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  Karen said she sensed that she got pregnant that night, and she was right. She never said a word of this alleged incident to anyone until years later. However, the damage had already been done because, according to Wayne’s defense team, Karen told him at some point that he was the product of rape.

  Only she and Gene know the truth about what happened that night, but when Gene recently learned of her accusation, he fervently denied it.

  “She’s fantasizing,” he said. “I probably didn’t want to have sex if she didn’t want to. I don’t want to be in bed with somebody who doesn’t want to.... ‘No’ means no and I respect that.”

  He said he didn’t remember arguing with Karen about sex—ever—and said they never stayed together in a hotel when he played football out of town.

  When he heard that Karen told Wayne he was the product of rape, he said, “That’s sad. That’s really sad.”

  Curiously, when Karen’s mother, Vera, gave an interview in Wayne’s court case, she, too, said that she had been raped as a young woman. She also said that when she was pregnant with Karen, she tried to have a miscarriage for fear of what her mother would do. However, it’s unknown whether she communicated that to Karen.

  CHAPTER 2

  FEAR OF PUNISHMENT

  As a nineteen-year-old with two children, Karen felt so tied down that she feared she would never be able to get a divorce.

  She thought there had to be more to life than being young and sitting home alone for six or eight months while her husband was away on classified intelligence missions. It didn’t help matters that Karen didn’t get along with the other military wives. In fact, she didn’t like women in general—unless they were much older than she was.

  Given the circumstances under which Karen felt Wayne had been conceived, she was determined not to love her new baby.

  Nonetheless, she couldn’t help but notice that Wayne had the most perfect little body, completely symmetrical and not in the least bit chubby. Wayne was such a good baby that she couldn’t stop herself from softening to him, although she later admitted that she was never one to show love for her children.

  Karen was more concerned with trying to cope with her own loneliness and misery over her lost freedom than she was with being affectionate to her boys.

  “I just always assumed they would know that I loved them,” Karen said later. “I feel bad about it because now, you know, looking back, I see I should have just not assumed. I should have shown them how I was feeling.”

  Gene said Karen would touch the boys, but not lovingly. When she changed their clothes, he said, “she was pretty rough on them.”

  Rodney didn’t seem to need nurturing, but Karen thought Wayne needed it more than anything. Wherever she went, Wayne followed, content just to be leaning up against her or touching her in some way.

  “He just liked to be near me,” Karen said, “and, I mean, I liked having him near me. . . . It didn’t take much to make him happy.”

  Wayne sought attention from his father, too. When he was three or so, he used to stand next to Gene while he was shaving, imitating his gestures with the razor. He also started singing country western songs, and by all accounts, he had a surprisingly good voice.

  For years, Gene’s family had no idea about his marital problems. In fact, Gene’s brother Jimmy thought Gene and Karen had a very strong bond. While Gene was stationed in the early 1960s at Two Rock Ranch near Petaluma, Jimmy said, Gene liked to show Karen off.

  “She was a nice-looking woman,” Jimmy said later. “I think he put her on a pedestal.”

  Gene, a strict military man whose life was very structured, was always seen as the dominant partner in the marriage.

  Jimmy looked up to Gene, who was ten years his senior and was the brother after whom he patterned his own life. Gene commanded respect and authority, but even Jimmy had to acknowledge that he could be short on patience, just like their mother.

  “[He] has a strong personality,” Jimmy said, but added that Gene was never “overdomineering.”

  Still, despite Gene’s stern, gruff exterior and Karen’s lack of nurturing ability, they each had a softer side. They both drove buses for disabled children as a part-time job.

  Growing up, Rodney and Wayne had their own room with bunk beds. One morning, the boys seemed awfully quiet. Then Karen saw why. Two-year-old Wayne had reached into his diaper and smeared feces all over his bed and the surrounding walls.

  “Now, that day I got angry,” Karen said later.

  Rodney watched with amusement as she cleaned Wayne in the tub, then washed down the room.

  Not long after this incident, Karen heard Wayne screaming outside their mobile home in Cotati. When she got to the front door, she saw that he’d fallen down the stairs and hit his head, right near the hairline.

  “It scared the heck out of me because there was so much bleeding,” she said.

  She drove him to the doctor’s office, where they gave him three stitches. They told Karen to watch him carefully and to make sure he didn’t go to sleep, but he seemed okay.

  When it came to minding their mother, the two boys couldn’t have been more different.

  Karen used to count to three, and by the count of one, Wayne had already done whatever his mother demanded. Rodney, on the other hand, would wait until the very last second to make a move.

  According to Karen, the boys’ punishment was a matter of dispute between her and Gene.

  “He would holler and he would get out a belt and I used to have fights with him over that. I would say, ‘Don’t do it, stop!’” Karen said.

  She said Gene didn’t do this frequently, but sometimes he hit them too hard, leaving welts on their shoulders. Karen said she would cry and sometimes he would stop the beating, and sometimes he wouldn’t, which prompted the children to run off, screaming.

  Many years later, Rodney said he couldn’t remember Karen ever trying to stop Gene from hitting him or Wayne, nor could he remember any welts. But what he did remember was that Karen always left the discipline to Gene, saying almost daily, “Just wait till your dad gets home.”

  Gene said he’d always hated it when his own mother used to slap him in the face and when his father beat him and left welts. So when it came to his own boys, Gene said he sometimes used a belt, but mostly used his hand, trying “not to hit them anywhere but their butt.”

  He also said that he could never be sure whether the boys had really done something bad enough to deserve a spanking, as Karen repeatedly asserted, so he didn’t do it very hard—and he didn’t remember leaving any marks.

  But of the two boys, Gene and Rodney later agreed, it was Rodney who took the brunt of his discipline.

  Wayne and Rodney were close, but they also competed against each other. Wayne would later tell a psychologist that Gene used to make the boys put on boxing gloves and duke it out, but Gene and Rodney said that order actually came from the boys’ grandfathers. Karen explained that her stepfather Billy thought it was a more gentlemanly way to settle their differences.

  “I was a coward when I was a kid,” Wayne told the psychologist. “My brother is a little heavier than me, but I could never beat him up, so I just got beat up.”

  Wayne said things eventually turned around. Although he and Rodney disagreed on the time frame, they both said that Wayne, as a young adult, was finally able to get the best of Rodney.

  The contrasts between the boys also came out in the ways they took their punishment—often for fighting with each other.

  “Rodney would just slough it off,” the boys’ uncle Jimmy recalled. “He knew that he screwed up and he should make sure that he doesn’t do it again. Wayne handled it quite differently. . . . He would hold it in . . . maybe even to the point of holding a grudge for a long time.”

  One afternoon Wayne and Rodney had given each other a bloody nose and a black eye, rolling around in the gravel until two of Gene’s employees broke them apart. Wayne knew that Gene would be angry, so he ran off and h
id in an abandoned car.

  When Gene came home, Rodney ratted out his brother’s hiding place. Gene jerked open the car door and Wayne’s limp body poured out. Wayne had been so scared of getting in trouble that he’d passed out, waiting for his punishment. Gene slung him over his shoulders, laid him on the sofa, and told Rodney to get his brother some water.

  “Gene, myself, and my father are all good at that—putting the fear of God in without even touching a person,” Jimmy said later.

  Although Gene was brought up Protestant, he didn’t go from church to church with Karen and the boys as she explored various religions. Karen was born Jewish, and, thus, so was Rodney, who later became very religious and joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

  Rodney was far more social than Wayne. While he liked to play outside with the neighborhood kids, Wayne was happy to hang around the house with Karen or in the sandbox with his toys. But he didn’t cry much as a child unless he hurt himself or got upset with Rodney.

  While Rodney was even-keeled, Wayne displayed emotional highs and lows like his mother, held on to his feelings, and couldn’t let go.

  “He was defenseless,” Karen recalled. “Everything got through to him. . . . It penetrated.”

  He was also very loving.

  “There was a sweetness about him,” she said. “He always had that little smile—not that ha-ha thing, you know? It was just quietly sweet.”

  Perhaps in an unconscious effort to overcompensate, Karen tried to do more for young Wayne then she should have. She finally realized this one day when she got a call from his kindergarten teacher.

  “I want to ask you something,” the teacher said. “Do you do everything for Wayne?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Karen said.

  “Well, the other kids are putting their shoes on and putting their coats on. He stands there and waits for me to do it. I’m thinking you must be doing all these things for him.”

  Karen said yes, she did.

  “He should be learning to do these things himself,” the teacher said.

  Because of the nature of his intelligence work, Gene was sent all over the world on assignment—to Beirut, New Delhi, Tehran, Bangkok, North Thailand, and Okinawa—spending up to a year at a time away from Karen and the boys.

  When he got word he was going to Okinawa, Gene decided to try once more to make his flailing marriage work, this time by bringing his family with him. The only problem was that Karen didn’t want to go.

  According to her, she threatened to divorce him if he made her go.

  “Just let me stay here,” Karen pleaded.

  But Karen said Gene told her he would take the boys away from her if she left him. “‘I’ll turn into an alcoholic and I’ll just do away with myself,’” she quoted him as saying.

  Karen said that’s when she stopped talking about leaving. She was miserable, but she didn’t want the boys to grow up without their father.

  Gene insisted he never threatened to harm himself or commit suicide. Rodney and Gene both said he wasn’t the type—Karen was.

  Nonetheless, the whole family did, in fact, go to Okinawa for a couple of years when the boys were in elementary school in the late 1960s.

  Life was very difficult for Karen during that period. She felt as if she was about to have a nervous breakdown.

  “Send me back to the States,” she begged Gene. “I want to go back to the States. I can’t do it anymore.”

  One morning eight-year-old Rodney came into the kitchen and saw his mother sitting in a pool of blood, with both of her wrists bleeding. Karen told him that she’d cut herself on the lid of a can, but Rodney didn’t believe her.

  “I was smart enough to know it wasn’t an accident,” Rodney said later.

  Rodney said Karen had been taken away by paramedics to the military hospital by the time Wayne woke up.

  Years later, a forensic psychiatrist would classify Karen’s teenage incident of swallowing pills as a suicidal gesture and this incident in the kitchen as a genuine suicide attempt.

  Karen claimed she got her wish to go home after she finally spoke to Gene’s commander about her wishes, but Gene said he sent her back himself after one of his men broke down and told him that he’d been having an affair with her.

  “Shortly after that, I started making arrangements to get her back to the States with the boys,” he said.

  Karen brought the boys back to Eureka, California, where she proceeded to have an affair with Gene’s fifteen-year-old brother, Billy, who was still living with his parents.

  “Evidently, she got lonely and decided that she liked the looks of my little brother and took up with him,” Jimmy recalled. “[Billy] talked to me about it and he was scared to death.... He asked me what he should do, and I said, ‘Well, Billy, there’s not much you can do, and, hopefully, this thing will go away.’”

  Karen told Gene about the affair when he returned, prompting him to buy her and the boys a house in Santa Rosa—220 miles away from Eureka and Billy—before he went back to Okinawa to finish his assignment. He was discharged from the army as a staff sergeant shortly thereafter, in 1969.

  “There was rape committed, but not by me,” Gene said later. “[Billy] was a kid. Now that’s rape.”

  In 1970, Karen said, she and Gene had another argument about sex, this time at two in the morning while the boys were asleep.

  Again, memories vary drastically among the Ford family members.

  Karen told it like this:

  She always kept a .38-caliber Magnum in the house, careful to hide the bullets in a separate place so the boys wouldn’t shoot themselves. Karen said Gene got the gun out that night. “If I can’t have you, nobody is going to,” he said.

  After trying unsuccessfully to wrestle the weapon away from him, she ran to hide the bullets—only, Gene got to them first. She was scared he was going to kill her, the boys, then himself, so she ran next door and asked the neighbors to call the police.

  When she came home, she still didn’t know if the gun was loaded.

  “Don’t do this,” she told Gene.

  Luckily, at this point, the police pulled up.

  “I’m divorcing this man,” she told them. “Take him right now. I don’t want him in the house.”

  She said the police took Gene away, and when he came back a few days later, he said something Karen would never forget.

  “You won,” he said.

  According to Gene, this description of events is another of Karen’s fantasies. “That’s quite a story,” he said. “I’ve never been in jail in my entire life.”

  Gene said he’d bought a gun for Rodney to use, once Rodney was old enough to be responsible. And yes, he said, he kept the bullets in a separate place. After an argument at the end of the marriage, Gene recalled, Karen gave the gun to their next-door neighbor, saying she was afraid Gene was going to hurt her or somebody else.

  He said he and Karen had sex one last time at her encouragement, but it wasn’t enough to hold them together any longer.

  “It’s not working, is it?” Karen told him over breakfast the next morning.

  “No, it’s not working.”

  “How ’bout thirty days? Is that enough time for you to clean up your affairs and leave?”

  “How ’bout today?” he replied.

  Rodney said Karen gave him the news in the hallway that morning, saying, “Your father and I are getting divorced.”

  Both he and Gene said the police never came to the house.

  CHAPTER 3

  DIVIDED ATTENTIONS

  Within days of his parents’ split, Rodney said, Karen’s new friend Steve Shurtluff came over to the house. Rodney and Gene later shared the belief that this relationship had been going on long before the breakup.

  Karen, however, said she didn’t meet Steve, a twenty-four-year-old Vietnam veteran and postal carrier who was seven years her junior, until a year later. She said she introduced him to the boys after they started dating, and th
ey all seemed to get along well.

  After about six months, she said, Steve started talking marriage, but she wanted to live together for a while first. They ended up getting married, anyway.

  During this time, Gene would take one or both boys to his house in Healdsburg, in Sonoma County, for his weekends with them, often fighting with Karen when he picked them up.

  Rodney said he and Wayne always looked forward to those weekends, when Gene would teach them construction skills or take them flying. After leaving the military, Gene had begun buying fixer-upper apartment complexes and remodeling them. He would move into the worst unit while he worked on the others. He’d rent out the finished units, fix up the one in which he’d been living, then sell the whole complex.

  One year, Karen said, Gene was supposed to pick up Wayne for his birthday, but he never came.

  “Wayne was sitting out on the front doorstep, waiting for his dad, and his dad never called and never showed and [Wayne] was very depressed,” Karen said. “It was a really sad moment for Wayne. It really hurt. His dad was always making promises and letting him down.”

  Gene said he didn’t remember doing that, but it’s possible that he could have missed one of Wayne’s birthdays if it fell on one of the alternate weeks that Karen had the boys.

  In Steve’s view, Wayne was a nice, shy kid who didn’t know how to express his feelings in a positive way. Rather, he would throw temper tantrums, leave class, or skip school entirely. Steve said he and Karen never talked to Wayne about why he behaved this way; Karen had no ability to communicate about private, intimate things.