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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Gail Bridges, like Clara, had also gone into seclusion for weeks after David Harris' death, in part because of the public speculation about who she was and why she had become romantically involved with the orthodontist. Reporters quickly found out that this was not the first time she had been accused of having an affair. During Gail's divorce proceedings, which began in 1999, Steve Bridges claimed that she had been carrying on a lesbian relationship with her best friend, Julie Knight, who was married to Charles "Chuck" Knight, a software specialist for an aerospace company. Chuck made the same allegations about his wife during their divorce. Neither husband ever presented any definitive evidence in court that proved a lesbian relationship, and Julie and Gail's lawyer, Valerie Davenport, of Houston, later stated in a court filing that the tale had been invented by their husbands merely as a way to divert attention from their own "improper misconduct," including, she alleged, the abuse of alcohol and prescription pills by Steve and an extramarital affair carried on by Chuck with one of Gail and Julie's close friends (charges both Steve and Chuck deny). Still, for the media, the lesbian allegations gave the Harris saga an irresistibly salacious new twist.
And the story only snowballed when it was learned that Gail and Julie had appeared on a segment of the Sally Jesse Raphael show in 2001, wearing wigs and dark glasses, to talk about their former husbands' attempts to portray them as lesbians. Soon, videocassette tapes of the episode, which had been titled "My Husband Spies on Me," were in the hands of most Houston media outlets, and soundbites were being played on the local news shows. A photo of Gail in her wig was run in the Houston Chronicle. "Bisexual Triangle Led to Car Slay of Hubby," the always-hyperbolic New York Post proclaimed. Gail Bridges had become the Hester Prynne of the Houston suburbs. Only she wasn't wearing one scarlet letter. She was wearing two: an A and an L.
How had so many likable, normal people—known around their neighborhoods for their decency—found themselves entangled in such a saga? How had they ended up doing things to one another, and to themselves, that simply defied explanation? In many ways, what happened on July 24, and everything that led up to it, was the real-life version of one of those novels that are periodically published exploring that well-worn topic of American fiction: madness in the suburbs. "It is madness. There's no other way to describe it," Julie Knight told me one day, shaking her head slowly as we sat at a Joe's Crab Shack in a sunbaked strip mall next to Interstate 45. "You really do think you have your life worked out. You really do think nothing can go too wrong. And now here we all are on the front pages of newspapers."
ONE WOULD BE HARD-PRESSED TO find a more pristine suburban world than the bedroom communities south of Houston. Almost everywhere you go there are new developments under construction, all of them made up of custom-built, split-level homes with "great rooms" that lead off the kitchen. In these neighborhoods, the small front yards are neatly landscaped and the sidewalks have no cracks. There are community swimming pools, soccer fields, and stop signs at every intersection. Residents go to churches where the sanctuaries look like civic center auditoriums, and there they give thanks for their good jobs, for their healthy children, and for their pretty homes with the pretty picture windows that look out on other pretty homes across the street. Probably none of them can imagine that someday they will need to visit Blue Moon Investigations, the suburbs' most prominent private investigative agency, located on the second floor of the Morgan Stanley office building along Webster's Bay Area Boulevard.
Blue Moon is owned by a chatty Rubenesque woman named Bobbi Bacha who wears long black or purplish dresses with granny boots and talks in such a cheerful, singsong voice that people who call her for the first time often mistake her for a teenager. The 43-year-old is not exactly a portrait of the hard-boiled detective: She always keeps a stack of decorating magazines in her car in case she needs something to read during stakeouts. Because she wants her clients to feel at home when they visit, she has given her offices a distinctly feminine touch, lining the walls with serene photographs of the moon, placing long-vined potted plants and small, gurgling fountains next to the windows, and burning cinnamon candles on her and her employees' desks. To soothe her clients' nerves, she serves them Constant Comment hot tea, never coffee.
Bobbi understands that marriage is an often flawed and disastrous institution. The daughter of a Galveston police officer, she began working as a secretary at a private investigative firm in the early eighties after her husband, her high school sweetheart, left her for another woman. After a second failed marriage, she began working nights for another private investigator to keep food on the table for her three children. Occasionally, when no baby-sitters were available, her children sat in the back seat of the car doing their homework or leafing through comic books while Bobbi tailed cheating spouses. She was good. After word got around about her lying under a dining room table with a tape recorder to catch a wealthy married man with another woman, she had full-time job offers from many of the dozen or so private-detective agencies in the Houston area. But sensing an opportunity to make her own mark in the mushrooming southern suburbs, she opened Blue Moon Investigations in 1995, taking out large ads in the area Yellow Pages with the headline "Need a Clue? Call Blue."
Today, her business is thriving. On the various days that I visited with her, she was involved in the case of a wife wanting to know if the "thera-stress consultant" that her buttoned-down insurance executive husband was visiting was actually a massage-parlor prostitute, a husband wondering if his wife was having sex inside the family Suburban with cowboys she was meeting at a country-western bar, and an astronaut's wife who thought her husband was making out with a secretary on his lunch break at the NASA complex. She has 38 assistant investigators, most of whom are younger women who work part-time, doing surveillance jobs at night after spending their day taking college classes or toiling away as schoolteachers, executive assistants, or salesclerks. Bobbi admits she prefers female investigators—"I think we are so much more naturally observant," she says—but she does want people to know she's an equal opportunity employer. Her chief investigator, Jeff Moore, is a former male stripper. And when Bobbi is overbooked, she gets her third husband, Lucas, a brainy Boeing engineer, to do surveillance work for her, despite the fact that he's a bit of a Mr. Magoo who at restaurants will often circle the dining room a couple of times on his way back from the restroom because he's forgotten where his table is located.
On the afternoon of January 27, 1999, Bobbi was about to leave the office when the phone rang. A man named Chuck Knight told her that he needed someone that evening to watch his wife, Julie, and her best friend, Gail Bridges. Chuck and his wife lived one neighborhood away from Gail and her husband, Steve, and the two couples were good friends. They went to the same church, Bay Harbor United Methodist. Their boys played on the same soccer team. They drank champagne together every New Year's Eve at the Knights' house. But for the past year, Chuck said, neighbors had started coming to him and Steve, asking why Gail and Julie spent so much time together—going to lunch, taking tennis lessons, sitting around at one or the other's homes—while the husbands were away at work. Chuck said he began to have suspicions himself after watching Julie and Gail hugging and, he says, fondling each other when the two couples went out to dinner. The more time passed, and the more their marriages soured, the more Chuck and Steve thought they realized what was going on: Their wives must be lesbians. Chuck told Bobbi that he and Steve would be watching the children that evening so their wives could go shopping at the Baybrook Mall for a couple of hours and that he wanted the two of them followed. According to Bobbi's notes, Chuck said to her, "But I bet they will go to a hotel. Or they might just pull over on the side of a highway to do their business. Gail has a boob job, and my wife will not be able to wait to touch those puppies."
Bobbi sighed. She had promised her husband and children that she would get home early to fix dinner, and all of her investigators were already booked. But she did not want the male-owned-and-operated Turman and Associates, her chief competitor in the suburbs, to get Chuck's business if she turned it down. She took his credit card number over the phone—Blue Moon charges $55 an hour, with a four-hour minimum, for a surveillance job—and she drove over to the Knight house in the Harbor Park subdivision of League City, where she waited for Gail and Julie to drive off in Gail's Navigator.
Out came Julie, a curvy blonde with startlingly blue eyes, wearing blue jeans and a red Tommy Hilfiger top. Out came Gail in blue jeans and a pink top. The two women drove to the mall and visited a few stores, with Bobbi following at a safe distance. When they lingered at a Nine West shoe store, Bobbi walked in and sat near them, trying on shoes, including a pair of stiletto heels. Meanwhile, the two women swapped stories, laughing loudly, before finally heading back out of the mall, driving through a McDonald's for soft drinks, and going home.
The next day, Bobbi told Julie's husband, Chuck, that they had acted like Wilma and Betty from the Flintstones and that there was nothing at all lesbianlike about their behavior. The only time they got physically close, she said, was when their heads briefly moved toward each other in the car.
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