Love Me To Death (7 page)
Authors: Steve Jackson
Guiding her across the room, Neal brought her to a point where he told her to turn around and sit down. The seat was farther down than she had figured and she quickly realized that she was sitting on a mattress. He told her to lie back. She didn’t want to, but now she was becoming afraid. She did as told but began to cry when he grabbed her wrists and then her ankles and tied each at a corner of the bed. She was spread-eagled, blindfolded, and badly frightened.
Neal seemed to have changed. Gone was the warm, friendly guy who was going to get her a great job and buy her roommate a new home. He told her to shut up and quit crying. “You haven’t seen me get cold and mean,” he warned, “and you don’t want to.”
She felt him fumbling at the buttons of her blouse until he had it open. There was a shock when she felt cold steel against her chest as he slipped a knife beneath the front of her bra and cut it off with a single stroke. He used the knife to slice her pants off her body and then her underwear.
“Do you want to die?” he asked her, pulling off the duct tape.
“No,” she cried from fear.
“Then do as you’re told,” he said. “Just stay calm and stop crying.”
Scott did her best to control her tears. She thought that she was about to be raped, but Neal suddenly stopped what he was doing and asked her a question. “Have you ever seen a human skull?” he asked.
“No,” she said, not wanting to, either. She heard him get up and cross the room. A minute later he was back, removing her blindfold. He clutched something in a piece of paper. Delicately, as though it might break, he pulled an object from the paper. It was a bloody piece of bone with hair still attached. “You see that?” he asked, and placed it on her bare belly.
Neal left the piece of skull on her stomach for a minute, watching her reaction, before picking it up and tossing it over onto a large object wrapped in black plastic that she could see to her left. He’d been crouching at her side, but now he stood and walked past a chair at the end of the mattress and over to the fireplace. By lifting her head, she could see that he was standing by another large object that was covered with a blanket. He reached beneath the blanket, and to her horror, he lifted a woman’s leg up. He let it fall back to the floor with a thud.
Next he walked over to the object in black plastic. It was another body, he said, and gave it a hard kick. All the while, he studied her face, looking for something.
Scott was sure that she was going to die. Why else would he show her what he had done and then let her live?
Neal came back to sit at her side, placing duct tape over her mouth again. He fondled her breasts and groped at her legs. Again she thought it was the prelude to rape, but he stood and said that he had to leave to get someone else.
“You better not make a sound,” he warned. He had colleagues upstairs who would remain there so long as she was quiet. “If they come down, they won’t be as nice to you as me.” He said they’d rape and then kill her.
Neal covered her from head to toe with a blanket. Then he left her there in the dark, thinking of the horror that surrounded her, and believing that he was telling the truth about “the others” upstairs. She concentrated on the country-music station that he’d left on the television for her entertainment, counting two music videos and two commercial breaks before she heard the garage door opening again.
Seven
July 5, 1998
All Angela Fite wanted when she entered the town house with William “Cody” Neal that night was a place to call her own. A home for herself where she could raise her two children in safety. A sanctuary. At twenty-eight years old, she also would have liked a man in her life who would treat her well, but she hadn’t had much luck when it came to matters of the heart.
Back in 1989, Angela was working as a waitress at a restaurant when she met Matt Rankin and fell in love. He was big and tough, and handsome, too. She told her mother, Betty, that he reminded her of her father, Wayne Fite. Angela’s dad was an ex-marine who served in combat in Vietnam and afterward worked in various, often mysterious jobs for the U.S. government. He and her mother had been divorced since Angela was five. She had lived with him for a couple of her high school years, but it was clear that she had missed him being in her life. Later, when looking for reasons for what happened, her mother would wonder if Angela stayed with Matt because of the resemblance and if when that resemblance proved to be a sham, she turned to Neal.
Both men were domineering, but there was at least one major difference: Wayne Fite loved his daughter dearly and would have never hurt her, but Rankin was abusive to Angela and would be arrested for it several times. About a week after she started seeing Rankin, Angela’s younger sister, Tara, and Tara’s boyfriend, Jeb, were visiting when they noticed a hole in the wall near the floor. “How’d that happen?” Tara asked.
“Matt kicked it,” Angela responded with a shrug. “He was upset.”
Later, as they left the apartment, Jeb told Tara, “That’s the sign of a violent man. I don’t see that relationship lasting.”
The violence troubled Tara and later her mother, Betty, when she learned. It was not what she had hoped for her eldest daughter. When she was born, January 11, 1970, Angela had been a beautiful baby with a full head of dark hair, blue eyes, and rosy cheeks. She’d carried an easy disposition into childhood and adolescence, a straight-A student who never got into any trouble. She did have one childhood quirk and that was she named all of her dolls “Kayla” and told her mother that someday she would name her own daughter as she had named her dolls.
She and her sister, Tara, who had come along three years later, were polar opposites in their personalities. Angela was easygoing; Tara could fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. Angela kept her room neat; Tara was a pack rat. Yet the girls were nearly inseparable as children. Angela, as her family and friends called her, mothered her little sister whenever allowed. Tara was afraid of the dark and often crawled into her sister’s bed. There they would take turns quietly singing songs until they fell asleep.
Betty wanted them to be close; that way if anything happened to her, they would have each other. The mother and her two daughters made it a point never to walk out the door, or hang up the telephone, without saying, “I love you.”
When Angela Fite was a junior in high school, she told her mom that she wanted to go live with her father in California. She had reached an age when she wanted to know her father better. She stayed with him when he moved to Texas. Soon Tara announced that she missed her sister and went to join her in Texas. At first, it was only supposed to be for the summer, but when she got back, she cried for four days straight until resolving to move.
Betty always hoped her daughters would find nice young men, find careers they enjoyed and, when ready, present her with grandchildren to love. She was happy to learn that Angie had met a nice young man who’d recently graduated from high school and was in the air force. She hoped the relationship would last; from what she’d heard, Angie could have looked a lot further and not found a man who treated her as well. But Angie was young and not ready to settle down.
After a year, Tara moved back to Colorado. This time it was Angela who followed three months later to be near her sister. Betty was glad to have both living close to her and proud that they had both grown into such beautiful, intelligent young women.
But life took a turn for the worse for her eldest daughter. Shortly after Angela Fite moved into an apartment with a friend, Stacey, the other girl was in a traffic accident that left her in a coma with severe brain damage. Angela went to her hospital bed nearly every day, hoping that her presence might help her friend regain consciousness. But the girl was gone and wouldn’t be coming back.
Then the brother of the boy she was dating, another nice young man, committed suicide. The resulting difficulties in dealing with that ended their relationship. Betty tried to comfort her daughter by saying that God must have some reason, some plan, that humans couldn’t understand for such tragedies. But that only incensed her daughter.
“God doesn’t make these things happen,” Angela retorted.
Unfortunately, Jeb’s prediction for the relationship between Angela and Matt Rankin was wrong. It did last. And it was soon apparent that Rankin was indeed a violent man, one who didn’t limit his assault to walls. He drank a lot, which brought out the worst in him, but Angela thought her love would bring him around. After about six months, Angie and Rankin moved into another apartment. Then a few moved into another apartment. Then a few months after that, Tara got a call from her sister asking for help. Angela told her that she and Rankin had been in a fight the night before. A rather one-sided fight in which he beat her up and attempted to strangle her. In desperation, Angela had jumped off the second-story balcony of her apartment to escape. He threw her stereo off the balcony after her.
The police arrived, and Rankin was carted off to jail. “I need you to help me move,” Angela said to her sister. “I’m afraid he’s going to kill me. . . . I could see it in his eyes.”
“You need to leave him,” Tara agreed. Her sister was always smiling, always upbeat, but now she was clearly frightened.
Tara and Jeb went over to Angela’s to help her move. They were accompanied by a police officer, in case Rankin got out of jail and showed up.
Angela Fite moved in with her mother, who had remarried, to a man named Rod Von Tersch. Two weeks later, Angela was back with Rankin, assuring everyone that he’d apologized and seen the error of his ways.
Angela was already caught in the cycle that is known all too well to those who deal with domestic violence. There would be a period of remorse on Rankin’s part: phone calls, flowers, and tearful contrition. Then something would set him off—generally right after he’d been on a binge or carousing for several days with other women—and she’d get beaten up. The police would show up, arrest Rankin, and Angela would swear it was over. Several times she moved out and in with her mother or sister. Then Rankin would show up, begging her to take him back, and she’d go.
“I love him,” she’d explain to her family. They would have to watch her go back to wait for the next explosion, hoping he wouldn’t put her in the hospital the next time. Or worse.
There were minor deviations to the cycle. For instance, Rankin learned that if he called the police first and came up with some story about how she’d attacked him, it would be Angela who was hauled off to jail.
Tara believed that her sister probably did hit Rankin on occasion, but out of self-protection. It didn’t give him the right to beat her up; he was a lot bigger than Angela was—the sort of hothead who went to bars to pick fights. She was exasperated; her sister had been so strong in the past, so self-confident, but now she acted so dependent on a man who abused her. Tara grew more frustrated when her sister announced that she was pregnant. “How can you think of having a baby with him?” she demanded.
Angela replied that she thought having a baby would make the relationship stronger. But even after Kyle was born in June 1993, the violence continued. Only now, there was a child stuck in the middle, a child who often ended up in the care of Tara or her mother while Rankin and Angela dealt with their troubles.
Money was always tight. Rankin worked construction, which was seasonal, and Angela worked as a waitress. Still, she’d always impressed her sister and mother by how she could do with so little and still make whatever tiny apartment she was living in feel so warm and inviting. She loved her children; every little event in their lives—a first tooth lost, birthdays, holidays—a major event.
Angela might have looked at her family from two blackened eyes, but she was always smiling, even with a split lip, and confident that someday things would get better. She worked to make it so by studying at night, with Kyle cooing and playing by her side, to become a dental assistant.
Yet her life with Rankin was not getting better, it was getting worse. In the beginning, the violent episodes occurred maybe twice a year. Then it was every few months until by 1997 it was every couple of weeks.
“That’s not love. That’s not respect,” Tara would yell at her sister. She begged her, “Leave him before you get killed.” Angela just pointed out that she couldn’t afford to live on her own and support a child, nor could she live with her mother or sister forever. She was sure that Rankin loved her; he just had some issues to work out.
After one beating, Angela Fite had moved back in with her mother when Tara came over and persuaded her to go for a bike ride. They had reached the top of a hill when Angela began vomiting. It turned out that she was pregnant again, and soon afterward she moved back in with Rankin. In April 1996, she gave birth to a girl, whom she named Kayla.
Again she hoped a child would save her relationship. But not one child or two changed Rankin, and it affected Angela more than just physically or emotionally. She would find work as a dental assistant, but her home life would soon interfere—whether it was a beating that she’d suffered or a court date that she had to make—and she would lose her job. Once at an office party, Rankin assaulted the dentist who employed her, costing her another position.
At last in January 1998, Angela’s sister and mother persuaded her to leave Rankin and move into an apartment on the west side of the metro Denver area, closer to where they lived. She got a job at a bar called Fugglies, a small dive of a neighborhood bar.
Rankin hadn’t been home for seven days when she moved out. When he finally came looking for her, he was upset that not only had she left him, she’d taken a job. He took her keys and purse and flung them into a nearby lake. He drove away in her van with both kids.
Not long afterward, Angela told her mother and sister about a new friend she’d met at the bar named Jimmy Gerloff. When she met Gerloff, Tara wondered what her sister was doing wasting her time on him. He was a fat, older man with a beard, who looked like he couldn’t walk two blocks without having to sit down, and he was rude besides. Angela insisted that they were “just friends” and that he was helping her get to work since Rankin had disappeared with her van.
Gerloff also took Angela to the county courthouse to get a restraining order against Rankin. The order required him to return the van, the keys, and the kids. He gave back a set of keys and the kids, but left without saying anything about the van. Angela’s family soon learned what kind of friend Gerloff was when she told them about the night he made a pass at her. They were driving in a remote area in his truck when he suggested that they become something more than friends. Angela rejected the advance and the next thing she knew, she was standing in the dark on a deserted road, watching him drive away.
One night, Angela called Tara and asked her to come over right away “to take me to the store.” Tara drove to her sister’s apartment with a girlfriend only to find Gerloff sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. He barely acknowledged Tara’s presence, except through a cold, sideways glance that told her he didn’t appreciate her being there.
Tara ignored him, but Angela made no move as if to leave. “I thought we were going to the store?” Tara asked, her voice rising. Angie didn’t move.
Angry, Tara left. Angela later told her that she hadn’t wanted to anger Gerloff, whose behavior was beginning to worry her. She’d called him that night on his cell phone because she needed a ride to the store. He said he was nearby and would come right over. The weird thing was that he showed up on her doorstep in less than a half minute . . . as if he’d been right outside all along. When she could do so in secrecy, she’d then called her sister, hoping he would leave, but she hadn’t wanted to press the issue.
That was the last time Tara had seen Gerloff. He seemed to pretty much drop out of the picture after introducing Angela to a friend of his, a guy who, he said, was a bounty hunter who might be able to help her deal with Rankin. A guy named Cody Neal.
Angela Fite told her mother and sister that not only was Cody a bounty hunter, but he supposedly had connections to the mob; he told her that he’d once been a hit man. When her mother voiced her concern about her daughter associating with an alledged paid killer, even a retired one, Angela assured her that in the past, he “only went after bad guys.” She warned her mother and sister that if they ever met Cody, they weren’t to mention what she’d told them because she’d been sworn to secrecy.
One day, Angela’s van mysteriously showed up in front of the Von Tersch apartment. The vehicle was a total wreck, its engine shot. It was assumed that Rankin had brought it back, but that was dispelled when he called asking Betty if she knew the van’s location. It was missing, he said. Betty didn’t tell him, but Angela had told her mother some days before that Gerloff had found the van in the garage of one of Rankin’s friends. To her knowledge, they’d left it there, and she had no idea how it ended up at the Von Tersch home.
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