Before He Wakes (17 page)

The period of remodeling was not the first time that Doris had taken note of Barbara’s expensive tastes. Just before Russ’s and Barbara’s wedding, the women at Barbara’s church had given a bridal shower for her. Barbara had offered Doris some towels that one church member had brought as a gift. They were cheap, Barbara had told her, and she wouldn’t think of using them.

The house was not all that Barbara and Russ had been spending on. She was now tooling about town in a new pale green Cadillac Seville, which was almost identical to the car Kay Pugh had been driving when she was murdered. Russ, who always had liked fine things and fancy cars (he had been driving a Corvette when he married Jo Lynn) and always managed to find a way to possess them, usually by taking extra jobs or bartering, was driving a 280Z.

Brenda Monroe and her children joined Barbara, Russ and the boys at Barbara’s parents’ cottage at the beach that summer and found Barbara acting the happiest she’d ever known her to be. Barbara, of course, had reason to be happy. The troubles brought by Larry’s death and the year of uncertainty that they had caused were now behind her. All the insurance companies had paid up. She had the big house and the fine car she had dreamed of having. Soon she would have her own beach cottage, too. And her new marriage was giving her new social standing as well as security.

Sex and security had been her main motivations for marrying Russ, and nine months after her wedding, she would acknowledge in a letter to her former in-laws informing them of her marriage that it had been one of convenience. Russ, she wrote, “provides for us very well and is a good father to the boys. We are very close friends, hoping that love will follow.”

Nobody who saw them together would have known that Barbara wasn’t in love with Russ, however. The two were openly affectionate. He always called her “Honey.” She called him “Baby.” They seemed well matched, enjoying the same things. They did everything together. Barbara seemed almost afraid to let Russ out of her sight. She attended all of his games and always hovered near him, especially when female students were about. At times she seemed almost desperate to please him. She took up jogging and weight lifting so that she could be with him when he worked out.

The marriage and the new exercise regimen had a transforming effect on Barbara. The hippiness that had long plagued her began to melt away. As her muscles toned, she got a tan and took on a lithe, healthy look. She cut her hair short and tinted it an even lighter shade of blond. She wore contact lenses instead of glasses. She became expert at makeup. She began dressing in ever more expensive clothes. The effect was remarkable. Longtime friends noted that Barbara never had looked better. Why, at times she was actually glamorous.

By their first anniversary, Russ’s and Barbara’s marriage seemed on a sound footing, even if others still had reservations about it that they didn’t make known.

On Mother’s Day 1980, Barbara sent Doris Stager a card in which she had written a personal message:

Every day, I thank God for you and Dad. Sometimes, I just can’t believe you’re for real because of the animosity I always had from my previous in-laws. You made me feel loved, wanted and important. Slowly, I’m getting to the point where I know I can come to you for anything because I know you care.

If Barbara’s sentiments for her in-laws were genuine—and Doris wondered if they were—the Stagers were more cautious in their feelings for her. They noticed that Barbara only called when she wanted something. When Russ asked his parents to join them in activities, Barbara sometimes seemed resentful, yet she always wanted her family around. Doris and Al wanted to be close to Barbara for Russ’s sake, but they sensed that she didn’t really want to be close to them. Barbara and Russ came to their house often for Sunday dinners after church, but Barbara never wanted to stay long and would soon be making excuses to leave. When Doris and Al were invited to their son’s house, Barbara’s family, or others, were apt to be there as well. While the Stagers tried to be congenial with the Terrys, they would never develop a comfortable relationship with them. They found it difficult to talk with James and wondered if he ever got a word in at home. Marva, they thought, was one of those people who knew everything and always had to have the final word. And mother and daughter were exactly alike. “Barbara had something to say about everything, unless she knew she was going to be cornered,” Doris later would say. But in her mother’s presence Barbara usually yielded. “Barbara folded her wings when Marva spoke,” Doris recalled. Both usually had something bad to say about almost everybody, Doris noted, and she couldn’t help but wonder what they said about her and Al to others. They had the feeling that both Marva and Barbara looked down their noses at them—“Mrs. Bigshot,” Doris sometimes referred to Marva later—but they kept their feelings to themselves.

“She was Russ’s wife,” Doris later recalled. “We would go along with what we had to, to keep peace in the family.”

She would hold her tongue as well when she inadvertently stumbled across another of Barbara’s lies.

In the spring of 1980 Barbara was working at PATCO, a wholesale distributor of shipping supplies. She had taken a job as a part-time secretary the previous fall, working four or five hours a day so that she could be finished by the time the boys got home from school.

One evening a neighbor who also worked at PATCO called Doris and asked, “How’s Jason?”

“He’s fine,” Doris said, wondering why she would ask such a question. The neighbor seemed a little taken aback. She had asked, she explained, because Barbara had called saying she couldn’t come to work that day because Jason was in the hospital. Doris had just talked with Jason and knew that this was not so, a pointless lie. It disturbed her so much that she called Barbara’s mother to tell her about it. Marva seemed unconcerned that Barbara would do such a thing. “She just sloughed it off,” Doris later recalled. Not wanting it to seem that she was trying to interfere in his marriage, Doris decided that she shouldn’t bring this up with Russ.

Russ and Barbara had begun attending Grey Stone Baptist Church regularly, and they were becoming one of the most popular couples in the church, which boasted a membership of more than two thousand. Much of their popularity was due to Russ’s long-term membership and his outgoing, fun-loving, boyish nature, but the members embraced Barbara as well, despite her reserved demeanor.

That summer, Russ and Barbara grew especially close to another couple at the church, Harry Welch and his new wife, Terri. Harry and Russ had met when both were playing for the church softball team and they had been friends for a couple of years. Harry was general manager of WTIK, a 5,000-watt country music and sports radio station in Durham. He was as outgoing and friendly as Russ and just as athletic.

Harry also had an odd ambition: He wanted to break the world’s record for one-arm pushups. In July 1980, with Russ serving as verifier, he did it—3,821 pushups. Harry and Russ appeared in a news photo that was sent to newspapers around the country, and Harry made it into the
Guinness Book of World Records
.

That month, too, Russ officially became a father. At the end of October, he had filed legal papers to adopt the boys. On July 16, the adoption was granted, and Bryan and Jason Ford became Bryan and Jason Stager. Later, Barbara would apply for a new birth certificate for Jason, removing Larry’s name as father and replacing it with Russ’s.

No one could doubt Russ’s feelings for his new sons. He was devoted to them and loved spending time with them. He was always teasing or tussling with them, or instructing them in sports. Discipline was left to Barbara, allowing Russ to be a pal to his stepsons, and all who saw them together could tell that the boys adored him. All onlookers also were impressed by how well behaved and well mannered the boys were. There was a good reason for this. “Barbara controlled Bryan mentally,” Doris recalled. “He did exactly what she wanted. You can’t imagine the control she had over Bryan.” Friends noticed that a simple inflection in Barbara’s voice would cause Bryan to alter his behavior. Jason, on the other hand, was her pet, and if Bryan corrected his younger brother in his mother’s presence, Doris later recalled, “she would rake him over the coals.” Yet Doris knew that Barbara often left the boys alone, with Bryan expected to look after Jason. She learned that when Bryan called one day and said, “Meemaw, Jason won’t mind.” Doris thought that the boys were too young to be left alone, but she wasn’t certain what to do about it.

Russ and Barbara joined a couples Bible class to which Harry and Terri Welch belonged, and they often went out after church for ice cream or pizza. They soon were joined by Bill Gordon, a dentist, and his wife, Carol, who was the daughter of Malbert Smith and had known Russ and his family for much of her life. The three couples grew close and visited frequently at one another’s houses. They went to Duke University sporting events together, spent weekends at the beach, made other trips together. The three men became golfing companions.

As the friendship between the three couples grew, the Welches and Gordons became well aware of Barbara’s need to impress, to gain approval and acceptance through her possessions. Now she had more people than ever to impress, and she bought accordingly.

The Welches and Gordons were amazed at the money that Russ and Barbara spent. Barbara traded her Cadillac, which had a leaky sunroof, for a new steel blue Mercedes. Russ bought a new four-wheel-drive Jeep, then a new Honda motorcycle and a Galaxy speedboat to use for waterskiing when he and Barbara and the boys went to Lake Kerr or Lake Gaston with his parents, as Russ and his family had done for years.

“Seemed like they were always doing something new,” Terri Welch recalled years later.

Barbara bought new clothes constantly, shopping only at the most expensive stores. On trips with the Welches and Gordons, she always sought out trendy boutiques.

“She would pick something out and say, ‘Gee, this is two hundred dollars. What do y’all think?’ ” Terri said. “We’d say, ‘Well, looks good. If you can afford it, get it.’ She always got it.” Sometimes Barbara would pull a fat roll of bills from her purse to pay for her purchases, but more often she used credit cards.

The Welches and Gordons knew that as an assistant high school coach, Russ didn’t make a big salary. And Barbara probably wasn’t making more than minimum wage as a part-time secretary. Yet they kept spending as if they had been born to wealth. Russ surely had no family money, and neither, they thought, did Barbara. The only way that the Welches and Gordons could explain all the extravagant spending was that Barbara must have gotten a lot of insurance money from her first husband’s death.

That was what Joe and Alissa Sommers also figured. Joe, too, was a coach at Durham High, and he and Russ had become close friends. When Russ had started dating Barbara, the two couples began doing things together. They went to ball games, took occasional trips and frequently got together at one another’s houses for dinner or to watch Braves games on TV. Barbara told them that her first husband had died from an accidental gunshot wound, although she offered no details, and Joe and Alissa decided that had to be the source of all the money that Russ and Barbara were spending. Barbara was generous, frequently bringing clothes or toys as gifts for the Sommers’ young daughter. But as Russ’s and Barbara’s spending increased, Joe and Alissa began referring to them as “our rich friends.” By 1981, the Sommers decided that the Stagers’ lifestyle had grown so extravagant that they no longer could afford to keep up with it, and they began spending more time with other friends.

Barbara left her part-time job at PATCO at the end of January 1981. Her coworkers had wondered what a woman who drove a Cadillac, then a Mercedes, was doing in a low-paying part-time job, and she had told them that she only worked to have something to do. Her first husband, who traveled in his work, had died in an accident, she explained, and she had received a lot of insurance money. Her coworkers assumed that her husband had died in a traffic wreck.

Barbara’s supervisors at PATCO considered her a good employee, genial and quick to learn, but prone to skip work without adequate excuses and “to stretch the truth.” She usually called in to say that she had a problem of one sort or another, often involving her children, that kept her from coming in, they would later recall. Not long before she quit, she said that she had to miss work because her husband was having surgery on his back that day. One of her supervisors saw her and Russ at the mall later that day, however, and noted that Russ was walking with a quick step for one who supposedly had been under a surgeon’s knife only hours earlier.

In February, Barbara applied for another part-time secretarial job at Moore Business Forms. She began in March, working from eight to one. The company employed only one other secretary, and Barbara let her know that she didn’t have to work. This woman would recall later that Barbara talked a lot about money. She said that she had gotten a lot of money from her first husband’s death and that she got a very low interest rate on her home loan because she had so much money in her savings account at the savings and loan.

Barbara also talked frequently about religion and sometimes brought a Bible to work. She complained to her deskmate that some of the company’s salesmen spoke suggestively to her.

The salesmen had a different version. As the weather grew warm, they said, Barbara began wearing low-cut sundresses to work, and it was quickly apparent that she never wore a bra with them. She would act teasingly with the salesmen, often saying suggestive things herself, then go back and complain to the other secretary when one of them responded.