Body Parts (10 page)

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 1993, 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

E
LIZABETH AND
M
AX

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. She 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.

A week later, they got into an argument and she took off to see her family in Las Vegas, but came back the next day after she and Wayne talked on the phone. Looking back, Elizabeth knew that she should have stayed away, but she wasn’t ready at the time.

Other than the rape, Wayne was never violent with Elizabeth—not even the time she hit him during an argument over whether she should visit her mother in Vegas. Strangely enough, he wanted her to go and she didn’t. He was standing on her purse and bending over to reach inside for her mother’s phone number when she smacked him in the face. He called the police, but by the time they arrived, he’d calmed down enough to talk them out of taking her away, because she was pregnant.

Wayne had seemed pleased about the baby once he found out that it was a boy. Elizabeth didn’t know what they would’ve done if it had turned out to be a girl.

When it was time to go to the hospital, Elizabeth said, Wayne seemed very put out that he had to go along.

On December 10, 1995, their son was born and they named him Max.

Not long after the birth, Elizabeth’s father suggested, as he had in the past, that the young family move to Las Vegas, where there would be great job opportunities for both of them.

They made the move that February and stayed with Elizabeth’s mother until they could get their own apartment in the same complex the following month.

Once they were on their own again, Wayne started asking Elizabeth to talk to him about being a prostitute. Since she’d never been a prostitute, she didn’t quite understand his new sex game and refused to tell him what he wanted to hear.

Wayne started working as an apprentice for the electricians union, but he decided he would rather drive a cab.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth stayed in their two-bedroom apartment, taking care of Max. She kept the house clean, did the laundry, and cooked for him, just like he wanted, but she began to detach herself emotionally as the sex games continued to escalate.

Elizabeth let Wayne tie her wrists together once, which she considered “normal kinky,” but she wouldn’t do it again because she didn’t like feeling confined. On several occasions, Wayne put his hands around her neck as he was reaching climax. He wasn’t forceful about it, so Elizabeth never said she minded, although she didn’t say she liked it, either.

Still, Wayne wasn’t happy. He was constantly depressed, holding on to things and not letting go of them. In addition, he started making her drink vodka straight from the bottle until she threw up. He talked about putting a padlock on her vagina so that no one else could get inside and started asking to pierce her breasts with safety pins.

She figured if she let him do it once, then he’d be satisfied and move on. But that didn’t happen. If she didn’t let him poke her, he would become morose. So sometimes she would let him, just for a minute.

“That really hurts, I don’t want to go through this, Adam,” she would tell him. Sometimes she would cry, saying, “Why would you want to do this to me? I don’t like it.”

More and more, this odd behavior seemed to be something that Wayne needed, and also something that Elizabeth could not withstand. She didn’t like the way he was constantly masturbating on the couch, either, particularly when she caught him in the act.