of the bodies, but it was an important part of getting away with murder. If there was no body, it would be difficult to even determine if a crime had occurred. People disappeared every day, and not all of them were killed. In America, it was perfectly within someone’s rights to disappear without leaving a trace behind. Without a body, it would be tough to say that wasn’t exactly what had happened. Even if authorities could somehow otherwise determine that a murder had been committed, they would have trouble figuring out who did it and how if they didn’t have a body. Hiding or disposing of the body would have to be a key plank of our killer’s repertoire if we were going to write a compelling and believable book, we decided. But how?

  “I heard somewhere that there are hundreds of bodies in the desert outside Las Vegas,” Sean said finally. “Like every time the mobsters out there killed somebody, they just drove outside town, drove off the road for a while and buried them. I bet now that the city has gotten so big, there are tons of people living on top of dead mobsters they just built their houses on top of.”

  The idea was starting to
take shape: The plotline centered on a killer who kept getting away with murder because he covered his tracks so well and never left bodies behind for police to investigate. The killer could be a suspect in multiple disappearances, but he would just keep killing because police could never find enough evidence to actually prosecute him. It was a story that I hadn’t seen and one I thought Sean and I could tell well enough to get a book—or even a movie script—sold.

  Sean liked that idea—the smart killer always being one step ahead of the authorities. He also liked the idea of a movie script rather than a book.

  “Movies are the way to go,” he said. “There’s just a lot more money in it. We should hash out our story as if we’re writing a book and then just write it as a movie script. Or both, but the script should come before the book, sort of like the way they do those Star Trek books after the movie has come out.”

  I wasn’t as comfortable writing scripts, since the few I had done had been video or radio scripts for TV preachers, which I assumed would be significantly different from movie scripts.

  “I like it,” I said anyway. “But we need to have him dispose of the bodies in different ways. We can’t just have him always burying them in the desert or dumping them in the ocean.”

  Sean thought about it for a second. There had to be more ways to effectively dispose of a body than burying someone in a desert.

  “I heard a story about an old widow who died like forty years after her husband disappeared and when they were dealing with her estate, they found a deep freeze in a storage room,” he said. “When her family opened the storage room after she died, her husband’s body was in the freezer —she had put him in there and then just kept paying the rent for 40 years so they never caught her.”

  I laughed, imagining the family of a little old lady discovering that Mee Maw was a hardened criminal who had kept the most extreme secret for over forty years. It was a compelling story angle.

  Sean went on.

  “Our killer can’t leave any evidence. That’s the hook, right?” he said. I nodded, as if he could see me do so over the phone. “He gets everything he needs to know from TV; they spill all the beans about how they catch killers on there. All he has to do is watch TV to plan perfect murders.”

  The idea was starting to shape up into something we could use.

  I could almost feel the wheels turning in Sean’s mind. I just didn’t realize they might have been turning as he devised the script of an actual murder instead of working on our book/movie concept.

  But as we fleshed out our story, he was clearly soaking up ideas. I thought that was to move the story along. The killer would have to have all the right tools in advance. He couldn’t kill on a whim; he would have to plan each one out so he didn’t leave any evidence behind. That was a key to the story. A passionate killer would leave too much evidence. This guy would have to have a plan with each and every one—a plan with each kill, a way to make sure he never slipped, never made a mistake. He would have to be meticulous and never let himself diverge from his plan.

  We both decided to do some draft work and then revisit the idea later. Drafting has never been a strength of mine, so I procrastinated on it. I prefer to have an idea in my head and just write and give the idea life, but Sean was more meticulous than that. Just like the character sketch document I had found on his computer four years before, he would methodically work out the details of each book before he wrote the book. It was probably a more efficient way to work, but I had never been able to make it happen that way. My style was more chaotic: just dive in and let the story tell itself. But Sean never could work that way. He used outlines, sketches and plans to write his books and I admired that about him.

  When I started writing novels later, I tried his approach but it still wouldn’t work for me. I just couldn’t do it and perhaps that’s why we worked so well together: each of us brought different strengths to the task. Sean’s strengths in writing translated well into the real world. I would buy a car and change the oil when I heard the engine knock or when the “change oil” light got too annoying to ignore. Sean, however, never missed a scheduled oil change. That’s just how he was; he was a planner and I was not.

  Chapter 13

  SEPARATION

  Joy had a serious flirtation with another man early in her marriage to Sean, and the betrayal—even though he had all but forced it on her—haunted Sean as long as Joy was still alive.

  Simon Greene, who is now a television production professional, was Joy’s boyfriend when she worked at Morris Cerullo’s ministry with him and was trying to cover up her relationship with Sean.

  “She was definitely cheating on him,” Simon told me while saying that at the time he didn’t know Joy was married to Sean. “We didn’t have intercourse, but it was...clearly cheating.”

  One day, after making out and perhaps a little more, Joy told him, “I really want to run away with you and be with you forever, but you just don’t understand all the things that are going on in my life right now.”

  Those things, of course, were really just one thing: she was secretly married to her roommate, who was already married, and even then, her young and carefree spirit was struggling against the idea of a lifelong marriage that had begun before she even had a chance to figure out who she was and who she wanted to become.

  When Simon found out about the secret marriage, the straightforward guy in him wouldn’t let him do anything but confront Sean, who apparently had let Joy’s fling with Simon go on in order to cover for his secret marriage.

  “I confronted him to his face,” Simon said. “I told him, ‘If you’re married to her, your wife has been cheating with me.’ It probably wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done; he kind of lost it.”

  It was impossible for Sean’s ego to accept the idea that his wife might find another man more desirable than him. Before that point, he had frequently praised Simon, who at the time was attempting to become a Christian hip-hop artist. But after Simon revealed the extent of his relationship with Joy, Sean could say nothing good about him anymore; he was dumb, lazy, entitled and shady, the kind of guy who would gladly sneak in and steal someone’s wife.

  The fact that Simon had no idea that Joy was secretly married did nothing to assuage Sean’s vitriol toward him. In fact, the story Sean told about the boyfriend’s relationship with Joy was completely different than the one Simon himself told.

  In Sean’s story, Simon wanted Joy but Joy continually rejected him, finally resorting to demanding that he leave her alone. Tara Walzel, Joy’s friend, confirmed that Sean’s account was false.

  “Joy was in love with Simon,” Tara said. “I remember thinking that they were really cute together and Joy was so into him.”

  Sean’s story didn’t ring true to me at the time but it didn’t seem important, because Sean was in the middle of a litany of names of people who “wanted” Joy and were jealous that he had her, so Simon’s was just another item on that list.

  According to her friends, Joy’s mind was again wandering away from Sean, but this time, not for another man—just toward freedom from the constraints of a religion that treated women as the property of men. The relationship, she told friends, wasn’t “fulfilling.” Plus, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be married under any circumstances, much less the one she was in. She was young and aching to be free and explore her options, to improve the future for her sons. But she couldn’t do that while her husband was directing her life, leading her where he believed God intended her to go.

  But it was complicated. She had two children and a husband who would not willingly suffer the loss of both his wife and the children she had borne him. And there was no way Joy was going to leave them behind. So she couldn’t just pack up and move out, even though that was her instinct. She was trapped, and with no obvious way out making itself apparent, she decided to settle in and get what freedom she could inside the marriage. She wanted to go to school to become a makeup artist and to learn American Sign
Language, she told Sean, who at least verbally acquiesced to her demands while delaying their fulfillment to an undisclosed later date.

  The family just couldn’t afford for Joy to become a full-time student, so while she was perfectly welcome to pursue her dreams, she would have to wait a little while to see them come to fruition. In the meantime, Joy had reconnected with her friends.

  “She eventually got back in contact with us,” Rino said. “She came right out and told us (about the polygamy). She just kind of laid it out. She was pretty open about it.”

  That first reconnecting happened at a party and that’s when Joy’s old high school friends met Sean, who had come along with Joy.

  “Wow. Polygamy,” Rino said. “For me, and I think most of our group, we already thought something was off, because the Joy we knew was a really strong-willed young lady. For us to think that she would be submissive to that situation was kind of strange, but when we met him with Joy, it was, um, like we didn’t skip a beat. There was no awkwardness, and she just kind of laid it out: don’t judge me, you don’t know the situation.”

  That was enough for Joy’s friends, who had always accepted each other, even if they didn’t always understand the decisions each had made. They weren’t friends with Sean, after all; they were friends with Joy and if that’s what made Joy happy, they certainly weren’t going to shun her because of it. Plus, other than the obviously weird polygamy angle, Joy’s husband was...sort of okay.

  “He seemed like an all right guy,” Rino continued. “Real respectful, and since most of Joy’s friends were guys, who were a good chunk of her life growing up, he met like ten or fifteen of us that day, which can be intimidating to anyone. I thought he handled it real well, and I didn’t get any kind of weird vibe from him at all.”