Authors: Ken Englade
Larry reported the animal stolen, but he never expected to see it again. To his surprise, he was wrong. Twelve years later, he was driving through a rural section of South Dallas when he spotted an old horse grazing beside the highway. The horse, although aged and feeble, had the same distinctive markings as the colt that he remembered as Lady.
When he stopped and asked who owned the horse, Larry was directed to an elderly black man, who told him that he had bought the animal sometime earlier for his grandchildren to ride. Asked where he had gotten the horse, the man gave a name that Larry recognized as a friend of Joy’s father, Henry Davis.
In the fall after the summer of the horse incident, Larry transferred from El Centro to North Texas in Denton, which was about forty miles north of Dallas and close enough for Joy to make frequent visits in her green convertible. Their relationship continued through that winter, even after Larry dropped out of college due to a severe case of flu that kept him from his classwork.
That August, almost three years after they met, Joy and Larry were married. Some twenty-one months later, on May 8, 1970, Joy gave birth to their only child, a boy they named Christopher Davis Aylor.
According to Larry, that was a major turning point in Joy’s life. Just before Chris was born, Joy quit her job, and she didn’t work outside the home again until after she and Larry were divorced years later. Instead, Joy devoted herself unselfishly to the baby.
“She was a wonderful mother,” Larry said later. “She read to Chris at night. She played with him. She became very protective of him. She organized her life around the child.”
At the same time she was moving closer to Chris, she was, according to Larry, moving further away from him, telling him that his sex drive was too strong and that he was making too many demands on her. In desperation, Larry once broached the subject to Joy’s father. “What do you think about a woman in her twenties who says she doesn’t need sex?” Larry asked Henry.
Henry looked closely at him and delivered some country wisdom, not necessarily reflecting on his daughter: “If you’re not scratching it, someone else is,” he said.
In a portrait taken late in 1971, when Christopher was nineteen months old, Joy and Larry looked like the typical young Dallas couple of the era. For the photograph, Joy wore a blue and white granny dress, primly buttoned almost to the neck. Her hair was more red than its natural blond, and she wore it in a bouffant, shoulder length with bangs that dipped below her brows. Although possessed of a well-shaped mouth, she was unsmiling, almost grim, for the camera. The picture, too, did little to emphasize her large eyes, which are accented by incredibly long lashes, or her satiny smooth skin. Joy was a woman who would get prettier as she aged.
Larry, on the other hand, was flamboyantly clothed in a sports shirt decorated with red, white, and blue squares. His hair was as long as Joy’s, disappearing over his shoulder in the photograph. He, too, wore bangs that dipped sheepdog length—a marked contrast to later years when he would wear his hair in tight curls and sport, in succession, a short beard and then a mustache. Like Joy, Larry was unsmiling. The only one of the three showing any evident emotion was Chris, then a blond toddler, who was perched on Joy’s lap wearing a blue and white checked jumper and an uncertain half-smile.
While Joy’s attitude bothered Larry, he was too busy to give it his full attention.
After he dropped out of college, Larry continued working at several dead-end jobs, the most profitable of which was the one selling men’s clothing. While he claimed to be bringing home $40,000 a year, which was not an inconsiderable amount of money in those days, he realized that he did not want to be a handkerchief and tie salesman for the rest of his life.
Since his father had been peripherally involved in construction and since Larry had worked in the business for a couple of summers, Larry began thinking seriously about going into construction as a future. He also remembered how Henry Davis had brought his brothers into the industry and how his father-in-law had set Michael Walker up in the business soon after he and Carol were married. But the Michael/Carol analogy was a double-edged sword. Michael had never been interested in the construction business in the first place. Besides that, his involvement ceased abruptly when Carol caught him with another woman, someone he met in the business, and divorced him.
Still, soon after Chris was born, Larry went to his father-in-law and told him his plans.
Henry gave him a cold stare. “Michael cost me a bundle,” the older man said.
“I’m not Michael,” Larry replied.
“I realize that,” Henry said, “but you don’t know much about construction.”
“I can learn,” Larry answered.
“Do that and then come back to talk to me,” Henry advised.
Larry went from Henry to a man with a reputation as one of the most competent men in the industry and asked for a job. The next day, he began working as a carpenter for $2 an hour. A week later, he got a fifty-cent-an-hour raise.
After a year of working in the grunt end of the business, Larry went back to Henry and asked for some financial backing to help him get started with his own company.
“How much you got on the hip?” Henry asked, meaning how much of his own capital did he propose to put up.
“I’ve got four or five thousand put aside,” Larry said.
Henry shook his head. “You’re a little bit light,” he said.
Instead of financing his venture, Henry agreed to sell him one of the lots in a subdivision he was developing if Larry could get a loan from a bank for part of the money.
The bank agreed to take a chance, and Larry began his first house late in 1971. A few months later when it was finished, he sold it for $69,500, clearing about $9,000 after he paid off the loan. What really made Larry feel good, though, was the fact that his profit was about twice what the bank expected him to make and that his house sold for some $20,000 more than any of its neighbors’.
That house led to another, and gradually Larry W. Aylor Custom Builders Inc. won a reputation for quality and craftsmanship. As the business grew larger and Chris got older, Joy began working for the company as well, designing the interiors.
The business boomed beyond the Aylors’ or the Davises’ expectations. Within a relatively few years, Larry and Joy joined the sizable community of the city’s young and semi-rich. On her wrist Joy wore an expensive Rolex, and in her parking spot in the garage was a bright red Porsche, right next to Larry’s Jaguar. Larry also had bought himself a motorcycle, a pickup truck and trailer, a boat, and several four-wheel-drive vehicles. And, to gratify his need to escape the city once in awhile to indulge a macho self-image, he bought a 140-acre ranch in Kaufman County, an hour’s drive to the east.
By all indications, the couple had it made: a prospering business with a good reputation for providing quality and value; a bright, healthy son going into adolescence with doting, financially comfortable parents; and a decade-plus marriage that ostensibly was as solid as the concrete foundation on one of their houses. In actuality, their life was largely a pretense.
The business, indeed, was doing well. But Larry and Joy were having more than a few problems. One of them was Chris, or rather the effect his grandparents Henry and Frances were having on the boy’s development.
Joy’s parents seemed to thrive on having growing children around the house. Joy’s sister Liz was eleven years younger and was almost of another generation. In addition to Liz, Henry and Frances had practically adopted Carol and Michael’s daughter, a girl named Michelle, who was a little younger than Liz. And then there was Chris, the only boy-child in the family. No matter how much Larry objected, it seemed as though Frances and Henry were always buying the boy things, or promising to buy him things, if only he would do what they asked of him. As he grew older, the stakes got higher: They each demanded more of the other. While the gifts began with toys and trinkets, they later escalated to sports cars and expensive clothes. In return, Chris was expected to live with them.
But the problems in the two families were not restricted to the relationship between Chris and his maternal grandparents. Larry and Joy’s marriage was suffering as well.
According to Joy, Larry had a roving eye and did not go to great lengths to conceal it. At the same time, she said, he hovered over her possessively and often overplayed the part of the jealous husband. According to a neighbor, Larry once ordered Joy to leave a party early because she was spending too much time talking to the hostess’s nineteen-year-old son. Neighbors also related how Larry hounded Joy with unimportant calls on his CB radio, tracking her down in her car or in the house, questioning her about who she had seen, where she had been, and where she was going. Joy confided to one friend that she dreaded visiting their construction sites because her trim figure almost always drew whistles from the workers. Although
she
didn’t mind the attention, Larry did. As soon as they were alone, Larry would berate her, accusing her of trying to lead on the men.
Joy’s friends told D magazine that when she was around Larry, Joy appeared intimidated, hardly speaking. But when he was not there, she was outgoing, cheerful, and full of fun. Once, over lunch with a neighbor, Joy asked if her friend thought she was “selfish” or “stupid.”
“Of course not, Joy,” the friend said, shocked. “Why would you ask such a thing?”
“Because,” Joy said, “Larry always says I am.”
On the other hand, Larry felt that Joy was becoming increasingly distant from him and closer to her parents, who also were trying to manipulate Chris.
There also were problems with Carol, Joy’s older sister.
Beginning in her teens, Carol, a blond, hyperactive adolescent whose weight swung wildly from needle thin to pudgy, had begun demonstrating a mental instability that would worsen as she grew older, eventually leading to treatment in the psychiatric unit at the prestigious Baylor University Hospital when she was in her late twenties. Long before her hospital treatment, however, Carol was engaged in a seesaw love/hate relationship with her parents and siblings, an alliance that on at least one occasion required Henry to summon the police to their house.
Her unhappy marriage to Michael Walker did not help. According to Michael, years after the marriage was over, Carol continued to harass him, forcing him to repeatedly change his telephone number in an effort to dodge her. After she physically threatened him (telling him, Michael said, that she “knew people who make people disappear”), he canceled his utility contracts and reapplied for new ones in the names of friends so she would not be able to trace him.
It was when Carol’s instability became undeniably obvious that the elder Davises grew worried that she would not be able to care for her child and took Michelle to raise as their own.
By 1982, on the eve of Larry’s meeting with Rozanne and Peter Gailiunas, Larry and Joy’s situation was coming to a head. Strangely, however, as her marriage moved on rockier ground, Joy seemed to become more aware of her sexuality. She began taking more pains with how she dressed, shucking her usual jeans and button-down shirts for more feminine apparel. She also began paying more attention to her makeup, which up until then was virtually nonexistent, learning to highlight her strong features such as her high cheekbones and seductive eyes. She also took one other major step: She checked into a hospital and surgically had her breasts enlarged. Larry’s response was not enthusiastic.
“Well, you’d better get used to it,” Larry recalls Joy telling him, “because this is the new me.”
4
If, by mid-1982, Joy and Larry’s marriage could be classified as shaky, so too could Peter and Rozanne’s, even though theirs was of much shorter duration.
Rozanne had met her physician husband five years before, in November 1977, when they both worked in the intensive care unit of a Boston hospital. She was a twenty-seven-year-old registered nurse; he was a thirty-year-old nephrologist moonlighting on the weekends in the emergency room so he could, according to one person who knew him in those days, meet more young women. As soon as they met, something clicked; there was an immediate sexual attraction between Peter and Rozanne, a magnetism that soon led to an intense affair.
When he met Rozanne, Gailiunas was dating someone else, but he quickly terminated that arrangement so he could devote more time to the dark-haired nurse. However, for at least several weeks after the beginning of their affair, he was not aware of the fact that Rozanne was already married. By the time she got around to telling him, she added that she had filed for a divorce and would soon be free.
Within a few months they had decided to move to Dallas and get married. It was a decision that Rozanne, at least, would learn to regret.
Rozanne, who had lived all her life in leafy, wet, and chilly New England, was not prepared for the heat, the humidity, the relative barrenness of the North Texas prairie. Dallas’s only saving grace, as far as she was concerned, was her job at Parkland. But that did not last long. She had been at the hospital only three months when she got pregnant. After their son was born six weeks prematurely in 1979, Gailiunas encouraged her to quit. She complied, but soon afterward their marriage began a definite downhill slide. The decision to have Larry Aylor build them a grand new house—a dream house—was an attempt to salvage the relationship. The result would be a tragedy.