Body Parts Page 4

  Wayne didn’t understand the dance between the sexes, so he was put off when girls would tease him because he couldn’t figure out whether they liked him.

  One day, a girl gave him a card at a school party that said, “Wayne, you have too much kindness.” He brought the card home, embarrassed, not understanding why a girl would do or say something like that.

  Steve recalled that Karen showed no emotions toward the boys and never hugged them. If one of them got hurt, she would simply try to talk them through it.

  By the time the boys were teenagers, Karen and Steve could see that Gene favored Rodney over Wayne, and Wayne could feel it.

  “I never saw Gene outwardly shun Wayne or anything like that, but I knew that he didn’t quite understand Wayne,” Karen said. “He didn’t have the rapport with Wayne that he had with Rodney.”

  Gene later said that he and Rodney were a lot closer in many ways because they were so much alike, but he always paid more attention to Wayne so as not to hurt his feelings.

  “He was a pretty envious or jealous person, as was his mom,” Gene said. “If anyone was treated unfairly, it would have been Rodney, and he never complained about it.”

  Rodney, who always felt that Wayne got more attention, often called him a mama’s boy. “If we were both in the same spot and trouble happened, I’m the one that got it,” he said.

  Karen’s separation from her sons—when Wayne was twelve and Rodney was fourteen—is another example of contrasting perceptions of events among family members. Wayne, Rodney, and Gene have always felt that Karen abandoned her sons, and yet Karen said this accusation amazed her.

  According to Gene, twelve-year-old Wayne called him up in tears one day, saying, “Dad, can you pick me up? Can I live with you?”

  “Of course,” Gene said. “When do you want me to come get you?”

  “Right now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’m on the porch with my bag. She threw me out.”

  Gene said that when he talked to Karen about this, she told him, “I just can’t control him anymore. I don’t want him around me.”

  Rodney said he stayed behind to try to ease the tensions between family members and please his mother, but Karen soon kicked him out, too. He said he was fourteen when he came home one night to find the front door locked.

  “Let me in,” Rodney said.

  “Nope, you’re not getting back in this house,” she declared.

  Rodney said Karen told him he was uncontrollable and that “I was just like my dad and she wasn’t going to have me around anymore.”

  Rodney went to live with a couple of families in the neighborhood, a few nights here and a few nights there, but that only lasted until his father found out. Gene decided Rodney should come and live with him, which didn’t go over very well with Wayne. Gene said Wayne started acting out because he no longer was the sole focus of his father’s attention.

  Gene expected the boys to help with his construction projects when they came home from school. If they didn’t do what they were told, Gene came down on them—and hard.

  Not surprisingly, the brothers handled this differently. Rodney enjoyed learning everything he could, while Wayne struggled. He couldn’t do what his father and his teachers wanted and take care of his own needs at the same time.

  At a loss for how to handle Wayne, Gene approached his friend Keith Hale, saying Wayne had totally shut down. He asked Keith to talk to Wayne and see what he could do.

  Keith found Wayne in his room with the shades drawn, sitting in the middle of a heap of clothes, schoolbooks, and papers. Wayne was rubbing his feet.

  Keith asked what was going on and Wayne replied that his feet hurt.

  “When he took his socks off, his feet were covered with open sores that had become infected,” Keith later recalled. “He said it had been months since his last shower or even a change of socks.”

  Asked if he would like to move into Keith’s house for the summer, Wayne said yes.

  “He went to work with me most days,” Keith said. “He got stronger and things were looking good. At the end of the summer, he went back to his dad’s.”

  Gene said Wayne was fine until Gene met the woman who would become his wife in 1976. Wayne didn’t like his new sister or Gene’s new wife.

  “That upset him, that changed him,” Gene said later. “He didn’t like getting the divided attention, just like way back when, with his mother.”

  Keith said there was never a doubt that Gene loved his sons. He just expected them to work as hard as he had growing up. “The big difference I see is that Gene’s family was solid. What he was able to provide the boys was anything but.”

  Time periods seem to blur together for this family, so it’s difficult to tell how long Wayne stayed where, but he was traded back and forth between his mother and father and his uncle Jimmy before heading off on his own to Redding when he was about fifteen.

  Karen had an entirely different take on Wayne’s adolescent and teenage years.

  According to her, Wayne had problems with some of his teachers, with whom she and Steve had met several times. One said that Wayne seemed angry and that he was taking it out on them by being aggressive and belligerent.

  When Karen and Steve tried to talk to Wayne about this, he denied there was a problem and refused to discuss the matter further.

  Then, Wayne came to her one day and said, “Mom, I want to go live with my dad.”

  When she asked Wayne why, he said that his father would teach him how to fly and they could work construction together. So she thought about it for a few days, then told him to go ahead, even though she figured Gene would ultimately let Wayne down.

  A few months later, she said, Gene told her that he was having issues with Wayne.

  “[He] called me and said there was some problem with Wayne having broken into a store and there was a gun involved and he was pretty angry with Wayne. And he said, you know, ‘He’s an idiot, blah, blah, blah.’”

  After that incident, Gene was able to work out an informal arrangement with some friends in the police department so that Wayne would wash police cruisers every day after school for six weeks as punishment. Soon afterward, Wayne stole a car and went joyriding, causing the punishment to be extended by four weeks. Gene said Wayne would not only wash the cruisers, but also rewire them so they didn’t work properly.

  Karen said Wayne called to say he wanted to come back to live with her because he was upset with his father. He claimed that Gene had promised to pay him for his work but never did; he felt used.

  After Wayne came back, it all went downhill from there. He started staying out late, prompting Karen and Steve to drive around looking for him so he didn’t get picked up by police for breaking curfew. When he’d finally come home, he wouldn’t tell them where he’d been. He only grew more and more defiant.

  Then one of his teachers called to complain that Wayne had hit her—an offense worsened by the fact that she was pregnant. She advised Karen to get Wayne some counseling. The incident earned Wayne a weeklong suspension, but Wayne refused to see a counselor.

  The tension peaked when Wayne grabbed his mother in the garage during an argument over his behavior. For the first time, Karen felt scared of her own son.

  “Don’t ever do that again, Wayne,” she recalled telling him. “Next time, I’ll get up on the chair and I’ll punch you out.”

  Years later, Karen would acknowledge that perhaps Wayne felt neglected because she and Steve went out so much; she was having fun for the first time in her life. She said they tried to include the boys when they went bowling or to baseball games, but neither one usually wanted to go. Rodney had his friends and Wayne was involved in wrestling.

  Nonetheless, Karen was at her wit’s end, so she called a lawyer for advice on what to do with her out-of-control son. Karen was told that as long as he was living at home, she would be legally responsible for his actions. She didn’t remember whose idea it was, but W
ayne went to live with his uncle Jimmy in Eureka.

  Jimmy remembered his teenage nephew as a loner, always so deep in thought that he could be quite uncommunicative. Wayne also had pronounced mood swings and could get very upset at times.

  Wayne would tell Jimmy that neither of his parents loved him, that “nobody cared for him at all,” Jimmy recalled. “I’m sure that after he left my place that he probably felt the same way about us.”

  Jimmy bought him a motorcycle, and Wayne took out his anger on the machine.

  “He’d beat it up, physically kick and beat the motorcycle because it wouldn’t start,” Jimmy said.

  By this time, Wayne’s feelings about punishment had evolved in an unusual way. One day he decided to run away, so he headed north, but he turned around and came back once he reached Arcata, California. Instead of returning to his uncle’s house, however, he went straight to Juvenile Hall.

  “They wanted to know why he’s turning himself in, and he says, ‘Well, I was trying to run away,’” Jimmy said. “And then I had to go up and get him out of Juvenile Hall and bring him home.... He wanted punishment because he had the thought of running away, and he felt that he needed to be punished for that.”

  Jimmy was baffled by this, so, he said, “I didn’t hammer on him for it.”

  In another incident, Jimmy and his wife went away for several days, and when they returned, Jimmy could sense that something wasn’t right with his Camaro.

  They were sitting around the house when Wayne broke into tears and confessed to Jimmy that he’d taken the car.

  The next night, the doorbell rang, and Jimmy opened the door to find a police officer with Wayne on the doorstep. Apparently, the officer had caught Wayne trying to steal a battery from another car to put into the Camaro because he’d killed the battery by leaving the lights on.

  “He couldn’t handle doing something wrong and not being punished for it,” Jimmy said. “He has such a strong sense of justice, even today, about things.”

  When Wayne was sixteen, Karen said, Gene called to complain that he was upset with their younger son.

  “We decided maybe the best thing for him would be to go in the military to get him off the street and get some discipline,” she said.

  Wayne would later claim that he got the idea to join the U.S. Marines after seeing the movie The Boys in Company C, but because he was still a minor, he needed parental consent.

  “Dad, will you sign papers for me to go into the Marine Corps?” he asked Gene.

  Gene was ecstatic. “Yes, where do I sign?”

  Rodney said Wayne lied about his age to the recruiters, but no one noticed because he was big for his age. He had just turned seventeen by the time he entered boot camp in January 1979.

  The marines would train Wayne—like every other recruit—to be a lean, mean killing machine.

  CHAPTER 4

  KELLY AND THE HEAD INJURY

  Around Halloween in 1980, Wayne met Kelly Dick, a pretty, petite blonde, on a blind date. They were introduced by one of Wayne’s coworkers at Shakey’s Pizza in Irvine, who also worked with Kelly at a bank. Wayne was still in the marines and Kelly was in college, living in an apartment on campus.

  Kelly liked the macho silent type, so she was attracted to Wayne, who seemed a bit standoffish and indifferent at first. He would go without calling for a week, saying he’d forgotten her phone number; then, curiously, he would walk fifteen miles to see her from Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, where he lived on base. She couldn’t figure him out—or if that was his intent—which kept her intrigued.

  On their way back from dinner in late November, they saw a two-car accident at the side of the highway. Wayne asked Kelly to stop so he could see if anyone was injured. One of the passengers was bleeding from the neck, so Wayne told Kelly to go find a pay phone and call for an ambulance.

  Kelly drove off in search of a phone, but because it was dark and she wasn’t familiar with the industrial area, it took about twenty minutes before she could get back.

  She saw fire trucks, police cars, and rescue workers, but no sign of Wayne, so she approached a firefighter and tried to describe her missing date: “Big, tall marine. Have you seen him? You know, a jarhead. You can’t miss the haircut.”

  But no one had seen him. They just kept asking if she’d seen the third car.

  “Well, I was the third car.”

  “No, the red car.”

  Kelly didn’t learn until later that they were referring to a red car with a drunk driver who had swerved off the highway, hitting Wayne and another person, then sending them nearly forty feet down an embankment.

  She drove around until 3:00 A.M., looking for him, tracing the route he would have taken if he’d walked back to the base.

  It was the next morning, and she was at Shakey’s, talking to the friend who had introduced them, when one of her roommates called to say that Tustin Community Hospital had phoned. Wayne was in the hospital and wanted her to come.

  At the hospital, she learned he was in the intensive care unit, which had a big sign that said RELATIVES ONLY. She wondered why they’d called her if she wasn’t allowed to visit him.

  “Are you Kelly?” the nurse asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Get in there, all he’s been doing is repeating your phone number, over and over and over and over again, till we promised him we’d call you.”

  Wayne looked as if he had landed right on his face, which was swollen to twice its normal size. His face was black and blue around the eyes. The fall had ripped off most of his lip, requiring stitches to sew it back together. His four front teeth were shattered and his jaw was broken, but he was conscious.

  Considering that he couldn’t seem to remember her phone number before the accident, Kelly wondered how he’d managed to do so after taking such a pounding.

  When she returned the following morning, Wayne’s mother was at his bedside.

  Karen was still living in Santa Rosa when she got a call from an ICU nurse.

  “We have your son here, and if you can come, it would be a good idea because he’s been in a serious accident. He has serious head damage.”

  “How serious?” Karen asked.

  “Well, his teeth are knocked out and he’s got damage to his mouth, and we think he has a concussion.”

  Karen asked the nurse to tell Wayne that she was on her way. She called Rodney to see if he wanted to fly down with her, but he said he wanted to go by himself.

  Wayne was conscious, but in pain, when Karen arrived. His primary injuries, as far as she could tell, seemed to be in and around his mouth.

  “Thanks for coming, Mom,” he said, complaining about his missing front teeth. “I’m going to look terrible.”

  “You can get teeth,” she said. “Nobody will even know that they’re false.”

  Karen only stayed for a couple of days, leaving Kelly to take care of Wayne for the rest of his nine-day stay.

  Rodney said Karen called him after she first heard from the ICU, saying, “You need to come and see your brother. I don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

  But he and Gene later said neither of them felt the need to go to the hospital because Wayne’s commanding officer told Gene that Wayne’s injuries weren’t serious, that he’d only gotten “a couple of teeth knocked out,” and Gene had passed that assessment on to Rodney.

  Neither of them learned the severity of Wayne’s head injury until much later.

  Years later, Wayne told a psychologist that he’d been pressing his hand against the wounded driver’s neck to stop the bleeding when he was thrown down the embankment. Apparently, he knew quite a bit about the arteries in the neck.

  “A drunk swerved off and hit me. Killed me,” Wayne said.

  “Killed you?” the psychologist asked.

  “Yeah, they revived me. I woke up three days later. . . . The whole one side of my body just didn’t work very good and my head was all swollen up, and it was a pretty tough time.
”

  Wayne wasn’t able to go back to work right away, and because Kelly’s three roommates had gone home for the holidays, she offered to let Wayne stay with her so she could nurse him back to health. They grew closer over the next week or two, and once he was feeling better, they traveled to northern California to visit his mother, Rodney, and some other relatives.

  They flew up and drove back in a 1953 Chevy that Wayne bought from his brother.

  Kelly noticed a change in Wayne’s behavior after the accident—he seemed much friendlier to her and paid her more attention.

  In February, Wayne was about to leave for a couple of months of training in Alabama. He told her he would earn a bigger salary if he was married, so they decided to get hitched on the sly, while Kelly was still in school. She would go home for the summer; then they would have a big wedding in the fall.

  They eloped in Las Vegas that May. However, their plot was foiled by Kelly’s sister, who found out their secret and told Kelly’s mother all about it.

  Kelly noticed another change in Wayne’s behavior, about two weeks into the marriage. The two of them were talking over some wine when Kelly asked Wayne about his family and what it was like growing up; she’d gotten the feeling that he hadn’t been treated very well. When she pressed for more information, Wayne clearly didn’t want to talk about it, but she wouldn’t let up. That’s when Wayne got physical.

  “He wasn’t actually aiming for me, he was just trying to swing at me, to tell me to shut up, and he ended up hitting a stud in the wall and broke the knuckles in his right hand,” Kelly said. “It just shattered all the knuckles, so he ended up going to Alabama with a cast on his hand.”

  Something had changed in Wayne since they’d said, “I do.” He’d become more demanding and domineering. His whole attitude toward her had shifted. And it only got worse.

  Some of Kelly’s complaints about Wayne’s behavior sound somewhat similar to Karen’s complaints about Gene. Regardless of what may have happened in the Ford family house when Wayne was growing up, it would be typical for him to model his expectations of how a wife should act and be treated based on his perceptions of his parents’ marriage.