04.Die.My.Love.2007 (17 page)

Finally, in Houston that spring, Piper fi led for bankruptcy.

On the forms, she listed total debts of $289,596. She owed Tina $15,000, her mother $80,000, and $76,000 on credit 126 / Kathryn Casey

cards—over and above the debt Fred had taken on. Later, Fred would argue that many of the debts were fabricated, including the $100,000 she listed as owing him. For monthly expenses she listed $6,390.

Although child support isn’t dischargeable in a bankruptcy, the filing had the potential of stalling the Virginia divorce case, as the federal bankruptcy court took jurisdiction over Piper’s finances. To prevent that from happening, Fred hired a Houston attorney, Don Knabeschuh, and fi led yet another petition, this one asking the federal court to deny the bankruptcy. Knabeschuh would later recall the way Fred unemotionally described the turbulent events of the past years, as if he’d repeated them so often to so many that he’d grown immune to the pain. At Piper’s Houston bankruptcy hearing, Knabeschuh attended in Fred’s place.

When he explained to the judge that Fred was his client, Piper glowered at him.

In Virginia, the Jablin children’s dog died, run over in the street after it ran out of the gate. The children were sad, and Fred packed them up for a weekend at the beach house. In Texas, Piper didn’t show up at a second bankruptcy hearing and failed to file the required reports and schedules. The judge dismissed the case. Piper filed a second bankruptcy petition, and again Fred protested through Knabeschuh. This time, when Piper met with Joseph Hill, a bankruptcy trustee appointed by the court, she tried to convince him to use the bankruptcy court to set aside the Virginia divorce settlement.

When Hill told the judge of the conversation, the judge terminated Piper’s second bankruptcy with prejudice, barring her from filing a third time.

That summer, Piper didn’t attend her twenty- fi fth class reunion in Harlingen, but gossip swirled about her, news of her divorce and the scandal of losing her children, her old friends comparing notes like high school girls gossiping about who’d disappeared with a boy into a dark corner at DIE, MY LOVE / 127

Saturday night’s dance. If there was a consensus, it was that Piper’s ex-husband must have manipulated the judge. How else could it be explained? To her hometown crowd, Piper had always been an “A-lister,” brilliant and beautiful. It was hard to understand how her life could have taken such a tragic turn.

Off for the summer, Fred offered to either send the children to summer camp or take them to New York, to see where he grew up. The children chose New York, and he was thrilled. While there, he took them to a Broadway play, as his mother had once done with him.

In Kingsley, neighbors had watched Fred change. He’d always been viewed as a good dad, one who played with his children, but now Fred had become “Mr. Mom,” a dad who chauffeured his three children to soccer, planned birthday parties, and called moms to set up sleepovers. During the school year, he joked with the mothers and children on the corner as they all waited together for the yellow school bus to arrive. As the bus pulled away, he’d wave at Paxton, who would wave back with a smile. One eve ning Fred watched
Lord of the Rings
with his son. As he did in the classroom at the University of Richmond, Fred used the movie’s characters and their actions and words to illustrate methods of leadership. “Paxton couldn’t believe they watched a movie like that in college,” says a neighbor. “He thought college must be cool.”

Meanwhile, Piper continued to argue with Fred via e-mail, demanding he pay to send the children to her for visitation.

She claimed the judge had ordered him to do so, which was blatantly untrue. At times it seemed that she tried to bully him into doing what she wanted. This time Fred stood fi rm, refusing, and wrote her, “Your continued delusional asser-tions and fabrications trouble me greatly.” The tenor of their correspondence became even more heated, with Piper claiming Fred had forced her into bankruptcy. He labeled 128 / Kathryn Casey

her claims were “pure lies.” He also wrote that he knew she’d hit Callie and given her “dubious” prescription medicines during the children’s last visit to Houston.

“Control your anger and emotions,” he wrote. Then he turned to another matter. Piper had paid no child support since the court order had come down: “And please forward the $8,012.16 you owe me in child support.”

Scraping up the money somewhere, Piper eventually sent the children airline tickets, at a cost of $879. When they visited, she and Jerry Walters took them on day trips to Galveston and Austin, where they swam in the city’s favorite swimming hole, the chilly waters of Barton Springs. “We had a blast,” he’d say later. “They were great kids, and Piper was absolutely engrossed with them.”

Fred, however, continued to be angry. He called one day and Tina answered, telling him that Piper and the children were with Walters. “I’m unsure of the identity of ‘Jerry,’ and why I should expect the children to be with him,” Fred e-mailed Piper, obviously peeved. “Is he another of your boyfriends or another of your lawyers?”

Yet, all too soon the children were on a plane, headed home to Virginia, and Piper was left in Houston, with more dark clouds gathering around her. It had been less than a year since she’d arrived in Houston, and her professional life was again falling apart.

Despite not collecting rent since a few months after she’d moved into the office, McVey had allowed Piper to stay.

Then something odd happened: McVey began hearing that cases he referred to her, for which he was supposed to receive a percentage of her fees, had settled and she hadn’t paid him.

As if that weren’t enough, one day a client called about a drunk-driving trial for the following morning. McVey quickly realized that Piper had taken a hefty deposit from the man, DIE, MY LOVE / 129

saying McVey would represent him, and then kept the money and told McVey nothing about the case.

“She had to go,” he says.

Without explanation, McVey told Piper she had thirty days to move out of his offices. “She didn’t even ask why,”

he says. “She knew what she’d done.”

During her time there, Piper had put a sign in the front yard, one with both their names in raised letters. After she moved out, McVey blotted out her name with a thick coat of silver paint. Still, the legacy of her time with him continued, when a month or so after Piper moved out, a middle-aged couple came to McVey’s looking for the lady lawyer who’d taken their money to represent them in a no-fault divorce.

Wanting nothing more to do with Piper’s problems, McVey gave the couple directions to her house, where she’d set up a small office, just blocks away. They left, and he thought little more of it, until Piper burst through his office door, furious.

The couple, she said, had become infuriated when she admitted she’d never filed any of the paperwork. They were so angry, a shouting match erupted in the front yard, and someone had called the police to report a disturbance.

“Don’t ever tell anyone where I live again,” Piper ordered.

McVey agreed not to, but he was surprised. In his experience, attorneys usually wanted clients to fi nd them.

About that time in Virginia, the judge held a hearing on Piper’s back child support. She owed nearly $10,000, and the judge ordered her to begin paying an additional $200

each month to catch up. Judge Hammond also ordered her to either return Fred’s mother’s jewelry or pay him $4,000.

When Bischoff’s report on distributing the marital assets was released, the news, again, wasn’t good for Piper. Rather than giving her half, Bischoff suggested the court award 130 / Kathryn Casey

Piper her own retirement funds, $7,858, and $67,487 from Fred’s. It was just over twenty percent of the more than $300,000 in his 401(k)s. It must have been a particularly bitter blow to Piper, especially since Fred had offered her a more lucrative settlement a year before and she’d turned it down.

Still, her finances

were looking up when, just before

Christmas 2003, the court sent her the first check from Fred’s 401(k): $32,212.29 from his account at the University of Richmond. Another check for more than $40,000 arrived just after the first of the year. With money to spend, Piper rented a one- story, white brick ranch house with a large backyard filled with trees in Kingwood, half an hour north of Houston. Her two cats had a deck to sun on, and inside she had a greenhouse and an aquarium filled with tree frogs. She decorated it with her antique writing desk and an armoire she bought along the side of the road. In the driveway, she parked her latest purchase, a new black Jeep Liberty.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the money went quickly, and by February, Fred was again threatening to take Piper back to court if she didn’t pay him the child support due that month.

In response, she sent nearly $2,500, which brought her up to date, along with a letter in which she claimed she was “un-employable even as a teacher” due to the divorce and not having custody of her own children. She then told him she expected him to use the child support money she’d sent to buy the children tickets to visit her over spring vacation.

When Fred got the letter, he e-mailed her back: “It is amazing that you could send this to me as child support and then turn around and ask me to send it back to you to pay for visitation travel expenses!!!” He forwarded Piper’s e-mail to Shilling with a note: “I can’t quite believe Piper! She seems delusional and/or is playing games.”

Yet, no matter what happened between them, Fred didn’t stand in Piper’s way when she wanted to see the children, as DIE, MY LOVE / 131

on Mother’s Day when she flew into Richmond for the weekend and then wanted to extend the visit by a few days. Fred agreed, making up a list of the children’s schedule for that weekend for her, from scouts to soccer. Despite the list, Fred later complained that the children never made it to their events. More than the other children, Callie seemed disturbed by being with her mother. This time when Piper briefly moved back into her life, Callie’s Brownie leader and the school nurse both called Fred, saying his youngest was crying inconsolably.

That spring, Margaret Thatcher came to the Jepson School to lecture, and despite the continued battle with Piper, Fred’s life and those of his children appeared to turn a corner.

Throughout the long divorce battle, Ciulla watched the way Fred had changed, becoming more thoughtful and in tune with his students. By that spring she was noticing that he finally appeared more at ease with the direction his life was taking. In the neighborhood, other parents noted how the Jablin children, too, appeared calmer and more at ease.

“With Piper in Texas, it was like they were emerging from a long dark night,” says the mother of one of Paxton’s friends.

“You’d see them in the yard with Fred, having fun and laughing. We thought that they might survive without too much damage.”

Inside the house on Hearthglow, Fred covered the dining room table with boxes filled with family photos of Piper, himself, and all three of the children. On weekends, he sometimes sorted through them, or ganizing, as if trying to put in order the last twenty years of his life.

That March, 2004, Fred was invited to Rutgers University to give a speech. Instead of flying to the New Jersey campus the night before and being wined and dined as guest lectur-ers often do, he flew in the morning of the speech and returned the same eve

ning, not wanting to leave the kids

132 / Kathryn Casey

overnight. On the podium that day, he talked of his latest research. It would seem fitting to those who knew him. After all he’d been through the previous three years, worrying about what might happen to him and to the children, Fred had decided to investigate the concept of courage. Why?

“Because it’s an essential quality of an effective leader,” he told the group gathered to listen. He talked of Germans who helped the Jews during World War II, and common citizens who changed their lives to help their communities. From the Latin, he explained,
courage
came from
cor,
the heart. One of the scholars he quoted was the philosopher Paul Tillich, from his book
The Courage to Be
.

“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restless-ness,” Tillich had written.

Meanwhile, in Houston, Piper’s romance with Jerry Walters had flourished for more than a year. Off and on, there was even talk of love and marriage, but the passion had cooled by the spring of 2004, and they were dating others.

Later, Walters would consider why. Tugging on the seam of his neatly pressed blue jeans, he’d recount how Piper loved children and animals, “anything that breathed.” But at the same time, he felt she never considered his needs.

“Piper wanted everything to be about Piper,” he says.

By then, like Tina, Piper had turned to the Internet to meet men, specifically the dating site Match.com, where she hooked up with Dean Lowry, who worked in the oil business. The first night they talked on the telephone, the call lasted four hours, but instead of becoming lovers, they became friends. They went dancing, something Piper loved, and Dean had a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. When they went out riding, Piper held onto him as they rode down country roads cut through the woods north of Houston.

Once, when he came to pick her up, she was outside in her backyard, covered in mud, planting trees.

Dean listened to Piper’s woes about the divorce, her con-DIE, MY LOVE / 133

viction that she’d been misused and cheated of the children.

Each day, she called her children, sometimes three and four times. To Dean, it was clear that more than anything Piper wanted to have them with her. When they came to visit, Piper had no time for him or anyone else.

Not long after they met, Lowry introduced Piper to Charles Tooke III, who worked as an oil landman, a freelancer who researched local, county, and federal rec ords going back decades to document oil, mineral, surface, and royalty rights, helping oil companies determine who to pay for the crude they pumped. “I’d trained others over the years,” says Tooke.