21
With her wedding approaching, Michelle Hetzel had many exciting new days ahead to look forward to, but already a problematic aspect of her past was threatening her chances of future happiness with Brandon. That part was her relationship with Devon Guzman, whom she’d first met back in grade school.
Devon Neireda Guzman was born just across the Delaware River from Easton, Pennsylvania, in the town of Phillipsburg, New Jersey, on June 9, 1981. She was the first child of Ricardo Guzman and Melody Otto, who’d conceived her not long after high school. Her middle name was bestowed in honor of her paternal grandmother.
Rick was born in Brooklyn, New York, one of four children, two brothers and a sister. The Guzman family left Brooklyn and began moving westward in 1969, when Rick was eight years old, settling first near Clinton, New Jersey, a picturesque town centered around a historic woolen mill, which stood as a symbol of early-American industry and claimed to be the most photographed spot in the Garden State. In 1972, the family moved west again, this time to Easton.
“I grew up basically right here in Easton,” Rick said. He attended Easton High School, and just after that, he met Melody Otto, a petite and bubbly redhead who was the sister of Rick’s sister’s boyfriend. “That’s how we met, back in ’79,” he said. “Devon was born in ’81.”
Rick Guzman is a straight-talking truck driver who speaks his mind with a flair that’s impossible to forget. “As you can see, I’m not your average individual,” he said during an interview. “I have quite the personality. Point is, Devon was like that. So she was really vibrant.”
Even as a young girl, she displayed the free spirit and vivacious personality that would make her a popular teenager and a much-remembered personality among family and friends. The sparkling character is something that runs in the family. “My parents are that way, all my brothers and sister,” Rick said. “We’re just kind of personalities that you just don’t forget.”
Some of the outgoingness was in the upbringing, Rick believed. “Some people, they grow up being timid. Depends the way you bring them up. Suppress them, they’ll be shy. Encourage them, they’ll shine.” Devon was encouraged, and she certainly shone, growing into a good-humored, active and athletic girl. She was nimble on her feet, loved to be on the go and participated in karate and other activities.
Three years after Devon was born, in 1984, Melody gave birth to a son, Derick, and she and Rick married the same year. Marriage and family life held its ups and downs for the young couple, and twelve years after the birth of their first child, in 1993, Rick and Melody divorced. Immediately afterward, the children lived with their mother, while Rick moved into a rented town house in Forks Township, remaining nearby to continue doing his share to raise the children.
Two years later, in 1995, Rick was ready for a change of scene. He had some savings put away and a bonus coming to him from his trucking job. One of his brothers, who lived in Phoenix, Arizona, offered to take him in until he got settled in the West. Knowing he’d have no problem finding a job driving a truck in a big city like Phoenix, he made the move, happy to be able to take the children with him.
“I thought, what a great idea—a fresh start, somewhere totally new,” Rick said. Devon was fourteen years old, a difficult age socially to be uprooted from friends and family and moved across the country. And it wasn’t easy for Rick, either, a single father raising two children during the challenging preteen and early teen years. But he relished the idea of supervising his children and providing stability and structure through these vital years of their lives. Having family close by eased the transition.
The difficulty of long-distance custody arrangements strained family relations at times during those years, but overall the children thrived in Phoenix. The move was imbued with the wide-open freedom of a clean start and a feeling of adventure. “We went out there with no furniture,” Rick recalled. “We took a tube ride down the Salt River and we kept the tubes at the end of the ride. We kept them for furniture. It was fun, you know. She was fourteen, he was eleven. They were doing great.”
Looking back, it was a happy, fun-filled time. “The kids were excelling in their academics, their attendance, their attitude,” Rick said.
Rick, Devon and Derick spent two years in Phoenix before family matters brought them back East, in 1997. Now sixteen years old, Devon entered Easton Area High School, where a familiar face was there to welcome her: Michelle Hetzel.
Devon and Michelle had first become friends when they were schoolgirls. “They were little,” Rick recalled. “They were still in grade school. Michelle had a newspaper route when they met. They were still pretty young yet.”
The friendship had lapsed during the years Devon was in Arizona, and the girls had no contact with each other during that time, but it quickly resumed when Devon returned.
“So we came back and they started hanging out again, and you know, they were young ladies now. They were six-teenish, seventeenish,” Rick said. Referring to Michelle, he said, “I never did see anything crazy coming from this girl.”
Rekindling their friendship in the halls of Easton Area High School, Devon and Michelle were drawn together right away. The connection was so natural, it was as if Devon had never left. However, adolescence had introduced a new and troubling factor into their relationship that had not existed in their more idyllic girlhood friendship.
This factor evidenced itself through competition over Michelle’s close friend, a towering blonde by the name of Keary Dehaven, who had moved into South Side around sixth grade. By high school Keary had developed statuesque proportions and a striking glamour that occasioned one observer to describe her as “model material.” Michelle, on the other hand, possessed a more understated beauty, and was described as proper or even “prissy.” Keary was Michelle’s close friend, but once Devon entered the picture, a three-way tug-of-war dynamic ensued. The girls were close and devoted, but the competition drove a sharp wedge in the friendships.
Part of the reason for this wedge may have been simple adolescent jealousy, favoritism games or jockeying for best-friend status, but another part was romantic competition. Michelle may have been less forthcoming about the fact that her developing sexual identity was at odds with that of the majority of her boy-crazy peers in the hallways of school, but Devon was more open. She understood herself to be bisexual, and she shared this fact about herself with her close family.
Rick preferred Michelle over Keary, who was less polished than Michelle and occasionally “manhandled” his daughter. He admitted that not everyone shared his fondness for Michelle and that “women’s intuition” told at least one person close to Devon that Michelle was trouble. But Rick didn’t see it.
“I actually liked her. You know, she always came by and she was a finer breed. Nicer clothes, nice car, nice family,” he said. “But she had the wool over my eyes. I never would’ve thought. Never.”
Dealing with an alternative sexual identity could not have made the year or so they spent in high school together an easy experience for Michelle, Devon or Keary—all three of them dropped out without graduating.
In the year that followed, free of school schedules, classes and homework, the girls entered into commitments that seemed designed to set a new course for their future relationships. Michelle found Brandon, and their relationship moved quickly to the engagement stage. Keary also met a man and married him, changing her name from Dehaven to Renner, but they quickly separated while he went off to basic training for the army. In his absence Devon and Keary took their relationship to a new level. Keary moved into Devon’s mother’s house on Ferry Street in Easton. Then, in October 1999, Devon and Keary set a wedding date of their own. It was to be June 11 of the coming year, and it marked the anniversary of their relationship together, the day they began telling people that they really were a couple.
On the surface the fierce three-way jealousies involving Michelle, Devon and Keary appeared to be dissolving as the girls moved through their eighteenth year. They embarked upon paths that promised eventually to disentangle them from the close-knit triangle they’d formed in high school and propel them into adult lives and relationships of their own, apart from the jealousy-plagued threesome they had become.
But the fact was that under the surface, the tension that had always existed still existed. Only now, with Michelle engaged to Brandon, and Devon committed to Keary, it had been forced underground. The love triangle had not gone away, but rather it had become a secret, and the feelings engendered gathered force in the confines of secrecy. If before, these feelings had been merely destructive to healthy friendships, now they were growing dangerous.