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  Similar to his relationship with Kelly, Wayne’s sexual practices with Wadad seemed normal at first.

  Initially, he asked her to give him oral sex, but she said no.

  “I can’t do something like that if I don’t love you,” she said.

  Wayne seemed pretty upset by this, but he didn’t take it out on her, perhaps because things changed soon enough.

  It wasn’t long before Wadad fell in love with Wayne, so she was more willing to do what she needed to please him—that included letting him put a safety pin in her nipple during sex.

  “I loved him a lot and I thought, well, you know, I’ll try that,” she said later.

  Even though it hurt, she let him stick her on four separate occasions. He never pushed the pin all the way through, he just pricked her with it and pulled it out when she complained of pain. (Wayne later told a psychologist that he’d administered diabetic injections to one of his teenage girlfriends, and over time, the needles became sexually arousing to him.)

  Wayne would ask Wadad to bite his nipples and he would bite her breasts as well, hard enough to leave teeth marks, but not enough to make her cry.Wadad knew he liked this, so she went along. She also didn’t object to him setting up a camcorder so they could watch themselves while having sex.

  But Wadad had her limits. She drew the line when he said he wanted to bring another woman into their bed. It made no difference that he said an ex-girlfriend let him watch while she had sex with another man.

  “I thought about it, but then I thought. . . it wasn’t in my heart to really do something like that,” she said. “I’m just not like that, and so I never—thank goodness—I never did something like that, because I would’ve regretted it.”

  She also refused to have anal sex with him after they experimented once or twice because it hurt too much.

  Unlike with Kelly, Wayne never forced Wadad to have sex when she didn’t want to. On the other hand, Wadad said, “I never said no to him, so I don’t know how he reacts to that. But he never . . . coerced me or anything.”

  Years later a woman named Janice Hawkins said she’d met Wayne at a karaoke bar in Vallejo in October 1987, and she let him live with her for a time. During that period, she said, he asked her to pinch his nipples so hard that she feared she would pinch them off. She also said he hit her once while they were having sex, and masturbated in front of her teenage daughter.

  In 1989, Wadad said, she and Wayne were living in a two-bedroom house in San Clemente. They both knew their relationship was not going anywhere and that they weren’t good for each other, so they started to break up. Again. But then Wayne had an idea.

  “Why don’t we just break up slowly?” he said. “I’ll sleep in the other bedroom.”

  As usual, Wadad agreed to go along. She had no other immediate plans.

  So Wayne moved into the other bedroom and they lived largely as roommates, although they were still occasionally intimate. This went on for a year, while Wayne was supposed to be looking for another place to live. Wadad said she wanted to keep the house because she had a dog.

  Around this time, Wayne told his brother he’d started taking prelaw courses at Saddleback College, a community college in Mission Viejo, with the hopes of becoming a criminal defense attorney someday. (Wayne never got past the tenth grade in high school, but he ultimately earned his GED.) A Saddleback spokeswoman confirmed he attended courses there from 1990 through 1992, although she couldn’t confirm which classes he had taken whether he’d completed them.

  One day, Wayne came home, crying, but he wouldn’t tell Wadad what was wrong. “I don’t want to,” he said.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  He finally explained that he’d been walking along the sidewalk when he came across a girl, grabbed her purse, threw it up on the roof, and bit her breast. Wadad didn’t understand why Wayne would do such things, but she didn’t press him for an explanation because he was crying.

  There were other strange incidents around this time as well. While he was working as a tow truck driver and helping some people on the road one night, a young teenage couple from out of state approached him. They said they had no money and needed to buy gas, so Wayne brought them back to the house.

  It was summertime and Wayne was on break from driving the school bus, so he sat around the kitchen table, playing cards with these kids. Wadad came home from work one evening and saw Wayne, sitting at an angle and facing the girl, who was about fifteen. He was shirtless and was wearing cutoff shorts with no underwear, so his testicles were hanging out the bottom. Wadad tried to signal him to tuck himself in, but he remained oblivious.

  Finally, she had to say something.

  “Why don’t you cover yourself?” she asked.

  “What’s the big deal?” he replied.

  Wadad felt he was being disrespectful, but later she realized he must have liked watching the girl react to his exposed genitals.

  Also during that time, Wadad and Wayne rented the second bedroom to a young woman whose pretty cousin came to stay with them. Wayne told Wadad he saw the cousin, through the window, sleeping naked on her bed.

  “What were you doing looking in the window?” Wadad asked.

  “Well, her blinds were open.”

  It didn’t hit Wadad until later that there was no other reason for Wayne to be outside her window except to stare at the girl. Their yard was such a mess that they never even used it except to let the dog run around.

  Finally, at long last, Wayne announced he’d found another place to live.

  “Where?” Wadad asked.

  “Right there,” he said, pointing to the house next door, which was also adjacent to his former employer, B&M Towing.

  Wadad was outraged. “You can’t do that to me,” she said.

  She soon realized that she would have to move because even after he was living next door, he was still coming and going from her house as he pleased. She found a studio in San Clemente and left her dog behind.

  Wayne was drinking quite a bit and going out at night, singing karaoke. He and Wadad were still intimate off and on until the end of 1992, when he told her that he’d been with somebody else. That was the end for Wadad.

  “I told him I didn’t want any part of him after that,” she said.

  In September 1992, Wayne applied for a job with the U.S. Border Patrol. In his application, he claimed to have supervised more than thirty-five employees at a time in the marines, writing that he left the military because “as a career I was not interested.”

  During his time in the marines, he wrote, “I was responsible for maintaining high standards of appearance, mental and physical readings. I was an expert with the M-16 A2 rifle and .45 pistol for most of my six years. I was promoted to sergeant after my 20th birthday.”

  He listed the skills he’d developed as: “map reading and navigation math with logarithms”; first aid for chemical, nuclear and biological injuries; radio communications; use of radiological equipment; “survival in harsh environments”; “nuclear blast reporting; use of weather data; and many other classified and unclassified skills. I learned teaching, leadership, and the ability to speak and write clearly and concisely.”

  He omitted mention of his demotion and discharge, but perhaps the description he gave for his job after the marines spoke for itself: “As a security officer I was responsible for ensuring the security of some 35 pools, Jacuzzis, tennis courts and two small lakes. . . . I was also responsible to cite violators of the association rules and regs (the strictest imaginable). During my employment with Woodbridge, I developed or maintained the following skills: radio communications, crisis situation management, abnormality observation, public relations and rating of situation reports.”

  Wayne didn’t get the position with the Border Patrol, which, as a federal law enforcement agency, may have had access to the details of his separation from the Marines.

  In March 1
993, Wayne called Rodney to say he’d been arrested on suspicion of firing a weapon and cruelty to animals.

  “What happened?” Rodney asked.

  Wayne explained that the two Dobermans belonging to the owner of the B&M tow yard next door were barking constantly and trying to get under the fence between their two properties, apparently wanting to get hold of Wadad’s dog. Wadad had asked Wayne to keep the fluffy, mild-mannered white creature when she moved into her new apartment.

  Wayne told Rodney that he had repeatedly warned the owner about what he would do if the dogs got into his yard.

  “You need to fix the fence,” Wayne said he told the owner. “If they get in here and hurt my dog, I’m going to kill them.”

  Eventually, one of the Dobermans did get past the fence and got into a fight with Wadad’s dog. Wayne told Rodney he tried to separate them, but he finally gave up. So he went inside, got his shotgun, and killed the Doberman.

  “I would probably have done the same thing,” Rodney said later.

  Ultimately, Wayne was sentenced to five days in jail for cruelty to animals, but it’s unclear if he served any time.

  Although Wayne and Wadad were engaged for a while, Wadad never really thought about a wedding or having kids with him. Looking back years later as a wife and mother, she tried to make sense of why she stayed in their relationship for so long.

  “I think I was just waiting for him to make the right move in his life, but he never did it,” she recalled. “I waited till I was twenty-six and I woke up that morning, on my birthday, and thought, ‘What am I doing here?’”

  After living away from Wayne for a while, and evaluating how she should be treated by a man, she decided that he hadn’t respected her at all.

  “I just don’t think he respects women, period,” she said.

  But Wadad didn’t seem all that angry at him. She said she figured the way he turned out had something to do with his relationship with his mother. Wayne had told her that he’d been very close to Karen, hanging on her dress in the kitchen as a child; then one day, “she just looked at him and said, ‘I don’t want to be your mother anymore,’ and she left. She just left.”

  Rodney agreed with Wadad’s assessment. “Something happened when he got kicked out of the house [by our mother]. He didn’t trust women anymore,” Rodney said. “That’s as far as I can see when he started having problems with women.”

  Rodney described Wadad as a very nice person, “one of the best people I ever met.” She always got along well with Rodney’s wife, so well that the four of them often went to car shows together.

  “We just loved her to death,” he said. “Wadad was the best and healthiest thing that ever happened to my brother.”

  But Wayne didn’t seem to appreciate what he had in Wadad until years later.

  “He used to browbeat her, treat her terribly,” Rodney said.

  The ironic part about all of this is that Wayne would later look back on these years and describe Wadad as the love of his life.

  CHAPTER 7

  ELIZABETH AND MAX

  In early 1994, Wayne was working as a disc jockey at Taka-O, a Japanese sushi restaurant and bar in San Clemente, where he ran the karaoke machine.

  His friend Dave was dating a pretty twenty-one-year-old named Elizabeth Ault, but after they broke up a few months later, the slender blonde started coming to the bar just to see Wayne, who was a dozen years older than she was.

  They started dating at the end of May and got close pretty quickly. In the beginning, Wayne brought her flowers. Within a couple of months, they were living together, and soon after that, they were talking about getting married.

  Elizabeth was working at Lane Bryant, a clothing store in Orange County. Wayne, who was still going by the name of Adam, was working at an auto repair shop with his friend Scott Hayes, a mechanic he’d met when the two of them worked at B&M Towing. Scott was married to a woman named Linda, and the four of them often socialized together.

  Before Wayne and Elizabeth had a chance to set a wedding date, she got pregnant. This time, Wayne left the decision about having an abortion to his girlfriend, and because they weren’t married yet, Elizabeth chose to have the procedure.

  On October 15, 1994, the two of them were married in Las Vegas at the Tropicana Hotel, once known as the “Tiffany of the Strip,” and home of the city’s longest-running showgirls production, Folies Bergere.

  Right before the ceremony, Rodney, who was Wayne’s best man, made his feelings known about the impending nuptials, while the bride’s father and brother stood silently by. Elizabeth’s father, who worked for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, eventually was promoted to deputy chief and commander of internal affairs.

  “You shouldn’t marry her,” Rodney told Wayne. “She’s too young. She’s too volatile. You’ve already had problems and I don’t see it getting any better.”

  But Wayne didn’t listen and stubbornly married his young bride anyway.

  Wayne stopped working at Taka-O after the wedding, because, Elizabeth said, it wasn’t the kind of “scene to be working in when you’re married.”

  But that didn’t stop the two of them from going there together. Wayne liked playing darts and the two of them often entered tournaments.

  They were talking one day, asking each other questions about their past lives.

  “Have you ever killed anyone?” she asked, wondering about his time in the marines.

  Wayne said no, but he did tell her about the night in 1992 when he hurt a girl pretty badly in a bar in San Clemente. He said someone had jumped on his back, so he turned around and reflexively decked the person, only to see that it was a young Latina woman whose jaw was dangling from his punch.

  He said he ran out of the bar and took off in his red Jeep. He went over to Scott’s house and told him he needed to paint his vehicle blue because the girl he’d hurt was part of a Mexican gang and he didn’t want her fellow gangsters to track him down by his car and take revenge.

  Just as in his previous relationships, Wayne started asking to expand their sex life soon after the wedding: he wanted to watch Elizabeth have sex with another man.

  Initially, she said she didn’t want to, but she changed her mind after he fought and argued with her, making her life a living hell.

  “I can’t even put it into words,” she said later, crying as she recounted a part of her life that she had since tried to forget. “He would just make life so bad that I thought, if this will make him happy—and it’s stupid on my part, you know I’ve made some mistakes in my life—and I just thought maybe it would get [our life] back to normal.”

  Elizabeth wanted to make her husband happy and get past this fantasy. So one night, she got drunk enough to feel emotionally numb, then the two of them picked up a marine from a bus stop and went back to the barracks. The three of them had sex, but the men didn’t touch each other.

  The next morning, Wayne was very proud of Elizabeth. “You were great last night,” he said.

  Elizabeth looked at him and said, “I can’t believe I did that. I never want to do it again.”

  Nevertheless, she agreed to do it two more times, and each time, Wayne’s afterglow only lasted about a week.

  Finally, Elizabeth said she couldn’t do it again, and meant it.

  “It’s awful,” she told him. “I don’t know why you would want to do that to me.”

  “Well, don’t you want to make me happy?” he replied.

  But sometimes it was hard to make him happy—especially when he was sulking. If Wayne didn’t get eight hours of sleep, he blamed Elizabeth and refused to go to work. She would toss and turn before she went to sleep, and he needed to lie still, so Elizabeth slept on the couch most of the time.

  By March 1995, Elizabeth was pregnant again.

  During the pregnancy, Elizabeth hadn’t really felt much like eating until the evening. But one morning in August, she was unusually hungry, so she made herself some eggs, bacon, and toast. S
he settled in on the sofa to eat her breakfast while she watched some TV, but Wayne decided that he wanted to eat her food rather than cook something for himself. He also wanted to have sex.

  “What he expected of me as a wife was to cook his breakfast, and cook his lunch and cook his dinner,” Elizabeth said later. “If he had to go to work without his breakfast, he was pissed at me . . . whether or not I was sick.”

  But this time, he took his anger out in a different way. “He just took control of me and he—he raped me. . . . It was bad. I didn’t want anything to do with him. I just wanted him away from me and he took a belt and wrapped it around my neck and told me to suck his dick. And I wanted to bite it off, but I didn’t want to get killed or anything. That was the only time I was really frightened of him. . . . He hit me with the belt. . . . He got on top of me [and] I felt like I was going to die.”

  Elizabeth ran out of the apartment naked, screaming, and into the laundry room, where she grabbed a towel and wrapped it around herself. Wayne got scared and called her back inside and told her it would be okay.

  “No, I’m not going back in there,” she told him.

  Elizabeth looked around in case anybody was watching, and she saw a young boy. She went back into the apartment so that she didn’t cause a scene.

  She took a shower and then let Wayne have sex with her. She lay there, lifeless, letting him do what he wanted, hoping it would make things better. Afterward, she cried.

  They were supposed to drive up to see Rodney and his wife and kids that day in Pomona, so they could all go to a classic-car show. They went as planned, as if nothing had happened.