The Donna Paradox
To Whom It May Concern:
I was going to write an account of my life to date, but I fear that I have lost the will to
delve into such a tedious project. As such, I am writing this abbreviated memoir that will go
over my life with my wife and the source of my eventual downfall:
First Encounters (excerpt stolen from book)
In the summer of 1990, I would meet the eventual love of my life and, ultimately, my
demise. Mind you, I wasn’t actually looking for love, as I was deeply in love with Sarah (my
first long-term girlfriend…I’ll go over this in greater detail in the book), especially after we took
it to the next level, so to speak. However, I did have a single best friend, the same one that
served as the conduit to Sarah and I’s relationship, Tony. We happened upon a girl in the
neighborhood, Donna, that was in his grade and not too bad looking. She was exceedingly
friendly with us and rather flirty, especially for a 13 year old girl.
We spent a lot of time at her house, mostly using her in-ground swimming pool. We
would also invite over other friends to play cards, watch TV, etc.. In essence, her house became
the hangout spot for my friends and me. One particular day always stands out to me above all
others: It was a hot, sticky summer day and we were tired of swimming. We were rather bored
and it was just Tony, Donna and me; we were also rather hungry and there wasn’t much to eat at
her house. We decided to make some boxed brownie mix, but, with my culinary prowess, I
decided to add some peanut butter and a bit of other extra ingredients like more butter, sugar,
etc.. The batch of brownies turned out fantastic and Donna loved them; it’s a memory that we
both recall fondly.
We had a lot of great times together. We used to spend almost every night out playing
flashlight tag, which was popular in our neighborhood, largely because it was an excuse to be out
after dark. We used to play at the local high school, but, technically speaking, no one was
allowed on high school grounds after dark. One night, while we were all out playing, a cop
entered the school parking lot with his lights on. We all fled like mad, in various directions;
there were several of us playing at the time. Donna decided to follow Tony and me, which led us
to the adjoining school grounds, a local private school. Unfortunately, there was a rather large
fence separating the two schools and the wiring at the top of the fence was rather brittle and
sharp. Tony and I had no problem traversing the fence, but Donna was afraid to deal with the
jagged top portion. I stopped running when I noticed she was having a hard time and I ran back
to her to help. I took my jacket off and threw it over the top of the fence so she wouldn’t have to
deal with the sharp wires at the top. It helped her get over, but not before she got a nasty cut on
her inner thigh; one she carries to this day. However, this seemingly innocuous gesture on my
part seemed to leave an indelible impression on her, which undoubtedly changed her view of me.
Though my aim was to get her and Tony together, Donna began to take an interest in me
instead. The girly flirts became increasingly directed at me and more explicit with every passing
day. Donna was very good at using her feminine wiles to impress us; a little too good, as she
seemed to be experienced well beyond her years. In one particular incidence, her outward
sexuality really came to the forefront: One night, during that summer, Donna approached Tony
and me to let us know that her and her friend were going to be babysitting at a house in town and
she invited us both to come hang out with her. Well, far be it from me to pass up a chance to
hang out with two girls, without adult supervision, on a Friday night.
Tony and I arrived around 9PM and though Donna seemed very excited to have us there,
her friend was far less encouraged to see us. Regardless, we quickly found our way to the
kitchen to raid the refrigerator. Though our aim was to find some good, free food, we instead
happened upon several premixed Long Island iced teas. Tony and I weren’t the type to imbibe,
but Donna was strongly insisting on it and we didn’t want to look like dorks. So, rather than just
start drinking them one at a time, we instead decided to play poker with the loser of each hand
taking a couple of shots. Tony and I were very adept at poker and Donna’s friend opted out of
the situation. It didn’t take long for Donna to get rather smashed, but cards became rather boring
in a hurry, so we put on some music and just hung out for awhile.
Not long after we broke up the poker game, I asked Donna to go upstairs with me to one
of the bedrooms, because I wanted to ask her if she liked Tony. She walked into the bedroom
rather eagerly and quickly took a position on the bed. I asked her what she thought of Tony and
she said, “he’s okay”. I pressed the issue a bit and told her that I’d like the two of them to hook
up and she replied, “I’d rather hook up with you”. But, she quickly acquiesced and said that
she’d give him a try and she asked me to send him up to the bedroom. Tony was a bit shy and
was reticent to join her in a bedroom alone, but, with a little prodding, he eventually decided to
do so.
In the meantime, I sat downstairs with her friend and watched TV. The kids they were
babysitting were asleep, so we had to turn the music off and the friend really didn’t seem to want
to talk, or engage us in any way. So, we just sat quietly and watched television whilst Donna and
Tony hung out upstairs. This was a rather short-lived situation though, as Tony came back down
after only about 20 minutes and he didn’t seem particularly thrilled either. When I asked him
what had happened, he said, “she tried to kiss me, but I didn’t want to”. I was rather
dumbfounded by the whole thing, because I was sure he liked her and, even if not, she was an
intoxicated, attractive girl that was willing to make out with him. Tony said he wasn’t attracted
to her, but I’m not sure if he was just too shy to deal with the situation, or if he just had really
high standards.
After talking with Tony, I quickly realized that Donna hadn’t come back downstairs with
him. I went upstairs to the room to see what the issue was and when I walked in the room she
had removed her shirt and was lying on the bed in her bra. I asked her if she was okay and she
said that she didn’t like Tony, but really liked me. She stood up and moved towards me and
kissed me. I was taken aback by the whole situation and quickly took a step back. I told her that
I thought she was cute, but that I had a girlfriend that I loved and I just couldn’t do this. She
seemed a bit disappointed, but she asked me to help her find her shirt. I helped her put it on and
we went back downstairs. Donna downed the rest of the Long Island Ice tea and became
extremely intoxicated to the point of banging into tables and falling down. The friend got pissed,
as it was her babysitting gig and she didn’t want the kids to wake up, so she asked us to take
Donna home before they got in trouble.
The trip home was one I’ll never forget. Tony and I had a blast, but largely at Donna’s
expense. On the way back home, she lost almost all ability to walk, which was rather hilarious
to us as we had never really seen someone intoxicated before. Eventually, we walked by the
grocery store in town and decided to “borrow” a shopping cart so we could wheel Donna around.
Well, we decided to have some fun with it, so we began to slam her into various objects. It was
rather comical, though much to her objection. Eventually, the road ran out and we had to cross a
field and the grocery cart wasn’t exactly an off-road vehicle. This is where things got really
weird and it was the first real red-flag in our relationship.
While we were traversing the field, Donna began to lean heavily on me and could barely
stand up, let alone walk. She fell down a couple of times and I tried my best to keep her up, but
it proved to be a rather daunting task. Shortly after one fall, she just laid there and expressed no
interest to get up. I asked her what was wrong and she said something along the lines of, “why
don’t you want me; don’t you think I’m pretty?” I told her that she was very attractive, but in the
process of saying so she began to disrobe. Not only did she take her shirt off again, but she also
quickly removed her bra. She repeated the “don’t you think I’m attractive” mantra, but didn’t
stop at the bra. She immediately pulled off her shorts and underwear together and we were faced
with a completely naked girl lying in the middle of a field. Tony and I were stunned. She
looked up at me with this very intense look in her eyes and said, “you can do anything you want
with me”. She then said, “fuck me, you know you want to”.
Tony and I wanted no part of the whole situation, so I told her she was drunk and that we
needed to get her home. We gathered up her clothes and helped her dress as best we could. She
seemed very distant during the whole process, as if she wasn’t mentally there. Nonetheless, we
managed to get her clothes back on and get back on our way. Her motor skills seemed to
improve a bit following the debacle in the field, as if some of the previous issues were being
exaggerated, but she was still clearly drunk and Tony and I weren’t done having fun with the
whole situation. We finally got to our development, but Donna had no clue where she was. We
walked her up to a couple of houses and told her she was home, but we were still a block, or so,
away. We were laughing hysterically as she tried to walk into each house, but we quickly
whisked her away before someone came to the door, though one guy chased us down the street!
Eventually, we found our way to her house, but we wanted no part of dealing with her being
drunk and her mother finding her as such. So, we dropped her at her doorstep and ran like hell!
The next day I got a phone call from her mother asking for my mom, which was
disconcerting to say the least. Her mom tried to pin the entire thing on Tony and me and said
that we were all out drinking and that we got her drunk, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Luckily, my mom was somewhat naïve, so not only did she accept the fact that we had no part in
getting Donna drunk, which was the truth, but she also bought the lie that we didn’t partake in
the drinking at all. Although, to be fair, Tony and I only took a couple of shots of Long Island
Ice tea, which really wasn’t even enough to faze either of us. Donna, on the other hand, drank, I
believe, three of them by herself and I suspect she was sneaking drinks elsewhere, as the family
had a fairly well-stocked bar and she seemed very experienced when it came to drinking, which
was exceedingly odd for a 13 year old.
Unfortunately for Donna, her mother decided to punish her by sending her off to live with
her father, the gravity of which wouldn’t hit me until much, much later. Either way, Donna was
effectively gone and we never talked to her again after that night. Honestly, the loss really didn’t
impact me, as I knew she would be trouble with Sarah and Tony had no interest. So, selfish
though it may be, I was glad to see her go, but, in hindsight, I didn’t know exactly how high of a
price she was paying, but that’s a discussion for later on in this story…..
Encounters of the Second Kind
I next encountered Donna whilst playing basketball, with Tony and others, outside of a
friend’s house that was next-door to her house. I had been broken up with Sarah for nearly 2
years, so was, in effect, on the market, so to speak. It was late spring and I immediately noticed
her beautiful eyes as she gazed over at me from her mother’s stoop. Of course, not having a
girlfriend at the time changed my motives a bit and I quickly returned the glance and made my
way over towards her.
I had recently purchased a red sports car (Mitsubishi Eclipse) and quickly used the car as
a pick-up line. She had fallen in love with it, so I told her she could drive it, even though she
didn’t really know how to drive a stick. I guess one could call this our first real date, but I’m not
entirely sure if it counts and she had a curfew at her mom’s house that cut the whole endeavor
short. However, her mother could not control what she didn’t know, and thus began our long
relationship.
The next day, Donna had skipped school to visit me at my mom’s house alone. I was
working the late shift at a factory, so I used sleep as an excuse to be in my underwear when she
arrived (smooth, I know). The only problem is that I took a shower anticipating her arrival, so
my hair was still wet and she wasn’t an idiot. In either event, the dumb ploy worked and she
hopped in bed with me and we had sex. This is where the second red flag should have shown
itself, as we barely knew each other and the sex itself was on a level that I had never experienced
before; she was clearly experienced well beyond her years and I found the whole experience
rather enticing/intriguing. I had been with a dozen, or so, girls by that time and though each was
certainly different, the experiences were largely the same. Donna, on the other hand, was in a
different league all-together. Although I hadn’t watched much porn in my life, reflecting back,
her mannerisms certainly reminded me of what one would expect out of a porn star, yet she was
just 17. But, again, at 18, it just seemed interesting and fun…..very fun.
I quickly fell head over heels for her and the relationship took off like a rocket ship. It
wasn’t long before we were talking about kids, marriage, etc.; this all occurred in the span of a
few weeks. But, during this time, the 3rd, and most serious, red flag popped up: We were lying
down in my room watching TV and she had, apparently, fallen asleep. I got up to get something
to drink from the kitchen only to return to an empty bed. I heard this voice from the closet say,
“get away” and quickly noticed that Donna was huddled in the closet terrified. As I tried to
approach her, she was spouting off nonsensical things that did not mesh with our current time
and place; she was completely dissociative (not that I knew that at18). I did what I could to
comfort and orient her and she eventually snapped out of it. This precipitated the first
conversation about her mental health issues.
She told me that her recent ex-boyfriend, Matt, was terribly abusive. That he beat her,
threatened her with guns and raped her along with his brother; all monstrous acts that played to
my underlying need to nurture people. So, what would normally send most men running, only
served to reinforce my bond with her. This is where I went wrong.
After she opened up about the ex-boyfriend, more and more events started to surface
about her life, including an alleged gang rape and other sexual assault issues. The stories also
led me to push her into therapy; something her parents were thoroughly against, which I found a
bit odd. At the time, I had no reason to question her stories, nor her actions, which often caused
me concern, but, like my mother, I’m naïve at best.
There were many occasions where Donna would just disappear; often in my car (I let her
take mine because it was nicer than hers). She would always have an excuse, such as, “I went to
the beach with my sister”, or, “I met an old friend for dinner at Red Lobster”, but these all later
turned out to be false, but not until much later in our relationship and when I questioned the odd
nature of some of the excuses I was immediately branded as jealous and untrusting. It was the
beginning of a vicious cycle. The “Red Lobster” incident was a particularly complex one that
seemed to change over the years. The incident first came up because she was very late returning
to her Father’s house in Wilmington, where she resided at the time. I showed up there only to
find no one home, despite the fact that she got off of work over an hour before my arrival.
I waited at her dad’s house for about two hours before, eventually, her father and stepmother showed up. I asked them if they had heard from and/or seen her and they replied, “no,
we haven’t seen her all day”. This was around 8PM and her dad invited me in to wait. It wasn’t
until almost 11PM that Donna pulled up in my car, a full seven hours after her shift ended. I
wasn’t exactly thrilled by the untimely nature of her arrival and she became very defensive about
my line of questioning. Her eventual excuse was that an “old friend” from Pennsylvania had
contacted her and wanted to take her to dinner. I should have realized how implausible the
excuse was, as this was before cell phones, which means the guy would have had to find out
where she worked, contacted her at work and set up the dinner in the span of a day. But, I
bought the excuse and decided to just let it go, but it would haunt my thoughts for the years to
come.
The eventual “truth” wouldn’t come out for years and after Donna’s mental breakdown,
which is a bit off the timeline here, but I’d like to keep the story encapsulated. Anyway, in time,
Donna came to admit that she, in fact, had not met some friend from PA; instead, she said she
met her ex-boyfriend, Matt for a dinner at Red Lobster. She eventually went on to say that he
raped her in the bathroom and that she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it, especially, as she
said, because she was on her period, which means that he raped her anally. I was livid over the
admission and wanted to kill the guy. Again, my nurturing response was triggered, which only
served to bring me closer to her.
However, this isn’t the end of this story: There were certain inconsistencies in the whole
Matt story that never settled well with me and once I was far enough removed from the visceral
reaction of the horrible story, I began to press her on some of said inconsistencies. Eventually,
she came up with a completely different version of events, in which some guy from work, likely
a pilot, as she worked at a small airport and had a thing for pilots, asked her out and she said yes.
At first, she said nothing physical happened, but, after a bit more pressing, she said that they had
sex that night. Given, at this time, Donna had many claims of rape during our marriage, I asked
her if it were consensual and she said she wasn’t sure, but she thought so. This was one of the
rare few times that Donna would actually admit to cheating without rape being a buffer, but this
didn’t occur until about five years into our marriage.
Back to the current timeline: As noted previously, Donna had several issues potentially
relating to infidelity. Another one that sticks out is the time Tony, Mark and I went swimming in
Tony’s pool with Donna. I believe we had had a few beers, so I wasn’t exactly with it.
However, I did notice that Mark was getting really close to Donna and that they almost seemed
like more of a couple than her and I did, but I dismissed it because I was screwing around with
Tony and, at the time, had no reason to suspect that anything bad was happening. But, once
Donna and I got in my car, she inexplicably admitted that Mark was “fondling her breasts” in the
pool and that she was upset about it. Obviously, I was livid with Mark and when he and Tony
showed up at my house (they followed us over) I immediately went off on him. He admitted to
touching her, but he claimed that, “she came over to me and started playing with my dick”. He
apologized profusely and said that, “she’s a whore man; get away from her!” Of course, I sided
with Donna and told him to leave and that if he came near her again I’d kill him. Honestly, I
never pressed Donna on this incident, but, in hindsight, I would venture to guess that she
initiated everything and only told me to preempt his story and trigger my nurturing response by
playing the wounded victim again….it worked. Unfortunately, I think Tony sided with Mark,
which forced me to distance myself from my childhood best friend; we still spoke and
occasionally hung out, but our relationship would never be the same again. I quickly started to
recede to Donna; she became my entire world.
That aside, the relationship was going fairly well and I soon found that Donna was
pregnant. As a result, marriage became a very viable subject and we agreed to get married on
her 18th birthday, which was about 6 months into the relationship. However, Donna did not want
to be in the MD/DE area and she used the excuse that her family would not accept the
pregnancy/marriage, and her fear of her ex-boyfriend, Matt, to justify our move to Oregon to live
with my father. It was on the way to Oregon that we got married; in Elko, Nevada two days after
she turned 18.
Marriage and Other Shenanigans
For the most part, our time with my father was fairly good. Well, as good as one can
expect whilst living in a small apartment with a parent. Donna seemed to do well with the
pregnancy and a lot of the psychosis and dissociation seemed to wane a bit. However, she had
issues with premature contractions, which ended her up on bed rest for the last few months of the
pregnancy, which I think forced her to ground her behavior, but I’m not entirely sure. There
were some similar incidents that were hard for me to rationalize, but nothing as salient as the
issues she had in Delaware.
On June 14th, our first child was born; a beautiful baby boy that we named Chrystian. I
cried profusely when they placed him in my arms; the emotion and feeling of love simply cannot
be described in words. However, shortly after Chrys was born, Donna began to grow discontent
and I was likely losing my temporary job working with my dad as an admin clerk. At the same
time, the factory job, that I was fired from previously, agreed to rehire me in Delaware, so we
jumped at the opportunity and made our trek back east to live with Donna’s father.
There was always an odd tension in her father’s house that I couldn’t quite put my finger
on and some of the odd behaviors began to resurface. She would drop me off at work and then
disappear for hours. She would always make an excuse, such as she was spending the day with
her mom, but she thoroughly disliked her mother. There were also times when I would wake up
and she would be having sex with me, despite my objections. I was working 12 hr shifts and had
mono, so I was very tired and sex wasn’t exactly on the menu, sans days off.
I never did fully get the story on what occurred during that period, but I suspect that there
was a lot more going on than I actually knew about, or would eventually find out about, thus was
life with Donna. In either event, she eventually grew very discontent at her father’s house and
my factory job did not earn us enough to move out on our own. Donna also had issues with
parenting and made it clear that she was discontent in the role of stay-at-home mom. She was
never much of a nurturer, nor was she ever content being a “homemaker”. As a result, she
hatched a plan to join the Air Force, as we believed we could support Chrys on a military salary
and it would provide opportunities for both of us to go to school. We were roughly 19 and 20 at
the time and Chrys was approaching 1 year old. But, this should have been another red flag, as
the discussion was rather one-sided: She was bent on moving away and though I would
eventually agree, I don’t think I had much of an alternative in the matter. She HAD to get away
and get away now!
Air Force Strong
Eventually, the plan came to fruition and we moved to Wichita Falls, TX as Donna
shipped off to basic training at Lackland AFB in San Antonio. The base in Wichita Falls was to
be her technical training base, so we were able to reduce some of the time apart that typically
follows basic training and technical training in the military.
Her basic training was roughly 6 weeks long and the separation was painfully difficult on
me, which should have been the first clue of my codependency, but that’s for a later discussion.
During this period, I became the mom and dad in the family and raised my son on my own. Over
the years, I would teach him to walk, talk and everything else. Our time together was unique to
say the least. He was a good kid, in that he had a very set schedule: He would wake up around
7am and required feeding every three hours. He would typically end up in bed, for the night,
around 10pm, and though he would get up every three hours, he wouldn’t fully awake until 7am,
or so. I was exceedingly proud of the child he was and the man he eventually became. I really
enjoyed the time with him, but being alone was very hard on me, so the experience was
bittersweet at best. I also had some jealousy issues, as Donna had that odd history of
disappearing and excuses that seemed utterly implausible.
In basic, she admitted to meeting a guy that she kissed, but I suspect that was one of her
many half-truths to throw me off the scent…..it worked. Eventually, she graduated basic and
came back home to Wichita Falls and the “guy” went off to a different training base (so I was
told). In either event, I was very relieved to have her home and quickly grew to love my role as
the caretaker for the family. I cooked, cleaned and took care of Chrys. I even pressed Donna’s
uniforms and shined her shoes each day, so she could meet the Air Force dress standards (she
was the best dressed at all times). I loved her and I loved my family.
However, after she disclosed the kiss with the guy in basic, I began to suspect that more
had happened and my trust began to wane a bit. I pushed her on several occasions for a better
story, including some of the odd stories like meeting some random long-lost friend at Red
Lobster. So, she gave me her first real story that involved sex: She stuck to the fact that the kiss
in basic was just a kiss, but this is when she first admitted that she met her ex-boyfriend, Matt, at
Red Lobster and not some random friend. I believed her; the half-truth ploy always worked on
me!
Soon after she got back from basic, the odd behavior started again and there would be
gaps in time, such as coming home from tech school a few hours late. She would claim that they
were held late from class, but I quickly found that other members in her class were released on
time. I pressed her about the discrepancies, but there was always a convenient excuse, like she
was just hanging out with friends and talking…..”how dare I micromanage her life”, she would
say. She always had a way of twisting, what would eventually turn out to be, valid concerns
against me.
This period was also filled with incidents that I should have followed up on, but I always
gave her the benefit of the doubt. In one particular case, our neighbor, and friend, gave me a
half-hearted warning that she saw Donna making out with some blonde guy in the laundry room
of our apartment complex. She was also concerned that Donna and her husband, who was also
in the Air Force, were coming home late together. I dismissed her concerns and bought the
excuse that she was just jealous because her husband came onto Donna and Donna said no. In
all likelihood, Donna was having sex with him, but, at least on this account, I never managed to
get anything out of her, but I never really pressed her on it either.
Money quickly became another major issue in the relationship, as living off base was
bankrupting us given that she was netting around $600 per month and our rent was $450. Due to
the severe money issues, her squadron commander, at tech school, recommended that she get a
hardship assignment, so she was assigned to Sheppard Air Force Base (SAFB), as a permanent
duty station, so we could get housing on base. This helped with the finances a bit, but we also
found out that she was pregnant with our second child.
The second pregnancy also came with complications that put Donna on bed-rest again.
This was another good time for us, because the mysterious gaps in time began to disappear, as
she couldn’t leave the house. We were lucky that she was in the Air Force, as she received full
pay for being in bed for around 3 months.
Eventually, Allison was born. She was a bit premature, so she was very tiny, but I was so
proud to have a baby girl and Chrys was ecstatic to have a baby sister. For months before and
after Allison’s birth, things were great with the family and the relationship. I thought we were
both very content and madly in love with one-another, but then things took a darker turn.
Up until this point in the story, Donna’s indiscretions were largely minor (so I thought)
and hard to pinpoint without sounding conspiratorial, but she had made a close friend in the Air
Force and began to go out on the weekends until 2-4AM, which, given that the bars there closed
at 1AM, was a bit problematic for me, especially given that this friend’s husband, my best friend
(Troy), claimed that his wife would come home no later than 12:00 to 12:30AM, but I thought he
was just screwing around with me. She would come home drunk out of her mind and left me to
take care of Chrys and Allison. Chrys was never a problem, as he was always a great kid, but
Allison had severe reflux disorder and would projectile vomit more often than not following a
feeding, no matter what type of formula we used. The poor girl’s stomach was always upset,
which meant that I had to rock her for hours on end, as movement was the only thing that seemed
to sooth her. She quickly developed a huge attachment to me to the point of spiking a 102
degree fever if we tried to leave her with sitters. Though a bit off-topic in terms of Donna and
my relationship, this point will prove relevant later in the story.
Back to Donna’s alcohol fueled nights out: For obvious reasons, I was not okay with her
going out and getting drunk at night clubs until, at times, hours after all the clubs closed. But,
the more I pressed her on the issue, the more she pressed back and labeled me a bad husband and
father (a pattern that will repeat as you follow this story). I knew more was going on, but I had
no proof and it was driving me mad.
One night, I finally developed the courage to stand up for myself and I told her that she
could either go out, or have me, but not both. She became irate and called me controlling. She
took the kids and went to her friend’s house and left them there, with the husband and my best
friend, to go out clubbing with said friend. She said if I came over there she would call the
police; my kids were effectively held hostage. I called and pled with her to reconsider and that I
couldn’t mentally take losing my wife and kids, but this only made her more distant and hateful.
She had effectively turned me off in her head.
I decided that I just couldn’t take it anymore. I knew there were numerous lies going on
and that I was a good dad, but she was the one in the military with the job and I was just a
deadbeat dad for staying home to raise my kids. She has a knack for destroying my character,
even though the set-up we had was something she wanted; we didn’t want strangers raising our
kids and she didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom, but she always used that set-up to her
advantage in these cases.
As a result of the utter madness and corner I was painted into, I decided to drink some
vodka, write my suicide note and take a razor blade on a walk around the golf course at 12am.
I’m not sure when, exactly, I slit my wrists, but I believe it was on the 9th hole. Unfortunately, I
was just an uneducated kid with little to no knowledge of anatomy, so I was unaware that slitting
one’s wrists is a nearly impossible means of committing suicide. Eventually, I wandered over to
the friend’s house where my wife and kids were; it was late and she had returned from clubbing.
I was bleeding pretty bad from my wrists and, generally speaking, I was covered in blood, but
my wife would not exit the house; she only managed to shout through the door to tell me to
leave, despite seeing me covered in blood. She merely called the police/ambulance and let me sit
outside on the curb. This should have been another major flag. No matter how mad I’ve ever
been with her, or any loved one for that matter, I could not fathom turning a blind eye to them if
they’re hurt, let alone bleeding profusely.
The police and paramedics were largely comforting and I was shipped to a psych ward
off base for a couple of weeks. Things got really strange at this time, as Donna began to break
down a bit and the emotions/empathy started to return. In essence, she started to care again and
came to see me. She never admitted to any wrong-doing, but, through a lot of counseling from
her first sergeant and a therapist, she decided to stop going out and partying without me.
Though I didn’t find out until much later in the story, Donna eventually admitted to a
major incident that happened whilst I was hospitalized: About two years later, while divulging
the numerous sexual encounters/rapes after her breakdown, Donna admitted that my best friend,
Troy, had come over one night while I was in the hospital and forced himself on her while the
kids were down the hall sleeping. She went into great detail on this one and even told me how
he did it, what he said and how she shamefully cleaned up afterwards. In time, with Donna’s
help, I confronted his wife about the incident and they both claimed that it was consensual and
that Troy told his wife shortly after it happened. I’m still not sure what to make of this one, as
she was fairly detailed on the encounter and genuinely seemed to convey fear over it. However,
looking back, it does strike me as a bit odd as she continued to not only have a relationship with
the wife, but also had a relationship with him. She even allowed them to babysit our kids on
occasion. Sadly, I was oblivious and remained friends with him…I was the perpetual tool.
That said, it was during this time of repair, shortly after being released from the mental
hospital, that I found out that she was pregnant with our 3rd child. Again, there were
complications with the pregnancy, so she was put on bed-rest for nearly 6 months. This gave us
time to heal and time to repair some of the lost trust on my end. On June 24th, my beautiful baby
Bean was born; her official name was Jenna, but she had developmental issues in which she
would just lie there for hours curled up like a little bean, thus the name stuck.
The eventual admission about sex with Troy, shortly before Jenna’s conception, would
leave me with the one of the biggest red flags of my life, as the timeline matched up in a way that
Troy, or any of the numerous guys she was sleeping with during the clubbing phase of her life,
could, in theory, be Jenna’s father. I would sit up for countless nights, long after the fact, trying
to match up the timeline to see just how probable this revelation could be, but I wasn’t made
aware, for a fact, that any of this had occurred until a couple of years after her birth, which
means I had to dig through medical records to try and match everything up. To this day, I still
don’t know, for certain, if I’m her biological father, as Donna rarely used a condom when she
cheated and rapists tend not to worry about such things (if, indeed, she ever was raped). When I
raised the concern with Donna she would half-heartedly deny that there was any chance, but her
denials seemed to lack conviction, as one would expect with such an accusation. Instead, she
would simply tell me to get a DNA test, knowing that we couldn’t afford it and also knowing
that, in all honesty, I really didn’t want to know the truth, as I loved Bean to death. Moreover,
what would I do with the information if it turned out that she wasn’t my child? She was still MY
daughter and I’ll always consider her as such; even worse, what good can come out of knowing
that, based on what I believed at the time, my daughter was conceived by a rapist? Though, now
I’m not so sure the incident in question was rape….I really don’t know anymore.
Not long after Jenna was born, Donna began to enter into some of her same old, bad
habits. She went out with friends from her squadron one night for a retirement party that only
lasted until about 9pm, but she managed to come home pass-out drunk at about 3am. She
claimed that a few friends stayed late and drank at the NCO club, but the club closed, at I
believe, 1 am. Again, the story didn’t add up. She did manage to call me a few times from the
club, but the calls stopped coming at around 9PM and as the hours wore on I became
increasingly concerned about her whereabouts. I was left home with all three kids and, at the
time, Jenna was sick and still had, yet undiagnosed, developmental issues.
I paced the floor for hours and waited up until she stumbled in the door at 3AM. Livid, I
asked her where the hell she had been and why she didn’t call to let me know she was okay. Of
course, she turned the line of questioning against me, as she always did, and made me out to be
some paranoid, overzealous husband. It wouldn’t be until much later, during her mental
breakdown, that she would eventually admit where she was and with whom she was with:
This would be her first admission and it came just before she had her mental breakdown
in Pensacola, FL. At the time, Donna had exhibited some odd behavior, as if she were hiding
something. All of the previous issues, that still lingered unanswered at this stage in my mind,
began to resurface, so I pressed her one night on the various discrepancies noted above.
Eventually, she focused on the night at the NCO club and admitted that she went clubbing with a
couple of friends shortly after she called at 9PM. Specifically, she went out with a guy named
Anthony, a fellow coworker and her supervisor. She said that she was too drunk to drive, so he
offered to drive her home in our car (the little red Eclipse). On the way home, she said they
stopped in a parking lot and she had sex with him in the driver’s seat of our car.
This was the first time she ever openly admitted to cheating on me and the news
eviscerated me. I didn’t really get angry though; instead, I was overwhelmed with sadness and
pressed her on details of the encounter. I also felt the inexplicable need to have sex with her; it
was almost like I was marking my territory, for lack of a better phrase. Eventually, though, the
“details” didn’t add up. She said he was very forceful and that her leg was caught in-between the
car seat and the door in a very painful way that left her with a bad bruise. In time, she would
also say that she told him no and that he wouldn’t accept no for an answer. Another would-be
rape.
Eventually, I would come to accept the incident as rape and my sorrow turned into anger
and was no longer directed at Donna. However, to this day, I’m not sure what the actual truth is
when it comes to Anthony. She demonstrated real fear of him well after this admission, even
going so far as to include him in some of her numerous, and eventual, dissociative episodes;
something she didn’t do with any of the other men. Yet, in her description, she was “on top” and
the jeans she was wearing were practically painted on her and not something someone could
remove casually whilst reaching across a manual transmission car; she had to take them off of
her own volition. Yet, that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have used some sort of psychological
tactic to force the issue. Donna did claim that he used his position as her boss as leverage against
her, so I’m really not sure what the truth is here and I really want to give her the benefit of the
doubt on this one. If any rape did occur whilst she was in the military, this was the one.
Shortly after the Anthony issue she went out with a friend of her mother’s, from
Delaware, that was in the Air National Guard and down for a week of technical training. Her
mother sent her down with the explicit instructions of taking her out and getting her “laid”;
something I wouldn’t know for years to come. To me, though, Donna was just going out with a
family friend to have some drinks, but she didn’t come home until shortly after 4am; 3 hours
after all of the clubs closed. I was furious, but she said she just went back to her friend’s hotel
room and hung out for a bit. Questioning her further only pushed her into previous hate speech
where she began to blame me and call me a bad father. However, she did promise to stop with
the late nights out after this last tryst.
As with all of the other encounters, I wouldn’t find out the “truth” until years later: She
admitted that her mother sent this family friend down with the intent to get Donna laid and the
friend had, essentially, walked up to a random couple of guys at a bar and told them that her
friend was looking to do just that. Obviously, that’s a homerun for a couple of guys out on the
prowl, so they eagerly agreed to go back with them to her motel room on base (the guys were
also military and on a brief training assignment). The friend, whose name is, I believe, Angela,
left Donna alone in the room with one of the guys and sat out on her balcony with the other guy
leaving them to their own devices. Donna was also VERY descriptive about this encounter and
she always wavered between whether or not it was consensual. She said that she did make out
with him on the bed and that when it came time to have sex, he went to the bathroom to prep
himself (I guess) and put on a condom. Donna, apparently, disrobed while he was gone. They
made out a bit more and he eventually moved to have sex with her. This is where she claimed
that she shut her legs and he forcefully pried them open, which she said took several attempts.
She also said that she told him no on several occasions, which would certainly qualify as rape in
my book.
Oddly enough, though, she was exceedingly descriptive about this particular case. She
told me that he was very good in bed and that the encounter took almost 40 minutes. She also
said that he would say things like, “I’m so much better than your husband, aren’t I?” It couldn’t
be more crushing, but this was under the auspice of a rape, so what was I to say? She would
discuss this event a few times over the course of the years and she eventually made a rather
disturbing admission that was also somewhat of a spoiler of events to come: She said she faked
an orgasm to try to get him to “finish”, but that she actually had an orgasm shortly thereafter,
which, especially in the context of a supposed rape, was disturbing for her. Even worse, this was
after she admitted to me that she had been raped/molested by her father as an 8 year old kid and
she said that the orgasm occurred because she dissociated from the event by thinking about her
father and her father was supposedly the only other person, aside from myself, that she ever had
an actual orgasm with. This was a rather disturbing admission that will become more clear later
in this story. Take from it what you will….
Not long after the Anthony incident, she began to grow very discontent about being at
SAFB and, thus, started desperately searching for an assignment that would take her away.
Eventually, she was granted a special duty assignment to Pensacola Naval Air Station, an Air
Force detachment group. It was a great assignment, so we jumped on it, though, at the time, I
had no idea why.
Our time in Pensacola was largely good. There were a few issues with Donna coming
home from work late with shady excuses, but none of the explicit 4am stuff again. She also
began to divulge her insecurity with a specific guy at work that was harassing her sexually. This
made me feel good, because it showed that she was being open about the encounter and that she
appeared to not want any male advances. However, all of the prior incidents really began to
weigh on me.
It was also during our time in Pensacola that Donna would eventually admit that she had
a relationship with a female coworker. Of course, like many of her admissions, I wouldn’t find
out about this until much later. Essentially, many of the gaps in time, during that period, were
due to the fact that she was going home with this girl, Kathy. They forged a secret, physical
relationship right under my nose. Even worse, they practically flaunted it at me, yet my naivety
and ignorance were impenetrable! Basically, we went out with Kathy several times, to various
bars, and she and Donna would play the “role” of bisexual lovers, whilst telling me that they
wanted to have a threesome with me. Of course, I wasn’t exactly against the notion, so I looked
right past the overt sexual intimacy between the two and, instead, focused on the manly dream of
having two girls at once.
In fact, the would-be dream almost came to fruition one night when the girls were
drinking particularly heavily and Kathy decided to come home with us. The babysitters already
had the kids in bed, so we all headed right back to the bedroom and jumped into bed. Donna and
I made out pretty heavily and I tried to involve Kathy, but Donna basically passed out during the
process. Shortly thereafter, I turned my attention to Kathy and she was rather receptive. She
allowed things to go rather far, but wouldn’t exactly “reciprocate”. When I tried to have sex
with her, she pulled away. I asked her if she wanted to and she said no, which was rather selfish
of her given what she allowed/prompted me to do, but it was what it was and I’m not one to push
the issue. Sometime during the process, however, Donna woke up, grabbed me and we
eventually had sex right next to Kathy. The whole thing was rather messed up, but I wouldn’t
know how much until Donna later admitted that they were, essentially, girlfriends at the time.
Not long after the Kathy encounter, Donna began to mentally break down to a point
where she could not bring herself to go to work anymore. She largely blamed the aggressive coworker as the catalyst, but I think it was a culmination of many things. Eventually, she
attempted suicide, around Christmas in 2001 (Christmas is a significant time for her, as I’ll
discuss in a bit), and was hospitalized for PTSD. During this time, Donna really broke down; it
was like the floodgates opened and years of psychological issues came pouring out.
She remained in the hospital, off and on, for nearly 6 months, in which she received
intense treatment and was diagnosed with several disorders, including psychosis and dissociative
tendencies. The doctors were having a hard time snapping her out of her mental slide and her
suicidal tendencies would not abate. However, one night, after she was released from her first
initial hospitalization, I decided to get away for a night with her so that we could bond and I
could take some of the weight off of her shoulders. My mom had come down to help take care
of her and to help me with the kids as Donna was initially hospitalized for almost three months,
thus we had a babysitter and mom was willing to pay for us to spend a couple of nights at a hotel
on Pensacola Beach. Donna was doing fairly well for most of our time there, but, again, when
she was in that state between asleep and awake she lost her mind and I found her on the balcony
of our hotel room curdled up in a ball, crying. When I asked her why she was out there she said
she was going to jump, and we were about 10 stories up. She didn’t seem to quite know where
she was, nor what was going on, but I was able to eventually get her off of the balcony and back
into the room. We left early that night and she had to be hospitalized again the next day.
It was during this second hospitalization that the doctors decided to give her electric
shock therapy (ECT). The therapy lasted two weeks and it was a very difficult time for both of
us. The ECTs wiped her brain in a way that was heart-wrenching. One particular encounter, not
long after one of her “treatments”, haunts me to this day: I brought all three kids to see her and
when we walked into her room the kids ran to give her a hug and she pushed them away. She
had no idea who they were and asked me why I would bring a bunch of strange kids to see her. I
cried for hours that night; I thought I had lost my wife.
Daddy Issues
She was eventually medically boarded from the Air Force in 2002 at the age of 25. So,
we packed up the family and headed home to Delaware to live with her dad again. Her mental
issues were still rather severe and she was divulging more and more to me as time went on. She
also tried to commit suicide a couple of times at her dad’s house, and was hospitalized as a
result. One attempt, in particular, stands out, as it was similar to her attempt in Pensacola. I’m
not entirely sure about all of the details, but I believe Donna had sent the kids and me out on
some errand (we may have been visiting my brother). I returned home without the kids, so I’m
inclined to believe that I left them with family. When I walked into her dad’s house, I called out
to let her know I was home, but got no response. I checked downstairs to see if she was visiting
her step-grandmother, whom resided in a separate living space in the basement, but she wasn’t
there and neither was the step-grandmother; apparently her father, step-mother and stepgrandmother had gone on vacation to the beach. Eventually, I walked into the bedroom that we
were staying in and found her turning blue with the cord from the blinds wrapped around her
neck. Luckily, she was still breathing and somewhat responsive. I called 911 and she was
whisked away by an ambulance. Unfortunately, the mental hospital in Delaware was not very
family friendly and they wouldn’t let me stay with her during the admissions process, so I was
forced to go home until she stabilized.
She was gone for about two to three weeks and, for some reason that I still don’t
understand, she insisted on my sister-in-law picking her up to take her home. She came home a
good 15-20lbs heavier than she left and she had dreadful cornrows, but I didn’t even so much as
hint to my disapproval; rather, she asked me how she looked and I said, “beautiful”. Shortly
after she got home, she explained that the cornrows were done by her black “girlfriend” in the
hospital, which I really didn’t comprehend at the time, as I hadn’t heard about Kathy, nor her
bisexual/homosexual tendencies. Later, I came to find out that she had a moderately sexual
relationship with the girl, which, honestly, I don’t really care about given the circumstances. In
either event, I stood by her side when no rational man would have and I still hadn’t gotten to the
worst part of the whole story…..
It was also during this period that many of the previous revelations came about. Not only
did she mention Troy and the guy her mom set her up with, but she also touched on the nights
she spent out, at SAFB, shortly before my suicide attempt. She admitted to sleeping with at least
three different guys, though she held that two of them were rapes. However, she did admit that
one of them was not the result of a rape. She was also fairly detailed on this incident and said
that the guy drove her from a club, late one night, to a grocery store parking lot (Winn-Dixie).
She said that they kissed passionately and that she eventually pulled his penis out. She told him
to put a condom on and she took her pants off. He put the driver’s seat down and she climbed
over and had sex with him. She said the whole thing was over in a couple of minutes, though.
I would normally be furious over such an admission, but keep in mind that I was hit with
all of this in a very short period and it came amongst a couple of other incidents that she claimed
were rapes (yet, all similar in nature: Parking lots in a car). But, I also know this is an excuse on
my part and I really should have seen the underlying pattern. Hindsight is a bitch that way and
though I now know I’m an idiot for standing by her, I just couldn’t see the forest through the
trees in the moment. I just wanted to help her; to “fix” her……
In time, she was both awarded VA compensation and Social Security benefits, which
amounted to well over $3000 per month in nontaxable wages. The money enabled us to move
out and rent a townhome in Smyrna, DE, near my mom, and she was strongly insistent that we
get out of her dad’s house, even though the kids seemed comfortable and, all things considered,
it wasn’t a bad situation. Donna stabilized a bit after moving to Smyrna, and although she still
had nightly issues pertaining to her mental health (she spent many nights crying on my shoulder),
the risk-taking behavior seemed to stop and there weren’t too many gaps in time that went
unaccounted for, though there were a few, in hindsight.
However, her mental health issues did not entirely abate and I eventually found her
huddled in the corner of the kitchen with a knife. When I attempted to approach her in the
kitchen, she thought I was someone else and was threatening to hurt me if I didn’t move and give
her access to her car keys, so she could commit a murder/suicide at Dover AFB, close to where
we lived. Her intention was to drive our car into the guard shack, killing as many people as she
could before they mowed her down with M-16s. I was able to talk her down and she never did
attack me with the knife, but this led to a fairly lengthy hospital stay. Luckily, the kids were all
in school, sans Jenna, whom I believe was asleep during this whole fiasco.
However, this
incident stands out a bit, because it’s the first time she openly admitted to homicidal ideation.
In time, Donna began to stabilize a bit and, with me around fulltime, her suicidal
tendencies began to decline, but I gradually had to cut back work and school to accommodate
this need; something she would come to use against me down the road. In either event, we were
able to qualify for a home and we found a great home on a few acres in Felton, DE.
Things went fairly well in Felton for the most part, but there were some lingering
questions I had about the multitude of rapes that Donna had claimed. Some seemed plausible,
but the sheer number and various details made me suspicious, so I tried to broach the subject
without triggering her PTSD issues, which was a fine line to walk.
In time, Donna admitted that not all of them were rapes and that she had indeed cheated
on me on at least two occasions (mentioned above). However, during the process of admitting to
these affairs, she began to breakdown as if she was hiding something even worse; something that
no one knew and she was terrified to admit and, considering what she was willing to admit, it
had to be something huge!
It was late one night in Felton when Donna began to talk about her childhood. She began
by saying that her dad would do weird things like masturbate while she was in the shower with
him at around 6 years old. Through much convincing, she continued the story and eventually
admitted that her father started raping her around the age of 8, but I wouldn’t know the full
extent until much, much later. She also claimed that her mother knew of the issue and told her,
“I know what you and your father are doing…..I’m putting you on the pill”. This was when
Donna was 11. Of course, this triggered my nurturing response, so the affairs kind of took a
backseat.
I’ve had some friends/relatives, recently, tell me that maybe she was even lying about her
father, but I just don’t buy that premise. She was far too detailed about her dad and there were
far too many real-world implications that matched up with the stories. Two things in particular
come to mind: First, Donna has never really had eyelashes; she picks them out both consciously
and, at times, subconsciously whilst she sleeps at night. She’ll go very heavy on the eyeliner to
give the illusion of eyelashes, so most people don’t recognize it. She told me that she does this
because her dad would always look into her eyes and tell her how beautiful they were. Basically,
when he “finished” he would look her in the eyes and say, “you have such beautiful eyes,
Pumpkin”. Pumpkin also became a severe trigger word for her.
The second issue would manifest itself every year around Christmas and it explains the
original suicide attempt around that time frame, as she was always very anxious/depressed
during that time of year from Thanksgiving through New Years). Basically, we could not have
any images of Santa Clause in the house and she had to control every aspect of how we
celebrated the holiday. I felt bad for her, because she had to feign Christmas joy for the kids’
sake, but, in reality, she was petrified by the whole ordeal. This was all due to the fact that
Donna claimed that her father would routinely dress up as Santa and play the role for her, her
sister and other kids in the neighborhood. He would also climb into her bed, during the
Christmas season, and rape her in his Santa suit. It was an abomination! Sadly, he still dresses
up as Santa to this day and entertains various young kids; it’s a nightmare.
There were various other claims that manifested in real-world behaviors, but some are too
personal/sexual and I really don’t want to delve into them. Suffice it to say that I believe, wholeheartedly, that her claims about her father were very, very real. Not only did she have the
specific behavioral tendencies noted above, but I also believe that each time we moved (ran
away), she was trying to flee from her family.
There’s one more horrible thing about the story with her father that I should touch on,
though I do so reluctantly: There is a slight possibility that Chrys may be his grandfather’s child.
I hope like hell he isn’t and I wouldn’t treat him differently if he were, but Donna was still
sleeping with her father during the time of his conception and something about Chrys’s looks
always reminded me of the evil son-of-a-bitch. Though, Chrys’s mannerisms scream “Jason”, I
just can’t be sure if that’s a product of the fact that I almost singlehandedly raised him (nature
versus nurture, I guess). I hope, beyond hope, that he’s not the product of some incestual rape
between his mother and grandfather, but I can’t rule it out, sadly…neither can his mother, which
is utterly disgusting!
It wasn’t long after this latest admission that Donna began to show signs that she was
beginning to break down again. She began to become combative with me and rather distant,
which led to some arguments on, or around, Thanksgiving (holidays). In time, she came to admit
that she had stopped taking her medications, and she was on numerous meds. One night, in
particular, Donna said that she really wanted to die, but, unfortunately, it was rather late and she
refused to go back to the mental hospital in Delaware, as they were very combative with family
and largely geared towards drug addicts that were court ordered to be there. As such, I had to
stay up ALL night to ensure her safety until the following morning, around 6AM, when we all
piled into the car (I had no babysitter) to drive her 3 hours away to a VA hospital that specialized
in PTSD (Perry Point). It was a great hospital; however, this hospital stay hit Donna really hard,
as the kids were now old enough to be impacted by her loss. In particular, Jenna took the
incident really hard and cried profusely as they carted Donna off. She offered to give her mom
her bunny, which never left her side, and she begged her not to go; it was heart-wrenching!
Donna never forgot that moment and it made her far more reticent to seek in-hospital treatment
in the future. The VA hospital also wasn’t limited by insurance concerns, like the civilian
hospitals were, so they kept her for over 3 months.
This was particularly hard on me, as I not only had to raise the family on my own again,
but I had to shuttle us back and forth for visits, which was nearly a 6 hour round trip. The kids
really didn’t understand the difference between “being sick” and the true nature of Donna’s
psychological problems, let alone why she had them, so although the separation was hard on
them, it wasn’t nearly as impactful as it could have been had they been a bit older. At the time,
they were between 3 and 6 years old and, to this day, they have no idea of what occurred during
any of the events leading up to this, nor this event in particular.
Shortly after Donna got home from the VA, I began to worry about the issues with her
father; specifically, I began to worry about my own kids, as we had allowed them to spend a
great deal of time with him alone, even going so far as letting them spend entire weekends with
him at the beach. Eventually, Donna and I agreed that we needed to talk with them, so she
pulled them aside, one by one, and asked them if anything inappropriate had occurred. Both
Chrystian and Allison denied any wrong-doing, but my youngest, Jenna, said that, “poppop
licked my pee-pee”. She was only around 4 at the time, but we reported the incident to the
police, only to have them do nothing. However, part of that was due to Donna’s reluctance to
admit that her father had raped her as a young child; that is a secret she will take to her grave, I
believe, especially now, given that she’s hitched back onto them for financial reasons, but I’ll
discuss that later.
Both Donna and I wanted to get away from her family following these revelations, so we
began to look for houses in places that did not have grandparent’s rights. In particular, we began
to look in Pennsylvania, which was only about an hour from Felton and close to my brother, who
lived in northern DE. However, someone quickly made a cash offer on our house in Felton; an
offer that would net us about 60k in profit in an 11 month span. This offer came with a 30 day
closing date, so we had to move and move fast. Unfortunately, my family would not put us up
while we looked for a house in PA, at least not with a cat.
The Lewis and Clark Trail, Bitches
So, off to the northwest we ran to live with my father again; the only person that would
put us all up. At the time, my father lived in Vancouver, WA in a small 3 bedroom house. He
had a wife and stepson, so we had to pile all five of us into one room WITH a cat. Honestly, it
wasn’t too bad given the tight space and it took us about a month to find a townhome to rent in
Camas, WA. We wanted to buy, but school was starting soon and we wanted the kids in the
Camas school district.
The story gets a bit boring here, as the next several years were fairly decent, both in terms
of Donna’s mental stability and the overall welfare of the family (or, so I thought). Donna was
only hospitalized once and it largely had to do with the VA messing with her compensation and
the stress that it evoked. However, Donna was adamant that I needed to be home to help her
cope and to help her parent. It was almost like having 4 children in the house. But, I enjoyed
playing the role of nurturer with her, as it’s something that’s always been a part of who I am.
However, it was hard not having friends, as Donna became functionally agoraphobic and there
were still trust issues with her and men.
For the most part, things were good, however, one day in July, a couple of years later, we
had an incident. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, Donna had quit taking her medications, which
manifested in the way of impulsive behavior and more standoffishness on her behalf. Again, as I
began to press her on the issues, she responded by pushing back harder and attacking me as a
father and husband. Eventually, the issue came to a head one late night on, or around, July 2nd. I
felt, after many hours of trying to figure out what was wrong with her, that I had lost control of
the situation and she was trying to get to her keys so she could just “leave and move somewhere
else”, leaving me and the kids behind. Obviously, I wasn’t going to let that happen, as I knew
this wasn’t really her talking, so I said I was calling 911 for help. She responded by grabbing her
cell phone, the only phone we really ever used in the house, and ran downstairs to call my sisterin-law (it was around 4AM back east). I was very upset that she would call my family at such an
hour and that she was involving them in our issues, and, in a move that I’m not exactly proud of,
I grabbed her phone from her and threw it out the window in the dead of night. I ran back
upstairs and slammed the door to look for my own phone, but she quickly pursued me and tried
to beat me to it, as she knew where it was and I didn’t (it was in one of the desk drawers in the
bedroom). She tried to get around me and, when I stood in the way, she began to punch me in
my chest rather aggressively and grabbed my throat. Eventually, I bear-hugged her and walked
her out of the bedroom, but she wouldn’t let me close/lock the door, so I had to shove her to get
the door shut. However, whilst I searched for my phone, she went outside and found her own.
In essence, she beat me and called the police to avoid going to the hospital, which is something
she feared greatly after her stay at Perry Point.
Clark County, where we lived, is one of those pseudoliberal areas that has vastly overcompensated when it comes to domestic violence cases. We went from never getting any help to
anyone, no matter how severe the abuse was, to throwing everyone in jail for minor
disagreements no matter how little, or nonexistent, the evidence is. If the police are called,
someone IS going to jail, period. In this case, I had told the police that I had to push Donna out
of the room to look for my phone and that’s all they needed to lock me up. What I didn’t tell
them was that Donna was trying to beat me to my phone and was punching me in the chest and
trying to choke me in order to maneuver her way around me in the tight space in our bedroom. I
told the cop that Donna had severe PTSD issues and that she was having a dissociative episode,
but, apparently, he was an expert on PTSD and said that, “I have friends with PTSD and that
doesn’t sound like PTSD”….idiot.
Once locked up, Donna went into defensive/attack mode again, for a brief period, and
told our kids how horrible I was and how abusive I had been. However, she quickly began to
realize how absurd that sounded to everyone that knew us, so she switched gears and dropped the
dissociative/sociopathic nonsense. Eventually, she managed to see her long-time psychiatrist
whom quickly diagnosed her as having a severe manic episode and wrote a letter to the
prosecution to that effect. They reluctantly dropped the charges, but they still firmly believe that
I was the bad guy, because, after all, that’s what the textbooks say.
The whole event was rather traumatic for me and I had to start monitoring Donna’s pill
intake to ensure that she was properly medicated in the hope of avoiding future incidents. In
time, though, things stabilized and I went back to school and, eventually, finished both my
bachelor’s and master’s in psychology. Again, things were going well and the kids were fairly
oblivious to the actual severity of Donna’s condition. More importantly, she never explained
that incident in July to the kids, as she promised to do as a condition of my returning home after
being incarcerated. To this day, they still think I was the aggressor in that situation, which would
also come back to bite me in the ass in time.
You see, to this day, no one really knows just how severe Donna’s issues are; not even
the psychiatrist that treated her for nearly 8 years. Not only did Donna have various anxietydriven fears, but she was also highly paranoid (especially when it comes to me) and prone to
bouts of psychosis and dissociation. But, the doctors largely knew about those issues; perhaps
not the severity of them, but they were aware that they occurred from time to time. What they
didn’t know was the Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).
DID is, in essence, what most people refer to as multiple personality disorder and it’s an
exceedingly difficult illness to diagnose, because various personalities can have various disorders
of their own that can mimic bipolar, agoraphobia, etc. In short, Donna has several distinct
personalities ranging from a young child of around 8, to a completely sociopathic executive
personality, effectively a 16-17 year old, that would stab me in the back in a heartbeat. It’s the
latter personality that seemed to drive all of the illicit behaviors above and it’s also the one that
always firmly believed that I was plotting to throw her away and take the kids. She even had
names for some of the personalities: The sociopathic, teenage one was “Marie” and she had
another younger teenage one that she called “Missy”.
The real mind-blowing thing about these personalities is just how much they would not
only alter her personality, but also alter her physiology. It took a number of years for me to
notice, but I began to be able to delineate between the various personalities based on her facial
expression and the overall way she carried herself. When the younger personalities manifested
themselves, her body would, in essence, become a teenager again. Her stomach was firmer, her
breasts were perkier, and she lacked any of the complaints synonymous with being 30+ years
old. In particular, she had severe issues with her hips, but those issues disappeared when Missy
or Marie were out. She was like a different person! Marie, though, was the easiest to spot.
When she was out Donna’s eyes went dead; it’s as if she was looking at you, but the lights
weren’t on. I would playfully call this her “game face” until I realized it was a different
personality. It’s sad, because I see her in pictures today with a smile on her face, but she has
those dreadful dead eyes that no one else seems to notice. Thus is the way DID works, the
subtleties of which make it exceedingly difficult to diagnose.
It’s Marie that drove the events on July 2nd. Basically, Donna believed I was going to
leave her and take the kids, so she quit taking her meds to prove that she was “all better”; she
was building a defense against a nonexistent threat. I also believe it’s this personality that drove
the prior events, as well as cheats on me as a means of preempting my eventual cheating on her.
It’s madness personified.
Case in point (and this is somewhat guessing on my part): Not long before the events on
July 2nd, Donna began to shut down sexually and claimed that her PTSD would not allow her to
enjoy normal sex. She said she felt horribly guilty for this, so she began to push me to have an
affair outside of the marriage, provided the affair was purely sexual and not emotional.
Obviously, I was a bit reluctant and I didn’t have the means to simply run off and have a purely
sexual affair with someone anyway, especially given the rather reclusive existence we had due to
her agoraphobia.
In time, Donna began to push a bit more and she began to take a more active role in the
endeavor. She even tried to catch me having an online affair by posing as a random girl from an
internet game and emailing me asking for a no strings attached affair. But, I immediately told
Donna of the email, almost as if I was proud of it; I have a touch of honesty Tourettes, I think.
The whole situation was utter madness, as she posed as this would-be gamer girl for weeks in
back-and-forth emails, even going so far as to send pics, one topless, from time to time. I have
no idea where she got the pics from, but she made a convincing case that this fictional girl was
anything but. However, I had my suspicions in this case, as I was starting to learn from her prior
trickery/lies, and I eventually pressed her into admitting that she was the author of all of the
emails; it was ridiculous. Even worse, the whole thing backfired on her, because I more or less
told her about every email I got, though I may have omitted a detail or two from time to time.
For the most part, I was completely honest about the would-be relationship.
Donna and I were pretty open about such things and though we weren’t technically what
I would call polyamorous, both of us were open to the idea that, as long as something was purely
sexual, sex, in and of itself, would not be a relationship killer. But, even with those parameters
in place, I would never have sex with someone behind her back and I never did (or, with her
knowledge for that matter, sans the tryst with Kathy). Yet, she had this perpetual paranoia that I
was going to leave her for some other woman and many of her detrimental actions were driven
by said paranoia.
As it also turns out, Donna had tried prostitution on, or around, the July 2nd time period.
She admitted to one such encounter, in which she placed an ad on Backpage and some guy from
a neighborhood just a few blocks away responded. She said she showed up and there was $300
in an envelope on the counter. There was very little discussion and she immediately went to the
bedroom and took her clothes off and had sex. She also said that he was a retired Air Force
officer and, likely, married. The sex was apparently distant and rather quick, which I guess is
good? But, I didn’t find out about this until very recently and I’m not quite sure why she told
me. I would also bet that she has done it more than once. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that
Donna tends to give a piece of the truth in order to stop me from digging deeper, especially given
our financial woes at the time, but I’ll discuss them in a bit.
The prostitution thing also came at an interesting time in my life, as things appeared to be
very good with her and with our relationship, yet I kept suffering from odd physical ailments that
I’ve yet to fully understand the cause of. In particular, I spent two nonconsecutive years with
mono-like symptoms in which I would have an overwhelming need to sleep, nearly all day, once
or twice each week for a period of about 10 months. I dismissed it as recurring mono, after
much research, as it greatly resembled the mono I had at 19, but, in hindsight, I’m not so sure. I
also had two inexplicable cases of severe vomiting that ended me up in the ER on two separate
incidences that were only a month, or two, apart. The second one is the most troubling, however,
as I woke up feeling just fine, but Donna had inexplicably made me an awesome hot breakfast.
She made eggs, hashbrowns, bacon, etc., and Donna almost never cooked. In fact, outside of
helping me cook breakfast on Christmas mornings, I can’t ever recall her making a breakfast,
aside from the occasional father’s day and/or birthday. When I asked her about whether or not
something got into the breakfast, not for an instant thinking she did anything intentional, she
became extremely concerned; she had a look of terror in her eyes. I spent most of the day in the
master bathroom puking about every 15 minutes and she spent hours on the computer looking
up, what I thought, were remedies for stomach bugs/vomiting. Eventually, she went to the store
and brought home charcoal tablets and told me they might help, but she seemed reticent for me
to go to the hospital. However, after 24 hrs of vomiting every 15-30 minutes, I was thoroughly
dehydrated and needed fluids desperately. It wasn’t until much later that a friend made the
correlation between the odd sleeping disorder, the vomiting and the odd choice of a charcoal
tablet, which is largely used for poisoning. Could she really have been poisoning me to keep me
disabled/incapacitated?
Not only do these things correlate to the weird prostitution behavior, but, as I found out
much later, Donna was bleeding money somehow and getting into severe financial distress,
unbeknownst to me. You see, Donna did finances in the Air Force and it was one of the only
duties she ever said that she wanted to handle as a contribution to the family, so I largely stayed
out of the family finances outside of asking her for updates from time to time (trusting the
untrustable). Seemingly, things were great with the finances, as we never seemed to run into
financial difficulties (so I thought) and we lived at a fairly high standard of living. However,
though we had a nice house and a few toys, like a big screen TV, decent computers, video
games, etc., we really didn’t splurge on much. We had the same ratty furniture for nearly a
decade and we never took vacations, which can eat up a chunk of a family’s finances each year.
Yet, as I would later find out, Donna was not only borrowing money from my mom and dad to
pay bills on occasion (though, to her credit, she always paid them back), she was also running up
debt at an alarming rate. During my health issue period, she had run up a nearly 30k credit card
debt and even managed to defraud USAA bank out of three thousand dollars by taking advantage
of a loophole in their balance transfer system (I still can’t get a personal bank account to this day;
I have to be on a joint one with my dad, because I’m blacklisted). She also began to take out
credit cards in my name (she was a master at forging my signature) and she took out multiple
personal student loans in my name whilst I was in college, none of which I was aware of. In
short, she eventually ran up nearly 100k in debt without anyone ever knowing and it just
happened to coincide with my inexplicable illnesses, her risk taking behavior and the event on
July 2nd (and the event to be discussed soon with Allison).
Although all of this stuff was happening right under my nose, I was completely unaware
and, as far as I knew, things were going great. Money didn’t seem like an issue, the inexplicable
physical issues eventually diminished and Donna and I were getting along great. But, that would
all change on another dark day in July that would eventually cause my downfall:
The Allison Debacle
I awoke one day, in mid-July of 2012, to a frantic Donna saying that there were two
detectives at the door to see Allison and that they had whisked her away to “talk with her”. I
quickly got dressed and headed downstairs to see what was going on. Both Donna and I
assumed that Allison had done something wrong with her new group of friends, who were
trouble-makers to say the least. Eventually the detective emerged with Allison and said that they
had to question her further at the police station. They barely gave us enough time to hug her and
wouldn’t even let her change out of her pajamas and/or put a bra on. We asked if we could
follow and they said sure, so Donna and I got into the van and followed them over. We also
contacted Chrys, who was out doing yardwork for someone at the time, and told him to head
over and pick up Jenna on the way. Eventually the detectives came out to the waiting room, after
about two hours, and asked to speak with Donna and me.
To this point, I had no clue what this could all be about, but it would quickly become
clear as I entered the room and the detectives said, “we have a few questions for you; do you
mind if we record this interview?” I quickly said yes and asked them if something was wrong, or
if I was being questioned for doing something myself, and they said no; they just had “some
questions”. It didn’t take long to get to the heart of the matter as they started off the questioning
by asking if I had ever touched Allison’s breasts. I was really caught off-guard and my already
horrible anxiety issues kicked into full gear, but I thought I had nothing to worry about, as the
accusation was absurd. Regardless, I immediately responded with a hard “no, of course not”.
They then told me that Allison had accused me of “inappropriate touching”; that I had
“inappropriately touched her breasts”, but they never gave me any specifics, only vague
accusations and they never used anything as explicit as “molestation”.
At the time, I had no idea why Allison would levy such an accusation, but, as a brutally
honest person with nothing to hide, I began to play devil’s advocate and throw out things that
Allison could possibly misconstrue as “inappropriate touching”. Allison, like my other two kids,
was very affectionate with me. We hugged and kissed all of the time and were never shy about
expressing our love for one-another; something I was rather proud of as a parent. But, Allison
was also a severe tomboy and we would wrestle a lot and, generally speaking, she would cling to
me more than the other two kids. So, I told the detectives that maybe she felt uncomfortable
with that affection as she grew older and developed into a young lady. I really couldn’t think of
anything else that could be driving it, however, there was one particular incident that always
bothered me and, like an idiot, I told the police.
Basically, Allison developed at an alarming pace around the age of 11. She was
developing a little too fast and she had developed some stretch marks on her hips and upper chest
near her shoulder (I have stretch marks there too, so I could empathize). Her mother, for
whatever reason, really dwelled on the stretch marks and Allison became terrified that they’d get
worse and she’d be some kind of monster. So, we took her to the doctor to see if there was
anything we could do about it and he prescribed vitamin E lotion, that we picked up from the
drug store. Well, that night her mom, in typical Donna fashion, went to bed around 9PM and left
the rest of us up. Allison, Chrys and I played Call of Duty, online, until around midnight when I
decided it was time for me to head to bed as well. As I said goodnight, Allison became frantic
and said that she needed to put on her ointment. I told her that she could do it herself: Simply
rub a bit on the areas in question; it’s not hard! But, she began to cry and begged me to put it on
myself. You see, much like me as a child, Ally was a perfectionist and if she didn’t know how to
do something like a pro on the first try, she simply wouldn’t try it. It was nearly impossible to
push her into new sports, new activities, etc., I had to hold her hand and walk her through
everything until she got comfortable with it. Anyway, I told her she could wait until the morning
and get her mom to do it, but she persisted. Eventually, I acquiesced and put it on her myself. I
really didn’t think much of it initially, but her “development” hit me in the face like a ton of
bricks and I found the whole thing to be rather uncomfortable. I even told Donna the next
morning of what had occurred and that I don’t care how much she whines, I wasn’t going to do it
again; it was on Donna to make sure it got done.
Personally, I didn’t see it as that big of a deal. I was putting a medically prescribed
ointment on my 12 year old daughter for medical reasons, so I didn’t think much of discussing
the issue with the detectives, but they seized on the story and twisted it around as some sort of
sick perversion on my behalf. Oddly enough, Allison doesn’t even recall the event, nor does
Chrystian and he was sitting right there when it occurred. They also asked me some BS about
whether or not I had ever masturbated and whether or not I had ever looked at pornography,
which, I obviously admitted that I did, as has every man in the history of mankind, but, again,
they used it to paint me as some sort of pervert, which is mind-boggling ridiculous, especially
given that my sexual proclivities tend to lean towards the modest end: I’ve owned one porn
magazine in my life (Donna and I purchased a Playboy with Carmen Electra in it out of curiosity
because we watched Baywatch at the time; we were all of 18/19 at the time) and my libido is
average at most. On top of that, I’ve always viewed porn as a bit demeaning, especially the
harder stuff, though, like most men I would assume, I can appreciate the naked female form if
done tastefully. But, given the accusation being levied, I played into their schema and, in corrupt
Clark County, it was enough for an arrest apparently. I was charged with child molestation.
It wasn’t until later that I discovered how absurd the whole thing was, as Allison
apparently said I touched her while she was sleeping and Jenna, who slept all of a few feet away,
denied seeing anything. They didn’t even interview Chrys and he was awake most nights before
I went to bed. They go out of their way not to investigate things that could countermine their
“investigation”. Moreover, I wouldn’t find out about the specific accusation being levied until
much later when I finally managed to hire a lawyer. Without going into too much detail, her
accusation wasn’t just implausible, it was impossible. She got every detail wrong. Basically,
she accused me of touching her the night she got her tonsils out. She said I walked into her
room, got on my knees and groped her breasts. Unfortunately for her story, she didn’t realize
that we hadn’t separated her bunkbed yet. You see, we bought a bunkbed that could be taken
apart to form separate beds, but we set it up initially as a bunkbed. At the time, she was in the
top bunk in a single size bed, whilst Jenna slept in the bottom bunk in a full size bed. In essence,
I would have had to be standing on Jenna’s bed to do what she claimed.
Even worse, she had no recollection of what actually transpired during that time period,
as Ally took the surgery very poorly. She was in terrible pain, yet kept throwing up anything we
gave her, including her pain medications. As a result, Allison slept in our room on the floor so
we could monitor her and because we didn’t want her puking in the top bunk of her bed. All
details that seemed to escape her. The worst part, however, is that she chose this particular event
to use in her little story. I was such a great dad during this period, as I was always very close to
Allison and I couldn’t stand to see her suffer. I spent 24/7 nursing the girl, getting up with her
several times a night and holding her hair every time she puked. Her mom was never a nurturing
person and she couldn’t take the puking, so it all fell on me. When I wasn’t holding her hair, I
was sitting with her on the couch in the family room watching horrible Disney shows and getting
her drinks, ice pops, etc. on command. I even rubbed her feet for hours on end, as she said it was
the only thing that took her mind off of the pain. In fact, on the second night, Ally still wasn’t
holding down ANY liquid and she was showing no signs of improvement. Even worse, she was
starting to exhibit signs of severe dehydration and her fever spiked that night to about 102; she
seemed to be getting worse and I was terrified! I decided to take her to the ER at around
midnight and we would spend all night there; the sun was coming up on our way home. So,
what was one of my proudest moments as a father was turned into a story about a horrible
atrocity and I’m not sure I can ever forgive her for it.
The tonsil story aside, it wouldn’t be long before the true motive behind the accusation
would become evident: Donna was reluctant to believe her from the beginning, mostly because
Donna has been there and done that, so to speak, and none of the signs were present. If anything,
Allison became more affectionate with me as time progressed; in fact, the night before the
detectives came, and the accusation became official, she asked me to join her in her brother’s
room to help her “spec” her mage on World of Warcraft. I spent hours teaching her about the
various specs and spell combinations. When I got up to leave, she said, “dad, my shoulders are
really sore from weight lifting, could you massage them?” So, I gave her a quick massage and a
kiss on the back of her head and left….hardly the poor, abused girl she was portraying.
According to Donna, shortly after they all returned from the police station, Allison went
upstairs to play video games and talk to boys online, while the family sat downstairs utterly
distraught, but Donna did not allow her siblings to beat her up over the accusation and Donna did
not want to press her on it so soon; she was trying to do the right thing. Eventually, Allison
came downstairs with a big smile on her face and asked to help Donna make dinner, but,
inexplicably, she had dug out an old apron from her keepsake box; an apron that she won with
me in a cooking contest a year, or so, earlier. Allison expressed no emotion whatsoever; not
anger, not sadness, nor depression…it was as if nothing happened and she turned off her
emotions all-together (very Donna-esque).
Donna quickly picked up on the lack of emotion, but kept it to herself for a day, or so.
The next day, CPS showed up and told Donna that Allison needed counseling, so Donna
approached her later that night about the issue and Allison quickly stated that she really needed
help mentally. She was very candid about the fact that she had been experiencing mental health
issues and told her mother some very disturbing things, so disturbing that Donna decided to tape
some of it on her iPhone. Allison said that she routinely thought people could “read her mind”
and that she heard voices that told her to kill her siblings. She even thought about specific ways
to kill them, like getting Chrys’s dragon dagger and stabbing him with it while he slept. She also
stated that she thought about killing herself and that she had a hard time telling reality from
fiction, especially at night when she was trying to sleep, something we had known for quite some
time, but dismissed as a minor issue that she was just joking about. Case in point, Allison woke
up one morning swearing that she hadn’t slept much and that she got up in the middle of the
night to “make a turkey sandwich”. When we pointed out to her that we ALL saw her clearly
sleeping and that not only was there no mess from this fictitious sandwich, but we didn’t even
have turkey in which to make a sandwich with, she remained defiant and swore it occurred
regardless of what the evidence showed.
This issue with reality would seem important given her accusation, but the prosecution
wanted no part of it, even though she said, on tape, that, “well, the cops forced me into saying he
touched my vagina, but I really don’t know if he touched my boobs or not…I just don’t know if
it was a dream” (paraphrasing here; it’s been awhile). Even worse, it became clear that Allison
was strongly motivated by a relationship that she had with a boy named Jacob; a boy that her
mother and I forbid her from seeing just a couple of months earlier. It was the boy that called the
cops and her obsession with him would grow more and more apparent as time wore on.
Regardless of how the prosecution would eventually take the admission, Donna was
obviously concerned about the mental health stuff Allison was divulging, so she decided to get
her help at the local hospital as no one in our insurance network would see her for weeks. At the
ER, Allison was very forthcoming with the doctors and even told them about her invisible friend
that was lording over them in the doctor’s office. The friend is a living sword/woman that
protects Allison and tells her what to do. She would even turn towards the “friend” during the
medical interviews and inexplicably start laughing. It reminded me eerily of Donna’s issues,
which I think Donna quickly caught onto. In addition to what Allison was saying, she was also
exhibiting an odd physical symptom: her pupils were widely dilated, which the hospital took as
some sort of reaction to a drug, so they tested her for every substance known to man and still
wouldn’t accept that she wasn’t on something; they eventually decided it might be bath salts,
which they apparently couldn’t test for. However, their ER doctors need a bit more education on
psychosis and how pupil dilation can be a symptom, just look at LSD and how it impacts the 5HT2A receptor (nerd moment over). Eventually, the ER said she had to be admitted, but,
apparently, the only hospital that takes kids in Washington state is a horrible one that’s nearly 3
hours away, so they let Donna take her out of the hospital under the very explicit condition that
she take her right to an ER in Oregon to be evaluated there, which would also later come to bite
me/Donna in the ass. Donna did as she was told and took Ally to an ER in Oregon at Legacy
Emanuel. The Legacy ER team got the same symptoms out of Allison and also wanted her
immediately admitted to their children’s psych unit. They also expressed real concern over her
pupil dilation; a symptom that one cannot fake.
Once Ally realized that someone was actually going to treat her issues, she began to open
up a bit about her obsession with Jacob and that she may not have been honest about the whole
touching thing. She told one of the Legacy nurses about the whole situation, in private after her
mother had gone home, and the nurse suggested that she write the prosecutor and explain her
feelings, so she sat down and wrote a letter that said, in no uncertain terms, that she was pissed at
me for not letting her date Jacob and that she used the touching thing as an excuse to remove me
from the situation, which she also told her mother on tape. In addition, she wrote a private letter
to Jacob apologizing for lying to him and begged him to forgive her, but said letter would
eventually fall into Donna’s hands and, thus, my lawyer’s hands. However, the prosecutor, and
Camas cop, really didn’t like the new events and they began to come up with some conspiratorial
BS in which Donna was masterminding the whole thing, so the prosecutor for the case sent an
email to Kim, at CPS, telling her to “meet with her” and, shortly after the email, Kim and the
Camas cop headed to Oregon to kidnap Allison. Donna just happened to be there, as they were
having a family progress meeting, so the Camas cop locked her in a room and had her removed
from the PRIVATE hospital in a state outside of Washington. He also signed the form that took
Allison into custody, because Kim obviously wasn’t stupid enough to take a child in an adjacent
state without some sort of court order. In effect, they kidnapped my daughter across state lines
in order to save their case….it worked.
But, let’s not stop at a taped conversation, a letter to the prosecutor, or a private letter to
her would-be boyfriend…..no, we later got a treasure-trove of information via a cell phone that
we just happened to luck out on. Basically, Allison began to attack her mother, as it proved
convenient, because CPS, and various foster parents, were willing to facilitate her relationship
with Jacob and Donna wouldn’t. In time, Donna said no more cell phone, as Allison was using it
to have a text-message relationship with the boy, which CPS used against Donna, by saying they
were the good ones that would let her see the boy and Donna was the mean one for taking him
away, even though they acknowledged some “inappropriate texts” between the two and would
take the phone away for a week. However, we wouldn’t know the gravity of these texts until a
few months later. You see, Donna suspended the phone’s active status, but one can only do so
for a few months, which just happened to expire on January 1st, 2013. In December, Donna
asked for the phone back and, undoubtedly, CPS checked the phone for anything inappropriate
around Christmas, so they decided to hand it back just before January 1st. However, the deleted
messages all popped back up the instant the phone became active again on the 1st.
Oh my God, were the messages disturbing! Not only did they have explicit
conversations about getting me out of the house, but the boy would say atrocious sexual things,
like that he wanted to “rape her”, “fist her until she bled” and “torture her while he masturbated”;
it was utterly disgusting and wreaked of a boy that was clearly disturbed. Even worse, CPS
KNEW about these conversations, yet allowed her to continue seeing him, as it was clear
leverage over her mother….it worked.
Eventually, CPS, with the prosecutor working hand in hand, managed to convince
Allison that her mother was punishing her by taking Jacob away, so she lashed out at her mom
and tried to put her in jail as well. The prosecution needed to explain away the recantations, so
they had a theory that Donna had “tampered” with Allison, so, eventually, Allison wrote a letter
that said exactly that: she told her mother that she “witness tampered” her (where the hell does a
13 year old get that kind of specific legalese?) and that she should “rot in jail”. She also said that
her siblings should “be in foster care, too”. Oddly enough, in the same letter, she went on to say
that if her mother would only accept Jacob, she could come home and they could be a happy
family again. The motive was as clear as day. That sort of flip-flopping became a norm in her
letters to her mom. Not only would she tear her apart one second, then turn around and act as if
they could be best friends if only she accepted Jacob the next, but her handwriting would also
change as her emotions/personality would change within the letter. This goes back to the
physiological changes that I noticed with Donna’s DID, as Donna’s handwriting would also
change drastically as she switched between alters. Allison’s handwriting would go through the
same drastic shift from letter to letter and even within a given letter as her tone shifted. Later,
Ally would come to admit that she has “at least five different personalities” in a therapy meeting
with her mom, but, of course, the state pseudo-therapist didn’t even make note of the revelation,
as it would hurt the “PTSD” theory which they needed to keep her and their case.
These weren’t the only red flags, though: Allison also levied accusations against her first
foster mother, a pseudo-therapist with CPS. Specifically, the foster mother took the cell phone
away, due to “inappropriate texts” with Jacob, so Allison accused her nephew of sexually
assaulting her. Even though the incident was reported to the police, they did nothing oddly
enough (would have been detrimental to their case against me). They did, however, move her to
a new foster home, one she still resides at today. In this home, she would claim that she was
raped on, or about, January of 2013, and she reported the incident to CPS, yet they did nothing.
It wasn’t until months later that she told a state psychologist that she thinks she “may have been
raped”, and Donna and her state therapist got a copy of said interview, that something was
actually done. The therapist was alarmed and called the police and Donna made sure they were
made aware of the incident, but CPS claimed they “looked into it” and came to the conclusion
that Allison was prone to exaggerating things of a sexual nature (go figure); nothing was done.
What Allison said occurred was that her foster sister, a girl a couple of years older, invited over
two boys and had sex with one of them, whilst pushing Allison to have sex with the other. Ally
said she declined, but the boy did it anyway. My baby girl lost her virginity to a rapist at
14…Jesus Christ!
This went on for a LONG time, as the case took nearly two years to resolve itself.
Unfortunately, I agreed to pay my lawyer 25k, but only managed to pay him 19k and that didn’t
include trial costs, which would be another 10k. I KNOW this influenced my lawyer’s handling
of what should have been an open and shut case, especially with the detective and prosecutor
committing felonies. But, despite Donna fighting tirelessly to exonerate me for nearly 1.5 years,
she eventually cracked, and I don’t really blame her for doing so (sort of). Donna went so far as
to contact state senators/representatives over the issue and went to the state Capitol in Olympia,
on a couple of occasions, to get something done, which was HUGE for a woman that was
functionally agoraphobic! However, the prosecutor kept threatening her with felony “witness
tampering” and CPS pushed hard to get Donna to back off. Eventually they told her, in no
uncertain terms, that even if I win the case and/or it’s dropped, they would “come get Chrys and
Jenna” and put them in foster care if she continued to support me. Donna went back to one of
the senators to get help (Liz Pike and another whose name escapes me) and their advice was
pretty simple: run! They told her to flee the state, as CPS was a beast that couldn’t be
defeated….they do what they want when they want and nothing could be done to protect her or
our kids. So, as soon as the kids finished their school year, Donna packed up what she could and
fled back to our home state of Delaware without me.
At first, Donna stayed with my ex-sister-in-law and contacted me as if things between us
were okay, but I think the threat from CPS was too much for her to bear, so she began to waver,
as it was convenient to keep the kids safe. The biggest catalyst to our demise, however, was the
fact that CPS kept telling her that they were going to contact everyone in our family to find a
suitable family to adopt Allison out to, which was just an idle threat in hindsight, but she was
terrified that her mother or father would get wind of the situation and push for custody of ALL of
the kids, so she preempted it all by contacting her mother and feeling the situation out.
Ironically, CPS never contacted her or her dad (to my knowledge), but she let the demons back
in her life and she eventually reverted to that teenage, sociopathic personality.
One thing to keep in mind, that I haven’t touched on yet, is that her family was very adept
at buying her silence. Daddy would rape her, then buy her a shiny new boat, which is why
Donna always had a hard time accepting gifts from me. ALL of the jewelry that I bought her, in
our early years, mysteriously disappeared, as did a lot of the clothes and others items that I
bought her for birthdays, Christmas, etc.. Eventually, I stopped buying her material things and
started to make cards and other things that she wouldn’t equate to “buying her off”. But, Donna
had run us into enormous debt, she had destroyed our credit and couldn’t buy a home, nor find a
place to rent. Moreover, how can she restart a life with a “child molesting” husband with very
little prospect of gainful employment, given the accusations, any time soon? So, as a result,
when mommy swooped in with an open checkbook, she decided to make a deal with the devil
and throw me away for financial security and a place to live.
In the process of throwing me away, she also threw my family away; a family that
embraced her as one of their own for over a decade as she ran from her own family. She has cut
them off in a way that they have had NO communication with her, or my other two kids, for over
a year. My children are living in a bubble with monsters and they’re completely in the dark
about any of this. Donna seized on the opportunity to turn them against me, to the point that
Jenna has now taken her grandfather’s surname; the man that raped her mother as a young child
and molested her as a toddler. It’s mind-boggling, but I’m powerless to act, because Donna
implied that she would testify against me at trial and I was terrified to bring my kids back in a
state, as witnesses, that would promptly put them in a foster care industry in which even senators
seem powerless to fight. I HAD to take a plea deal to protect myself long-term and to protect my
kids from a horribly corrupt system in Clark County. Not to mention a money hungry lawyer
that wouldn’t have lifted a finger in a very winnable case, because I was behind on
payments….it’s such a corrupt process!
At the end of the day, I can say this: Due to Donna’s issues with her dad and rape in
general, I was hypervigilant in protecting my daughters. They were not allowed to spend the
night over anyone’s house if there were an older male present and they couldn’t go anywhere
unless they were with someone I could trust. Unfortunately, I think the desire to protect them
from sexual abuse ultimately led Ally to accuse me, as we were very open about the subject and
she saw me as a barrier to the boys she wanted. Even worse, that process, in turn, put my
youngest daughter with a child raping pedophile and Ally in a foster home to be sexually abused.
And people wonder why suicide is always on my mind; it’s a tragic irony of epic proportions.
Honestly, I’m not sure what Ally thinks today. I believe she still holds that “something”
happened, even though she knows what she originally said was a lie. At last I heard, she said
that I “grabbed her breast while we were wrestling”….I guess that makes me a child molester.
It’s ridiculous beyond words….
One last point on this issue: Given the huge financial problems we had around this time
period, which no one knew about except Donna, I wouldn’t put it past her to set all of this up. If
anyone touched that poor child in a sexual way, it sure as hell wouldn’t have been me and though
the legal system never wants to point fingers at the female in these cases, she is the hypersexual
one with a history of childhood issues. Donna also had an odd obsession with Allison’s
development and would parade her around in swim suits, bras, etc. when she got new clothes.
But, I have absolutely no proof and I don’t want to levy such an accusation sans some sort of
evidence beyond the anecdotal. However, Donna did have an issue with younger looking guys
and she always gravitated towards either old men, or guys who were in their teens or, at least,
looked like they were in their teens. Keep in mind, her sexual personality was also a teenager.
All Stabby and Shit
But, that isn’t even the worst thing Donna has done. I can take the cheating and the
lying; I can even accept her leaving me because of the pressure from CPS and her desire to
protect our other two kids, but what she did in late September of 2013, is beyond my ability to
forgive. At the time, Donna was living with her mother and the text messages/communication
began to wane day by day. As I began to point this out to her, she fell into the tired BS in which
she accused me of being controlling and overbearing, so I tried to back off, even though,
objectively speaking, it was very odd behavior for a wife of 18 years, especially given that she
knew I was teetering on the precipice of suicide given all that I was facing/dealing with;
something she conveyed to several people, so it was no secret that she knew suicide was
foremost on my mind. This was even more relevant given my prior history with suicide; it was
no “cry for help”, or some other nonsense.
But, on a seemingly good night for me, I received a text that *should* have ended my
life. I was having a relatively good night: I had made a healthy dinner and the 49ers were
playing a primetime game that night. I hadn’t heard much from Donna that day, but I had grown
accustomed to being ignored by her, so I was happy to sit down and watch the game, when I got,
what was in essence, a Dear John text from her with no explanation or response from her. It was
a fairly lengthy text that said, in effect, that she didn’t want to be with me anymore and that she
wasn’t certain whether or not anything had happened between Allison and me. It was exactly
what she knew she had to say to push me over the edge and it worked. I immediately replied
asking if it were a joke and got nothing in return. My heart began to leap out of my throat as the
implications sunk in. I texted several more times asking her to respond and got nothing, so I
began to call her. I left message after message to no avail and eventually told her that I wasn’t
going to make it through the night if she wouldn’t at least let me know why she felt this way.
That night, around 5PM, I decided to kill myself. For whatever reason, I decided that I
would achieve this by stabbing myself in the heart (symbolic I suppose), but I was afraid of
knives and didn’t like the prospect of being “sliced”. However, I was cool with the notion of
puncturing myself, so I devised a plan to get something akin to an icepick to facilitate my
demise. Unfortunately, said plan would prove more difficult than I had imagined. I went to five
different stores to find what I was looking for and eventually found an “awl” in a hardware
specialty store that was exactly what I wanted! Once I eventually found the right tool, I had to
tie up some loose ends; namely, make sure our cat, CC, was taken care of, so I bought a super
large kitty litter pan, more kitty litter and a large bowl that she could eat from for weeks. I also
sent out suicide notes, to everyone in the family, to my mom that I had written long before this
night (I had been contemplating suicide for quite some time, and Donna knew it). I also bought
some Southern Comfort to take away some of the butterflies that I knew would eventually crop
up.
Once I had everything in place, I set the stage for my death. I didn’t want to make a huge
mess in dad’s house, where I was living alone, as he was doing contract work in Wyoming at the
time, so I decided to do the deed in the bathtub. I also didn’t want to be uncomfortable, so I put
in a nice, wool blanket and propped up my pillow; it was like my own little coffin! I set up a few
knickknacks around me, such as the teddy bear Jenna and Chrys gave me with their voices on it
and some pictures of the family, including Donna. I also made sure to shut the door, as I didn’t
want CC to be disturbed by my corpse. When I was ready, around 10PM PST, I took a few of
my dad’s Oxycontins to numb what would undoubtedly be a painful process and drank a few
swigs of Southern Comfort to give myself some courage. I laid down in the tub and said a last
few words: I said that I loved Donna and the kids and forgave them for everything and hoped
that they would be safe. I then took the icepick in my left hand and placed it on my heart, just to
the left of my sternum. With my right hand I smacked down on the pick and drove it into my
chest to the hilt. I don’t remember much after this point, other than the repetitious movement of
the hilt of the pick with each heart beat. It moved rhythmically with every heart beat….it’s one
of the few things I recall from that night, but, apparently, that wasn’t the only thing that was
worth remembering….
Apparently, the pick missed my heart by a millimeter, or so, so I didn’t die right away,
but I did black out. During this black out, some 2-3 hrs later, I managed to get my cell phone,
which I placed next to me in the tub, and texted Jenna (maybe Chrys too, but I’m not certain).
Essentially, I told her goodbye and that I loved her, but I also blamed her mom, which wasn’t
right of me to do, regardless of whether or not it was true. I also apparently contacted my mom
and she called me and I inexplicably answered and told her goodbye. I remember saying
something to the effect that I was really cold and that it was okay, because it’s what I wanted, but
how hard must that have been for a mother that loved me to death? I weep as I write this….
However, I don’t remember much of this and, as it turns out, I managed to go through an
almost gallon sized bottle of Southern Comfort throughout that night, something that I do not
recall at all, but someone told me the bottle was empty when the paramedics arrived. Even more
horrifying for my family back east, was the fact that, even though the paramedics were called
and showed up at around 4AM my time, they did not have the legal authority to enter the home,
as it was my dad’s and they couldn’t get ahold of him. So, eventually, they just left me for dead
and, in the process, left my family back east powerless to get me help. It must have been heartwrenching for them! In time, though, the people at 911 got ahold of my dad and got the key
code to enter through the garage. This didn’t happen until about 9AM my time, which meant I
spent about 11 hours with an icepick in my chest. Eventually, though, they came in, which was
one of my first memories of that night, sans the initial stabbing. I remember an EMT standing
over me in the tub, then the next thing I recall is seeing a family friend when I was on the gurney
about to enter the ambulance. I remember telling her she looked beautiful and that I was sorry
for putting her through this. Apparently, Donna had called her to circumvent the obviously inept
911 system.
I don’t recall getting to the hospital, but I do remember a brief moment from the ER: I
recall, more than anything else, a female doctor kneeling over me and saying, “this is going to
hurt a bit”…..God, what a lying bitch! She made an incision into the left side of my chest and
proceeded to shove a damned tube in. It sounds half as bad as it felt; it was the worse pain of my
life and vastly exceeded stabbing myself. In time, I would come to understand that it was a chest
tube that was needed to drain fluid from my chest and facilitate the inflation of my left lung,
which I had punctured and collapsed…I spent the night breathing with one functional lung. I
don’t recall much other than that painful procedure. I woke up, later that day, in the trauma ward
with a fulltime CNA watching over me 24/7. The pain was rather excruciating, but they had me
on the most powerful pain med one could be on. Unfortunately for me, I’m allergic to opiates,
so the pain meds were causing me to itch profusely and puke constantly and puking is no joke
when you have a chest tube in and even breathing is like shoving daggers in your chest! After
cycling through various lesser opiates, they eventually put me on ibuprofen, which actually did
the trick and helped a bunch.
My dad flew home to be there for me and I heard daily from family. However, the first
call I received from Donna was disturbing at best. The first words out of her mouth were that,
“if you really wanted to kill yourself you would have pulled it out and stabbed yourself a few
more times”, followed by a reminder of how expensive this would all be. It was appalling and
the CNA in the room, at the time, was disgusted (they monitored everything, what with me being
stabby and all). She never once expressed concern for my well-being; rather, she simply turned
off her empathy, which is the true mark of a sociopath! But, it wasn’t until later that I put two
and two together and realized the extent of what she had done. You see, I had asked her,
previously, whether or not my 650k dollar life insurance policy would pay out in the event of a
suicide (I wanted my kids taken care of), so she researched the policy, which was at home in our
safe, and found out that it had a two year suicide clause; a clause that ended in July of 2013…this
was September of 2013 and she was the sole beneficiary of all of it.
She ran to her rapist, pedophile parents because of her financial issues and she knew that
a dead husband would solve every financial issue she would ever have. It’s disgusting and
beyond what I ever thought she was capable of doing. Even worse, I would learn that she was
having an affair well before any of this took place; an affair that she continues to this day. Oddly
enough, she replaced me with a guy who is, for the most part, just like me. He likes the same
things I do, but he’s capable of supporting her, where I might not have been. I never knew
money could motivate her so strongly, but I was terribly wrong in that assumption!
I’m not sure why she’s done the things she’s done to me. I’ve always made excuses for
the behavior in my head, but this is now the second time that she seemed content to let me die.
Does she really not care? Does my death really not faze her? Part of me wants to believe that
it’s just one bad personality amongst a host of good personalities, but it’s hard to justify that line
of reasoning when she’s continued down this path for several months now. The whole thing is
terribly perplexing, because she really did seem to indicate that I saved her from a life of misery.
She even called me her guardian angel at one point. Hell, shortly before the Dear John text, she
sent me a link to the song, “Gone, Gone, Gone”, which was all about supporting someone no
matter what. I can’t listen to that song without falling apart; it’s so sad and so confusing.
Then again, she would do just utterly horrible things like send me a video of Chrys doing
poi, which he learned from her current boyfriend in August of 2013, though she claims they
didn’t have a relationship until well after her Dear John text in late September. Even after the
suicide attempt, she would do evil things like send me a pic of her in this beautiful blue haired
get-up and claim that she was just “going out with a friend” and when I pressed her if it were her
boyfriend, she flatly said no. Yet, she posted a pic of them together, with that get-up, on a
Facebook page that she refuses to block me from, knowing I’ll see it. She’s literally trying to
cause me harm. Hell, she just posted a pic of her and her boyfriend together on what would be
our 19th anniversary (today). I just can’t grasp the hatefulness of it all, as she’s a very bright
person when she wants to be and she does this stuff very deliberately.
What does all of this mean? I’m not entirely sure, but I’ve learned to take the Ockham’s
Razor approach with Donna, such that the simplest, and most obvious, answers tend to be the
correct ones and the optics of that whole event kind of speak for themselves. I really hope I’m
wrong, though, and that her initial text was not a deliberate attempt to influence me into killing
myself, but she, more than anyone else, knew just how thin the thread was that I was clinging to.
What bothers me most about the whole incident is not the possible attempt on my life for
personal gain; rather, it’s her ability to not only disconnect emotionally from me, but also her
ability to influence the kids towards that same end. I’ve often wondered how Allison could have
done what she’s done, but now I see that this ability to completely detach oneself from any
semblance of emotion/empathy as something that just runs in the family and comes directly from
her. After almost 20 years of taking care of her and being closer to her than I thought possible
for any two human beings, she was willing to just sever her ties with me like one would lance a
boil. I simply don’t understand it. Even worse, she’s perfectly willing to put Jenna around her
rapist grandfather, which is a line I NEVER thought she’d cross; it’s an abomination!
Shitty Footnotes
As a side note: There is more to this story than I’ve detailed in this short memoir, but
that will have to wait for the formal book to come. She has done far more than what is detailed
here but, for the sake of brevity, I decided to only include the major events, which I think gets
the point across should I decide to end this miserable existence prematurely again….
Oddly enough, I still find myself loving Donna and though Allison’s actions break my
heart, I know I would forgive her if she only made the slightest attempt to reconcile, but will she
ever? Donna told me once, while we were walking at my dad’s house one night, that “Allison is
just like me and if I were her, I’d go down with the ship.” I didn’t really think much of the
statement at the time, but I think that was one of my problems: I didn’t listen intently enough to
what Donna was actually saying; instead, I heard what I wanted to hear. On a different night
when we were out walking, we delved into a conversation about our relationship and how great
we were doing, all things considered. But, Donna made a sort of out of context comment about
how I shouldn’t trust her, because “I’m a monster”. I downplayed the comment and told her that
I was fully aware of her bad side and what it was capable of….I clearly didn’t listen.
In fact, Donna made it clear to me, very early on in the Allison debacle, that she didn’t
want her back. I think Allison reminded her of herself and her mother and she was terrified of
what she would do if she came home and Donna did something that Allison did not agree with.
This got even worse after Ally tried to put her in jail for taking Jacob away. It go to a point
where I think Donna wanted to physically harm the girl, but I never really harbored that sort of
anger towards her, nor do I think I could harbor that kind of anger towards any of my children no
matter what they did. Donna developed a profound hatred for her, even though, these days, she
pretends, to my other kids, to love her and want a relationship with her. It fits the script. But,
what I can do when the lies are more believable than the truth?