Suburban Madness
Why would a devoted wife deliberately run over her beloved husband three times? It's quite simple, really. He was having an affair with a woman accused by her allegedly pill-popping ex-husband of carrying on a lesbian relationship with her best friend, whose ex-husband has been indicted for an illegal wiretapping scheme designed to catch the two in the act and cover up his own infidelities with her former Lamaze-class buddy. Any questions?
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According to Bobbi, Chuck asked her to "inflame" that part of the report and make it seem worse than it was. (Chuck says he never asked Bobbi to inflame anything, nor did he refer to Gail's breasts as "puppies.") "Mr. Knight, you do know that women are different than men?" asked Bobbi in response. (Besides her ability to hide in closets and sneak onto hotel room balconies, Bobbi also likes to think of herself as a kind of therapist who can help her clients better understand human behavior.) "Even if two women kiss or hug, it doesn't mean they are sexually active with one another. Not at all." Chuck hung up, and so Bobbi filed the case away and turned to her next piece of business.
Then, in mid-July 1999, Julie and Gail showed up at her office. As they sipped hot tea, they told Bobbi that they had both filed for divorces from their husbands within a week of one another, and they went into all the standard horror stories about bad husbands that Bobbi had heard thousands of times. Among their complaints was that their husbands had been threatening to expose them in court as lesbians, which they said was preposterous. They thought their spouses might be using the lesbian tactic to force them into agreeing to out-of-court settlements that would leave them with less than their fair share of the community property.
Julie said she wanted her husband tracked to see what he might be hiding. (Gail backed out of hiring Bobbi at the last minute, saying she wanted to try to keep the peace between her and Steve during their divorce.) Bobbi had one of her investigators tail Chuck, who began noticing that he was visiting the house of a friend down the street and that another woman was showing up at that house about the same time. Then Bobbi's investigator caught Chuck and this other woman flying off to Tampa, Florida, for a weekend trip. The woman was Laurie Wells, a part-time baton-twirling instructor and the wife of Steve Wells, a respected suburban remodeling contractor. When Bobbi brought in Julie and Gail to deliver her report, the two women's mouths dropped open. The three women and their husbands had once been good friends. Gail had met Laurie at a Lamaze class and then invited her to Bay Harbor Methodist.
Before too long, all three couples—the Knights, the Bridgeses, and the Wellses—were finalizing their divorces, and it was not pretty. The spouses kept trooping off to court with accusations of all sorts of misbehavior, sexual and otherwise. They got into shouting matches at the mall and left threatening messages on each other's voice mail. Julie found her house vandalized, which she blamed on Chuck and Laurie and Steve Bridges. Chuck occasionally followed Julie in his car. During one episode, Julie claims he stuck his middle finger out of his driver's side window while she stuck a camera out of her sunroof, snapping photos of him to show to a divorce judge. And in one of the more heated court skirmishes, Gail and Julie accused Chuck and Steve of taping their phone calls and then splicing the conversations together so that the two wives would appear to be swapping sexually suggestive comments about such activities as eating ice cream. After Julie and Gail paid a visit to the district attorney's office, both men were indicted on felony charges of illegal wiretapping. (Charges against Steve were later dropped, but charges against Chuck are still pending.)
By late last year, everyone was officially divorced. Chuck and his new girlfriend, Laurie Wells, both of whom had gotten little property in their divorces, moved into a small apartment together. Steve Wells had full custody of the Wellses' two girls, in part because Laurie had called him and said she was going to teach the children to hate him, a phone call that he taped and later played before a judge. In her divorce settlement, Julie got full custody of her and Chuck's two children, but she was continually returning to court to ask for protective orders against Chuck, who she claimed was stalking and harassing her and the children. As for Gail, she got custody of the two youngest children while Steve got custody of the eldest. She and the two kids moved into a smaller house nearby, and then Gail got a job at Space Center Orthodontics.
IF THERE WAS ONE MAN who did not seem likely to get involved in an affair, it was David Harris. "I'm not exaggerating this. He just didn't look twice at another woman," one of his co-workers told me. He was a little vain—he wore a toupee to keep up his looks—but he was never the kind of guy who wanted to go out drinking with his buddies or flick the channel over to HBO to watch Real Sex when his wife wasn't in the bedroom. He and Clara were devoted members of Shadycrest Baptist Church, where David played the drums in a contemporary Christian soft-rock group, the Colemans, providing the backbeat on such songs as "Sing Hallelujah" and "You Make Me Complete."
David had been divorced before, though infidelity reportedly had not been the cause of the breakup. His wife claims that she left him because he had been too focused on his career. After his marriage to Clara, his career had indeed taken off. Besides building his own practice, in which he was putting braces on hundreds of kids and some adults, including Bobbi Bacha's husband, Lucas, he had purchased seven other dental practices in the area and put together a management team to staff and supervise them. By 2001 his income was skyrocketing. He was clearing as much as $35,000 a month from Space Center Orthodontics alone, and he bought a piece of land in a more upscale shopping area so that he could build an enormous, six-thousand-square-foot new office. Once the building was finished, Clara was going to move her practice there so they could be closer. When his daughter, Lindsey, who worked at Space Center Orthodontics in the summer, told him that her goal in life was to become an orthodontist too, he told her that there would always be an office available for her to come work with him.
Why, then, after having built such a life for himself, did he want to put it into play? Some of David's friends wonder if he felt a typical middle-aged need to shake up his daily routine. They think he was at that place in life where the attention of a new woman was suddenly tantalizing. He had, after all, been telling his friends that he sometimes felt unappreciated by Clara, who was consumed with the children and with her own business. On the other hand, some of the women in his office believe he simply fell under the sexual spell of a woman they think was clearly out to snag him. "I remember watching Gail bend down in front of David to get some papers out of a filing cabinet," one woman told me. "But instead of bending at the knees, like everyone else, she bent at the waist so that her butt would stick up. And I thought, 'Uh-oh.'"
Around Space Center Orthodontics, it is hard to find someone who does not think that Gail saw David as her ticket back to the lifestyle to which she was once accustomed. But Gail's closest friends said that for the first several months she worked there, she never said a word to them about feelings she might have had for the orthodontist. Obviously, they said, attention from any man must have felt good to Gail, who had been embroiled for so long in a vicious divorce and who couldn't go to church or her children's school without people whispering that she was a lesbian. And, they admitted, Gail could be cute around a guy, turning on her high-school-cheerleader personality. But none of them really believed that she would get into an affair, until Gail began to mention that David was taking her to lunch. She told them that he had confided to her that he was staying in his marriage only for his business and the children. Then she told them that David had said he loved her.
No one from David's circle believes that the orthodontist was really in love with her. "If anything, he was infatuated with her for a while, nothing more," said a close friend who asked not to be identified. "He was never going to leave his wife."
Nevertheless, by early this summer, the employees were getting worried. Everyone was whispering about David and Gail's lunches at Perry's. And when someone saw the two of them apparently fondle each other in the office when they thought no one was looking, "the cat got out of the bag and started running all over the floor," said one worker. About that time, David's brother, Gerald, Jr., a psychologist who teaches at the University of Houston, had installed a video camera in the office to identify ways to improve patient-staff interactions. One worker kept turning off the camera because she didn't want Gerald to see scenes of David coming up to flirt with Gail.
Over the July 4 weekend, roughly four months into the affair, the Harris family took a vacation to Jamaica. A few of his closest co-workers were hoping that David would come back determined to save his marriage. When David returned, they decided to confront him. He was open with them, but when someone suggested that Gail be fired, he paused. He said he still loved Clara and did not want to end the marriage, but he had gotten emotionally involved with Gail.
Clara still knew nothing and presumably had no suspicions of what David was doing. No one from his office had said anything to her. But perhaps worried that the word would leak out anyway, David sat down with his wife on Wednesday morning, July 17, and confessed. He told her about the lunches at Perry's and the nights at the same Hilton hotel where they had held their wedding reception. Clara became hysterical. The two went to the office, where Clara confronted Gail, telling her that she was fired and that she could never come back. Two days later, on Friday, she allegedly called Gail so many times, ranting about what kind of woman she was, that Julie Knight reported to the police that Clara was making "terroristic threats" on Gail's life. One of Clara's friends, however, says she had only called Gail to thank her for opening her eyes.
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