After having their two sons, Carolyn became pregnant again, an unplanned pregnancy. Bob wanted her to have an abortion, but she wouldn’t even consider it. Even though the marriage was limping along badly by 1994, Carolyn wanted the third baby. This time, she had a girl. Bob soon came to dote on his daughter. His neighbors said he absolutely adored her.
Carolyn stayed home with the new baby for a few months, then she went back to work. Bob still didn’t help much at home, but she seemed able to handle both her job at the investment firm and her duties as a wife and mother with ease.
By January 1998, Carolyn was working full time for the investment firm. She and Denise were both assistants to executives in the Bellevue office. It worked out well because Carolyn’s daughter was in a day care across the street from her office.
Morgan Stanley was a friendly place to work, and Carolyn fit right in. She was very artsy-crafty and made little gifts for more than a dozen of the women she worked with: crocheted and personalized little baskets for paper clips for their desks, or holiday cards that she designed and printed with stamps she carved. If she stopped to buy coffee for herself, she always brought in steaming cups for the women who worked near her.
At Morgan Stanley, there were Christmas parties and other get-togethers, but the big celebration of the year came right after the income tax deadlines had been met. After the staff had worked intensely for weeks to help their clients, the firm rewarded them by hiring limousines and taking them out for a gala evening they called “The Tax Party.” Bob didn’t approve of that, and it also meant that he had to look after the three children while Carolyn celebrated with her work friends.
The Jannusches and the Duralls spent more and more time together; Gary and Bob worked for the same company, and now so did Denise and Carolyn. The men often carpooled, and while Gary liked Bob well enough, he noticed that Bob wanted things his way. When Gary drove, he couldn’t turn on his car radio or play his CDs because Bob wanted the car quiet. And as always when they went camping, Bob Durall had to have special food—tofu hot dogs—when everyone else was roasting old-fashioned wieners on a stick.
While Bob enjoyed hiking or playing with his children, it was Carolyn who had to see to the details for every outing. He didn’t want to be bothered. He rarely cooked for his children; that was a woman’s job. If he fixed food for himself, he didn’t clean up afterward. When he peeled an orange, he left the peels in the sink. It was a small thing, but one of Carolyn’s friends thought it was inconsiderate, as if he were used to having a maid clean up after him.
Carolyn arranged all the dental appointments, haircuts, and doctors’ appointments and was soon the parent who drove their sons to soccer or baseball practice. She was a Cub Scout leader. The Duralls’ friends noticed that she never sat down; if the kids didn’t need her for something, Bob did. She was sad that she had little time to just play Barbies with her daughter or board games with her sons, but there weren’t enough hours in her days. Carolyn often took her youngsters to amusement centers like Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza for a quick meal. Most young mothers are busy, but she was parenting all alone, even though her children had a father who could have picked up the slack a little. He had time to play games with them, and if he was in the mood, he did.
Carolyn admitted to Denise Jannusch that she felt that Bob controlled her. Denise and the Duralls’ neighbors noticed that Carolyn was jumpy and nervous around him, always glancing at him to be sure he approved of what she did and said. When she drank one beer at a company picnic, he chastised her as harshly as if she’d gotten sloppy drunk.
She told Denise that Bob’s need to be in charge of everything began early in her marriage. “They were at a party and she told me that he wanted to go, but she wasn’t ready to leave yet,” Denise recalled. “He just picked her up and carried her out of the party and put her in the car and took her home. She was humiliated.”
Bob often abruptly decided to leave functions where Carolyn was enjoying herself. One time the Duralls went with their children to see her parents, who were vacationing on an island in Puget Sound. They drove separate cars that day. Carolyn told Denise later that for some reason Bob announced he wanted to leave “right now.” He told her to get everything packed into her car immediately so they could catch the early ferry. He took his car and left with the two boys while she scrambled to get all the children’s gear, toys, diaper bag, and Bob’s special food and supplies together and packed in her car. Then she raced with their baby girl to try to catch up with Bob and the boys.
“When she got to the end of the ferry dock,” Denise recalled, “Bob had his car parked way up first in line. She waved frantically to him, but he just looked back at her and laughed. He drove on the ferry without her. He saw the gates close before her car got on, and he knew she would have to wait hours for the next one.”
John and Linda Gunderson moved to Hoquiam Court, into the house next door to the Duralls. “I remember the first time I met them very well,” Linda said. “In all the stress of moving, I accidentally locked myself out, and our baby was inside. I was frantic, and then I saw Bob and Carolyn in their driveway. I introduced myself and told them what had happened. Bob said they couldn’t stop to help me because they had to go someplace, but Carolyn said, ‘Of course we’ll help you.’ ”
The Gundersons realized that that was pretty much the way things would be. If Bob Durall had something he wanted to do or someplace to go, he couldn’t be bothered with anyone else’s problems. Carolyn always made an effort to help.
Linda noticed that it was Carolyn who mowed their lawn and took care of the children, while it had to be a special occasion for Bob to help. Once in a while, neighbors saw Bob in his yard while his children played outside, but if any other adult in their cul-de-sac came outside, he assumed that he no longer had to supervise and went in his house.
Carolyn had become very close to Bob’s family, and she tried to keep her unhappiness from them. In a dozen years, she had become good friends with his sister, and she liked his mother, who was nearing 80. They shared traditions and celebrated holidays. Her mother-in-law always gave Carolyn scarlet geraniums for Mother’s Day, planting them herself in a wine barrel near the front door. Sometimes the Jannusches came over while Bob’s folks were visiting.
“Bob wasn’t very nice to his parents,” Gary Jannusch recalled. “They were great people—we really liked his dad—but he was just mean to them sometimes.”
There came a time when Linda Gunderson wondered if her neighbors spent any time together. “When Carolyn came home from work,” Linda said, “Bob left. And when he drove up, she would leave to go shopping or to ride her horse.”
Denise Jannusch understood that. While Bob had never physically hurt Carolyn, he verbally abused her much of the time.
And he didn’t make a secret of the possibility that he was seeing women outside the marriage. The Gundersons recalled a time when Bob was working at IPC. “He came driving up in a panic,” John Gunderson said. “He said there was some crazy woman coming after him, and he had to get Carolyn and the kids out of the house.”
While he did drive off with his family a few minutes later, the woman never showed up. A fellow worker at IPC verified that most people there were aware that Bob was seeing a woman he worked with. When he suddenly broke up with her, she suffered a nervous breakdown and ended up losing her job.
Bob left IPC. In the mid-nineties, he became the supervisor of the computer division of the King County Housing Authority, where he was responsible for all their information systems.
Thanks to a gift from his mother-in-law to both Carolyn and Bob, they belonged to a prestigious country club. It was Bob who took advantage of it. In photos, the couple still looked happy. But there was something in Carolyn’s eyes that warred with her smile.
By the summer of 1998, they had been married for a dozen years. Their children were nine, seven, and four. They argued sometimes, but few residents on Hoquiam Court realized the depth of the trouble
s in their marriage. All couples argue occasionally, and the Duralls weren’t yelling and screaming at each other. Whatever their differences, they seemed quite civilized to one another, but they just didn’t seem to be having much fun together.
The Duralls’ marriage had long since fallen into a pattern that many wives are all too familiar with. Carolyn realized too late that to placate Bob she had given up little pieces of herself for years until she had virtually no power left. Their marriage was all about making Bob happy, a task that was daunting, if not impossible, to achieve.
Her close women friends, coworkers, and neighbors knew; they often talked about their relationships over coffee, and the women who went to neighborhood barbecues or office parties noticed that Carolyn was edgy when the time came for her to go home. Bob rarely validated her as a wife or as a person. He didn’t trust her to handle money, even though they both contributed their salaries to the family income. Carolyn had to account for every penny, and Bob wanted to see all the receipts. His allowance was $200 a month; hers was $150 and out of it she had to pay the children’s expenses. During her work hours, Carolyn was responsible for huge sums of money belonging to strangers, but her own husband didn’t think she was capable of figuring out her grocery budget.
It was a relief for her when Bob went away on business trips. Only then could Carolyn feel comfortable in her own home. Bob wasn’t there to dart looks of disapproval at her. She could laugh as loud as she wanted, wear casual clothes, and let the kids mess up the house a little.
“She told me that she dreaded going home after work,” Denise Jannusch recalled. “She didn’t want to have to deal with Bob.” Carolyn had dreams. She thought about being a writer; she had even written several short stories that were quite good, but somehow she couldn’t write with Bob around.
Oddly, while it appeared that Bob was the one involved with other women, he was very jealous of Carolyn and constantly suspected her of cheating on him. For more than a decade of their rigidly controlled marriage, she had never looked at another man. Then in 1997, she met a man who was exceptionally kind to her and made her feel like an intelligent and valuable person. She’d spent time with him, a man who really liked her. Starved for love, she was an accident or, rather, an affair, waiting to happen. When she began having lunch with the other man, they could have become very deeply involved. Whether she physically consummated her friendship with him no one knows, but it made her realize that in her mid-thirties her life shouldn’t be about bending to Bob’s will. The other man had given her a glimpse of what life could be like without the suffocating black cloud that hovered over her constantly. She wanted that feeling again, but she didn’t want to have to sneak around; that was against her conscience. She hoped to find love before it was too late, but Carolyn wasn’t the sort of person who could commit to an extramarital affair, so she broke it off.
The timing was on schedule. Women who are unhappily married reach thirty-seven to thirty-nine and see forty looming. It’s a milestone in aging that makes a lot of people feel as if the door to youth is shutting. All of the euphemisms about “forty is the new thirty” seem hollow when most models and movie stars are only twenty years old, and movies and ads are clearly aimed at the young.
None of the counseling Carolyn and Bob tried had helped their marriage. Instead, she realized, their counseling sessions just gave Bob a chance to point out what was wrong with her. Carolyn bought a book called Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay: A Step-by-Step Guide to Help You Decide Whether to Stay In or Get Out of Your Relationship by a therapist, Mira Kirshenbaum. She read and reread it. When she showed it to Denise Jannusch, her friend noticed that Carolyn had underlined many sections of the book. She said it was helping her gain the courage to leave Bob. (She was not alone; one online bookseller had 143 positive reviews of Kirshenbaum’s books from women who were apparently facing similar dilemmas.)
By 1998, Carolyn had finally made up her mind to divorce Bob, raise her children on her own, and hope to have a chance at happiness. She had thought of it for a very long time; now she was determined.
“She called herself a ‘wimp,’ ” Denise Jannusch recalled. “She always used to say, ‘I’m just so wimpy; I can’t do it.’ But then she built herself up and began to think that maybe she could.”
Carolyn longed for freedom. And so did Bob. She sensed that and often wondered why he stayed. He resisted any conversation that might conceivably lead to a discussion of their problems. To her, the answer seemed plain. If he was as miserable as she was, why didn’t he just face up to a mutual decision to split up? Money, probably. They had a nice house, and he didn’t want to risk losing his share of the equity. Moreover, they had invested almost all their savings—$90,000—in some acreage near their home.
Most of all there were the children. Carolyn believed Bob loved their children, even if he no longer loved her. And one thing she was adamant about; she would ask for custody of their children.
They couldn’t go on the way they had been. Carolyn cautiously began to hope that she could convince Bob that they should divorce. If they couldn’t get it together after twelve years, they weren’t likely to miraculously mend their marriage.
Bob was still handsome and trim, although he had gone bald before he was 40. His chestnut hair was now only a fringe. After being bald for a year or so, his vanity couldn’t stand it, so he bought an expensive toupee that looked quite natural. Most of their new neighbors didn’t even know he wore one.
It wasn’t the way Bob looked, Carolyn explained to her friends. He was still an attractive man, but he was just too damned intractable. It was his way or the highway. Carolyn talked to her friends about her renewed hopes. She was only 36, she had a good job, and she longed for a world where she didn’t have to tiptoe around her own home. Bob had taken over paying the bills six months earlier so he even had domain over their checkbook.
The marriage was dead. She just wanted to be herself again.
Carolyn’s decision was reinforced one night after she went to a restaurant—Cucina Cucina—and a movie with her mother and Denise after work. Bob knew where she was, and he grudgingly agreed to stay with their children, but when she got home, she found he had locked her out. He didn’t answer the door when she pounded on it and called out to him. Embarrassed, she had to go to the Gundersons next door to get the key they kept in case of emergency.
During the early summer of 1998, Carolyn Durall somehow found the confidence she’d lost so many years earlier. She bought some new clothes, had her hair cut and bleached a lighter blond, tried new makeup, and laughed more often. She opened a small bank account in her name only with a $400 gift certificate given to her by her bosses at Morgan Stanley. She added to it when she could; her goal was to have enough money to pay the first and last months’ rent and the damage deposit on an apartment. There wasn’t much in her account, only about a thousand dollars, but it was one of the very first independent things she had done in more than a decade.
Carolyn was on edge by the end of July 1998. Besides the bank record of her secret account, she kept anything remotely personal and private at her office. Bob was driving her crazy, virtually stalking her. If she went out for lunch or pizza with her women friends, he would suddenly show up unannounced. “He seemed to know her every move,” one of her coworkers said. “How awful to have to live like that.”
Bob tried to get home before Carolyn did so he could note the time of her arrival. If she got home first and he saw her van there, he would take off his shoes and socks and tiptoe barefoot into the house to see if he could catch her with a lover. When she talked to friends on the phone, both parties could hear a click that signified someone had picked up an extension. Bob made sure to pick up the mail before Carolyn did, and he went through it carefully. He listened to all their voice mail messages and monitored her Internet access. He was expert at that but found nothing.
Carolyn didn’t have a lover or one in the wings. But she had made up her mind to be happy, which
meant that one day she would find someone she could love. She hoped that she could keep in touch with Bob’s family. His father had died shortly before, but she would miss his mother and her sister-in-law. They had been good to her, and she knew they would be shocked and saddened at the divorce. This year’s red geraniums were flourishing near Carolyn’s front porch.
Carolyn wrote down her financial status and studied it to see if she could manage on child support and her share of the family assets. She had made initial visits to two lawyers.
“She was getting herself very well prepared for this,” Denise remembered. “She was ready to leave.”
Although Bob Durall had never harmed Carolyn physically, her situation frightened her friends. Denise and Gary Jannusch owned a rental house, and their renters were moving out in mid-August 1998. It seemed providential. They were happy to rent it to Carolyn and her children. In late July and early August, the children stayed with her parents at their summer retreat on the island, going to camp during the day. If there should be an argument when Carolyn and Bob parted, the kids wouldn’t have to witness it.
The only thing that troubled Denise was that she and her family were going to be in Lake Chelan for the week of August 3 to August 8. It was about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Renton, and they would be far away on Thursday, August 6, when, as Denise knew, Carolyn planned to ask Bob for a divorce.
Although he had to know his marriage was moribund, Bob Durall’s friends and coworkers saw no sign of stress in him. He had always had unexplained absences from work, but since he was a supervisor he didn’t have to explain where he was. Of course, his job demanded that he be extremely proficient with computers, and he had access to the most complex and up-to-date ones available at the King County Housing Authority. He had an office with a door he could shut, and those who worked for him were used to finding him hunched over in front of a screen, tracking information vital to the department’s records. He was the one who checked on other employees at the Housing Authority to be sure their computer skills were up to par and that they were performing well. He made sure that no one spent too much time on their personal interests on the department’s computers.