“You wanna dance?” George asked.
Donna looked him over. “I don’t like the song,” she said, playing hard to get.
George asked her two more times that night.
Donna didn’t like any of the songs, she repeated.
“When you hear a song you like,” George finally said, “you come and get me.” He pointed to his seat at the bar.
No sooner had George gotten comfortable did the song “Caribbean Queen” by 1980s icon Billy Ocean come on. Donna loved that song (“It became
our
song,” she said later), and she motioned for George to meet her on the dance floor.
No one needed to twist his arm.
After the dance they sat down.
“We mostly talked about his mother’s death and how he wished he would have known about home health care because that may have made a difference in how long his mother may have lived,” Donna told police.
Throughout that night George “never told [Donna] anything personal about himself,” she claimed, “other than he was working at Eglin [Air Force Base] as an engineer. . . .”
What’s more, George never mentioned that he was married and had a family in Michigan.
“And I never asked,” Donna said.
The lights flickered inside the bar. It was time to go.
“We parted without exchanging phone numbers,” Donna said. “As a matter of fact, I did not even know his last name.”
George went back to his hotel and—metaphorically speaking—started growing a mustache.
Two weeks later, on Halloween night, Donna went to the same bar to meet friends, but they never showed up. As she walked around the bar, looking for her friends, Donna spotted George, and, as she put it, “our eyes met. . . .”
This time George introduced himself, sharing his full name. They danced. Laughed. Drank. George had found someone, it seemed, who understood him—a woman who felt the same as he did about life in general. Still, within all the hours they talked on this second night, George never told Donna he was married with children.
“Come on,” Donna said. “Come out to the parking lot. I want to show you something.” She was a little tipsy, smiling out of the corner of her mouth.
George grinned.
“What do you think?” Donna asked. “Since the last time I saw you a few weeks ago, I bought a new car.”
George stood and stared at what was a brand-new Lincoln Town Car. The thing was sharp. It definitely impressed George. Donna had money. Power. She owned her own company. He envied Donna. She was brassy and spoke up for herself. Gail was passive. Donna was aggressive and boisterous. What Donna had, George wanted—at least a piece of it.
“Get in,” Donna said.
“Okay.”
They sat. Donna locked the doors and turned on some music, low and slow.
They talked.
“You want to take the car for a spin?” Donna asked.
“No thanks,” George said, “but maybe I can drive it tomorrow or the next day.”
They embraced. Like a pair of twentysomethings meeting at a club, they kissed inside Donna’s car. As she later described what happened next, “one thing led to another. . . .” Soon they started “touching.”
“You want to go home with me?” George asked.
“Yes, I do,” Donna whispered.
“I’m married,” George admitted, tossing it out there at what was a no-turning-back-now moment. “But I have been extremely unhappy for years and years and years and years.”
Donna asked George where he was staying.
Right around the corner.
“Take me back there,” Donna demanded.
They left.
After sex, they talked. Then had more sex, and talked some more. George opened up, as Donna later explained, saying, “I talked to my mother before she died about my marriage and she told me that because I am an officer in the military, my wife will take everything. She told me to stay in the marriage until the kids were grown and gone. You’re the only one that I have been able to open up to.”
One night with this woman and the guy was spilling his life story.
“You’re not over the death of your mother,” Donna asked, “are you?”
“No.”
Donna spends the night,
said a police report,
and leaves in the morning.
That next afternoon George met Donna for lunch—and a “relationship” began.
According to one source, “Donna told me [she and George] had a ‘very sexually charged relationship,’ so I am sure that they are very sexual in nature. She also told me [George] shared so many things with her about his life and dreams that [Gail] never really knew or understood.”
The bond between them, for whatever reason, was instantaneous.
In a way George figured he was stepping into one more good time. At home in Michigan he was having “problems” with Gail. “Guys need sex,” said someone close to George and Gail then. “[Gail] wasn’t into it”—as if this was some sort of reason for the guy to jump from bed to bed. He was going to be spending a lot of time in Florida. This could be the ideal situation: to have someone there who could appease his sexual fantasies and do those things in the bedroom that his supposed oppressed Catholic wife never even thought of.
George had no idea who he had just slept with, or the psychopath he was now attached to. Donna Trapani was unlike any other woman George had encountered.
24
C
ONCERNED CARE HOME
Health, the first name Donna gave her company, was probably not the most appropriate, considering what a consensus of her former employees later revealed. For one, Donna was not the most compassionate person or employer, often calling her employees—even on off days—in the middle of the night to ask basic questions that could have waited until the following morning, if not the next person’s shift. But that was only half of it. At best, Donna was incompetent; at worst, she was negligent and criminal.
One woman, Christine Stokes (pseudonym), took a job with Donna shortly before Donna and George met. She took the position solely, Christine admitted, “because the money was so good. Donna paid her employees well.”
For that money, however, Donna expected loyalty and obedience. Nothing less would suffice.
When she met George in 1997, Donna was a forty-four-year-old, five-foot-seven woman, with beady, penetrating, and glossy green eyes. She weighed about 120 pounds (yet there was a reason, Christine Stokes learned, behind what was Donna’s obsessive weight control), and had long brown locks, routinely unkempt, and a problem with split ends and dried-out, thin strands of hair. Donna had an issue with facial hair, too, and spent lots of money to keep it under control with expensive trips to the spa. Donna was about keeping Donna happy.
The business was located in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, on the Gulf Coast—north of all the “sun and fun” action down in, say, Tampa or Miami—in between Pensacola and DeFuniak Springs, on the edge of Eglin Air Force Base. This is backcountry territory. Donna’s husband, Chuck, was born and raised in Louisiana, same as Donna, who had lived in New Orleans most of her youth.
Donna had one of those textbook stories of being abandoned, later adding to it: “I was raised by Momma since Daddy left us when I was six weeks old.” According to Donna, the impetus for her daddy’s departure was a “last straw” violent episode inside the house that she experienced. “He threw me against a wall,” Donna explained, “and my momma told him to get out.”
Not long after Donna turned seven, she and her mother moved from New Orleans to Mississippi. A few years after that, they hightailed it back to Louisiana, this time outside Baton Rouge, in Denham Springs. Donna eventually graduated from Denham Springs High School with a 4.0 GPA, in the top 10 percent of her class. She had beaten the odds of growing up fatherless, with a single mother, to be an outstanding student. From high school she went on to a junior college to work on an associate degree in data processing, which led to attending the nursing program and the University of New Orleans. In 1981, she graduated with a registered nurse’s degree. The future for Donna was about hard work and dedication to study. Donna wanted to help people and serve the community. She worked at a local hospital for a time and performed field duties for a home health care firm, which planted the seed of an idea to break out on her own and start a company she could manage the way she believed home health care should be. It was several years later that she met Charles “Chuck” Trapani (1989) and got hitched. Seven years into the union, Donna and Chuck moved to Florida to start Home Health Care Systems (HHCS). It was February 1996 when Donna opened the doors to her office, but it was August that same year before she was able to secure the necessary licenses to send her nurses out into the field. It was September before they could start serving patients’ needs.
“We had a staff of RNs, LPNs, VNAs,” Christine Stokes recalled. “We were a Medicare and Medicaid agency.” (RNs were registered nurses; LPNs were licensed practical nurses, and VNAs were visiting nurse aides.)
Donna came across as “scattered and weird” as Christine got to know her better while working directly with her every day, but again, “she paid very well. She paid more than any other agency in the area, and we can be, sometimes, motivated by pay. . . . You put up with a lot of things in the medical professional world—there are a lot of weirdos, and it’s just something you have to do.”
Almost immediately Donna exposed herself as aggressive and controlling in what was a hostile work environment. Heading through the door in the morning, employees never knew what type of day it was going to be, or the type of person they were going to get in Donna. It all depended on her mood.
“She was absolutely the worst micromanager I have ever encountered.”
Donna had to have her hands in every piece of the business; and most of the time, she made things worse, simply because of control and self-esteem issues of having her workers submit to her every whim.
Power hungry, envious, and jealous that others knew more—that was how Donna came across most of the time. Smart people intimidated Donna. She hired an extremely intelligent nurse, for example, a woman who had her master’s in nursing. The gal knew her stuff. Donna, however, badgered the woman about her work ethic, letting her know how incompetent she was. Donna left her nasty written messages on some of the orders the woman placed, telling her she was
the worst nurse [she] had even run into. . . . How the hell could you even work for the [government]—you’re illiterate!
And yet Donna never fired or reprimanded her. Instead, she found it a power trip to degrade and ridicule her every chance she got. This made Donna feel superior. It gave her that emotional high she got from simply bossing people around.
It all came from a fear of being inadequate; Donna never felt “good enough,” and often used her manipulative skills to make people understand that she was the boss, that
she
made the decisions, and no one was
ever
to question her authority. She ran the show.
There was one time when a major corporation wanted to buy Donna out. It would have meant a tremendous amount of money—likely enough to ride off into the sunset with her husband (or whichever man she was bedding down with at the time) and retire.
When the white shirts came to the office to discuss the transaction and have a look around, Donna was “absolutely horrid to these people,” a former employee said. “Every other word Donna used was the ‘F’ word.” It was bizarre, erratic behavior, as if Donna wanted somehow to sabotage the sale (which she ultimately did).
When asked a day later about her behavior, Donna responded, “Look, when you’re in a man’s world, you have to act like a man. You have to
talk
like a man.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” that same former employee had said.
But here was a glimpse of Donna’s skewed vision of the world.
“Donna was a white-trash woman all dressed up! She had a mouth worse than any sailor’s!”
Donna was obsessed with her weight and focused on her figure. There was even some indication—although Donna never came out and admitted to it right away—that she’d been obese at one time and had had gastric bypass surgery.
“Yes,” Donna’s husband said in the healthcare office one afternoon, “she had a gastric bypass.”
Donna had lost a lot of weight. She was proud of it, but she did not want to discuss how she did it. When she sat down to eat, many noticed, Donna could not eat more than a handful of food without being full. And she would spend nearly a half hour in the toilet after eating.
“She had [once] said that she had abdominal surgery and had lost a lot of weight because of that,” said a former employee. “She was very skinny at that point.”
“Donna was nasty, nasty,” said another employee. “She’d take all of her paperwork into the toilet with her and then start handing it out to us after walking out of the bathroom. It was disgusting. One of the girls in the office used to spray the paperwork with Lysol after Donna gave it to her.”
The other point Donna made clear to everyone was that she “absolutely hated and despised her husband.” Chuck worked at the office. “Chuck was, bless his heart, a Cajun. He presented himself in the way that he was Donna’s whipped puppy. He adored her. [He] would do anything for her.”
And Donna took advantage of it.
25
T
HE AFFAIR GEORGE
and Donna initiated in October 1997 took on a life of its own after that night they spent together. During the Thanksgiving holiday George returned to Michigan to spend the long weekend with his family. He did not seem any different. The same old George: stoic, reserved, content, a bit on the angry side. As Donna and George spent their first extended period of time away from each other—after nearly every day together while George was in Florida—they communicated via e-mail, fax, and phone.
George wasn’t gone but a day when Donna sent him a fax indicating how much she missed him. He needed to be “alone,” she wrote, when he read the fax. She explained how “lonely” it was in Florida without him. She noted:
a body here that sure does need your services.
Then she said her two legs were
longing to be wrapped securely around your body, feeling your powerful urges....
Her breasts were in need of his “gentle, warm” lips and his touch made them
come alive, erect, and [excited].
From there the fax went into a long, tedious, eighth-grade fantasy, talking about what Donna dreamt of. She sounded desperate and foolish, talking about bodies being “close together” and “powerful urges.” She confided how her
warm, dark tunnel [was] awaiting to be deeply explored by your/my wonderful joystick,
along with
the hardness of you.