Body Parts (6 page)

Jimmy remembered his teenage nephew as a loner, always so deep in thought that he could be quite uncommunicative. Wayne also had pronounced mood swings and could get very upset at times.

Wayne would tell Jimmy that neither of his parents loved him, that “nobody cared for him at all,” Jimmy recalled. “I’m sure that after he left my place that he probably felt the same way about us.”

Jimmy bought him a motorcycle, and Wayne took out his anger on the machine.

“He’d beat it up, physically kick and beat the motorcycle because it wouldn’t start,” Jimmy said.

By this time, Wayne’s feelings about punishment had evolved in an unusual way. One day he decided to run away, so he headed north, but he turned around and came back once he reached Arcata, California. Instead of returning to his uncle’s house, however, he went straight to Juvenile Hall.

“They wanted to know why he’s turning himself in, and he says, ‘Well, I was trying to run away,’” Jimmy said. “And then I had to go up and get him out of Juvenile Hall and bring him home.... He wanted punishment because he had the thought of running away, and he felt that he needed to be punished for that.”

Jimmy was baffled by this, so, he said, “I didn’t hammer on him for it.”

In another incident, Jimmy and his wife went away for several days, and when they returned, Jimmy could sense that something wasn’t right with his Camaro.

They were sitting around the house when Wayne broke into tears and confessed to Jimmy that he’d taken the car.

The next night, the doorbell rang, and Jimmy opened the door to find a police officer with Wayne on the doorstep. Apparently, the officer had caught Wayne trying to steal a battery from another car to put into the Camaro because he’d killed the battery by leaving the lights on.

“He couldn’t handle doing something wrong and not being punished for it,” Jimmy said. “He has such a strong sense of justice, even today, about things.”

When Wayne was sixteen, Karen said, Gene called to complain that he was upset with their younger son.

“We decided maybe the best thing for him would be to go in the military to get him off the street and get some discipline,” she said.

Wayne would later claim that he got the idea to join the U.S. Marines after seeing the movie
The Boys in Company C,
but because he was still a minor, he needed parental consent.

“Dad, will you sign papers for me to go into the Marine Corps?” he asked Gene.

Gene was ecstatic. “Yes, where do I sign?”

Rodney said Wayne lied about his age to the recruiters, but no one noticed because he was big for his age. He had just turned seventeen by the time he entered boot camp in January 1979.

The marines would train Wayne—like every other recruit—to be a lean, mean killing machine.

CHAPTER 4

K
ELLY AND THE
H
EAD
I
NJURY

Around Halloween in 1980, Wayne met Kelly Dick, a pretty, petite blonde, on a blind date. They were introduced by one of Wayne’s coworkers at Shakey’s Pizza in Irvine, who also worked with Kelly at a bank. Wayne was still in the marines and Kelly was in college, living in an apartment on campus.

Kelly liked the macho silent type, so she was attracted to Wayne, who seemed a bit standoffish and indifferent at first. He would go without calling for a week, saying he’d forgotten her phone number; then, curiously, he would walk fifteen miles to see her from Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, where he lived on base. She couldn’t figure him out—or if that was his intent—which kept her intrigued.

On their way back from dinner in late November, they saw a two-car accident at the side of the highway. Wayne asked Kelly to stop so he could see if anyone was injured. One of the passengers was bleeding from the neck, so Wayne told Kelly to go find a pay phone and call for an ambulance.

Kelly drove off in search of a phone, but because it was dark and she wasn’t familiar with the industrial area, it took about twenty minutes before she could get back.

She saw fire trucks, police cars, and rescue workers, but no sign of Wayne, so she approached a firefighter and tried to describe her missing date: “Big, tall marine. Have you seen him? You know, a jarhead. You can’t miss the haircut.”

But no one had seen him. They just kept asking if she’d seen the third car.

“Well, I was the third car.”

“No, the red car.”

Kelly didn’t learn until later that they were referring to a red car with a drunk driver who had swerved off the highway, hitting Wayne and another person, then sending them nearly forty feet down an embankment.

She drove around until 3:00
A.M.
, looking for him, tracing the route he would have taken if he’d walked back to the base.

It was the next morning, and she was at Shakey’s, talking to the friend who had introduced them, when one of her roommates called to say that Tustin Community Hospital had phoned. Wayne was in the hospital and wanted her to come.

At the hospital, she learned he was in the intensive care unit, which had a big sign that said R
ELATIVES
O
NLY.
She wondered why they’d called her if she wasn’t allowed to visit him.

“Are you Kelly?” the nurse asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Get in there, all he’s been doing is repeating your phone number, over and over and over and over again, till we promised him we’d call you.”

Wayne looked as if he had landed right on his face, which was swollen to twice its normal size. His face was black and blue around the eyes. The fall had ripped off most of his lip, requiring stitches to sew it back together. His four front teeth were shattered and his jaw was broken, but he was conscious.

Considering that he couldn’t seem to remember her phone number before the accident, Kelly wondered how he’d managed to do so after taking such a pounding.

When she returned the following morning, Wayne’s mother was at his bedside.

Karen was still living in Santa Rosa when she got a call from an ICU nurse.

“We have your son here, and if you can come, it would be a good idea because he’s been in a serious accident. He has serious head damage.”

“How serious?” Karen asked.

“Well, his teeth are knocked out and he’s got damage to his mouth, and we think he has a concussion.”

Karen asked the nurse to tell Wayne that she was on her way. She called Rodney to see if he wanted to fly down with her, but he said he wanted to go by himself.

Wayne was conscious, but in pain, when Karen arrived. His primary injuries, as far as she could tell, seemed to be in and around his mouth.

“Thanks for coming, Mom,” he said, complaining about his missing front teeth. “I’m going to look terrible.”

“You can get teeth,” she said. “Nobody will even know that they’re false.”

Karen only stayed for a couple of days, leaving Kelly to take care of Wayne for the rest of his nine-day stay.

Rodney said Karen called him after she first heard from the ICU, saying, “You need to come and see your brother. I don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

But he and Gene later said neither of them felt the need to go to the hospital because Wayne’s commanding officer told Gene that Wayne’s injuries weren’t serious, that he’d only gotten “a couple of teeth knocked out,” and Gene had passed that assessment on to Rodney.

Neither of them learned the severity of Wayne’s head injury until much later.

Years later, Wayne told a psychologist that he’d been pressing his hand against the wounded driver’s neck to stop the bleeding when he was thrown down the embankment. Apparently, he knew quite a bit about the arteries in the neck.

“A drunk swerved off and hit me. Killed me,” Wayne said.

“Killed you?” the psychologist asked.

“Yeah, they revived me. I woke up three days later. . . . The whole one side of my body just didn’t work very good and my head was all swollen up, and it was a pretty tough time.”

Wayne wasn’t able to go back to work right away, and because Kelly’s three roommates had gone home for the holidays, she offered to let Wayne stay with her so she could nurse him back to health. They grew closer over the next week or two, and once he was feeling better, they traveled to northern California to visit his mother, Rodney, and some other relatives.

They flew up and drove back in a 1953 Chevy that Wayne bought from his brother.

Kelly noticed a change in Wayne’s behavior after the accident—he seemed much friendlier to her and paid her more attention.

In February, Wayne was about to leave for a couple of months of training in Alabama. He told her he would earn a bigger salary if he was married, so they decided to get hitched on the sly, while Kelly was still in school. She would go home for the summer; then they would have a big wedding in the fall.

They eloped in Las Vegas that May. However, their plot was foiled by Kelly’s sister, who found out their secret and told Kelly’s mother all about it.

Kelly noticed another change in Wayne’s behavior, about two weeks into the marriage. The two of them were talking over some wine when Kelly asked Wayne about his family and what it was like growing up; she’d gotten the feeling that he hadn’t been treated very well. When she pressed for more information, Wayne clearly didn’t want to talk about it, but she wouldn’t let up. That’s when Wayne got physical.

“He wasn’t actually aiming for me, he was just trying to swing at me, to tell me to shut up, and he ended up hitting a stud in the wall and broke the knuckles in his right hand,” Kelly said. “It just shattered all the knuckles, so he ended up going to Alabama with a cast on his hand.”

Something had changed in Wayne since they’d said, “I do.” He’d become more demanding and domineering. His whole attitude toward her had shifted. And it only got worse.

Some of Kelly’s complaints about Wayne’s behavior sound somewhat similar to Karen’s complaints about Gene. Regardless of what may have happened in the Ford family house when Wayne was growing up, it would be typical for him to model his expectations of how a wife should act and be treated based on his perceptions of his parents’ marriage.

While Wayne was in Alabama, he called Kelly, ranting that the money she’d sent him hadn’t arrived on time. She was hurt to find out that he’d hocked his wedding ring to go out drinking beer with his friends. He, in turn, wasn’t happy to learn that she was pregnant.

When he got home, she said, “He basically told me that . . . he wasn’t about to have kids right now and I had to have an abortion. I told him I didn’t want to have an abortion and he said, ‘Well, I’m leaving then.’ And I felt like I had no choice.”

At the abortion clinic, a woman asked Kelly if anybody was forcing her to have the procedure.

“What if I say yes?” Kelly asked.

“Then we couldn’t perform the abortion.”

Kelly walked out of the interview room, past Wayne in the waiting area, and out into the hall, where she started to cry.

Wayne followed her. “What?” he demanded.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said.

Wayne grabbed her by the arms and shoved her toward the waiting room. “Get back in there,” he said.

After the abortion, Kelly said, Wayne became abusive, saying the only reason he married her “was for a steady piece of ass.” (Wayne had started having sex when he was fifteen and slept with eight women—primarily those with large breasts—before Kelly.)

When she didn’t want to have sex, Wayne wouldn’t take no for an answer, so Kelly started giving in just to stop the “mental torture” for a few hours. Otherwise, he would keep her awake, sometimes until 4:00
A.M.
, until she relented.

But after a while, even that didn’t work.

“It was like my whole life at home had to do with sex,” Kelly said later. “If I was a nymphomaniac, it might’ve been a great situation for me. But I’m personally not that sexually motivated.”

Wayne made it known that he wanted her to remain naked around the house. If she sat down to watch TV, she said, he would “feel free to come up and start suckling on a breast. I mean, it was just a constant barrage of this, like that’s all I was there for, that I was an object for his pleasure.”

When they went out together, he would ask her to wear shirts that were so see-through, she felt she wasn’t even wearing one.

Things got so bad that she started crying at her desk at five o’clock because she knew she had to go home. He expected her to cook elaborate three-course dinners—more often than not while she was in the buff—and he wouldn’t accept plain vegetables. They had to be doused in cheese sauce.

“If it wasn’t perfect or right, he got angry,” she said. “The thing was, I could never get angry back at him, because then I’d get in trouble.”

In January 1982, Wayne took a trip to Big Bear with some other marines. He asked Kelly to go, but she couldn’t, so he went without her. Before he left, Kelly told him not to lose her good towels, and also not to screw around.

“I already had the idea that he wasn’t going to be able to go five days without having sex, so it was like, half-joking, but half-serious,” she said later.

Two days after he left, one of Wayne’s friends phoned.

“Kelly, has Wayne called you?”

“No.”

“If he calls, tell him to come back.”

Kelly wondered what was going on. “Come back from where?” she asked. “What happened?”

“We can’t tell you. Just if he calls, tell him to come back.”

At the time, Kelly was playing cribbage with a young gay friend, who had overheard the conversation. He was so scared of her husband that he ran out of the apartment in case Wayne showed up.

When Wayne called that night around eleven, she was amazed to hear his story. Not only did he think that he’d done nothing wrong, he also didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to tell her about it.

“He just knew he was going to get caught, and that’s why he’d run,” she said later.