Before He Wakes (15 page)

Russ was meticulous about personal appearance, and he passed this on to his players. Looking good was important (“If we can’t win, at least we’re going to look good losing,” he liked to say), and to make sure that his teams always looked their best, he sometimes brought home their uniforms to mend, wash and iron, so that they would be just right. He taught his players to have pride in themselves, to struggle and endure.

“My whole philosophy in sports, period, is it’s a preparation for life,” he later told sportswriter Al Carson of the
Durham Sun
. “I think you have to get in there and fight, scrap and dig. Then when you get out in the world and things go wrong, you can hang in there. I try to teach my kids never to give up. You always have a chance until the last out.”

Russ and Jo Lynn were married on October 18, 1974, in a ceremony at her parents’ home in Raleigh. She was a senior at Meredith College in Raleigh, majoring in business education. After their wedding they moved into a three-room apartment connected to his Aunt Erma’s house on University Drive in Durham. Six months later, they bought a small brick ranch house with a basement on Willow Drive. After her graduation, Jo Lynn went to work for the Liggett Group in Durham, the corporation that controlled some of the city’s major cigarette manufacturing plants. Soon afterward, Russ took a step upward in his career, becoming an assistant coach at Durham High.

In 1976, Russ and Jo Lynn bought a larger brick house with three bedrooms, two baths, a huge master bedroom, den, fireplace and deck at the corner of Bramble Drive and Genesee Street in the Willow Hill subdivision off Guess Road, about five miles north of Durham.

Within a year of moving into the house, though, trouble had erupted in their marriage. Rumors reached Jo Lynn that Russ might be getting involved with a student, and one night when Russ didn’t come home, she went looking for him and spotted his car at the apartment of his friend and fellow coach, John Biddle. She parked nearby and at 2:00
A.M
., she saw Russ emerge from the apartment holding the hand of a teenage girl. After they had left in his car, she went to the door.

“John,” she demanded when Biddle answered, “I want to know what’s going on.”

“You’ll have to talk to Russ,” was all he would say.

Given to occasional fits of temper, Jo Lynn waited until the next morning, when she was calmer, to confront Russ. The girl was a troubled student he was trying to help, he claimed lamely. Jo Lynn accused him of lying, stormed out and went to her parents’ house, certain that her marriage was at an end. But a contrite Russ soon called, asking forgiveness, and after two weeks of pleading, he talked Jo Lynn into giving him another chance.

Things never would be the same again, however. Jo Lynn saw Russ in a different light now than she had in the early days of their marriage. The boyishness that once had been so charming now was simple immaturity that he refused to relinquish. He never would grow up, she thought. He wanted to remain a big, playful boy forever. Too late, Jo Lynn had realized that she and Russ had almost nothing in common. Russ’s main interest was sports, and she couldn’t care less about them. In addition, she didn’t like his friends, and he didn’t particularly care for hers. There were few things on which they agreed. Although they remained together and still loved one another, they were drifting further and further apart.

Matters finally came to a head on a night late in the winter of 1978, a year after Jo Lynn had walked out. An ice storm hit, downing power lines. With no TV to watch, no stereo to listen to, no lights to read by, Jo Lynn and Russ found themselves sitting in uneasy silence in candlelight, unable to find anything to talk about. They went to the same bed feeling the same isolation.

“Do you think we ought to try a separation?” Jo Lynn asked the next morning.

Russ was all too quick to agree. He packed his clothes and left. Jo Lynn cried as she watched him drive away. They had been married not yet three and a half years, and now she knew that it was over for good.

Two weeks later, they got together at a lawyer’s office and drew up a separation agreement. It was all very amicable, without bitterness or acrimony. Jo Lynn would move back home with her parents. Russ would return to the house to stay until he could sell it and they could divide the equity. They would go through the house together to decide who would get what from the possessions they had accumulated together. Russ would keep Sampson, the boisterous German shepherd they both loved. Jo Lynn didn’t want to inflict the dog on her parents, and Russ was better able to care for him.

After Jo Lynn moved out, she did not see Russ again until summer, when he called to invite her on a trip to the beach with his parents. She thought he was inviting her because of his parents, who had been upset about his separation and wanted to make certain that he was doing the right thing. She went, but the situation was strained. She didn’t know what to say to his parents, and she and Russ still found little to talk about.

Jo Lynn knew that Russ had been dating. He had gone out a few times with a fellow teacher at Durham High, an old friend. What she didn’t know was that he had been doing this for the sake of appearances, to distract attention from his real romantic interest. Secretly he was seeing a former student.

Sybil Jackson* was seventeen, and Russ, who was thirty, had known her since her junior year. After her graduation that spring, Sybil saw Russ every chance she could get. They went on walks together and played tennis. Once, with the help of her best friends, she rendezvoused at the beach with Russ. All the same, she was terrified that her parents would find out about her relationship with Russ and had told only her two best girlfriends about it.

Russ was in love with her and told her so. He wanted her to tell her parents about him so that their relationship could be open. They argued when he kept pressuring her about it.

She thought that she was in love with Russ as well, although later she would realize that it was only an infatuation. She never had dated anybody seriously and Russ had overwhelmed her. He was hopelessly romantic, she later recalled, warm, considerate, generous, always giving her little things. Once he presented her with a St. Christopher medal that he said his parents had given him when he was eight. He brought her flowers and even sent flowers to her house, although he signed other names to the cards.

Russ wanted to marry her. He loved to talk about the life they would build together, the children they would have. She knew that she couldn’t marry Russ. Her parents expected her to go to college. They would be devastated if she married, indeed if they even knew that she was dating a man so much older than she. She couldn’t let her parents down.

At summer’s end, she left Durham to attend college in another state. Russ went to see her on weekends. A couple of times she came home to see Russ and to attend the Durham High football games that he was coaching. She visited at the games with friends on the cheerleading squad and with the coaches and team members.

At one of those games, one of the coaches’ wives introduced her to a new friend of Russ’s who had started coming to the games. Her name was Barbara. She was just a friend, Russ told her, a neighbor who had lost her husband. Sybil was sure that that was exactly how Russ saw her, but she could tell by the way Barbara looked at Russ that she was after him “hot and heavy,” as she later described it.

This could have serious consequences, Sybil knew. Russ’s friends were aware of their relationship and if they knew, might not Barbara also? Sybil sensed that Barbara realized that she was her rival, and it concerned her. Would Barbara call her parents, perhaps anonymously, and tell them about her relationship with Russ in hopes of eliminating the competition? It was a worry she took back to school.

Russ still was pressuring her to marry him, and by the end of September she had decided to put an end to it. She had a deep affection for Russ, wanted to continue to be his friend, but she could not marry him. Her parents never would accept it. Besides, she had met a young man at college, somebody nearer her age. She liked him a lot, and he had asked her out. She was too young to be married and settled. She wanted to be able to date, have fun, enjoy her college years.

She told Russ all of this when he came to meet her for the weekend. He had given her many wonderful memories, she said, and she would never forget them. She could tell that Russ was crushed, although he tried to pretend otherwise. Later, she heard from his friends in Durham that he was having a hard time because of it.

Sybil was not surprised when soon after she broke off with Russ, she heard from her friends that he had started seeing Barbara.

Indeed, with the way cleared, Barbara was wasting no time. In mid-October, she brought Russ to Sunday morning services at Ebenezer Baptist Church and made a special point of introducing him to Jim Browder. Not more than two weeks later, Jim later recalled, Barbara approached him at church with a smile as wide as her face and told him she and Russ were planning to get married.

Jim congratulated her, and although he felt secretly relieved, he also felt a sympathetic concern for Russ, who seemed like a nice guy. Jim hoped that he knew what he was getting into.

12

Barbara’s imaginative view of her early relationship with Russ later would be set down in thinly veiled fiction in a romance novel that she would attempt to write. Although she would change the names and locations, she and Russ clearly are the main characters. She is a sexy and highly successful real estate agent who drives a Mercedes, lives in a fabulous contemporary house and reaches into her fantastic wardrobe several times each day to change her expensive clothing. Russ is a recently separated high school baseball coach who is Barbara’s equal only in sex appeal. Economically and socially, he recognizes that he never can be her match, but she brushes off his protestations of inferiority and wins him away from a high school cheerleader who is pursuing him. She feels a “strong sense of belonging” when she is cheering for Russ’s team, but her main interest in him is physical, and at the end of the last chapter that Barbara would finish, they “melt together in passion.”

With Russ as her new outlet for passion, things should have been going well for Barbara that fall. She was settled in her new house. Bryan was doing well at his new school, already on the honor roll, she boasted. Jason was in pre-school classes. She had made new friends at church, where she was taking part in more and more activities, as if she were trying to prove her piety and goodness. She also had a new job, her first since leaving the real estate agency in Archdale.

But as Barbara later would write of her romance novel heroine, “everyone who was acquainted with [her] was unaware of the turmoil inside her.” That turmoil obviously was Barbara’s, too, and it would lead her to brazen and bizarre behavior in the fall of 1978, when she began dating Russ. Later, it would seem almost as if she were subconsciously driven to take actions that were designed to have her castigated.

Barbara’s job was at Security Federal Savings and Loan, where she had gotten a loan to buy her house. She applied for the job on September 5 and was hired the following day as a teller trainee at a salary of $575 a month. The job of training Barbara fell to Joanne Brockman.* Joanne got along well with Barbara in the beginning, but within a few short weeks she began to have concerns.

On October 4, Joanne had a $100 shortage from the cash drawer that she had been working with Barbara. It was the first shortage for Joanne in fifteen months on the job, and no matter how many times she went back through the day’s transactions, she couldn’t account for it. She decided that she would have to watch Barbara closer in the future.

Two weeks later, just after she brought Russ to church to show him off for the first time, Barbara had a shortage of $357.12 while working from her own cash drawer. Two checks that she had taken that day added up to that amount, and Barbara remembered that she had cashed the checks for the customers and mistakenly posted them as loan payments. But when her supervisor called the customers, each said that he had brought in the check as a payment and had received no money back.

A day later, Barbara missed work, calling to say that she had personal business to which she had to attend. She called in sick the following day as well.

On November 17, a couple of weeks after Barbara had announced her engagement to Russ, Joanne Brockman had an unprecedented shortage from her cash drawer of $500. Twenty-five twenty-dollar bills were missing. Twice that day, Joanne told her supervisor, Barbara had inquired how much money she had in her cash box. After the earlier shortage Joanne had thought that Barbara simply had made a mistake. Now she was convinced that Barbara was stealing.

After that shortage Barbara began to be moved from branch to branch, filling in where a teller was needed. In late November and early December, she had several discrepancies in her cash drawer, but no major shortages. The only real blot against her was that a check that she had written for $50 and gotten another teller to cash had been returned for insufficient funds. That turned out to be only an indication of what was to come.

At the beginning of December, Barbara wrote a check for $935 for her house payment, which she had allowed to fall behind. It, too, was returned for insufficient funds. A mistake, Barbara said, and the check was redeposited.

On December 14, just before Barbara took Russ to Randolph County to meet Brenda Monroe and other acquaintances, she asked for a $400 salary advance for Christmas shopping. It was granted, to be repaid when she got her paycheck on December 21. When Barbara hadn’t repaid the advance by December 22, her supervisor asked her about it. She would be able to repay it soon, Barbara said. With Christmas so close, her supervisor didn’t want to appear like Scrooge and press her for it.