Deadly Divorces (18 page)

At last it seemed as if this acrimonious marriage
break-up
was once and for all about to be settled. Judge Weller for one was mighty relieved. Arbitrating in a divorce case was always thankless, but this one had been harder than most. Darren Mack clearly had a deep-rooted problem with
authority figures. He bridled visibly each time he was told to do something, and the looks he’d been shooting the judge… well, let’s just say they weren’t exactly full of professional admiration. The judge looked forward to ruling formally on the provisional settlement so that it could become the basis of the final divorce.

But over the next few weeks and months the
hard-fought
settlement began to crumble and corrupt under the acid onslaught of the Macks’ mutual bitterness. Particularly contentious was the question of the litigation suit brought against Charla by Darren’s mother. The terms of the settlement demanded not only that she should give up the idea of suing Charla over the missing jewellery, but also waive her right to sue her at any time in the future. Like her son, Joan Mack didn’t enjoy being told what to do and, like many Americans, she believed in life, liberty and the right to litigate at the drop of a hat. She did not take kindly to the law trying to shield her daughter-in-law.

Meanwhile, Darren’s already low opinion of the law hit rock bottom. He became convinced Judge Weller was heavily biased in favour of Charla. Why else was he trying to push through a settlement that was so blatantly unfair? Sure, Darren earned a lot of money, but by the time he’d paid Charla her $10,000 a month plus the mortgages on two homes and all household and childcare expenses, he was effectively well into the red. How on earth could that be justified? With each passing day, Darren grew more and more
angry about what he believed to be a glaring miscarriage of justice. Now, in addition to his money-grasping estranged wife, he had another focus for his anger: Judge Weller.

He began trawling the internet trying to find records of any transgressions in the judge’s past and he became convinced the judge was guilty of corruption, of passing rulings which favoured those who had contributed to his electoral campaign. Darren urged his friends and business acquaintances to join him to campaign against what he saw as the overt bias against fathers in the Nevada family courts. He started anonymous internet blogs in which he tried to ruin the judge’s personal reputation.

By the time the Macks next appeared in front of Judge Weller in May 2006, the agreed settlement – just like the passion the couple once shared – had been ripped to shreds. Darren Mack was no longer prepared to accept the terms that had been worked out in January. He wanted to see a different judge and thrash out a whole new settlement under the guidance of someone he could be confident wasn’t biased in his ex-wife’s favour. But Judge Weller had had enough. ‘I’m going to rule today,’ he told the warring couple, giving them one last chance to try to reach an amicable agreement before he decided it for them. ‘If we’re going to have settlement discussions, the time to have them is before a ruling because I fear that by ruling, all I’m going to do is ignite a confrontation,’ he warned them. ‘One side’s going to win, the other side is going to lose.’

It was a prophetic remark. Just three weeks later Charla Mack would suffer the greatest loss of all: the loss of her life.

The judge’s ruling that day was that the agreement worked out in January should more or less stand as it was. Darren Mack had to keep his mother from pursuing a lawsuit against Charla, and Charla in turn would have to drop any thoughts of legal action against her mother-
in-law
or the business. On the financial side Darren now had 48 hours to come up with $480,000 and would then be expected to pay another $500,000 over the next 5 years. Furthermore a date was set for another custody hearing, as Charla wasn’t happy with the arrangements regarding Erika.

Darren could hardly contain his anger as he listened to the judge’s ruling. In essence, the way he saw it, Charla had won. All she had had to do, it seemed to him, was flutter her thick black eyelashes and flick her heavy mane of hair and the judge acceded to all her demands. Meanwhile, he – a hardworking, devoted father – had his legitimate concerns dismissed as if he was nothing. If there was one thing he couldn’t stomach, it was being treated like a nobody. As he left the court, Darren threw the judge a look so murderous it seemed to poison the very air around it. Chuck Weller shivered. He was used to people being upset or disappointed at what he ruled, but he’d rarely come across someone so openly and aggressively hostile. At least that’s the last I’ll have to see of him for a while, he told himself, relieved.

How wrong he was.

If Darren Mack had been angry before the ruling, now his rage was out of control. His life had been whipped right out from under him, leaving him in total free-fall and there was nothing he could do about it. He felt completely impotent. Some guy who didn’t know the first thing about him or his marriage had said a few words. Suddenly he’d gone from being a wealthy, respected businessman and
full-time
, involved father to a debt-ridden schmuck who’d be working all his life to pay for an idle ex-wife, who was perfectly capable of earning her own living, and a daughter he was only allowed to see half the time. Well, Judge Weller had picked the wrong man to mess with.

Darren stepped up his efforts to discredit the judge, calling everyone he knew in an attempt to whip up media interest and portraying himself as yet another loving father sacrificed on the altar of family court pro-women bias.

Meanwhile, Judge Weller began to notice strange things happening around him. There were odd noises around his house that remained unexplained. Then, early one Saturday morning in June 2006, he woke to find a mass of bikers on his property after someone – paying cash – placed an ad for a motorbike auction in the local paper, including directions to the judge’s home and his phone number. Plus, a member of a fathers’ rights group contacted him privately to warn him that a certain individual was campaigning tirelessly to ruin his professional reputation.

But if the judge realised he’d made a powerful enemy, he wasn’t going to let it get to him. There’s an agreement among lawyers that they’d rather litigate in any type of case than an acrimonious divorce because it’s where emotions run highest and passions are most likely to spiral out of control with legal professionals trapped right in the middle. Catching the fall-out flak from an embattled couple was an unfortunate occupational hazard of any divorce lawyer. It came with the territory.

Darren Mack, however, didn’t consider himself to be just another statistic. He was the centre of his own, highly important world – a world Judge Weller and Charla seemed hell-bent on destroying. He just couldn’t get past the injustice of it all. This was America, for goodness sake! A man who worked hard all his life and did right by his kids ought to be lauded, not punished. Who did these people think they were?

On 7 June, Darren went to a local car-hire firm and rented a silver-coloured Ford Explorer. For a man who already possessed a Hummer and a Jeep Cherokee, it was an odd thing to do. But then again, Darren was always making trips here and there either on business or, more likely, pleasure. Maybe he wanted to save wear and tear on his vehicles or perhaps he just fancied a change. Who knew? Darren was very much his own boss.

On Sunday, 11 June 2006, Darren Mack phoned his old school-friend Dan Osborne, asking for a favour. The next
morning was hand-over day and Darren asked if Dan could be there when Charla dropped off Erika and if he would then drive the girl to his mother’s. Dan had known Darren for the best part of two decades and had roomed with him since his separation so he knew Erika well and treated the house as a home from home. He was also acutely aware of Darren’s marital situation. It’s a sad measure of the extreme emotions stirred up by divorce that a friend – who just two years before might have sat around a dinner table with a couple – would think nothing of being asked to prevent that same couple from doing one another physical or verbal harm now.

The following morning Dan Osborne turned up at his friend Darren’s home at around 9am, as arranged. It was another hot, humid June day in Reno and in the early morning haze the Sierra Nevada mountains flanking the city already seemed blurry. As usual, the road outside Darren’s house was deserted and the huge houses with their designer ‘gardens’ of perfectly kept plants growing out of grey stones and gravel seemed lifeless and rather flat, like cardboard cut-outs against the mountainous backdrop.

When Charla Mack’s Lexus SUV pulled up outside the house a short while later and Erika came flying out the car, Darren asked his friend Dan to take the 8-year-old upstairs to watch TV while he went to talk to Charla about something. Before he walked out, he grabbed a paper bag. According to the terms of the restraining order, Darren
shouldn’t have gone out of the house, nor should Charla have left her car. If either one of them had stuck within the law, how differently might things have turned out for the Mack family.

Upstairs in the Wilbur May Parkway condominium, Erika was engrossed in television, but Dan Osborne was starting to feel uneasy. Darren had been outside for around fifteen minutes or more. What did he have to say that was so urgent? Besides, Dan’s dog which he’d brought with him that morning was making a hell of a racket downstairs. Maybe it had got shut in somewhere, Dan guessed. He’d better go and find out what was going on. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ he called to Erika, who barely glanced up from her programme.

Dan was just starting down the plush carpeted stairs when the door that leads from inside the condominium into the garage burst open. The dog flew in, clearly agitated. The distressed animal appeared to be wet and its owner was horrified to realise that its face, throat and feet seemed to be covered with blood obviously not its own. Following close behind was Darren Mack. Dan Osborne will never forget the expression on his old high school friend’s face as he came in from the garage. Darren had a ‘weird look’, he would later tell investigators. It was as if he was scared of something, or had been scared by something. He also had a towel wound round one hand.

After Darren climbed wordlessly up the stairs and disappeared into his bedroom, Dan Osborne became, in his
own words, ‘freaked out’. Ushering Erika and the dog down the stairs and outside, he bundled them quickly into his car. His heart was thudding as he turned the ignition key trying to maintain his composure so as not to worry the little girl whose life, though she didn’t know it yet, would never be the same. Charla’s car was still in the driveway but there was no sign of the beautiful, vibrant actress. Dan had no idea what had just gone on but two things were very clear in his mind: he had to get Erika to her grandmother’s and something very wrong had happened in that house.

Dan was well into the 20-minute drive to Joan Mack’s when his mobile started to ring. ‘Hey Dan, it’s Darren. Why’d you leave so soon? How about going for a coffee with me?’ If Dan Osborne heard any strain in his friend’s voice he tried hard to convince himself of a reasonable explanation. Perhaps he’d cut himself while in the garage or maybe he’d spilled a tin of red paint. When Darren suggested they meet right away in a local Starbucks, Dan was relieved. How awful could things be if Darren was meeting up with him for a coffee? He must have been imagining things, he told himself.

Coffee was a fairly subdued affair but with the week stretching ahead in all its oppressive monotony Monday morning meet-ups can often be so. But, as Dan Osborne left Starbucks to continue on his way to Joan Mack’s house, he was once again assailed by the unshakeable feeling that
something was seriously awry with his good friend Darren. Delivering Erika to her grandmother’s house, he shared his concerns with Darren’s mum. The blood on the dog, the expression on Darren’s face, the towel around the hand, the fact that he’d changed his clothes before coming out for coffee – it just didn’t add up. Or rather it did, but not in any way either of them wanted to believe. Darren wouldn’t have done anything to Charla, they told themselves. Sure, things had got nasty between them but that was normal in any divorce. Darren was a great guy; he didn’t have it in him to hurt anybody.

But shortly after 11am Dan received a call from a friend that lent sickening weight to all his unthinkable suspicions. Chuck Weller, the judge Darren had been waging a public hate campaign against, had just been shot by an unknown sniper. At 11.11am, with a heavy heart Dan Osborne called the Emergency Services, asking them to investigate a possible incident on Wilbur May Parkway. When the police arrived 20 minutes later at Darren Mack’s house, they found it deserted. All the doors were locked and there was no sign of Charla’s Lexus, which Dan reported being parked on the driveway. The police had no search warrant so they couldn’t enter the property and all they could do was assume that at some point over the last couple of hours Charla Mack had got back into her car and driven away.

Besides, the city’s Emergency Services had a bigger story on their hands than a missing woman. The shooting of a
judge in government buildings in broad daylight was headline material.

Judge Chuck Weller had been standing at the window of his third-floor office in the County Courthouse just after eleven when there was a horrific cracking sound. The glass pane exploded into tiny fragments and the judge hit the floor as a bullet ploughed into his chest. One of the judge’s terrified staff was also hit by shrapnel fragments as she cowered on the ground although her wounds later turned out to be superficial. Still alive, the judge was rushed in agony to the nearest hospital but his immediate concern was for the safety of his wife, Roza. If the same person was responsible for the shooting as had placed the motorcycle auction ad the week before, they knew exactly where he lived. ‘Tell Roza to leave the house!’ gasped the 52-year-old judge.

Back at the courthouse experts were poring over the evidence. Signs were that this was a meticulously executed assassination attempt. The sniper appeared to have fired from a parking garage above a cinema complex that was some way from the courthouse yet retained a direct view of it. But who would have wanted Judge Chuck Weller dead? And who had the resources, the know-how and the sheer motivation to carry such a plan through?