CHAPTER 7
ELIZABETH AND MAX
In early 1994, Wayne was working as a disc jockey at Taka-O, a Japanese sushi restaurant and bar in San Clemente, where he ran the karaoke machine.
His friend Dave was dating a pretty twenty-one-year-old named Elizabeth Ault, but after they broke up a few months later, the slender blonde started coming to the bar just to see Wayne, who was a dozen years older than she was.
They started dating at the end of May and got close pretty quickly. In the beginning, Wayne brought her flowers. Within a couple of months, they were living together, and soon after that, they were talking about getting married.
Elizabeth was working at Lane Bryant, a clothing store in Orange County. Wayne, who was still going by the name of Adam, was working at an auto repair shop with his friend Scott Hayes, a mechanic he’d met when the two of them worked at B&M Towing. Scott was married to a woman named Linda, and the four of them often socialized together.
Before Wayne and Elizabeth had a chance to set a wedding date, she got pregnant. This time, Wayne left the decision about having an abortion to his girlfriend, and because they weren’t married yet, Elizabeth chose to have the procedure.
On October 15, 1994, the two of them were married in Las Vegas at the Tropicana Hotel, once known as the “Tiffany of the Strip,” and home of the city’s longest-running showgirls production, Folies Bergere.
Right before the ceremony, Rodney, who was Wayne’s best man, made his feelings known about the impending nuptials, while the bride’s father and brother stood silently by. Elizabeth’s father, who worked for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, eventually was promoted to deputy chief and commander of internal affairs.
“You shouldn’t marry her,” Rodney told Wayne. “She’s too young. She’s too volatile. You’ve already had problems and I don’t see it getting any better.”
But Wayne didn’t listen and stubbornly married his young bride anyway.
Wayne stopped working at Taka-O after the wedding, because, Elizabeth said, it wasn’t the kind of “scene to be working in when you’re married.”
But that didn’t stop the two of them from going there together. Wayne liked playing darts and the two of them often entered tournaments.
They were talking one day, asking each other questions about their past lives.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” she asked, wondering about his time in the marines.
Wayne said no, but he did tell her about the night in 1992 when he hurt a girl pretty badly in a bar in San Clemente. He said someone had jumped on his back, so he turned around and reflexively decked the person, only to see that it was a young Latina woman whose jaw was dangling from his punch.
He said he ran out of the bar and took off in his red Jeep. He went over to Scott’s house and told him he needed to paint his vehicle blue because the girl he’d hurt was part of a Mexican gang and he didn’t want her fellow gangsters to track him down by his car and take revenge.
Just as in his previous relationships, Wayne started asking to expand their sex life soon after the wedding: he wanted to watch Elizabeth have sex with another man.
Initially, she said she didn’t want to, but she changed her mind after he fought and argued with her, making her life a living hell.
“I can’t even put it into words,” she said later, crying as she recounted a part of her life that she had since tried to forget. “He would just make life so bad that I thought, if this will make him happy—and it’s stupid on my part, you know I’ve made some mistakes in my life—and I just thought maybe it would get [our life] back to normal.”
Elizabeth wanted to make her husband happy and get past this fantasy. So one night, she got drunk enough to feel emotionally numb, then the two of them picked up a marine from a bus stop and went back to the barracks. The three of them had sex, but the men didn’t touch each other.
The next morning, Wayne was very proud of Elizabeth. “You were great last night,” he said.
Elizabeth looked at him and said, “I can’t believe I did that. I never want to do it again.”
Nevertheless, she agreed to do it two more times, and each time, Wayne’s afterglow only lasted about a week.
Finally, Elizabeth said she couldn’t do it again, and meant it.
“It’s awful,” she told him. “I don’t know why you would want to do that to me.”
“Well, don’t you want to make me happy?” he replied.
But sometimes it was hard to make him happy—especially when he was sulking. If Wayne didn’t get eight hours of sleep, he blamed Elizabeth and refused to go to work. She would toss and turn before she went to sleep, and he needed to lie still, so Elizabeth slept on the couch most of the time.
By March 1995, Elizabeth was pregnant again.
During the pregnancy, Elizabeth hadn’t really felt much like eating until the evening. But one morning in August, she was unusually hungry, so she made herself some eggs, bacon, and toast. She settled in on the sofa to eat her breakfast while she watched some TV, but Wayne decided that he wanted to eat her food rather than cook something for himself. He also wanted to have sex.
“What he expected of me as a wife was to cook his breakfast, and cook his lunch and cook his dinner,” Elizabeth said later. “If he had to go to work without his breakfast, he was pissed at me . . . whether or not I was sick.”
But this time, he took his anger out in a different way. “He just took control of me and he—he raped me. . . . It was bad. I didn’t want anything to do with him. I just wanted him away from me and he took a belt and wrapped it around my neck and told me to suck his dick. And I wanted to bite it off, but I didn’t want to get killed or anything. That was the only time I was really frightened of him. . . . He hit me with the belt. . . . He got on top of me [and] I felt like I was going to die.”
Elizabeth ran out of the apartment naked, screaming, and into the laundry room, where she grabbed a towel and wrapped it around herself. Wayne got scared and called her back inside and told her it would be okay.
“No, I’m not going back in there,” she told him.
Elizabeth looked around in case anybody was watching, and she saw a young boy. She went back into the apartment so that she didn’t cause a scene.
She took a shower and then let Wayne have sex with her. She lay there, lifeless, letting him do what he wanted, hoping it would make things better. Afterward, she cried.
They were supposed to drive up to see Rodney and his wife and kids that day in Pomona, so they could all go to a classic-car show. They went as planned, as if nothing had happened.
A week later, they got into an argument and she took off to see her family in Las Vegas, but came back the next day after she and Wayne talked on the phone. Looking back, Elizabeth knew that she should have stayed away, but she wasn’t ready at the time.
Other than the rape, Wayne was never violent with Elizabeth—not even the time she hit him during an argument over whether she should visit her mother in Vegas. Strangely enough, he wanted her to go and she didn’t. He was standing on her purse and bending over to reach inside for her mother’s phone number when she smacked him in the face. He called the police, but by the time they arrived, he’d calmed down enough to talk them out of taking her away, because she was pregnant.
Wayne had seemed pleased about the baby once he found out that it was a boy. Elizabeth didn’t know what they would’ve done if it had turned out to be a girl.
When it was time to go to the hospital, Elizabeth said, Wayne seemed very put out that he had to go along.
On December 10, 1995, their son was born and they named him Max.
Not long after the birth, Elizabeth’s father suggested, as he had in the past, that the young family move to Las Vegas, where there would be great job opportunities for both of them.
They made the move that February and stayed with Elizabeth’s mother until they could get their own apartment in the same complex the following month.
Once they were on their own again, Wayne started asking Elizabeth to talk to him about being a prostitute. Since she’d never been a prostitute, she didn’t quite understand his new sex game and refused to tell him what he wanted to hear.
Wayne started working as an apprentice for the electricians union, but he decided he would rather drive a cab.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth stayed in their two-bedroom apartment, taking care of Max. She kept the house clean, did the laundry, and cooked for him, just like he wanted, but she began to detach herself emotionally as the sex games continued to escalate.
Elizabeth let Wayne tie her wrists together once, which she considered “normal kinky,” but she wouldn’t do it again because she didn’t like feeling confined. On several occasions, Wayne put his hands around her neck as he was reaching climax. He wasn’t forceful about it, so Elizabeth never said she minded, although she didn’t say she liked it, either.
Still, Wayne wasn’t happy. He was constantly depressed, holding on to things and not letting go of them. In addition, he started making her drink vodka straight from the bottle until she threw up. He talked about putting a padlock on her vagina so that no one else could get inside and started asking to pierce her breasts with safety pins.
She figured if she let him do it once, then he’d be satisfied and move on. But that didn’t happen. If she didn’t let him poke her, he would become morose. So sometimes she would let him, just for a minute.
“That really hurts, I don’t want to go through this, Adam,” she would tell him. Sometimes she would cry, saying, “Why would you want to do this to me? I don’t like it.”
More and more, this odd behavior seemed to be something that Wayne needed, and also something that Elizabeth could not withstand. She didn’t like the way he was constantly masturbating on the couch, either, particularly when she caught him in the act.
In June 1996, Elizabeth decided she couldn’t take all of this anymore, so she and the baby moved upstairs to her mother’s apartment for a week.
Wayne pleaded with her, promising that things would be different. But Elizabeth was starting to build up her own life—and her confidence. She was working with her mother in a catering company, and in just a matter of days, she had the car insured and was able to put Max in child care. Wayne called it “baby prison,” but he didn’t object to it enough to take care of Max himself. In fact, she later said, he never seemed to take much interest in their baby at all. He would never bathe or feed Max and he rarely changed his diaper.
Finally, Elizabeth gave Wayne an ultimatum: he had two weeks to prove that he could change.
“The way you live is not right and I am going to work,” she told him, referring to his previous opposition to her getting a job. She also told him that he wasn’t going to have his meals on the table whenever he wanted, because she had other things to do.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I’m not going to live like this,” she said.
Wayne tried to meet her demands for a day or two, but once he saw that she was serious about working, and not being his domestic slave, he went back to acting depressed.
On July 4, 1996, Wayne and Elizabeth went to a party at the top of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino, and two days later, she left him for good.
Elizabeth moved in with her mother because she didn’t have enough money for a down payment on her own apartment. The following month, she met a man and went to stay at his place in Green Valley.
“I mean, here I am with a six-month-old baby and I’m thinking nobody’s ever going to want me again,” she recalled later.
Her father disapproved of her new living arrangement. So in October, she and Max moved in with him.
At that point, Wayne had Rodney and Gene pick him up in a motor home and take him back to California, towing his broken-down Jeep behind them. Wayne lived with his father in Napa for a few months before he moved south.
Wayne was working for a karaoke company when he met a woman at the Blue Rock Inn in Vallejo. After they dated for a couple of months, he moved into her trailer in the waterfront community of Benicia, which is next to the Carquinez Strait, and is part of the San Francisco Bay.
While they were living together, Wayne told the woman that his ex-wife “destroyed their family” when she left him for another man. He talked about wanting to kill Elizabeth and often told her, “I know I’m going to hell,” but he didn’t elaborate.
He lived with the woman, whom he slapped once during sex, until he moved to his grandmother’s house in Eureka in September 1997. After that, they began dating long-distance.
One night in January 1998, the woman’s nephew got “pretty wasted” with Wayne on rum and Coke, and Wayne said he “hated women, that his wife took his kid away from him, and that he wanted to ‘cut them up,’ ‘dismember’ them and ‘hide everything that would identify them.’”
The nephew later admitted that he’d been intoxicated at the time, so he wasn’t sure if Wayne was talking about what he wanted to do to women, or if he was confessing about something he’d already done. Nonetheless, he subsequently told his aunt that Wayne was evil and she should stop seeing him.
The woman ended the relationship during a visit to Eureka the following month, when Wayne told her that he was in love with her twenty-year-old daughter and wanted to have a child with her.
Two months later, Wayne showed up in Benicia and argued with the woman at the trailer. She never heard from him again.
Sometime after his split with Elizabeth, Wayne started calling his mother, who was now going by her new married name, Arora. After moving back and forth to India, Brigitte was living in Austin, Texas.
Wayne always called pretty late at night. According to Brigitte, the first conversation went like this:
“I’m sorry, Mom, I’m calling you so late,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you called. How are you and what are you doing?”
Over the next ninety minutes, Brigitte said, the two of them cried as they talked about his feelings that she didn’t love him and that she had “deserted him.”
“Wayne, I love you,” she said. “I’m sorry that I didn’t show it more.”
“You abandoned me,” he said.
“Wayne, you’re the one who wanted to leave. I didn’t want you to leave,” she said. “I don’t even remember how we came to that. I love you.”
“Really?” he said. “You never told me.”
“Maybe I didn’t and I’m sorry. I just assumed you would know.”
Wayne told her how lonely he was and how people were hurting him.
“Whenever I open my heart,” he said, “whenever I’m honest with people, whenever I more or less reach out to them, they stab me.”
Brigitte could see that he was feeling sorry for himself, but she didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to scare him off after their estrangement. She wondered whether he was having a psychological breakdown.
Brigitte had just started a new job and couldn’t leave town, so she asked if he wanted to come visit her for a few days.
“No, Mom, I can’t,” he said.
“Why?”
“I just can’t.”
Brigitte told Wayne he could call her collect again, anytime. She also tried calling him, but nobody ever answered.
It was several months before she heard from Wayne again. Just like the first time, it was at midnight or 1:00 A.M., and Wayne was crying.
This time, Wayne said he was angry that people were persecuting him, but he wouldn’t give any specifics. He complained again that he was lonely without a girlfriend.
“Mom, I really want a family,” he said.
“Wayne, you have to go out there and make friends,” she said. “There are nice people out there and it doesn’t particularly have to be a girlfriend. Just go out and meet people. There’s a girl out there for you.”
Looking back later, Brigitte realized she may have sounded idiotic to Wayne, but she had no idea where his mind had taken him.
In December 1996, Wayne returned to Las Vegas with some relatives to see Max for his birthday, saying he was proud that the two of them shared a birthday in the same week.
Wayne brought Max a tricycle with a big helmet, which Elizabeth thought was ridiculous, considering their son was only a year old and could barely walk.
Elizabeth felt torn. When she called Wayne to encourage him to take part in his son’s life, all he wanted to talk about was getting back together.
“Max doesn’t have a mommy and daddy anymore,” Wayne would tell her.
“Yeah, he does,” she’d reply. “It’s just that you have to make an effort to be in his life, that’s all.”
“It just shouldn’t be like this,” he’d say.
“Well, it is and you just have to make sense of that, instead of trying to go back, ’cause that’ll just never happen.”
Wayne always blamed Elizabeth for his not being in Max’s life, reminding her that she was the one who left.
“So he frickin’ moves to California and makes it completely impossible to have a normal relationship,” she said later.
At some point in 1997, Wayne called to tell Elizabeth that he was coming to Las Vegas to see Max. So they came up with a plan for Elizabeth to drop Max off at the child care center, where Wayne could spend some supervised time with his son. She always feared that Wayne might abduct the boy.
Elizabeth had hoped to avoid running into Wayne, but he was there when she arrived with Max, so she suggested they get something to eat at a nearby McDonald’s while Max got used to being with his father.
Wayne’s eyes welled up with tears as they sat in the restaurant. “I just miss you,” he said.
Elizabeth didn’t want to get into it, and since Max seemed fine with Wayne, she told him to go ahead and take Max for the day, then drop him off later at child care.
Later on, Elizabeth went for sushi with her boyfriend, then called the center to make sure that Wayne had already come and gone.
“Did Adam drop Max off?” she asked.
“Yeah, but Max didn’t want to stay, so [Wayne is still] here,” they told her.
Eventually, Wayne left Max inside, but he sat outside in his car, ruminating, for quite some time.
On October 14, 1997, Elizabeth and Max met up with Wayne in Arroyo Grande, just south of San Luis Obispo, so that father and son could have a visit mediated by Wayne’s friends Scott and Linda Hayes.
The three of them took a trip with the Hayes family to the pumpkin patch known as Avila Barn, then spent the afternoon at Avila Beach, where Wayne and Max went for a half-hour stroll along the shore.
Scott thought Wayne seemed excited to see his son, and although Wayne was cordial to Elizabeth, he could see Wayne’s lingering disappointment about the separation. Wayne also told him he wasn’t happy that Elizabeth had shaved Max’s head bald.
Wayne left in a funk after the six-hour visit with the family he’d lost. But no one would know just how much the visit upset him until more than a year later.