Daughters and Wives of Monsters Club

In the days after my husband was swarmed by officers and arrested outside his office on Fifth Avenue and 32nd Street on his way home, I got a lot of strange emails. People, who had tracked me down, told me I was a stupid idiot. They asked me how I could not have known what my husband was up to. But there was one email I read to the end. It was from someone who had been in my shoes. Maybe not exactly my size 8, lilac New Balance sneakers, but close enough: instead of a wife, she was a daughter. And she knew what it was like to have a loved one reviled by everyone, whose mugshot was on the news every night.

It was impossible not to blame myself. To think how could I have missed the signs? Maybe I was a stupid idiot. For I did have no idea what he was up to “working late.” And that’s exactly what my new friend told me in the email - that this was how she had felt. How could the same dad who dutifully drove her to softball practice every Sunday afternoon and afterwards to the Dairy Queen, for her favorite swirl cone, been this monster, and how had she failed to see who he was? 

Bethany started a Go Fund Me campaign for me. You see, when the police descended to conduct the search warrant on our house, me and my two kids had to stay at the Holiday Inn. The search lasted two weeks. And by the time they were done, our house looked like a tornado hit, so we had to stay in our hotel room a month longer while a company that specializes in disasters put the house back together. Bethany’s contribution—the proceeds she collected from all the supporters she gained after writing her memoir about her daddy—was a Godsend. 

Before long my ex-husband’s trial came and they locked him up for good, but of course the hate email kept coming. He was an architect, didn’t I know his kind of mind would excel at planning these crimes? He drove an SUV, didn’t I realize the hatch was large enough to hold a petite body? He was a hunter, didn’t I ever notice that the camouflage blinds he used to lie in wait after baiting game could be employed to wrap a human body? 

To get my mind off it, I followed the news for cases that were just as disturbing as my ex’s. They weren’t hard to find. It seemed no day went by where a young petite woman wasn’t shot or strangled, her body wrapped in tarp or burlap before being hidden roadside in the brush or brambles, spaced at a tidy interval from the last kill, a trophy garden that the man could drive up to and visit whenever he had the urge.

I did what Bethany did: I looked up the email address of the blindsided wife—Gisselle was one of them—explaining that I understood what she was going through, then I set up the Go Fund Me campaign, tapping all the supporters I had gained by writing my memoir and going on tour, shaking hands with every late night talk show host on TV. In time, I heard from Gisselle and  the others I helped saying they had done the same for other unsuspecting wives and daughters. Our efforts did not wane. 

Before long, I had an idea. What if we all met up? We could have lunch—a little baked ziti, maybe garlic bread and a house salad, a glass of rosé—and chat and commiserate. With everyone in one place for the first time, maybe we’d call a few news stations and get them to cover the story. What would we call ourselves? I thought. “Daughters and Wives of Monsters?” What a club to belong to!

But the problem was, once we did a headcount, we learned our numbers were crazy. We couldn’t find a lunch spot big enough to hold us all. Which made me think. On the news they kept saying that our monsters’ behavior—the stalking, the preying, the dumping—was unusual, that this type of individual was rare. But was he? If we were a club too big to fit in a room and share some baked ziti, I doubted our husbands and daddies were rare. Maybe it was time to cut the crap. Maybe it was time everyone opened their eyes and saw what we were: a nation of serial killers.