To Hatred Turned (5 page)

After the fateful lunch in 1983 when each learned that the other was in the throes of a collapsing marriage, Larry and Rozanne began seeing each other regularly, slipping away for trysts when they could, and making do with hurried telephone conversations when they could not. In no time at all, the relationship evolved from a need for mutual consolation over their individual marital problems to a steamy romance.

Early in June, Larry decided to move out of the Arbor Trail house he shared with Joy into an apartment on Fair Oaks Crossing, less than two miles away. When he told Joy he was leaving, she dashed out of the house in tears and sped away. She drove to White Rock Lake, an oasis in the center of thickly populated East Dallas, and pulled into a parking space along the shore. She was sitting there, she told Larry later, crying like a six-year-old who had just dropped her ice cream cone, when a male jogger stopped and asked her if everything was all right. She replied that it was; that she was only broken up because her husband had just told her he was leaving. The two started chatting and the man asked her to have dinner with him.

“Thanks,” Joy said, smiling through her tears, “but I’m not ready for that yet.”

“Well,” the man told her, “when you think you’re in the mood, give me a call.” Borrowing a piece of paper from her, he wrote out his name and phone number and handed it back to her.

A couple of days later, when Larry was packing for his move to the apartment, Joy walked by and he noticed something in her hand.

“What’s that?” he asked, grabbing her arm.

“Nothing,” she said, clenching her fist.

Larry looked at her and smiled. “I think you’ve got a boyfriend,” he said.

Many years later, Larry suspected that the stranger Joy had met on the shore of White Rock Lake was a plumbing contractor named Jodie Packer.

Days after he moved out, Larry filed for a divorce.

Less than a week after that, Rozanne also left Peter Gailiunas. Taking her young son with her, she moved into a three-bedroom rental house at 804 Loganwood Drive in Richardson, a North Dallas bedroom community of about seventy thousand people.

Following Larry’s example, Rozanne also filed for divorce, using Larry’s lawyer to prepare the papers. And, as soon as she was out from under Gailiunas’s spell, she took a part-time job as a nurse in a pediatrician’s office.

Although Gailiunas had suspected for some weeks that there was another man in Rozanne’s life, he was slower to realize that it was Larry. One day when the two were hunting birds on Larry’s Kaufman County ranch, several weeks before Rozanne moved out, Gailiunas confided to the contractor that he thought Rozanne was seeing someone else.

Larry tried to look amazed. “No way,” he said as earnestly as he could. “She’s not that kind of person.”

Soon afterward, Gailiunas began zeroing in on the identity of Rozanne’s mystery lover. During one of his infrequent visits to the job site, Gailiunas cornered Larry and told him that he was sure that Rozanne had a boyfriend. “And I have a suspicion about who it is,” he added ominously, staring at Larry.

Larry looked him in the eye. “Why are you telling me?” he asked.

“I just wanted you to know,” Gailiunas said, turning on his heel.

What may have helped Gailiunas reach that conclusion was the fact that he had hired a private investigator and ordered him to follow his estranged wife to see if she was having an affair and if so, with whom.

The man followed Rozanne diligently and reported to Gailiunas that her secret paramour was Larry Aylor. When he heard the news, Gailiunas nodded in grim satisfaction. According to the investigator, Gailiunas ordered the private detective to continue shadowing Rozanne, keeping close enough to her that she would know she was being watched.

The man refused. “I didn’t want to frighten her like that,” he said later under oath. “I quit.” When asked about it, Gailiunas denied asking the investigator to let Rozanne become aware of his presence.

But from what Larry later said, Gailiunas himself had no qualms about putting pressure on his wife. In fact, a court issued a restraining order prohibiting Gailiunas from confronting or harassing Rozanne.

One day about the middle of the summer, several weeks after Rozanne had moved to Richardson, Rozanne told Larry that she and her estranged husband had a major confrontation—an incident that Gailiunas later denied ever occurred. According to Rozanne, she had gone to his house the night before to pick up Little Peter. But before she could get out the door again, she and Gailiunas got into an argument about her taking the boy home with her.

She grabbed Little Peter by the arm and was leading him outside when Gailiunas grabbed the boy’s other arm. Each refused to let go. When she furiously demanded that he release the boy, the doctor ran into another room and returned with a shotgun. “If you try to take my son away I’ll shoot you,” he allegedly said.

Another time, she related, describing an alleged incident also denied by Gailiunas, she went to pick up Little Peter and walked into the den, where she found Gailiunas sitting on the sofa in semidarkness. He had a paper plate on the coffee table in front of him containing a sandwich and a handful of potato chips. A soft drink stood next to the plate. Gailiunas had his sleeves rolled up, she said, and he was hunched over the table although he was not eating the food.

When she came in, she told Larry, Gailiunas reached for something else at the end of the table and produced a syringe. Allegedly telling her it was filled with a deadly drug, he motioned toward his bare arm, saying that if she did not come back to him he was going to inject the chemical into his veins.

Rozanne remained unmoved by the display. Nodding toward the plate of food, she asked him: “Did you fix the sandwich for me so I would have something to eat while I watched?”

Still one other time, Gailiunas taped a telephone call between Larry and Rozanne in which both made a number of disparaging remarks about their respective spouses. Gailiunas then took the tape to Joy, suggesting it might be something she would be interested in hearing.

According to Larry, Joy was indeed intrigued. Although their marriage was falling apart, Joy had not adjusted to the idea of divorce any better than Gailiunas had. That summer, Larry told his friends, he began getting harassing telephone calls at his apartment. He believed they came from Joy. Joy’s friends, however, claim that the actual situation was quite different. It was after Larry moved out, one of them said, that
Joy
began getting annoying calls. There was no doubt, her friends said, that Joy was upset about the situation. And not without reason. Before he told Joy he was leaving, Larry closed all of their joint bank accounts, effectively cutting off his wife’s financial support. That move sent terror into Joy’s heart because she feared she would not be able to care for their son, who was then thirteen, without going to her father and begging for help. And that she was reluctant to do.

There was little doubt, however, that Henry Davis was well aware of the situation. One day he tracked Larry to one of his job sites and cornered him, much as Gailiunas had done.

“Get your ass back home,” he told his son-in-law in blunt Texas talk, “and forget that black-haired bitch.”

Larry ignored the advice even though he, too, was under pressure from Gailiunas as well as Joy and her father.

One evening early in the summer, Gailiunas and his mother came to Larry’s apartment. According to Gailiunas, he knocked on the door and was let in. According to Larry, he was lounging around his apartment, watching TV, when he heard a noise and looked up. As he watched, the knob on his apartment door began turning.

Alarmed, Larry dashed into the other room where he could look out the window and see who was outside. It was Gailiunas and his mother.

After establishing who it was, Larry went back into the living room and opened the door. “What do you want?” he asked Gailiunas angrily.

“Is Rozanne here?” Gailiunas barked.

“No,” Larry told him.

When Gailiunas appeared skeptical, Larry invited the two of them inside so they could look for themselves. They went in and sat on the couch. Any belligerence that Gailiunas may have felt initially quickly evaporated. Propping his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands, he looked as though he might break into tears at any moment.

“I want you to quit seeing my wife,” Gailiunas pleaded with him while his mother sat rigidly at his side.

“I’m not seeing her,” Larry said. Then, he told the doctor in an unsympathetic tone that he was going to have to work out his problems with Rozanne on his own. “In the meantime,” he said, “get out of my apartment and don’t come back.”

Gailiunas and his mother left peacefully.

The affair between Larry and Rozanne continued throughout the summer and into a suffocatingly hot fall, interrupted only briefly by flareups the lovers had with their respective spouses. Despite the problems, Larry and Rozanne seemed to be deeply in love. Larry’s friends later told investigators that during that period they had never seen him happier.

Rozanne’s friends and family said the same thing. During a telephone call with her sister on October 2, Rozanne gushed that she had met a wonderful man who seemed truly to care about her and that she was wild about him.

“Tell me more about him,” her sister urged.

“I’m bringing Little Peter up in a little more than a week,” Rozanne said, since Larry had given her two airline tickets for her birthday, which was on September 24. “I’ll fill you in then.”

In an attempt to bring some tranquility to the situation, Rozanne worked out with her estranged husband an arrangement in which he would keep Little Peter on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights, and she would have him the rest of the time. On the weekday mornings after the boy spent the night with his father—Tuesdays and Thursdays—it was Gailiunas’s task to drop Little Peter at day care on his way to work. Rozanne then would pick him up when he got out at noon. In addition, Rozanne also took the boy to have dinner with his father just about every night.

Virtually for the first time in his adult life, Larry was technically free to come and go without any marital responsibility, and Rozanne had no commitments for four nights each week. As a result, they spent considerable time together. And when they were not physically in each other’s company, they communicated by telephone, usually chatting at least three times a day. As September drew to a close, Larry and Rozanne’s pattern continued, although there were difficulties.

On Wednesday, September 28, while Little Peter was with his father, Rozanne spent the night at Larry’s. But the next morning when she returned home, she discovered that someone had broken into her house, shattering a window in the kitchen, which was at the rear and sheltered from the street. The only thing that was missing, as far as she could tell, was a key that had been in the lock on the back door.

Immediately, Rozanne called a glazier, who replaced the broken pane, and a locksmith. When the locksmith arrived, Rozanne was highly agitated, pacing impatiently as he put a new deadbolt on the front door.

“Why do you think nothing was taken?” he asked her, seeking to make conversation in an effort to relieve her anxiety.

“I don’t think it was a burglar,” Rozanne replied. “I think my husband did it.” It would turn out she was wrong.

The next day, Friday, September 30, Rozanne saw Larry only briefly because they both had things that needed to be taken care of. The next time she saw him was Sunday, when she came over in the middle of the afternoon and stayed until about six
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The following day, Monday, October 3, Rozanne and Larry went to dinner; Rozanne went home shortly after six. They talked on the telephone at about eight-thirty and again at about ten, but she was in a foul mood and told him only that she would come see him the next morning before she went to pick up Little Peter.

On Tuesday morning, Rozanne left Larry’s apartment at about eleven-fifteen to retrieve Little Peter. Larry went back to work. She told him she would see him that evening at about six, after she took Little Peter to his father’s for dinner.

When Larry returned to his apartment at noon, there was a message on his machine from Rozanne saying that she and Little Peter were going to lunch, then she was going to take him to his ice-skating class. She would be back at her house by midafternoon. “Please call,” she added, “and remember that I love you.”

Larry tried to call her at three, but got no answer. He tried again fifteen minutes later, and again he received no response. At about four-thirty, he called his sister Karen and asked her if she had heard from Rozanne. When she said that she had not, Larry said he was going to go looking for her. “Maybe she’s had more car trouble,” he said, recalling the flat tire earlier in the day.

“I’ll go with you,” Karen volunteered.

Larry drove to his parents’ house and picked up Karen and the two of them decided to retrace Rozanne’s usual routes to see if perhaps she was stuck on the side of the road. But they quickly got jammed in rush-hour traffic on North Central Expressway and decided that the plan was not a good one.

“I’ll just go back to my apartment and wait,” Larry suggested. “She may be on the way there now.”