Online Killers (9 page)

Lieutenant Jack put Patterson and his partner, Chris Frosch, in charge of the investigation, and Frosch sped off to the hospital to interview Darlie Routier at the first opportunity. He needed to get as much detailed information as he could about what had happened to cause such blood-letting and havoc.

In a written statement given to the police a few days later, Darlie, then 26, told the following story.

She was awakened by Damon’s cries of “Mommy! Mommy!” In the dark, she said, she didn’t even notice she had been stabbed several times and that her carotid artery had almost been severed. She did, however, see a man moving through the kitchen, and she followed him as he went toward the garage. When she got to the utility room, she saw a knife and picked it up. Only then, she said, did she return to find Devon and Damon and realize that she had been stabbed too. Darin, who was sleeping upstairs with their infant son Drake, came downstairs after hearing his wife’s screams and began administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation to Devon. By then the assailant had disappeared.

A few days later, Darlie Routier would significantly change this account.

Blonde, hazel-eyed Darlie was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on January 4, 1970. As a teenager she was attractive to boys, among them Darin Routier. Darin worked in a Western Sizzler restaurant alongside Darlie’s mother, who found him a bright, talkative, good-looking boy with ambitious plans for his future. He would be, she figured, a good catch for her oldest daughter. Playing matchmaker, she introduced the two kids, and by all reports it was love at first sight for both of them.

The dark-haired, tall boy with wavy hair flipped for the five-foot-three, heart-faced Lubbock, Texas, belle with the big eyes. And she, in turn, for him.

The couple dated in high school and continued to correspond after Darin, two years older than Darlie, went away to a technical college in Dallas. At Darin’s going-away party, however, Darlie showed a possessive and cunning nature that had lain hidden beneath her surface sweetness. She became annoyed that she wasn’t getting enough attention, so she left the party. Then she came back frantic, claiming that someone had tried to rape her.

“That ruse gave her just the attention that she craved,” said a friend, and this incident was a portent of things to come.

After graduating from high school, Darlie joined Darin in Dallas, where he had been hired as a technician at a computer chip company. Darlie landed a job with the same firm and they lived together while saving their money until, in August 1988, they married. The couple honeymooned first-class in Jamaica.

On returning to Texas, the newlyweds first moved into an apartment in Garland, close to where Darin worked learning the booming computer chip industry. Within a year, they relocated to a home in conservative Rowlett, a small town as neat as
a pin. Here Darin started a home-based company named Testnec which tested circuit boards for computers.

Their first child was born in 1989—a healthy boy named Devon Rush—to be followed by another son in 1991—Damon Christian. With two children and a fast-growing business, the Routiers found it necessary to rent space in an office building. Their life seemed to be fulfilling the American Dream.

By 1992, their company had earned them a small fortune. The up-and-coming couple yearned to enjoy the prestige they felt was due to them and had a house built in Dalrock Heights Addition, an affluent suburb of Rowlett, some eight miles northeast of Dallas and adjacent to shimmering Lake Ray Hubbard. This was a model community of upper-class business people, crime-free streets and happy families who drove Subaru pickups in which they would convey their kids half a block to school.

The $130,000 two-story home of neo-Georgian design was a miniature mansion replete with classic porch, colonial shutters and a working fountain on the front lawn. Complementing their new life, the family boasted a Jaguar that sat gleaming on a circular driveway.

By all accounts, Darlie was happy. She was a very good mother, doting on her two children, living to celebrate the good times with them. At Christmas, their house was the most illuminated in the area. At Halloween, their windows displayed more goblins than any other. At Thanksgiving, it was said, the Routiers’ turkey was the largest and tastiest. On the children’s birthdays, Darlie threw gorgeous parties inviting classmates for an afternoon of frolics in their spacious entertainment center.

There was never any suggestion that Mrs. Routier did not love her children, and, for his part, Darin wore shirts with the
sleeves rolled up to show his muscles, grew his hair long at the back, and sported a diamond watch and several gold-nugget-and-diamond rings. He doted on his kids, too.

But there was another side to Darlie, claim some who knew her—a side that loved to show off to hide low self-esteem. She reveled in materialism and creating an impression, often to the point of the bizarre.

She had 36-DDD breast implants that she further accentuated by wearing tight-fitting tops, she made regular visits to the tanning salon and wore diamond rings on every finger, she bought a toy Pomeranian with white hair matching her own. When she bought clothes, they were revealing outfits she wore for a night’s dancing just to grab the attention of onlookers, and her wardrobe bills skyrocketed.

Darlie’s detractors—there are always plenty of those with jealousies and axes to grind—say that her need to be the flashiest, gaudiest woman around eventually overcame everything else in her life—including her children. Neighbors complained that Damon and Devon, not far past the toddler stage, were left unsupervised. And when Darlie did attend to them, she often seemed frustrated at having to take the time to do so. Her patience with them, it was said, had waned.

The roots of domestic problems surfaced when guests at a Christmas party silently watched as Darlie and Darin argued violently when she danced too many times with another man, fueling rumors of extramarital dating by both partners. But the couple continued to play the surface charade, buying, buying and buying.

Then they splashed out on a 27-foot cabin cruiser and a space for it at the exclusive Lake Ray Hubbard Marina.

In 1995, research shows, Darin’s company brought in about half a million dollars in gross revenues, from which he paid himself a salary of $125,000. “At the time, we were in the top two percent of the tax bracket for our age,” he boasted. And they spent every cent they made, with almost $12,000 worth of new equipment being purchased for the flourishing business. However, the flip side of the coin is that the Routiers’ tax return for that year indicated a gross income of $264,000, and with a profit margin of 40 percent, the couple netted a little over $100,000.

But, if the financial problems were causing stress in their marriage, no one in the neighborhood saw it. Their neighbors thought they were a hoot, Rowlett’s version of the Clampetts from
The Beverly Hillbillies
. Then Darin got behind on the bills; he was at least a month late on the mortgage and owed $10,000 in back taxes to the IRS and $12,000 on credit cards.

With his finances in serious trouble, Darin decided to start a second business, which he called Champagne Wishes. He would take people around the lake on his boat at sunset while they sipped Champagne and, if they wished, availed themselves of the vessel’s sleeping quarters.

However, Darin’s difficulties didn’t seem to concern Darlie: her shopping didn’t slow down and she made plans to take a trip that summer to Cancún, Mexico, with some girlfriends.

Nevertheless, even if they were a little flashy, the Routiers were not disliked. One neighbor called them “the Ozzie and Harriet of the nineties.” Darlie was known as a cookie-baking housewife who always let the local kids hang out at her home, which they called “the Nintendo House” because of the elaborate game room that Darin had designed. She cooked for neighbors going through hard times and generously made a mortgage payment for a neighbor with cancer.

Friends who were aware of the Routiers’ problems were happy when Darlie became pregnant early in 1995. They counted on the new baby as the catalyst to renew the couple’s love for each other. But, after Drake was born in October that year, Darlie suffered postpartum depression. Mood swings brought on sudden tempers and dark rages. She piled on weight.

Not helping matters was the state of the couple’s finances, which, despite good business profits from Testnec, did not meet the exorbitant lifestyle they preferred to live and had grown used to.

Suddenly ends did not meet.

Darlie, unable to shed the weight she had acquired since her pregnancy, grew increasingly antagonistic. She took diet pills that didn’t work—a fact that Darin would remind her of when the couple battled, knowing it was her tender spot.

Darlie sporadically kept a diary. There were times she would attend to it daily, followed by long absences. On Friday, May 3, 1996, contemplating suicide, she wrote, “Devon, Damon and Drake, I hope you will forgive me for what I am about to do. My life has been such a hard fight for a long time, and I just can’t find the strength to keep fighting any more. I love you three more than anything else in this world and I want all three of you to be healthy and happy and I don’t want you to see a miserable person every time you look at me…”

On that day, she considered taking some sleeping pills to kill herself. But she never swallowed them and didn’t finish her diary entry either. After talking with her on the phone, Darin became worried and drove home to comfort her. She told him she was ashamed of what she had done and would never think about taking her life again. Darlie said her “blah feeling,” as she put it, was because she hadn’t had a period in more than a year.
When it arrived a few days after her suicidal thoughts, she said, her spirits soared. In fact, people who saw her in the weeks that followed say she did not seem particularly despondent.

Her old friend Barbara Jovell did tell Darlie that she should get some counseling or perhaps enter a treatment center, as she herself had done when she once felt suicidal, but Jovell didn’t sense that Darlie was desperate or self-destructive.

In late May, Darlie and Darin took the boys to Scarborough Faire, a festival featuring characters dressed in medieval costumes. Darlie, flamboyant as always, wore a silky belly-dancing outfit. Nevertheless, any cost-cutting measures were still ignored, and spending sprees accelerated, so their financial troubles deepened. Testnec was hemorrhaging money and Darin was unable to pay himself the salary he required, nor pay Darlie anything at all for doing the books, which she had let go in her depression.

Creditors were now circling like vultures and demanded payment of late bills. Crunch time came on June 1, 1996, when the Routiers’ bank flatly denied them a much-needed loan of $5,000. The ship was sinking; the refusal of a financial lifeboat was the beginning of the end.

Later, at Darlie’s trial, Okie Williams of Bank One said the loan application by Darin was initially denied on June 1. He said the request was rejected a second time on June 3 “because of excessive obligations in relation to income, and related reasons.”

On Wednesday, June 5, the boys played in the hot tub, and that evening Damon and Devon huddled under blankets in front of a television Darin had just installed in the living room. Darlie and Darin would later say they stayed up talking past midnight, then kissed each other goodnight. Darin went upstairs to the master bedroom, where seven-month-old Drake was asleep in
his crib, while Darlie curled up on the couch downstairs next to the two older boys. She had been sleeping on the couch that week, she said, because she wanted to watch over Damon and Devon, who had been spending the night downstairs since school had finished, and because she was a light sleeper and would sometimes be awakened by Drake turning over in his bed.

A few hours later, the 911 dispatcher in Rowlett received a frantic call. “Somebody came in here,” Darlie screamed down the phone. “They just stabbed me and my children!”

 

Having examined from a distance the larger, although incomplete, picture, we can now move in closer and start to study several of its components. First, the fingerprints, which, according to the pro-Darlie camp and her legal team, are an integral part of proving her innocence. For among the few flyspecking issues that her supporters have seized on is the fingerprint evidence—or, to be correct, the lack of fingerprint evidence—which they believe may prove her innocence.

Darlie had told the police dispatcher that a man wielding a knife had attacked her and her sons. She said the assailant had dropped the knife when he fled the house and that she picked it up. The dispatcher told her not to touch anything, to which Darlie responded with a calculated comment, totally out of sync with the rest of the call: “God… I bet if we could have gotten the prints maybe… maybe…”

This being the case, there would have been no fingerprints on the knife other than those of Darlie Routier, who obviously wanted it on record that she had picked up the murder weapon—thus any prints found on it she had “inadvertently” placed there, conveniently erasing the alleged attacker′s at the same time.

Crime-scene technicians had discovered a hazy fingerprint on a coffee table in the recreation room. The table was very close to where Damon had been stabbed. At the trial, prosecution experts argued that it was a child’s print, while the defense team claimed it was an adult’s.

By a process of elimination, it was determined that the print apparently had not been left by Darlie, Darin or any of the investigators or emergency personnel who attended the scene of the murders. The police did not fingerprint the dead children at the time, and since the children were soon buried their prints could not be compared with the print on the coffee table.

Devon and Damon’s bodies were exhumed several years ago, and a post-mortem photograph was taken of the print from Devon’s right thumb. Family members also found a set of Damon’s fingerprints which had been taken as part of a school safety program.