Charmin' Billy

Karen didn't want two men in her bed, only one: Bill. She screamed at him, so angry that she started putting on her clothes, getting ready to leave. When the telephone rang again, Bill picked it up, said "No," and hung up.

Later, he told her she'd passed a test. "If you had said yes, our relationship would have been over," he said. "We'd have had a good time first, but it would have been over."

"I'd passed, and I didn't even know I was being tested."

There would be many more tests.

In 1984, Bill convinced Karen to move to Houston with him. That's where his mother lived, and he said he had a good job waiting.

When they arrived in Texas, Bill had Karen lease an apartment in her name, saying he didn't want the woman at the rental office "knowing we were having relations." And while it turned out there wasn't a good job waiting for Bill, he made sure she got one as soon as possible, as the assistant manager at an import store.

Ten days after they'd landed in Houston, Bill took Karen to a justice of the peace and they were married.

"It was a classic con," says Karen, who has since made an informal study of men who prey on women. "Got me away from my environment, away from my parents, away from my job, away from my friends...made me dependent on him for everything."

But she was 26 and thought she knew what she wanted in a man. In her mind, she was marrying her fantasy man.

Then, on her wedding night, Karen failed the next test.

He wanted to play a game of sharing deepest, darkest secrets. He went first, admitting that he'd had sexual relations with men. Then he asked her a question. Had she ever slept with a married man? She said that yes, she had, and she'd regretted it ever since. "He didn't like the answer and tried to choke me," she says. "He was madder than hell. He had my neck to the floor, and he was on top of me."

She was terrified. Why is he doing this? she remembers thinking. This isn't Bill. She'd never sensed violence in him. He'd talked about getting into fights with other men, but only when he was in the right. He'd told her he had a black belt in karate, even had the uniform, a samurai sword and was pretty good with his nunchakus. "But there was no temper," she says. "He was always sweet as pie."

Until she found herself on the floor with his hands around her neck and him calling her a "liar" and a "whore." When he finally let her up, he didn't apologize. She'd done a bad thing, and that's the way he saw it. He made her call the wife of the man she'd slept with and confess.

When Bill quickly returned to his old sweet self, Karen convinced herself that it was her fault he'd attacked her. She'd done something wrong and that's what provoked him. She'd have to be more careful.

A few days later, Bill announced they were going on their honeymoon, to a place called Canyon Lake. He'd found a romantic little cabin in the hills where they could see the lake from the front porch. Despite their lack of money, somehow he'd arranged for them to spend ten days there.

The first night, though, he wanted to play the question game again. He asked her something else about her sexual history. It was a small matter, really, but she should have known better than to answer him honestly. Except that's the way she'd been raised, and he'd said that for their relationship to work, they needed to always be honest with each other. So she answered truthfully and found herself pinned against the wall with his hands around her throat.

She got loose and ran from the bedroom to the living room, where she hid behind the couch in a little ball. She heard Bill come out of the bedroom. "Where is she?" a deep, angry voice asked.

"It was him, but some part of him I had not heard before," she says. "I was very fearful."

Not seeing her, Neal went out onto the porch and smoked a cigarette. She was waiting obediently, hoping he'd calmed down, when he came back inside. Again he acted like nothing had happened.

As long as Karen continued to do what Bill said, he'd stay sweet, charming Billy. But break his rules, and there'd be hell to pay. She was rarely allowed to go anywhere except work without him. And if she was five minutes late coming home from work, he'd want to know who she'd been "beeping...only he used the F word." If she went to the swimming pool and a man talked to her, he'd somehow know it and accuse her of having an affair. When they went out on the town, Bill always wanted her to doll up -- but if another man so much as said, "Hi," he'd grab her by the arm, hard enough to bruise, and escort her out. "See how you are?" he'd sneer.

Of course, none of the same rules applied to him. He came and went as he pleased and always seemed to have plenty of cash, although his only job was as the apartment complex's maintenance man. And that job got him out of the apartment at all sorts of strange hours. He'd answer the phone and say he had to go fix some woman's toilet. Later he'd come back, snickering about how the tenant met him in a negligee and just wanted to get in my pants. Of course, he'd swear, he kept his zipper zipped. "He thought he was God's gift to women. But I always trusted him. Me? I couldn't be trusted, even though I was never unfaithful to him."

Then there was the day an envelope arrived at their home, containing a pair of panties and a photograph of a beautiful woman. "He just said, 'I used to get that kind of shit all the time. It doesn't mean anything.' But I'm sitting there thinking, Yeah, but we're married now."

Karen couldn't figure out where Bill got his mean streak or his obsessive jealousy. She'd met his mother, "who was good as gold," she remembers. "A wonderful woman -- beautiful inside and out. She thought of Bill as her golden child; he could do no wrong, and around her, he wouldn't." His mother was the one who'd taught Bill how to act around a lady. To be a gentleman and open doors, send flowers, write poetry.

But Bill was no longer a gentleman around Karen. When he got angry, he'd slap her with an open hand or shove her roughly. He couldn't trust her, he'd say. But he had a quotation, something he'd read somewhere, that no matter what she had done wrong, however far she had gone down the wrong road, she could turn back. "Turn back," he'd tell her.

Karen knows how all of this sounds. "But I couldn't leave," she says, "not when I was the one who had done wrong. If he was unhappy, then I was the one who was making him unhappy. I had to stay and make things right...It's what you do when you think you really love someone."

Soon after the couple moved to Texas, her mother had told Karen there was something wrong with Bill. "I can't put my finger on it," she'd said. Karen didn't clue her mother in regarding Bill's abuse. But that feeling was so strong that Karen's parents changed their will to make sure Bill would have a tough time getting his hands on their money if he and Karen ever split.

As that first year of marriage passed, even Karen could see that Bill was a natural con artist. Not just in the way he could insinuate himself into any conversation and be whatever someone wanted him to be at the moment. But in little, everyday ways, too. If he was hungry and short of cash, for example, he'd go into a McDonald's, complain that a cheeseburger had been left out of his order and get one free.

Other habits were more worrisome. Those comments Bill made about other women in passing were getting louder, more vehement, and Karen worried that the women might hear. But he wouldn't stop, and if she wasn't careful, the comments would be directed at her as well.

The sex had also changed. When they were dating, their lovemaking was pleasurable and mutually satisfying. Although Bill had always been into experiments, such as body painting and photographs, in Texas he started getting kinkier, more aggressive. "Then it was 'Pain is good' and 'It hurts when it's good,'" she recalls.

It wasn't lovemaking anymore. It was hard, angry -- almost as if she wasn't there, or like it didn't matter who was there. They had sex when he wanted and how he wanted it.

When Bill decided to leave Texas after a year in Houston, that was fine with her. Neither of them liked the weather or the surroundings. They talked about using the money they'd saved, mostly from her job, to travel up and down the East Coast looking for the next place to live.

The adventure appealed to Karen, and so did the idea that the change might help them get their marriage back on track. Maybe if life wasn't so ordinary and stressful, they could recapture the magic. It seemed like Bill wanted a clean start: Before they left Texas, he insisted Karen be rebaptized "to cleanse my soul," she remembers.

They packed up the van and headed out, visiting relatives as they looked for a place to settle down. They stayed in Tennessee several weeks, then went on to New York, Vermont and Virginia. Finally they settled on Antioch, Tennessee, about fifteen minutes from Nashville. For Karen, that was like another dream come true. When she was seventeen, she'd taken a trip down a nearby river; when she returned home, she'd told a friend that someday she'd live in a log cabin in Tennessee.

But the young couple settled into an apartment, not a cabin. And the rules, tests and accusations returned. They'd only been in Antioch a few months when Bill's mother decided to move out of her home and into an apartment. Bill told Karen he had to go back to Texas to help his mother fix up her place to sell. He figured he'd be gone about three weeks.

Three weeks turned into three months. To pay for their own place, Karen had to take a second job and then a third. And still he didn't come home.

Bill always had excuses. His mom's house had needed more work than he'd thought, and her apartment needed more. But when he called, he always sounded distant. So Karen would talk to his mother and ask if Bill was all right. "Oh, honey, don't you worry about Bill," she'd said. "He's just fine."

She didn't know what he was doing, but Bill seemed aware of Karen's every move. He knew if she came home late from work. He knew if she had a bottle of beer in her hand when she answered the door. No sooner would she walk in than the telephone would ring, and Bill would be asking where she'd been and with whom.

After eight months, Bill finally returned to Tennessee. He lasted there two weeks, then took off. He left behind a seven-page letter, written front and back, listing Karen's faults. She couldn't be trusted. He thought she was perfect when he married her, but she wasn't, and he was sorry, but he couldn't deal with it. He wanted a divorce.

The next day, Karen was telling the woman across the hall that Bill had left her when the woman made a startling admission. At Bill's request, she and her husband had kept a diary of Karen's comings and goings. The woman showed it to her -- a steno pad with notations about the company she kept, even what she had in her hands as she stood out in the hallway. When Karen asked the couple why they'd done it, they shrugged. Bill had told them Karen couldn't be trusted and had asked them to keep tabs on her.

Two weeks later, Bill was back. He loved her, wanted to make it work. Years later, Karen would wonder why she agreed. But at the time, she was a young woman desperately trying to salvage a marriage that she had thought would last forever. "I had married him for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, 'til death do us part," she says. "I believed in those vows. I was willing to try again."

She came home a few days later to find that he'd sold all of their belongings, which were mostly hers. He'd gotten rid of her climbing gear and camping equipment -- thousands of dollars' worth of high-tech gear. He'd unloaded all of her pots and pans for $7, sold several antiques and given anything he couldn't sell to friends. All she had left were a few items of clothing, a fifteen-inch television, and the backpack and tent she kept in her car.

It was part of a grand plan, Bill told her as she walked around the empty apartment in disbelief. They were going to start fresh, live in their van for a few months to save money and then head to Colorado.