04.Die.My.Love.2007 (46 page)

Author’s Note

Two weeks after the sentencing, I drove to the Henrico County Jail East, an hour outside Richmond, to interview Piper Rountree. I was led through a maze of doors and thick interior windows, into a sunless, fl uorescent-lit

room. After the heavy clank of doors locking behind me, Piper arrived, so diminutive in her denim prison garb that she resembled an adolescent child. Her hair was perfectly combed and fell thick about her face, her nails carefully manicured, filed into perfect half-moons. We shook hands, and she sat across a narrow table from me, while a uniformed guard leaned against a wall five feet behind her, watching.

“No, I didn’t kill Fred,” Piper said, her voice high and strained.

When I asked her who might have, her eyes fl ashed and she became animated. As in the trial, she held her hands in front of her as she talked, palms clasped, as if praying. She told an elaborate theory that day. She said that Fred was an evil man, one with many enemies. “Anyone could have murdered him,” she said. Then she repeated many of the claims she’d espoused to Coby Kelley in the week following the murder: “Someone Fred was dating, who he treated like he’d treated me, abusing me, could have done it. Maybe Michael Jablin had it done to get Fred’s money. Or it could have been someone at work.”

In Piper’s twisted version, Fred Jablin wasn’t simply a 346 / Author’s Note

professor at the University of Richmond, but an infl uential man with his hand on the pen that wrote the checks. He had, she said, access to all the university’s money, the more than a billion-dollar trust. When I remarked that this seemed more than unlikely, that such funds are typically administered by trustees and university presidents, not professors, she called me “naïve,” describing Fred as all-powerful, an expert in the power of persuasion. “He specialized in advising people in how they could control others through communication,” she said, her brown eyes narrowing.

She went on to speculate that someone at the university could have framed her, by hacking into the computers of large corporations, including Southwest Airlines and Wells Fargo Bank, to forge rec ords and make it appear that she’d flown to Richmond the weekend of the murder. Why? It could have been over money, she charged, or because Fred was having an affair with a UR higher- up, perhaps not a woman but a man. “It was information that would have shaken the university,” she said, her voice rising. “That’s why they had him killed, to shut him up and keep the truth from coming out.”

She couldn’t explain all the witnesses who’d seen her in Richmond that weekend, and when I asked for evidence, anything at all to back up her claims, Piper simply smiled then shrugged, offering nothing.

In truth, at UR many still grieved for Fred Jablin. The school had set up a scholarship fund for the children, a section of the faculty lounge in Fred’s memory as a library that would house his work, and, something many believed he would have been particularly proud of, an award named after him for outstanding Ph.D. candidates. “We’d like him to be remembered at the university,” said Dean Ruscio. “He was important to the university, and we will continue to miss him.”

That afternoon, Piper and I talked about many things, from her childhood and family to her years with Fred and Author’s Note / 347

her love of her children. We talked about angels, and I asked her about the dark figure on her business card, the one that looked more like a demon. “I painted that myself,” she said, smiling. “Angels have always been special to me.”

Under Virginia guidelines, the first time Piper would become eligible for parole was in the year 2020, when she turned sixty. When the subject came up, she said earnestly, as if it were the most foreign of possibilities: “I don’t understand how they can do that to my children. They need me.”

When I asked about Tina, Piper’s expression softened.

“Could Tina have killed Fred?” I asked. Of course, there’d been ample testimony that Tina had been more than a thousand miles away, in Houston, the morning of the murder.

Still, Piper wasn’t ready to abandon her ruse. She smiled.

“Maybe,” she said. “I really can’t say. All I know is that I didn’t.”

I found myself staring at Piper, wondering how she could say she loved Tina and remain so eager to cast her as a suspect in a cold- blooded execution.

A month later I waited at the pool beside the Houstonian for Tina to arrive. As usual, she came late—two hours late.

When she walked through the

wrought-iron gate, many

looked up to see the chesty blonde dressed in a leopard swimsuit and matching pants, wearing a straw cowboy hat and thick red lipstick. She carried two large bags she plopped down onto the round patio table between us. “I brought my mail and my paperwork from the clinic,” she said. “I thought I’d sort it while we talk.”

With that, she turned to walk over to a nearby trash can, to throw out an empty water bottle. As she passed me, she sighed, saying, “You know, some mornings I wake up and I still can’t believe Piper did this.”

It sounded like an admission, a confirmation that she knew her sister was guilty, that Piper had been the one who pulled the trigger, gunning down Fred Jablin in his driveway. But 348 / Author’s Note

when Tina, who still had felony charges pending against her in Houston for tampering with evidence, returned to the table and I asked her, “What exactly do you mean?” she de-murred.

“Oh, Piper couldn’t have done it,” she said with a smile.

“Fred deserved it, but she wouldn’t have done it. My sister would never hurt anyone.”

We spent two hours together, baking under the scant shade of the umbrella, on a hot summer day. Tina was worried, nearly frantic about what lay ahead. “If I’m convicted, I’ll lose everything,” she said. “They’ll take away my license, and I’ll have to shut the clinic.

“Where will all my patients go?” she asked. “Who will care for them?”

As she’d once written a forty-two-page treatise on Fred Jablin, labeling it dangerous to allow him to be around children, on this afternoon Tina psychoanalyzed those who’d turned against her, her former lover Mac McClennahan and her once close friend Carol Freed. She said they lied. Why?

Cari out of some confusion, which she said arose from a troubled childhood. “Cari’s a mess,” she said. “I don’t know how she’ll survive without me. She counted on me for everything. A very sad case.”

When it came to Mac, she had another theory. Perhaps Mac killed Fred and framed Piper to get her out of the way, Tina conjectured. “Now he has Piper’s old job. That’s important to Mac.”

When I asked if she thought Mac—a man she’d only moments earlier described as nurturing and kind—would murder for a job, Tina just smiled. “I can’t tell you what anyone thinks is enough to kill for,” she said. Of course, there was a major problem with her theory: Police had found absolutely no evidence Mac was involved, and had, in fact, through records and witnesses, determined that at the time of the crime he was in the Texas Hill Country visiting his parents.

Author’s Note / 349

The entire time we talked, Tina sorted through the large black vinyl bag and the duffel bag she’d brought with her, organizing bills, tearing some up, filing the others into piles: bills to be paid, credit card offers, bills for the clinic, and bills for the house.

“Mac was really good at taking care of all this for me,”

she said wistfully. “He was organized.”

When I finally got up to leave, she rose to walk me into the hotel. While many nowadays fear identity theft and guard their information, Tina left the stacks of mail sitting open on the table next to the pool.

“You know, they don’t even have a law to charge me under in Virginia, that’s why they’re doing it in Texas,” she said as we neared the hotel elevator. Looking straight into my eyes, she then said something that for the second time that day could easily be interpreted as an admission that Piper murdered Fred, and this time something else, that Tina had, indeed, helped Piper cover it up.

“In Virginia, they understand that a family member is going to help in a situation like this,” Tina said. “They know that you can’t do anything less for someone you love.”

With that, we shook hands and I left.

On the drive home I considered the ties that bound these two sisters, recalling the words of one of Piper’s old school friends: “It was obvious that Tina was there for Piper, and Piper was there for Tina.” Unlike Piper’s love of Tina—one she was willing to sacrifice for her own ends—it appeared Tina’s commitment to her younger sister had never faded, so much so that she was willing to risk her career, even her personal freedom, to stand behind Piper.

The following months were busy, as the summer burned away while I worked on this book. For the most part, things slowly fell in place. But gradually something remarkable happened, as I received e-mails on my website from men across the country who said they were writing to Piper in prison.

350 / Author’s Note

Most had seen her on television, and something about her—

perhaps her stricken, waifish courtroom demeanor—touched them. The first, a Richmond actor, e-mailed that he felt drawn to Piper, that they wrote poetry back and forth, and that he was raising money for her appeal. Perhaps one day I could write the story of their love, he e-mailed, suggesting his relationship with Piper was evolving into more than friendship. It seemed even in jail, Piper’s allure hadn’t diminished.

On Friday, November 4, 2005, just days after the fi rst anni-versary of Fred Jablin’s murder, I saw Tina again, this time in a Houston courtroom. She was there to plead guilty in a plea bargain her high-profile attorney, Kent Schaeffer, one of the most sought after criminal attorneys in Houston, had negotiated with the assistant district attorney on the case, Kari Allen, who headed the prosecutors in the 388th District Court. As usual, Tina arrived late and in a fl ourish, wearing a tight blue plaid suit over a low-cut blouse, glasses dangling low on her nose. As she waited for the judge to arrive, she played with her cell phone, attempting to take photos of the room, as if for a scrapbook. She seemed oblivious to what was happening.

Just after eleven-thirty, she finally walked to the front of the courtroom and stood before the judge at the bench. The plea bargain was a good one for her. The charge was now attempted tampering with evidence. Schaeffer had negotiated it down to a misdemeanor. When the judge asked how she would plead, however, Tina still appeared uncertain. She looked at her attorney, who nodded. Only then did she whisper, “Guilty.” Her sentence: nine months of deferred adjudi-cation, a $300 fine, and eighty hours of community service.

If she remained out of trouble during that time, her record would be swept clean. She’d keep her license and the clinic.

Prosecutors, Allen said later, felt the sentence “fit the evidence.” Unsaid was that they had little against Tina except Author’s Note / 351

the word of Carol Freed, who could be considered an ac-complice and therefore potentially untrustworthy. But the bottom line was that Allen, like Owen Ashman in Virginia, doubted that Tina was involved in the actual murder. “We never had any evidence that tied Tina to the murder or the planning of the murder,” said Allen. There is no statute of limitations on murder, and if she found such evidence, Allen said they could file further charges. But the way she added that information gave me the impression she didn’t expect such evidence to emerge.

In the end, for all the speculation in Texas and Virginia about Tina Rountree’s involvement in the murder, it appeared that Piper had acted alone.

Before I left the courtroom that afternoon, one of Tina’s friends, Glenda King, a disheveled, gray-haired woman, a nurse, summed up much of what I’d heard during the year I’d investigated the case: “One thing about the Rountrees is that their children are more important to them than anything else in the world. I’ve never seen people who idolize their children the way Tina and the rest of the family does.

They’d do just about anything for the children.”

For the children. That phrase had been repeated so often by Piper that it had become the chorus in her tragic opera.

Months later, on the day before Valentine’s Day, February 13, 2006, nearly a year after the end of the trial, Piper was once again in a Henrico courtroom, this time with Elizabeth and Michael Jablin sitting at the opposite table. They were there to finish what Piper had begun the day she took aim at Fred and pulled the trigger. She’d thought that by killing him she could reclaim her children. What she’d actually done was made them orphans and given them away.

At the hearing called to sever her parental rights, Piper appeared relaxed, dressed in a white front-tie shirt and navy pants, her hair long and cut in bangs. From the stand, Michael Jablin testified about the children. Jocelyn, by then 352 / Author’s Note

sixteen and a high school junior, had two new cats and had begun planning her future, looking at colleges. Paxton, thirteen, and Callie, ten, were into soccer, and she was considering branching out into lacrosse. All the children were doing well in school, a portion of the credit due to the therapists who, Michael Jablin said, had “helped them so much.”

“It’s been a struggle to keep them moving on with their lives,” Donna Berkeley, the children’s court-appointed guardian, told the judge.

From jail, three to four times a week, Piper still wrote her children letters. Yet the children seemed to be separating from her. Since the trial, none had gone to see her or talked with her on the telephone. In the past year, Piper’s children had written only twice: on Mother’s Day and Christmas.

When the judge ruled, Piper was stripped of all parental rights, and Michael and Elizabeth Jablin offi cially became the children’s parents.

In northern Virginia, the Jablins had bought a larger house for their expanded family. Many in Richmond and at the University of Richmond believed Michael and Elizabeth would give the children the understanding and love they needed. But still, could Jocelyn, Paxton, and Callie ever forget that horrible morning, the dawn their mother gunned down their father while they slept? If not forget, could they ever accept it?