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  While Wayne was in Alabama, he called Kelly, ranting that the money she’d sent him hadn’t arrived on time. She was hurt to find out that he’d hocked his wedding ring to go out drinking beer with his friends. He, in turn, wasn’t happy to learn that she was pregnant.

  When he got home, she said, “He basically told me that . . . he wasn’t about to have kids right now and I had to have an abortion. I told him I didn’t want to have an abortion and he said, ‘Well, I’m leaving then.’ And I felt like I had no choice.”

  At the abortion clinic, a woman asked Kelly if anybody was forcing her to have the procedure.

  “What if I say yes?” Kelly asked.

  “Then we couldn’t perform the abortion.”

  Kelly walked out of the interview room, past Wayne in the waiting area, and out into the hall, where she started to cry.

  Wayne followed her. “What?” he demanded.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said.

  Wayne grabbed her by the arms and shoved her toward the waiting room. “Get back in there,” he said.

  After the abortion, Kelly said, Wayne became abusive, saying the only reason he married her “was for a steady piece of ass.” (Wayne had started having sex when he was fifteen and slept with eight women—primarily those with large breasts—before Kelly.)

  When she didn’t want to have sex, Wayne wouldn’t take no for an answer, so Kelly started giving in just to stop the “mental torture” for a few hours. Otherwise, he would keep her awake, sometimes until 4:00 A.M., until she relented.

  But after a while, even that didn’t work.

  “It was like my whole life at home had to do with sex,” Kelly said later. “If I was a nymphomaniac, it might’ve been a great situation for me. But I’m personally not that sexually motivated.”

  Wayne made it known that he wanted her to remain naked around the house. If she sat down to watch TV, she said, he would “feel free to come up and start suckling on a breast. I mean, it was just a constant barrage of this, like that’s all I was there for, that I was an object for his pleasure.”

  When they went out together, he would ask her to wear shirts that were so see-through, she felt she wasn’t even wearing one.

  Things got so bad that she started crying at her desk at five o’clock because she knew she had to go home. He expected her to cook elaborate three-course dinners—more often than not while she was in the buff—and he wouldn’t accept plain vegetables. They had to be doused in cheese sauce.

  “If it wasn’t perfect or right, he got angry,” she said. “The thing was, I could never get angry back at him, because then I’d get in trouble.”

  In January 1982, Wayne took a trip to Big Bear with some other marines. He asked Kelly to go, but she couldn’t, so he went without her. Before he left, Kelly told him not to lose her good towels, and also not to screw around.

  “I already had the idea that he wasn’t going to be able to go five days without having sex, so it was like, half-joking, but half-serious,” she said later.

  Two days after he left, one of Wayne’s friends phoned.

  “Kelly, has Wayne called you?”

  “No.”

  “If he calls, tell him to come back.”

  Kelly wondered what was going on. “Come back from where?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “We can’t tell you. Just if he calls, tell him to come back.”

  At the time, Kelly was playing cribbage with a young gay friend, who had overheard the conversation. He was so scared of her husband that he ran out of the apartment in case Wayne showed up.

  When Wayne called that night around eleven, she was amazed to hear his story. Not only did he think that he’d done nothing wrong, he also didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to tell her about it.

  “He just knew he was going to get caught, and that’s why he’d run,” she said later.

  Wayne told her that he and the guys had met these two young girls roller-skating, and he and one of his friends had invited them over to the cabin the next day. Wayne said they slipped off their wedding rings and had oral sex with the girls, who turned out to be only fifteen.

  When Wayne’s friend went to take the girls’ home, they stopped to help a young guy whose vehicle had broken down. The guy turned out to be the boyfriend of Wayne’s date, who immediately got out of the truck and screamed that she’d been raped. When the police came to the men’s cabin, Wayne took off, out the back door. He made it through ten or fifteen miles of woods before he finally found a pay phone to call Kelly.

  Wayne was eventually arrested for attempted rape and an arraignment date was set, but it kept being postponed. Kelly said this went on for six or eight months, which she remembered being “a very tense and stressful time for Wayne.”

  Today, Wayne’s rap sheet says only this about the case: “Victim unavailable/decline prosecution.” Whatever court records there might have been about the incident no longer exist.

  In April, Kelly and Wayne moved to Santa Ana, where he got a job managing their new apartment complex.

  Wayne’s mother had gone to India for a while and had come back with an Indian boyfriend. Karen and her new man lived with them for a couple of months, which gave Kelly a break from the nonstop sexual pressure.

  But that didn’t stop Wayne from being demanding in other ways. Wayne had a pool party one Saturday, during which he insisted that Kelly iron his uniforms and spit-shine his shoes. After she’d finished doing the chores, he told her to put on the new bathing suit he’d bought for her. It was white, with a gold patch at the crotch, and as long as it wasn’t wet, it wasn’t too revealing. So, of course, Wayne made her get into the pool so that everyone could see her in full glory.

  After a mix-up with the rent checks, the landlord got upset with Wayne, so they all had to move. However, Karen and her boyfriend got their own place because Wayne kept making racial slurs about the boyfriend being unclean and unfit to handle their food.

  Kelly got a new job working with thirty men in a warehouse, so Wayne switched gears and made sure she wore baggy clothes when leaving the house each morning. He also started trying to entice her into incorporating bondage into their sex acts.

  While he and Kelly were walking around Hollywood, they stopped at a sex shop, where he bought a deck of cards featuring women from the neck down or the knees up. The cards were specifically focused on the breasts, which were generally wrapped or tied up.

  Wayne got the idea that Kelly should imitate these women’s poses during sex. He had her dip her breasts in wax so he could make molds of them. He also told her he’d like to cut holes in a sheet, then cover her up so that only her breasts were exposed.

  Kelly felt as if she was losing herself amid all this kinkiness. “During this whole time, basically because of the verbal abuse . . . I had to have . . . such a tight rein on my emotions, so that I just didn’t totally have a breakdown. . . . I was just like a walking zombie.”

  Her salvation came in the form of a coworker named Bob, who, like her, was unhappy in a bad marriage. Bob became her confidant, and he began telling her that her home life “was not right.”

  Kelly’s breaking point came a couple of weeks before Christmas in 1982.

  Wayne was a total grinch. They’d spent two Christmases together, but they’d never gotten a tree, and he wasn’t one much for gifts. Kelly somehow persuaded him to let her put up a tree that year.

  One night, she came home from work, and as she always did, got on tiptoe and peered through the glass pane in their front door before she opened it. She could see Wayne inside, wrapping a big stack of presents he’d bought her. But after he saw her, peeking inside, he dragged her through the door and made her open every one of them. He was furious that she’d ruined her own surprise.

  When Kelly finally got up the guts to tell him that she was leaving, Wayne became apologetic and contrite. After Christmas, he even called her up at work and asked if she’d go to marriage counseling with him. She agreed. r />
  The therapist was a woman, who talked first to Wayne alone for half an hour, then to Kelly alone, and finally to the couple together. As she conveyed Kelly’s concerns to Wayne, Kelly could see the veins throbbing in Wayne’s neck.

  At the end of the session, the therapist pulled Kelly aside and said she’d have someone drive Kelly home. “I don’t want you going home with him,” she said.

  Wayne had never hit Kelly before—only grabbed her by the arms and shook her occasionally—so she wasn’t all that concerned.

  “No, no, I’ll be fine,” Kelly said.

  Kelly had seen Wayne get violent only once, when a kid in the video arcade had bumped Wayne and caused him to lose his game. Wayne hauled off and hit him so hard that he broke the kid’s nose, embedded his eyeglasses in his face, and split the skin above his eye deep enough that he needed stitches.

  After the counseling appointment, Kelly and Wayne went to the movies and discussed the therapist’s suggestions, one of which was to live apart for a week—him on base and her at the house. So that’s what they decided to do.

  The next day at work, Kelly told Bob what had happened and he suggested they go to dinner with some coworkers. Kelly had taken the bus to the warehouse, so Bob drove her home afterward. As they were approaching the house, Kelly could see a truck belonging to one of Wayne’s friends parked in the driveway, a sign that Wayne had brought a friend home when he was supposed to be staying on base.

  “Don’t stop,” she told Bob. There was no way she was going to walk into the house at 10:30 P.M. if Wayne was there waiting for her.

  Bob drove her to a nearby pay phone, where Kelly called her sister.

  “Can I come to your house?” Kelly asked.

  “What is going on?” her sister replied. “Wayne’s been calling here, like, every ten minutes for the past three hours. He’s drunk and he’s waiting for you to come home.”

  Kelly’s sister agreed to let her stay the night. Later, Kelly found out that Wayne had come home with two dozen red roses, hid the car, and waited for her to show up. But as the hours passed, Wayne drank more and more beer, growing increasingly angry. At some point, he put on his camouflage uniform and waited in the bushes with a bow and arrow to shoot her and whomever she’d been out with.

  Wayne was still phoning Kelly’s sister’s house at 1:00 A.M., ranting and raving, so Kelly finally took his call.

  “I’m not going to talk to you tonight,” she told him. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Kelly went home the next night, but Wayne took out his anger and jealousy on her for days.

  On January 13, 1983, Kelly hit an emotional wall as she was ironing.

  “I want a divorce,” she finally told him.

  Surprisingly enough, Wayne didn’t seem angry.

  “Okay,” he said. “Would you mind staying, living with me, until I find somebody else?”

  Kelly was a bit frightened by the strange calmness that had taken over her volatile husband. “No, I don’t think that would work out too well,” she said.

  They proceeded to discuss how to split up the furniture, TV sets, the car, and their two motorcycles. Wayne was fine, until Kelly said she wanted to keep her bike.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because I have friends that ride.”

  Wayne blew up, dragged her to the phone, and demanded she call her friend. She did as she was told and dialed Bob’s number.

  “Wayne wants to talk to you,” she said, feeling bad about putting her friend in the middle of all this.

  “What happened?” Bob asked. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, just Wayne wants to talk to you.”

  Wayne invited Bob to meet them for breakfast at a restaurant down the street in forty-five minutes. Bob agreed, so Kelly went to change out of her pajamas, taking Wayne at his word.

  But, of course, it wasn’t going to be that easy. While she was getting dressed, Wayne came into the bedroom and raped her, leaving bruises on her back and wrists. Then he told her to get dressed and they walked down to the restaurant. Just like that.

  When they got there, Kelly sat speechless—in the silence of the surreal—as Wayne asked Bob if he knew any girls he could introduce Wayne to, preferably ones with large breasts.

  “Bob’s just, like, flabbergasted,” Kelly recalled later. “He’s sitting there, like, ‘Well, gee, I don’t know, Wayne. I don’t know of anybody offhand, but I’ll keep my eye out.’”

  After breakfast, Bob turned to Kelly and said, “Drive [my car] to your house and get some clothes and I’ll take you away.” Then he took a stroll with Wayne, assuming that he had called Bob there to punch him out.

  “So you want to fight?” Bob asked.

  “Oh, no, man,” Wayne replied. “I’m happy for you.”

  Bob was confused as he and Wayne walked back to the house, where Kelly had already packed a bag. Wayne did nothing as she left with Bob.

  Wayne moved out a few days later, but he didn’t stop calling Kelly, who had moved to Pasadena. Within a couple of weeks, she started dating Bob, whose wife had kicked him out of the house. Eventually, he and Kelly moved in together.

  “I had made it clear to Bob, at the beginning, that I still loved Wayne, but it was just a difficult situation,” Kelly said later.

  Meanwhile, Wayne was stalking her. Every day he would call and report that he’d seen her driving down a particular street, kissing Bob at a certain traffic light, and having dinner in a specific restaurant.

  Because he worked during the day, he was only able to follow her in the evenings, but that changed when he showed up at her office one afternoon. He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her outside, where he yelled at her in the pouring rain, their wedding rings pinned to the front of his jacket.

  Kelly kept glancing around for Bob, who was scheduled to pick her up around that time.

  “Are you looking for him?” Wayne demanded. “If he comes here, I swear to God I’ll kill him. He better not even come anywhere near.”

  Bob drove up, as if on cue, then walked up the ramp toward them.

  “You got a problem?” Bob asked Wayne.

  But Wayne backed down. “No, I just . . . thought maybe we could get a cup of coffee or something and talk.”

  So the three of them went out for a while. Wayne described to Bob in explicit detail the sex acts he and Kelly had performed together, but Bob would not give Wayne the satisfaction of reacting. He just let Wayne talk until he was finished.

  Later, Wayne came to Kelly’s apartment and wrote messages on her windows, reinforcing the fact that he knew where she lived.

  Kelly and Bob finally moved to Cathedral City, near Palm Springs, to get away from Wayne. Shifting his focus, he tried to harass Kelly’s sister into giving him Kelly’s new address.

  Kelly began divorce proceedings, hoping that Wayne wouldn’t fight her move to finalize the divorce in six months, around the fall of 1983. Wayne waited five months and twenty days before he made a showing, so the six-month clock had to start all over again.

  During this period, Kelly lived in constant paranoia. She and Bob were at a sporting-goods store in Palm Springs one morning when she looked across the street and—to her horror—saw her estranged husband.

  “Oh, shit, it’s Wayne,” she said.

  “No way.”

  They got in the car, drove around the block, and, sure enough, it was Wayne, so they headed back to their trailer.

  Wayne found them within three hours. Somehow he’d learned that they were living in a trailer park near Palm Springs, so he went methodically to every single one in the area until he figured out which was theirs.

  Kelly never saw him again. He held up the divorce for a while longer, but he finally gave up. Or so she thought. The divorce ultimately became final in August 1984, which allowed Kelly to marry Bob.

  But Wayne would still not let go. He showed up at Kelly’s grandparents’ ranch in Chino in 1985, telling her uncle that he was an officer for the Norco P
olice Department (which did not exist), and asked to use the phone to report a car accident he’d witnessed. He attempted once again to get her address, but Kelly’s relatives pretended they didn’t know where she was.

  Looking back, Kelly described Wayne as extremely narcissistic.

  “He did not, from my view, comprehend that there are moral rights and moral wrongs, as long as it felt good to . . . him.”

  Rodney didn’t see much of Wayne while he was in the marines and married to Kelly.

  Rodney joined the navy in 1983 and was assigned to the Seabees construction battalion. He stayed in the service until 1990.

  When the two brothers finally spent some time together after the separation, Rodney noticed that his brother was acting aggressively and self-destructively.

  “He’d come unglued, throw a fit, leave. If it wasn’t his way, it wasn’t going to happen,” Rodney recalled.

  At the time, Wayne told Rodney that he was driving very fast on his motorcycle, missed a turn and hit a guardrail. He said he also wiped out while doing a wheelie several months later.

  Once Rodney learned more about his brother’s head injury from 1980, he attributed these incidents, along with Wayne’s increasingly aggressive behavior and hair-trigger temper, to that. Before the accident, Rodney said, Wayne had gone four-wheeling and rode his motorcycle, but always within safe, reasonable limits.

  CHAPTER 5

  “DANGER TO HIMSELF, OTHERS AND GOVERNMENT PROPERTY”

  Wayne’s military records provide a revealing look at his state of mind, as well as his view on life up to that point.

  At 7:30 P.M. on April 8, 1983, several months after the separation, Wayne was admitted to the naval hospital’s psychiatric ward in Long Beach, where he’d been sent from the marine base in El Toro after complaining of depression and problems adjusting to work. He blamed the difficulties on his split with Kelly.