George could have both women in the same day if he wanted. This must have done tremendous amounts for his ego. Yet, George must have become worried about losing Donna, because he turned around not long after receiving this letter and sent Donna a card she referenced in a second long, tedious letter, full of schoolgirl grandeur she had been spewing on her married lover for the past few months.
29
D
ONNA WAS NOT
a stupid woman. Some later said she could have turned CCHH into a multimillion-dollar corporation if she just allowed others to help her run it and, most important, kept her damn mouth shut. But Donna was about control, manipulation, revenge, and selfish pride. People didn’t cross Donna; she would get them back—maybe when they least expected. What many around the office realized after George came into the picture was that Donna had changed: her attitude, the way she acted, dressed, spoke. Everything was different—except her bipolar mood swings and angry approach to running her business.
“She started confiding in George about her business,” said a former employee. Donna leaned on George, asking him to help her make major decisions. At the time, the work colleague said, “I liked George a lot. We knew he was married, but we thought that he and his wife were separated.”
When George wasn’t around, Donna talked about him as though he was the “be all and end all,” not only for the business, but for life. In a short time she had become infatuated (obsessed!) with George. She had developed a dangerous and soon-to-be-lethal concoction of possessive love, a fanatical sexual desire, and a skewed outlet on life in general—all of this was based around what this man said and did.
“She loved him . . . said he was so wonderful and this perfect man,” said a coworker. “But she . . . became
obsessed
with him. We could never, ever understand, for example, what he saw in
her.
She wasn’t all that!”
This preoccupation Donna had with George became apparent as the 1997 holiday season wound down and she wondered where she and George stood. Near the end of the year, Donna wrote to George, explaining how she needed him to consider several of her ideas as “food for thought.” She mentioned how she had been “considering lots of options” because she was a firm believer in the notion that things happened for a reason. She thought their relationship was a “positive thing.” When they were together, she felt it was “very magical” and “right.” George could do no wrong in Donna’s eyes. Whatever he did (and she compulsively analyzed the guy’s behavior) was something she weighed considerably against the grain of his love for her.
The way he ate, walked, looked at her.
All perfect.
As the letter continued, Donna said she needed to be honest. She felt he was not “very happy” in his life. Of course, this was a slap to Gail. She said Gail wasn’t treating George in the manner that he should be. She called George a “very gentle, wonderful man,” who deserved someone who could make him feel “important, needed, loved, wanted, respected.” The woman he had stayed married to for twenty-three years wasn’t giving him that.
It was the beginning of Donna pointing at Gail and saying two things: First, you do not deserve this man. Second, stay out of my way—he’s mine.
This letter was Donna’s innermost thoughts. She wanted George to think about their relationship in a different way while he was back at home. Figure what he had with her, what he had with Gail, and weigh the two.
Maybe make a damn choice.
During that break George had a lot of time to consider all that Donna offered: a home, job, bed partner, good money, a business maybe to acquire and co-own someday.
George sent Donna a card on January 6, 1998, addressing it to “my love.” He wished Donna a “happy belated New Year.” It was nice, he said, to hear her voice the other day. It had “seemed so long ago” that he was in Florida. (The last time George had been with Donna was a week prior.) He talked about a tape Donna had sent him. He had listened to it that morning as he took his daily walk around the neighborhood. There were lyrics that had moved him to tears. It had even made him think about those times with Donna and the “passion” he felt for her and their “lovemaking.”
He signed the brief letter:
The One Who Loves You Very Much.
This short letter brought Donna to tears, she wrote in return. It was the first time Donna felt as though she had roped herself a bull. George wasn’t all hers—yet—but Donna knew this was the beginning. The more time they spent together, the deeper they felt about each other. She said she read his words “over and over.” She held the letter in her hands “so often and close to [her] chest.” She cried and cried “like a baby sometimes.” She went on about how she had not felt the feelings George was bringing up in so long that she had wondered if they existed anymore. She had been crying so much because she’d had no idea before then how George “really” felt about her. She suspected George was falling, but he had never articulated those feelings into words on a page—until now.
Then, near the end of the letter, Donna mentioned Gail, who was becoming the focal point of her anger. She was the one person standing in the way of her happiness. Donna said it “hurt” her to think George was “spoken for.” When she sat and thought about George “touching [Gail], kissing her,” having his arms around her, “making love to her, caressing her, smiling with her,” and “having fun” with Gail, it was enough to make Donna’s suffering the worst she had ever experienced. She said every time George reminded her of the fact that Gail and the kids had “claims” to him first, she felt nothing but “pain” and “fear.” She wrote:
[There is a] heaviness in my chest, a lump in my throat.... I am just second.
Donna closed the letter saying she had “hope” that someday she would become first in George’s life:
[That thought alone] has made me to feel a little more secure.
30
“H
E TOOK HER
away from all of us,” said a good friend of Gail’s from Texas. As Gail Fulton experienced real problems within her marriage (not the first time), she had no one—save for phone calls—to stand behind her and say, “You can get through this. We’ll help you. You do not need to put up with it.”
It did not surprise any of Gail’s friends that once she got settled in Michigan, Gail fell into a job at the local library. One of Gail’s outlets to get away from life’s problems was reading.
“I was jealous,” said a childhood friend, “that Gail had all of the—I mean
every
single one of them—Nancy Drew books. She adored those cozy mysteries. She read voraciously. She loved romances. Gothic-type stories. History. It more surprised me that she went to school for speech pathology. . . . She should have gone into library science.”
Gail was private to a point where she’d only unload real pain on her priest. When her friend from Texas called, it always went: “Gail, how are you?”
“Fine. . . .”
“Really,
how
are things going?”
“Fine. . . . Fine.”
Gail’s favorite topic was her children. Her friend didn’t mind, but she could always tell when something was eating Gail up inside.
“It was a strange thing,” said that same childhood friend. “When I was going through problems with my first husband and he asked me for a divorce, it was Gail’s father who got on the phone and told me exactly, step by step, how to
not
lose custody of my children, to keep myself safe.... They (Gail and her parents) took care of me. They called me every fifteen minutes at times to make sure I was okay.”
Now here it was, an opportunity for that friend to return the favor. Gail’s father was passed on, and she didn’t want to talk about divorce or child custody issues. She wanted to think—wanted to
believe
—that her marriage was salvageable. By 1998, she and George had been married for nearly twenty-five years. She didn’t want to give up.
According to a close friend, George had always been “dedicated to his mother. He was the star child. He was always the responsible one. He would always send his mother money. You look at him then and you think, ‘Wow, this guy’s good to his mom . . . brothers and sisters.’”
What a catch!
There was one time, shortly after being married, when George and Gail were stationed in Germany. An incident occurred there. Gail called a friend to explain, but again, Gail was mysterious about what was going on, whitewashing the situation.
“There was an inventory and it didn’t match up,” Gail said. George was responsible for the military building. “We have to pay it all back.”
Afterward, according to what Gail told her friend, the military took money out of George’s paycheck to recoup the loss. This saddled an already-struggling young family even further. Gail could stretch a dollar, but not as far as this situation seemed to be headed for.
“Yeah, George was so naïve,” Gail said. “He didn’t know that he should have gotten an inventory before he took over command of the building. Now all these things are missing. It wasn’t him, no way. But now we have to pay it all back.”
Soon after this, George was stationed in Panama. Gail went down to live with him, but then she returned home, without warning, not long after.
When her friend saw Gail that first day back in town, she could not believe her eyes. “She was so painfully thin and she had these incredible headaches.”
Gail’s friend wondered what was going on.
“Oh, nothing,” Gail said, brushing it off. “It’s just this and that. . . .”
Gail’s hair was falling out. She had black circles under her eyes, on top of bags. Her cheekbones were drawn in and pointed. She looked skeletal and depressed, curling into herself.
“She knew what was going on with George . . . ,” said that same friend, “and she internalized it.”
And eventually just let it go.
Forgive, forget, pray.
31
O
N JANUARY 21, 1998,
George sent Donna a card that had to make her year, even though it was only twenty-one days old. She must have known she had indeed roped herself a cowboy and had him now tied to the stable, there to do what she wanted with him.
Dearest Donna,
he began. On the inside cover was the drawing of a caveman holding a club, a bubble caption reading,
Who, me?
The card inscription read:
Now, there are still men, not a lot has changed
. George had written a cute little message in parentheses by the bubble caption,
George (OTJ??).
This was a recurring joke: George of the Jungle. The idea was that George had been so manly, so aggressive and savage in bed, keen on doing “wild” things underneath the sheets, Donna referred to him as “G.O.T.J.”
George sent the card to say how thoughtful it was Donna had sent him all the “recent heartfelt e-mails.” He appreciated it. On the way over to a client’s office, George explained, he listened to the Celine Dion tape and thought how great it was that Donna had gone to the trouble of sending it to Michigan:
You are going to spoil me!
Donna responded by sending George a card, pointing out,
You have made my life complete,
and other wishy-washy things new lovers say while, blinded by lust, in a euphoric state of courtship.
George’s response:
I’m just waiting for my chance to snuggle up close to you. . . .
Inside, a male mouse was pictured with open arms, heading at a female mouse. George said how “fortunate and blessed” he felt to have Donna. His writing was scribbled and hard to read at times, but the gist of it all explained how “trapped” he felt at home without being able to hold his true love in his arms and make love to her at will:
It feels like we have lived a lifetime.... I will always be there for you, Donna. . . .
This sort of horny, “Dearest Donna,” you rock my world, I cannot live without you, you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread, went on all month; Donna and George were exchanging card after card, letter after letter, e-mail after e-mail, fax after fax. Little of it had to do with work.
George wrote the same sentiments—almost word for word—in each card, and Donna lapped it up as if Shakespeare was the man’s muse. At times George would e-mail Donna sexually charged jokes he had heard.
Part of the fascination and obsession between them was augmented by their distance. The fact that they couldn’t be together all the time seemed to inspire the desire they shared for the next scheduled rendezvous. There was always a buildup to the next tryst—always a boiling period where they anticipated it, and allowed time to be a catalyst to what they presumed to be genuine love.
As February came, George said he enjoyed “opening up” and being able “for the first time” to share his “innermost thoughts and feelings” with someone he loved.
They celebrated ninety days together with a spate of e-mails, recalling in each how much they missed each other, ending or beginning the e-mails with juvenile sentimentalities of a haughty, embarrassing tone: I get so scared that I am going to wake up and find it was a dream, Donna wrote once. To her, it was a “fairy tale” she never wanted to end.
Within her letters and e-mails, Donna dropped subtle hints about Gail and how she viewed Gail as a third wheel in all of this. Donna herself was in the process of divorcing her husband. She couldn’t understand if George had felt the way he said, why he could not do the same. Though she rarely—if ever—challenged George on this point, she said she knew it was a “very difficult” decision for him to make. She was clear George had shared with her how much he “did not want to hurt” Gail, but, on the other hand, it was becoming “very hard” to deal with it for Donna. She said how easier things were, once she had officially separated from her husband. Donna knew it would be the same for George. The fear was in doing it, not the aftermath.
George answered that e-mail by sending Donna a link to an article referencing how important it was for males of his age to have sex, which spoke to how this man dealt with serious issues. To George, his mind was on his needs, both sexual and emotional. He did not care to discuss separating from Gail. He made it clear that Donna needed to focus on their relationship and forget about the decisions he needed to make.