SEVEN

Gerry

“I sleep with them, I marry them, okay? I could just sleep around.”

Jill Lonita Coit

Deposition, January 30, 1993

There was a new man in Jill’s life! She met him while she was fixing up her new business, before her breakup with Steely, and months before the divorce.

When Jill assumed ownership of the Oak Street Bed & Breakfast, she launched herself into the enterprise with her usual energy and enthusiasm.

Once her husband was back in Culver she worked quickly to wind up the paperwork finalizing the sale, so she could turn her full attention to renovating and redecorating the B&B to meet her own specifications of what it should look like.

Seth tagged along with her and apparently invested somewhere between $53,000 and $106,000, most of it from his trust fund, to become a partner. Different versions were eventually given of exactly how much of his money went into the B&B.

They shared the work as well as the financing. Jill cooked, cleaned, handled the books, and ran the office, making reservations and welcoming guests. Seth mowed lawns, did most of the repairs and handled the day-to-day maintenance. Neither mother nor son were lazy.

The business partnership between them was a business decision that Steely bitterly complained he had been unaware of.

“I didn’t even know my name wasn’t on the paperwork when the trouble started,” he says.

In Steamboat Springs, Jill was busy launching the new business. The B & B at the corner of Oak and Seventh Streets occupies a large lot with a string of single story wooden motel guest units painted brown and arranged in an L-shape. A two-story brown, wood-frame house constructed at the intersection of the streets, which sits back across the driveway and parking spaces from the center of the “L” has five additional guest rooms in the upstairs area.

Across an alley behind the ground-floor L-shaped units, there was also a small house and four additional parking spaces that were included in the purchase. Jill and her son rented the house to tenants.

A small single-story wooden building at the side of the main house in the motel complex was set up as the dining room, where guests were served a varied menu of breakfasts featuring selections from eggs cooked to order, with bacon, sausage, and ham, to delectable French toast or pancakes and hot or cold cereals. Guests were provided with endless pots of steaming coffee, fruit juice, and a selection of fresh breads and rolls, jams, and jellies and fruit—everything served family style at place settings arranged with linen napkins.

But Jill’s taste perhaps was most obvious in her decoration of the guest rooms. They were small, snug, and cozy. Perhaps above all, they were decorated with a feminine appreciation for design and comfort.

The one-bedroom units were dominated by huge, high brass beds that sat in the middle of the rooms, made up with thick, fluffy comforters with bright floral patterns. Pillows were almost big enough to serve as beds themselves. Another patterned quilt used as a wall hanging covered one side of the rooms. A large cradle-shaped wicker basket on the floor filled with fluffy towels and washcloths decorated with bright floral patterns to match the decor of the room, brass-based lamps and a couple of small tables—one accommodating a television set—comprised the remainder of the furnishings. Narrow walkways surrounded the bed on three sides, and a tiny bathroom about the size of an average closet accounted for the remainder of the space.

The low ceilings were barely high enough to accommodate a six-footer without bending his head, but rather than being a negative aspect, they merely added to the cozy atmosphere of the rooms. They conserved heat and made it easy to imagine returning from a cold winter day on the slopes, and burrowing into the warmth and snug security of the little bungalows. Crisp white lace curtains were hung at the windows, and a couple of healthy green plants completed the decorating motif.

Inside the house, the living room was sparsely furnished with antiques, including a few pieces retained from the estate of the late Thelma Steely. The brightly-polished hardwood floors and stairway bannisters were stained or varnished in their natural color to show the grain. A fireplace was built into one wall. The upstairs accommodations were also small, and a hallway bathroom was set up to be shared by the guests in two of the rooms. There were also a few two-bedroom units.

With all the renovations, Jill and her son were able to offer guests rooms ranging from $90 to $125 nightly during the ski season. The location, a few minutes’ walk from the shops, restaurants and taprooms along Lincoln Avenue and the side streets, was prime. Jill fixed up one of the upstairs units in the house for herself.

Seth and his girlfriend, Julie A. English, lived in one of the apartments in the L-shaped units. Another unit was set aside as a laundry room, leaving eight for rentals. Julie was an industrious and solidly-built young woman from Georgia who skied and enjoyed bicycling, gardening, and other outdoor activities. She also liked to travel, and she worked for awhile as a cashier at the Hard Rock Cafe in London, England, and as a travel coordinator and receptionist for a firm in Melbourne, Australia.

Seth began to look into the possibilities of adding a 500-square-foot greenhouse with dormer windows and French doors onto the central building, making preliminary enquiries with a builder and discussing city-zoning requirements with an attorney. He also talked about putting in a hot tub and spiffing up the driveway.

But the renovating and redecorating didn’t occur overnight or without a lot of hard work, and Jill found herself making regular buying trips around the corner to the Boggs Hardware store.

Boggs Hardware is a downtown landmark in Steamboat Springs. It is one of the oldest family-owned businesses in the resort town. And it occupies the ground floor of a two-story, red-brick building at 730 Lincoln Avenue, facing on the north side of the main drag, which is also US Route 40 and defines the little resort town’s six or seven-block-long central business district. Longtime residents refer to the structure simply, as the “Boggs Building.”

Surrounded by restaurants, taprooms, curio and souvenir stores, and T-shirt and ski shops that cater heavily to the tourist trade, Boggs Hardware was only a few minutes from the B & B. It was a trip Jill made frequently, and more often than not, of all the busy clerks and salesmen she was waited on, she was most often served by one of the co-owners, Gerald William Boggs. Family members and almost everyone else called him Gerry.

In 1989 when Jill bought the B & B, Gerry was a tall and husky lifetime bachelor a few days away from his forty-eighth birthday. He had rapidly balding dark hair, wore a heavy but neatly trimmed mustache and dark-framed glasses. He and his younger brother, Douglas W. Boggs, were the children of William Harold Boggs, who started the business in Steamboat Springs in 1939. A half-century later ownership had passed to the two sons and to another partner, Bob McCullough.

The Boggs brothers were native Coloradoans, but the oldest son was born in Burlington in Kit Carson County a few miles west of the Kansas border. At about the time WWII broke out in Europe, the family moved further west across the Front Range of the Rockies to Steamboat Springs in the fertile Yampa Valley. It was a nice place to live for a young family, with parents who were independent, hardy, and energetic enough to thrive in and endure the fierce winters.

Even in those early days, the vibrant little community already had a reputation as a resort town, although it is also the center of commerce for scores of other families who make their living as ranchers, farmers, miners, or railroaders. Many of the people who drove into Steamboat Springs to shop lived in other even smaller towns nearby.

But Steamboat Springs was the commercial center. And it has always drawn tourists. As recently as the early nineteenth century, nomadic Indians still made annual treks to the valley to live off the local bounty, while soaking in the profusion of hot sulphur springs that bubble up throughout the area. They believed the springs were sacred and the Great Spirit lived below them, hidden deep in the earth.

The Indians found the springs rejuvenating and visited them when they were exhausted, ill, or after battles with their enemies. Most of the visitors were bands of Arapaho or northern Utes, mountain Indians who pursued deer and elk in the high timber country and fiercely defended their Rocky Mountain domain against occasional hunting or war parties from Shoshone, Cheyenne, Kiowa and other neighboring tribes. The Arapaho and Utes clashed frequently over the lush hunting ground.

Most of the Utes who visited the roughly 150 natural mineral springs in what is now Routt County during the summer belonged to the Yamparika, or Yampa, band. Related Utes called them root-eaters, because of their fondness for the succulent carrot-like yampa root that was as much a part of their diet as wild game. They dressed in buckskin decorated with feathers and beads and lived during the deadly cold winters in teepees made of buffalo hide.

The tribal name of a group of their smaller, more primitive and weaker Piute cousins, the Uintahs, which fished and foraged farther west in the sun-parched desert plateau near Great Salt Lake, was eventually adapted to coin a name for the state of Utah.

The most memorable of the thermal springs once visited by the Yampa Utes is Black Sulphur Spring. It was the churning roar of the unique spring that led to the community’s current name. According to early storytellers, French trappers made their way into the valley in the mid-1800’s when they heard the sound of chugging, and assumed the noise was caused by an approaching steamboat. The mountain men were wrong. The noise was made by Colorado’s only geyser, chugging and gushing water into the air.

If the trappers had been in the area awhile longer and paid closer attention, they would have realized there was no way a steamboat could have negotiated the swift-moving shallow water of the rocky Yampa River at that point. Although there may have been periods of heavy snow-melt or other conditions a century ago when the river swelled, even then it’s still highly unlikely that anything with a deeper draft than a raft or a canoe could have safely skimmed over the rocks and boulders. Cold and clean, with deep pools scattered here and there, it was near perfect for breeding trout, but it wasn’t a stream that was formed to handle commerce or passenger boats.

Hot springs still bubble from the earth in the settlement today, but the geyser and chugging are long gone. The underground foundation was disturbed when the railroad was constructed through the valley. There are still more natural springs in the immediate area than any other location in the world, however. And residents share their habitat with a surprising variety of wild animals that have survived the encroachment of civilization. Mule deer show up in back yards, foxes raid chickenhouses and spook dogs, raccoons pilfer cat food from pet dishes, and rare bald eagles still occasionally screech overhead.

It wasn’t long before people realized the potential of winter sports for tourist revenue, and skiing became an important local business as well as an avocation. In the meantime, world competitors were developing on the slopes as males and females trained and vied in everything from cross-country and downhill skiing to slalom and jumping.

By the time Jill and Seth bought the Oak Street Bed & Breakfast, the even smaller town of Vail surrounded by the White River National Forest miles to the south, was the Rocky Mountain ski resort of choice for most of Hollywood’s celebrities for winter vacationing. But buoyed by the attraction of Mount Werner, which peaks at 10,585 feet and is named after a legendary family of world and Olympic skiers, Steamboat is becoming more popular every year. Storm Peak and Sunshine Peak are only 300 feet lower than the crest of Mount Werner, and with Thunderhead Peak, Christie Peak, and Rendezvous Saddle, they offer a glistening white powder crisscross of ski slopes and trails for everyone from beginners to world class competitors.

Winter tourists begin showing up in full force with the first deep snowfall to ski, snowmobile, dogsled, hunt, and take advantage of other winter sports. Steamboat’s resort hotels, motels, bed-and-breakfasts, and condominiums fill up with visitors, and the winter resort comes into its own as “Ski City USA.” The population of the town of 5,000 nearly doubles.

Gerry spent his formative years there, and returned to live out his life as an adult. He graduated from the local high school in 1959, then matriculated to the University of Colorado. He majored in political science, with a minor in Russian language.

Graduating in 1964, he enlisted in the Army and successfully applied for military-intelligence training. By the fall of 1965 he was in Vietnam as a member of the First Cavalry Division and helped set up the huge base at An Khe in the central highlands. He was assigned to a helicopter unit. After completing his one-year tour of duty he returned to Steamboat Springs for a thirty-day furlough, then went back to Vietnam as a volunteer for a second tour. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his service, and in 1967 was given an honorable discharge.

Although he joined the family business, his adventurous life didn’t end after returning home from the military service. He took advantage of a government program to learn to fly and eventually qualified to pilot multi-engine aircraft. And he became an excellent scuba diver and undersea and outdoor photographer, using his vacation time to travel to Pacific Ocean diving locations at least once or twice a year.

Like so many of his Rocky Mountain neighbors, he was a devoted outdoorsman. But he was also careful to make time for the academic and intellectual side of his personality and was an avid reader. He continued to take classes at the University of Colorado, served as a museum tour guide, and became a very good amateur archeologist and anthropologist.

He had a special fondness for mind-games, cryptograms, and anything that challenged the intellect. He liked movies and was a regular patron at local theaters, the Chief Plaza III across Lincoln Avenue from the hardware store, and the Times Square Cinema among the shops and restaurants scattered at the foot of Mount Werner. He frequently rented videos to watch at home, as well.

Gerry also loved children, showering the offspring of family and friends with attention and presents. He was “Uncle Gerry” to many youngsters, and became the godfather of the son of his business partner, Bob McCullough. He was a regular visitor at the McCullough home and on Christmas and birthdays, children could count on “Uncle Gerry” to show up with an armload of presents. He was a caring and loyal friend, and McCullough’s wife once remarked to her husband that if anything ever happened to him she knew she would have Gerry to lean on.

His friends were devoted to him, as he was to them. But if there was one thing he had missed out on in his busy life it was heavy dating experience or serious relationships with women. He was simply too busy, or too shy, to chase after them.

He was the kind of man Jill was especially successful with. And he looked like excellent husband material. He owned his own $90,000 home, earned a good salary of $2,500 a month with take-home pay of about $1,900, and had no large debts.

She could hardly have been more charming during their brief encounters at Boggs Hardware. According to Jill, she eventually spent nearly $19,000 at the store during her renovation project at the B&B. Her relationship with the quiet bachelor didn’t progress beyond small talk over her purchases at the store, however, until a warm day in the late spring or early summer of 1990—Jill was later unable to remember more exactly—when they chanced on one another outside the City Market Food & Pharmacy in Central Park Plaza at the edge of town. Gerry was with his father when they stopped in the parking lot to chat about her T-Bird. It was warm and she had removed the top.

The sports car was perfectly cared for and it was shining like new. Gerry remarked that he would love to drive it. He invited her out to dinner.

As Jill later recalled the incident, she told him that if he wanted to take her T-Bird for a spin it was okay with her. Later she dropped off a note for him at the hardware store. It was typewritten in cursive style on a word processor and, although her name was typed on the note, typical of her, it wasn’t signed. By Jill’s own admission, her handwriting was atrocious and she typed almost all of her written communications on a word processor, usually in cursive letters. And throughout her relationship with the Steamboat Springs merchant, she began his first name with a “J” rather than a “G.”

Gerry took her out, and he drove the T-Bird. He headed west on Route 40 past the Yampa Valley Regional Airport to a little restaurant in the town of Hayden, which developed after the railroad arrived as a cattle-shipping center for surrounding ranches.

After their first date, the couple got together a couple of times a week, usually driving somewhere for dinner dates or simply meeting for lunch at the Paradise Grill and Saloon, the Fifth Street Cafe, Anderson & Friends Good Earth Restaurant, or some other eatery near the hardware store. The people who live and visit in Steamboat Springs tend to be active and outdoorsy, and tourists are lured during the more temperate seasons with a variety of festivals and other events. Although snow sports and attractions are what Steamboat Springs is most famous for, they are far from the only game in town.

Jill and Gerry, like their neighbors, had year-round local entertainment choices. June featured marathon footraces, a music festival, the Yampa River Festival, and the Western Weekend with a huge chili-cooking contest, cowboy poetry reading, a rodeo, and an Old West gunfighter competition. On the Fourth of July, children and adults joined in a downtown parade along Lincoln Avenue. There was Cowboy Roundup Days for rodeo fans, the Summer Jubilee, and the dramatic and colorful Rainbow Week featuring a “hot-air balloon rodeo.” A softball tournament and more rodeos were offered for entertainment in August. In September there was Motorcycle Week to look forward to; they could view the annual Vintage Auto Race and Concours d’Elegance, or enjoy the Vintage Aircraft Fly-in.

But Jill and Gerry shared more personal pleasures, as well. They were both avid bibliophiles and they talked about books they had read and collected. One day she surprised him with a present of a Nordic-Track, which was set up in an area of the house used as an exercise room. She had a stationary exercise bike which also wound up in the room, alongside weightlifting devices and other workout equipment. Jill believed in keeping fit, and in addition to her lifelong avoidance of smoking and drinking, exercise was an important part of her healthy lifestyle. She and Gerry sometimes rode a tandem bicycle around the neighborhood. It was Jill’s.

By the time of the Christmas holidays, Jill had virtually moved out of her upstairs quarters at the bed-and-breakfast and into Gerry’s home at 870 West Hillside Court, on a steep ridge overlooking the town. Early the next year, Jill and Gerry slipped off to Boulder and obtained a marriage license. It was April Fools’ Day.

Three days later they were quietly married in a private civil ceremony in Steamboat Springs by a municipal court judge. The bride had told her groom she was married twice before: to William Clark Coit, and to Carl V. Steely. She was once-widowed, and once-divorced.

She gave her name on the application as Jill Coit-Steely, and indicated that she was divorced in 1983 in Haiti. Her birthday was entered on the form as June 11, 1944, and her place of birth as New Orleans. She used a post-office box number for her current address. The groom indicated his father was William Harold Boggs and his mother was Edith (Parke) Bullock, who was deceased. The elder Boggs had been married to his wife, Sylvia, for years.

There were no formal wedding announcements, and no photos of the happy couple in The Steamboat Pilot. Their friends and relatives learned about the marriage a few at a time. No fuss, no muss. Jill liked it that way, and Gerry was agreeable. He was a private man who had never sought out attention. Seth, his mother’s faithful confidant and shadow, didn’t even attend. Gerry’s brother and sister-in-law, Jan, joined the newly-married couple in celebrating the wedding with a big feed at the Old West Steakhouse a few blocks down Lincoln Avenue from the store.

Months later, the bride complained that two weeks after the wedding her new husband went off by himself on a scuba diving trip to Belize when he should have been with her on their honeymoon. He told her he couldn’t spend two weeks in a confined area with one person, she said. So she cancelled out and her husband went on the Central American scuba-diving adventure by himself.

The lifelong bachelor probably never should have gotten married in the first place, Jill groused. She married him for his intellect. Most of the eligible men in Steamboat Springs were ski bums, she explained.

Despite the irritation of the separate honeymoon, even if Jill’s version of the odd event is indeed true, the first months of the marriage were nearly idyllic. The energetic couple took weekend trips and occasional longer journeys together around Colorado or nearby states, usually staying in bed-and-breakfasts. Operators of many of the hostelries banded together to swap complimentary rooms and meals, and the couple took advantage of the cost-saving opportunity to travel.

About the time Gerry went off on his diving trip, an insurance claim was filed for major water damage at the house. The loss was eventually estimated at more than $17,400. Jill blamed the incident on Gerry. He insisted on remodeling his garage just about the time the season’s heavy snowfalls were about to begin, she said. Even though he had been warned about the bad timing, he undertook the project for her so there would be room to park her car in the garage alongside his Jeep. Another version of exactly why Gerry was remodeling the garage would be told later.

The claim, nevertheless, included damage to the drywalls, replacement of carpet from the upstairs hallway, bedroom, bath, and stairs, and major remodeling. Georgia A. Taylor, one of the few woman acquaintances in Steamboat Springs that Jill sometimes lunched with, was the claims adjuster. According to Jill, Seth pitched in to help out with the repair work, putting in more than thirty hours and charging for only a fraction of his time.

Jill drove all the way to Denver to shop and save money on appliances for the house. She bought a black leather sofa for the living room, replaced kitchenware, and shored up the supply of towels and linens. Even before the water damage occurred, Gerry’s house was sparsely furnished with a combination of treasured longtime possessions and cast-offs passed on to him by friends or relatives. He lived bachelor style. His new wife enjoyed upgrading things and giving the home a feminine touch.

Despite the damage, Jill moved most of the rest of her possessions into her husband’s house, and assumed the role of the new Mrs. Boggs. She already knew her father-in-law, William, and his wife, Sylvia; her brother-in-law and his wife, Jan. She met nieces and nephews and cousins; and she met the Boggs family attorney, Vance E. Halvorson.

She later recalled that shortly after Gerry introduced them, the lawyer soberly advised her that she was now a Boggs and should conduct herself as a Boggs. The implication was clear: her new role carried important obligations and responsbilities.

Now that he was married to Jill, Gerry had less time for private hours of reading, playing intellectual games, and poking around with hobbies like archeology and anthropology. For the first time, he attended the annual ski ball sponsored by the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club. It was the central event of the local social season. During all his years of living in the resort town, Gerry had never attended a major social event, and a photographer for the local newspaper, the Steamboat Pilot, snapped a picture of the prominent retailer, gussied up in a handsome, dark suit with his beautiful wife on his arm. Dressed in the suit and tie, Gerry looked more stiff and uncomfortable than entertained. But Jill, wearing her hair cut Audrey Hepburn-close, with dangling oval earrings and a white formal gown, was smiling and radiant as she walked into the glittering ballroom at the Sheraton Steamboat Resort with her husband.

When Jill’s middle son, William Andrew, got married, Gerry traveled with Jill to Jackson, Mississippi, to attend the nuptials. Andrew and his bride, Lynn, settled in Denver.

Gerry met Jill’s parents, Henry and “Nita” Billiot at the wedding. The first thing Mrs. Billiot asked her new son-in-law was about his religious beliefs. It was a surprising question, and he was a bit taken aback.

“I’m sort of a Heinz Fifty-seven variety-type religion,” he replied. Gerry wasn’t a regular churchgoer and religion wasn’t a big part of his life, but he was tolerant of the beliefs of others including some non-Christian traditions. Judging by the query, he figured Mrs. Billiot to be a woman of strong religious faith. The question was obviously important to her.

William Clark III also married. The youngest son and his wife eventually settled in Manhattan Beach, California, where he assumed a management position overseeing the operation of three stores for a national retail chain. When Gerry’s niece married, Jill attended the wedding with him, and some of the out-of-town guests stayed at the bed-and-breakfast. Suddenly, Gerry’s days and nights were filled with social events and family activities, many of them organized or arranged by his bride.

As they always had, cars continued to play an important role in Jill’s life. She loved them and she loved driving. She also resumed her zealous pursuit of education. Jill signed up for college classes at two schools in Greeley, the town laid out and settled east of the Rocky Mountains at the confluence of the South Platte and Cache LaPoudre rivers more than a century earlier.

She took psychology, education, and Asian history classes at the University of Northern Colorado, and geography and US history classes at Aims Community College. Jill attended UNC full-time during the summer and fall terms in 1991, and eventually continued through the fall term of 1992 and the spring term of 1993. She was especially interested in acquiring the proper education and credentials to counsel people who were suicidal. She was combining studies at two schools so she could graduate more quickly, and told people back in Steamboat Springs she was working for a master’s degree.

For most people perhaps, regularly making the grueling two-hundred-fifty-mile round-trip jaunts over the Continental Divide between Steamboat Springs and Greeley might be a prospect that was more discouraging than attractive for a successful businesswoman and homemaker who was already in late middle age. But Jill wasn’t intimidated, and she easily found accommodations in Greeley where she could stay during the week. She and her husband took turns driving to visit with each other on alternating weekends. One weekend he drove to Greeley or some other town where they could stay together at a bed-and-breakfast, and the next weekend she did the driving. Often their get-togethers were a hundred miles or more from either Steamboat Springs or Greeley. They went wherever they had a complimentary room, and they had an opportunity to visit areas of the state they hadn’t seen or spent much time in before.

At that time, Gerry owned a 1984 Toyota Jeep and a 1976 Toyota 4-Runner he had bought from his niece, Carlynn Taylor. Gerry usually drove the Jeep, and he fretted that it wasn’t good for the 4-Runner to sit around idle, so Jill borrowed it for some of her trips. One weekend he borrowed Jill’s Mercedes to drive to Evergreen, just outside the southwest edge of Denver to stay with her at a bed-and-breakfast. He picked up the car from Jill’s son, who had some diesel-mechanic training. Seth checked the oil and drove the car to a gas station where he filled the tank before turning it over to Gerry. Before his stepfather drove away in the car, Seth explained a few basics about its operation, such as how to gas it up, and how to buckle the seat belts. He cautioned that if motor oil was added, Gerry should use diesel.

Nevetheless, when Gerry was still miles from Evergreen the oil pressure trouble light flicked on. By the time he got to the bed-and-breakfast the engine was ruined. Seth drove down the next day in the Suburban with a mechanic and they hauled the car back to Four Star Repair in Steamboat Springs. Jill was upset, and let her husband know she blamed him for the expensive repair.

Gerry offered to pay for the repairs, but according to his later account, Jill refused. She planned to pawn the damaged car off on Carl Steely as part of her settlement with him. Jill denied she had any such intent. “I think it’s a joke because Carl would not accept a broken-engine car,” she scoffed.

The vehicle was the same car taken to a South Bend Mercedes dealer to replace the engine and transmission a couple of years earlier. Estimates for replacing the engine once again varied from $5,000 to $7,000, depending on who was making the calculations and whether or not a junkyard Mercedes could be found and cannibalized for the expensive part. The Blue Book value was only $2,800. A professional insurance adjuster eventually appraised the total value of the Mercedes at much less than that: $1,001.23.

Although Jill had a way of making a mountain out of a molehill, it appeared at the time that the bad luck with the Mercedes had caused only a minor glitch in the happiness of the marriage. She had another, more positive and happier revelation to spring on the couple’s acquaintances and friends.

Jill was either forty-six or forty-seven—depending on which year of birth, 1943 or 1944, is correct—when she began confiding to various people in Steamboat Springs that she was pregnant with Gerry’s baby. She told Georgia Taylor, and she told William and Sylvia Boggs. The prospective parents made an appointment with a local obstetrician-gynecologist, and discussed home birthing and the possibility of home delivery. But Jill never returned to the doctor for follow-up prenatal care.

Gerry was ecstatic. His heart was set on becoming a parent, and he especially wanted a little girl that he could raise and spoil. He even picked a name for their child: Lara. Jill disclosed to close friends of the couple that she underwent an ultrasound, which confirmed the baby was a girl.

Gerry’s friends in Steamboat Springs and elsewhere were thrilled at the news and happy for the couple. Barbara Smith, who had known Gerry since 1968, later recalled how excited he was about his impending fatherhood. He laughed and joked, and they decided to set up a college fund so Lara could attend Harvard. Gerry was obsessed with his daughter and speculated endlessly about how she would be raised and about her future.

He had the Boggs family attorney draw up a new will for him naming Jill and their unborn child as beneficiaries of his estate. Gerry explained to Halvorson that his wife also planned to have her lawyer, Bruce Jarchow, draft a new will for her.

The Thanine (Thane) Gillilands, a couple from the western Denver suburb of Westminster, who were especially close and longtime friends of Gerry, gave the expectant parents a crib, a stroller, and clothing left by their own little girl who had died. They were gifts from the heart, and Gerry appreciated their importance and special meaning to his friends. Mrs. Gilliland helped Jill shop for other baby clothes.

The expectant parents kept busy preparing for the arrival of the child.

Gerry had a $19,500 addition built onto his house for the baby. He bought books and audiotapes on child rearing and a car-seat baby carrier, and he promised he would arrange to pick up a high chair at the store, where he got a discount. Children’s books, including copies of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, If I Ran The Circus, Aesop’s Fables, Sneches and Six By Seuss, were collected, along with video movies: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, The Jungle Book, and Fantasia. A stuffed animal collection was started for the baby, with a large pink panther and a small dinosaur. Gerry was even given a card signed, “To Daddy, from Lara.”

Jill came home with armloads of baby clothes. “I bought gobs of clothes.… Everywhere I went. Any time there was a sale. I’m basically cheap. I bought lots of clothes,” she later recalled. Jill watched for sales at stores like Steamboat Kids and bought little girl baby clothes from infancy up to the age of four.

She explained she was seeing a doctor in Greeley to monitor the health of herself and the baby. But when Gerry asked who the doctor was, she was evasive. Eventually she gave him the name of a doctor at a womens’ clinic. The birth was expected in September, but the due date was eventually set back by several weeks.

Nonetheless, Jill inquired at a Steamboat Springs dentist’s office about making an appointment for a checkup after Lara cut her baby teeth. And she talked to a hairdresser about making an appointment to have the infant’s hair done. Lara was still apparently months away from making her appearance, but her mother was arranging a busy schedule for her. Nothing about her future welfare was being neglected.

Jill was gone from Steamboat Springs for weeks at a time, attending classes and hitting the books in Greeley or taking care of business affairs. It worried her husband terribly. He was concerned about his pregnant wife being away on her own so much and doing all that driving over treacherous mountain roads while she was carrying their baby. The child was the only thing he talked about when he telephoned or visited with his friends the Gillilands.

Despite his suspicions about Jill’s curious pregnancy and odd behavior, he asked his friend, Gilliland, for a professional opinion: Was Jill really pregnant? Gilliland was a Certified Physician’s Assistant (PAC). He was a highly-trained medical journeyman who was professionally and legally qualified to perform many, although not all, of the functions of a physician. Gerry cast him in multiple roles and at various times he was asked to be doctor and medical advisor, father confessor, and most important of all perhaps, trusted friend.

At that time, according to Jill, her pregnancy was in the seventh month. On the rare occasions lately when Gerry saw her, she didn’t look pregnant to him, but he didn’t trust his own observations. Although his brother and sister-in-law had a couple of children, and he was a godfather to another child, he hadn’t spent much time around pregnant women. He wasn’t quite sure how they behaved, or if a woman could carry a baby at that late stage without showing more physical signs than Jill was exhibiting. She was supposedly in her third trimester.

She wore bulky clothes, but that wasn’t unusual for anyone, man or woman, pregnant or not, who lived in the Rocky Mountain ski community during the late fall or early winter season. Jill was still pert, still full of energy, and looked as healthy as a whole-grain muffin.

Gilliland told his friend the only thing he could, considering the circumstances. Jill had dropped in for a visit with the Gillilands the previous week, but Thane hadn’t examined her. He said he simply didn’t know.

Gerry’s chum didn’t let matters drop at that, however. He telephoned the clinic in Greeley and asked for the doctor Jill had named as her obstretrician. No one there had been monitoring a pregnancy for Jill Boggs.

While Jill was replaying the old phantom baby game with her prominent Steamboat Springs husband, pressure was building on her from the divorce court judgment in Plymouth, Indiana. She owed Steely $100,000, and the deadline set by Judge Cook had long ago come and gone. Steely wanted his money. But coming up with the purchase price of the Oak Street Bed & Breakfast, costs of renovations and other expenses, had depleted most of her ready cash and other negotiables and plunged her deep into debt for loans from banks, family members, personal acquaintances, and ex-husbands.

In North Manchester, Metzger had indicated he would help out with a $50,000 loan. She was counting on an acquaintance in Mississippi, R. L. Goodwin, to provide more money. And the First National Bank of Steamboat Springs agreed to float a $50,000 loan to Jill and Seth.

Just about the time it looked as if she was about to work herself out of her financial morass, Steely filed a suit against her for $250,000. She and Seth were anxious to build the greenhouse and make other improvements at the bed-and-breakfast. But she was suddenly back in the soup, plunged even deeper than before into a money mess and left with hardly any room for necessary financial maneuvering.

She had tapped just about every possible source of loans she could think of, and she was still dreadfully short of money. Jill advertised the bed-and-breakfast for sale. An ad in the Steamboat Pilot on April 11, 1991 announced: “OAK STREET BED & BREAKFAST. Recently renovated, nine-unit plus five-bedroom house, charming antique decor in this turnkey operation.” No price was quoted.

Another ad in a giveaway real estate publication, however, pitched the B&B for $750,000. This time the copy specified a total of thirteen “professionally-decorated” rooms, one less than the newspaper listing indicated. A later ad in a different real estate booklet listed the “charming B&B located in the heart of Old Town” for $650,000. The ad carried a picture of the inn, and also stipulated thirteen rooms.

Jill also went to her new husband for help. She said she needed to borrow $100,000.

As later recounted by Jill in depositions, Gerry agreed to take out a loan from the Yampa Valley National Bank in Hayden where his brother was a member of the board of directors. Then he would pass the money on to her, in return for a personal note or deed of trust on the bed-and-breakfast. Jill signed over a partial deed of trust and settled back to wait for the loan.

Seth also recalled discussing the loan with his mother’s husband a couple of times—once during Burger Night at the Old Town Pub & Restaurant and another time during Taco Night at the Old West Steakhouse. “Gerry Boggs mentioned it to me that he was going to help us out,” Seth remembered, “because I was really stressed out about it. Gerry was going to help us out. Loan us $100,000.”

Like so much about Jill’s life and business affairs, explanations and surface appearances don’t always tell the whole story about what was really going on, however. For one thing, Gerry firmly denied in depositions that he ever agreed to try to use his brother’s influence in any way to obtain a loan from Yampa Valley National. He also denied talking with Seth at the restaurants and telling him he was going to loan the young man and his mother $100,000.

Gerry provided a startling different version of Jill’s motivations for signing over the deed of trust to him. She explained she wanted to give him the deed of trust in order to protect the Oak Street Bed & Breakfast for their child, he said. Jill didn’t want Carl Steely coming to town and seizing the business to satisfy the whopping financial judgment ordered by the Indiana court.

That version of the affair sounds especially believable in view of the fact that Jill never got the $100,000 loan Gerry supposedly promised to arrange for her.

Jill may have been concerned by the threat to the financial bulwark she had built for herself. But neither that nor baby Lara slowed the pace of her frenetic life. While all the talk and commotion was going on about the mysterious new member of the Boggs family, other more ominous matters that Jill and her husband were initially unaware of were already set in motion that were about to shatter her latest masquerades. Ghosts from her past were lurking just offstage, and were about to make their appearance.

The Boggs brothers were close, and Douglas was troubled by ugly suspicions about the real background and character of the perplexing woman who had charmed his longtime bachelor brother. All the mystery and intrigue over the baby simply didn’t make any sense, and other aspects of Jill’s behavior were troubling. She was pestering him to help her out financially, and there seemed to be reason to believe that both Gerry’s welfare and that of the hardware store could be damaged.

The concern mushroomed after Carl Steely traveled back to Steamboat Springs to ski and to talk with the local lawyer who was working with him to collect the divorce judgment from Jill. Attorney William C. Hibbard was also a skier, and the two men spent some time together on the slopes, mixing business with pleasure. Hibbard reportedly told Douglas Boggs that Jill’s husband was in town and he wanted to settle up matters with his wife. He was planning to file a lawsuit against her. The news was a bombshell. Douglas is said to have told his brother about the planned lawsuit—and that Jill was still married to a man in Indiana.

She was furious when she heard the story. Hibbard’s office was on Oak Street only a couple of blocks from the Bed & Breakfast, and she stormed inside to read the riot act. She was outraged because Gerry’s brother learned about the impending suit. “I went in and told Bill Hibbard, number one, he shouldn’t be putting my business on the street before he did something,” she later explained.

Among other things, she was also angry because some of Hibbard’s business associates or clients sometimes stayed at the B&B, and he had agreed to represent Carl. She considered the combination of the two to constitute a betrayal.

But the cat was out of the bag. Douglas Boggs talked by telephone with Steely. The Indiana educator had some hair-curling stories to tell about his onetime helpmate.

Douglas Boggs hired a private investigator from Denver to check into the life of the merry widow and divorcee who had breezed into town and married his brother after a whirlwind courtship. Judy Prier-Lewis had been a close friend of Gerry’s for twenty years and a private investigator for more than half that time. She turned to the task at hand with quiet determination. It didn’t take long to confirm that her friend, the brother of her client, was married to a bigamist.

As the investigation broadened the industrious PI learned that the new Mrs. Boggs had many other secrets hidden in her background. When the investigation turned for help to Houston, the private detective called on Stan Lewis Associates, a firm headed by a fellow sleuth in the Bayou City area. The two Lewis’s were no relation through either blood or marriage, but she had done work for him in the past. Stan Lewis, his colleagues, and Judy Prier-Lewis quickly collected an alarming package of information.

Jill Boggs was a woman who had been married to four different men before tying the knot with Gerry. It would still be awhile before Gerry learned she was wed to almost twice that number of men before she charmed her way into his life. A deposition was eventually filed in Routt County Circuit Court stating: “Four of the prior marriages overlapped and were either bigamous or polygamous.”

The investigators ultimately inspected court records, records of property sales, interviewed a string of men and women, and conducted surveillances. They determined Jill had used a fistful of names, including aliases that had no connection to the surnames of her various husbands. Perhaps most disturbing of all, one of her husbands had died in an unsolved shooting nearly twenty years earlier that occurred only twenty days after she filed for divorce. And despite police efforts to question her in the baffling case, she had avoided all personal contact with homicide investigators.

Gerry was crushed when he learned that his wife was still married to Carl Steely. Jill said she was merely confused about her marital status, and had made an honest mistake. She had believed she was divorced.

Jill went to a Greeley attorney, Elizabeth Strobel, and explained her problem, or at least part of it. She applied for declaration of invalidity of her marriage to Gerry, a legal ruling and terminology that amounted to an annulment. He was agreeable to permitting Jill to handle the matter with an out-of-town lawyer, and in an out-of-town court. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but it was embarrassing none the less, and he could see no reason to make the marriage muddle a public affair in Steamboat Springs. He didn’t even tell his family lawyer, until the annulment procedure was already a done deal.

The settlement was affirmed by the Logan County District Court in Sterling, more than one hundred miles northeast of Greeley on December 3. It wasn’t likely that a snoopy reporter from either Steamboat Springs or from Greeley would hear about it, and if a Sterling journalist stumbled onto the file he or she would have no interest in the case. There wasn’t much chance anyone outside the courtroom knew either Jill or Gerry or cared if they had obtained an annulment. The town and the court in the far northeast corner of Colorado less than an hour drive from the Nebraska state line was about as isolated from Steamboat Springs and Boggs Hardware as it could be.

A decree of invalidity of marriage was issued by Judge Steven E. Shinn. The jurist noted the couple believed at the time of their marriage that Jill’s previous union to Steely was already dissolved. When she attempted to obtain a copy of her decree of dissolution of marriage from the Indiana educator, however, she learned that it hadn’t yet been issued. She was still married to him.

“It is therefore ordered, adjudged, and decreed that the marriage of the parites in this matter is void, ab initio, and the Court declares this marriage to be invalid,” he wrote.

The judge observed that the couple indicated they hadn’t incurred any joint debts during the union, and agreed they had no joint marital property. Jill had indicated she was a student at the University of Northern Colorado, and was self employed as an owner of the Oak Street Bed & Breakfast. She listed monthly earnings of $2,000, including $1,500 in take-home pay. Her total income listed on the previous year’s federal income tax was approximately $24,000. She also indicated on an affidavit of financial affairs supplied to the judge, ownership of a single vehicle, the 1984 Toyota 4-Runner.

In an accompanying document in a space referring to custody of minor children, she declared that no children were born of the marriage. There were no references on the paper to the possibility that she was pregnant.

The matter of the annulment was handled quietly by the couple. Jill appeared at the final hearing with her attorney. Gerry didn’t make the long, exhausting drive across the front range for the hearing. The mess wasn’t the kind of personal Boggs family business that would lend special luster to their reputation in the community. After the annulment was concluded, they continued their rather odd relationship and living arrangements for awhile. They told the judge they planned to remarry once the legalities of her relationship to Steely were finally sorted out.

Jill’s sordid marital background had been exposed, however, and the handwriting was on the wall. In early December she packed up some of her clothes, cosmetics, and a few other small personal possessions and stormed out of Gerry’s house for good. They had locked in a nasty quarrel that Jill claimed was sparked when Gerry’s brother tipped off his parents about the annulment.

Gerry spent Christmas Day with Douglas and the rest of the Boggs family. He didn’t know where Jill was or who she spent the holiday with, but he couldn’t turn off the worry—because she had advised him three days earlier that he was a new father.

She talked to him by telephone and told him she had given birth to their daughter in Denver, alone and unattended at about eleven o’clock, Saturday night, December 21. She was at her son William Andrew’s home, but claimed she convinced him and his wife to go ahead with plans for a holiday visit with Lynn’s family in Mississippi. Gerry never saw his daughter; Jill never brought the baby home to show to him.

He became more despondent than ever, and Gilliland’s concern for his old friend mounted. He tried to talk Gerry into consulting a friend of his who was a psychiatrist. But Gerry was a proud man who was used to dealing with his own problems and had always been able to work his way out of whatever troubles were bothering him. He turned his thumbs down on the proposal.

Sometimes when he was especially desperate to get away from all the trouble for a while, he drove to the Gilliland home to stay over the weekend. He was embarrassed, frustrated, and so depressed he could barely function. Gerry fretted about Jill, about Lara, and about the effect his troubles were having on his parents and on the family business.

He was unsure of himself. His eyes were hollow, his hands shook, and he had been making mistakes at the store. He had trouble sleeping, his memory was shot, and it was beginning to look like he would never be able to work his way out of the mess he was in.

Gilliland suggested a couple of more times that he seek professional psychiatric help, but Gerry stuck to his guns. His troubles were something he would have to work out for himself. One time Gilliland talked with Douglas Boggs about arranging to have the troubled man hospitalized, but the discussion concluded with a decision to wait awhile longer.

As Gerry’s frustration and torment increased, Jill continued living life to the fullest, with the seemingly limitless energy she had possessed since childhood. Neither the baby, nor any of her mounting troubles seemed to slow her down. She was Gerry’s nemesis, and she pestered him by telephone at the house on Hillside Court, until he told her not to call him anymore.

“Don’t call me. Call my lawyer,” he snapped.

Seth helped his mother remove more of her possessions from the house. Gerry wasn’t at home. He had packed her things and dragged them into the garage near the door where she could pick them up without moving any further inside. She and Seth loaded two cars, then came back for a second trip to pick up books and a few other things they hadn’t had room for the first time around. Jill had a big collection of books. Seth wanted to take his mother’s stationary bike, but it was locked in the exercise room.

She still owned the U-Haul, but it was being used for storage and it would have taken too long to unload. Jill wasn’t at all pleased, and her son also complained that Gerry apparently tossed everything down the stairs into the basement, before moving them into the garage.

In an angry note, she complained to Gerry’s lawyer that her ex-husband deliberately destroyed her things. “Did you advise him to trash my possessions?” she demanded. She charged that Gerry scratched her oak furniture and tossed breakable items into boxes with other effects to deliberately cause breakage. He was hanging onto her good china, twenty-four-karat gold-rimmed goblets and purple wine glasses, and she simply wouldn’t stand for it, she warned.

She identified a long list of items she wanted returned, that included everything from five skillets and a coin ring to a Nikon camera, a gold bracelet, and a leather notebook she had planned to give Gerry for Christmas. Their relationship didn’t survive until the holiday, she said, so she wanted the notebook back.

“He is trying to force me to be mean and do something nasty so that he can retaliate.”

Halvorson countered the accusations by declaring his client hadn’t intentionally or accidentally damaged any property of Jill’s that was left at the house. If any damage occurred, he indicated, it was her own fault because she deliberately left possessions there so she could remove them in dribs and drabs in order to provide an excuse for continuing to pester Gerry.

“Mr. Boggs does not wish to retain personal effects of hers to the extent they have been left behind by her, but he doesn’t want her coming and going for her stuff on a repetitive basis,” the lawyer declared.

Jill fussed over everything. Nothing, it appeared, was too petty to pester Gerry and the lawyers with. She complained about the damaged Mercedes, but eventually agreed Gerry had offered to have it repaired and the offer was repeatedly refused. And Gerry claimed through his lawyer the engine was defective before he drove it, and Jill knew it. So she assumed the risk of the car being further damaged when she decided to drive it and to allow Gerry to drive it in a defective condition.

One day while Gerry was away from home, someone took the hand-held electronic garage door opener from his Jeep and used it to get inside the house. The intruder left a business card on his pillow so he would know someone had been there. Months later when a lawyer asked Jill about the incident, she denied having anything to do with it. She had no idea who might have done such a thing. It was an absolute mystery.

Regardless of whoever was responsible for the incident, it was part of a pattern of harassment that Gerry was subjected to for months. There seemed to be little question that Jill had a hand in most, if not all, of the dirty work.

As for Gerry, he could never completely relax. Just when he was about to take a deep breath, and try to convince himself he could see the light at the end of the tunnel, something new happened to upset him. He had taken over financial responsibility for the investigation, and eventually paid an estimated $6,000 in PI and lawyer fees while tracking his former wife’s trail of deceit and connubial flim-flam through Indiana, Texas, and Colorado.

He even enlisted the help of another Plymouth lawyer, Roy D. Burbrink, to collect information from court records and from witnesses in Indiana. Metzger was one of the witnesses called to the law offices of Stevens, Travis, Fortin, Lukinbill and Burbrink in the center of the Indiana town’s business district to give a deposition.

After the year-end holidays, Jill resumed her classes in Greeley, moving into a two-story house she bought. And the storytelling about the baby and other aspects of her life with Gerry turned extremely ugly.

She continued to commute between Greeley and Steamboat Springs, and when she was back in the Routt County resort town she spread false stories that Gerry was a closet homosexual. He managed to keep his guilty secret all those years because he traveled to other towns when he felt the urge for intimate male companionship, she asserted.

Jill was a passionate letter writer. The letters were almost always undated, and when they were inspected months after composition it was difficult to tell when they were really written. But they were convenient building blocks that always backed up her version of the relationship between herself and Gerry. Like the dental and hairdressing appointments for Lara and the stories about the pregnancy and birth, they provided ammunition for whatever Jill felt at the time would throw the most suspicion on Gerry and cast her in the best light.

She seemed at times to be operating as if she had taken to heart an old Indiana farm axiom, “If you toss enough fresh manure against a barn door, some of it’s bound to stick.” She flung a lot of verbal cow flops.

In an undated letter she addressed to Gerry, Jill berated him for drinking too much one time while they were soaking in a hot tub. She criticized him for what she said was his inability to love and be a friend to people. She referred in the note and in other statements to what she claimed was a traumatic event in his childhood when he was sexually abused by a male teacher. She accused him of belittling her because she was half American Indian, because she was Southern, and treating her as if she were stupid. She was maintaining a 3.5 grade-point average, while carrying at least twenty-one hours each semester, she defended.

In one letter, Jill was angry because he had wanted her to go to San Francisco with him for “one last fling,” she wrote. “Are you nuts?” Elsewhere in the angry missive, Jill complained she paid for his flight with her credit card, and he expected to use her paid hotel accommodations as well. (During their last days together she purchased a two-for-one airline ticket, permitting one passenger to pay and her companion to fly free. But they broke up before the scheduled date of the trip.)

Despite her claim in one letter that she was sensitive because of her cultural heritage, Jill was showing about as much compassion and understanding for her ex-husband’s feelings as a Lucrezia Borgia.

In another earlier note apparently written while they were still together, Jill complained he refused to have sex with her and used sex as a weapon. Because of her classes they were only able to see each other on weekends, and even then he wouldn’t touch her. Jill demanded to know if it was because he thought she was ugly.

Perhaps the most bizarre letter of all, however, was addressed to her husband’s attorney, Halvorson, at his office suite. This time there was a postmark with a date: Humble, Texas, January 6, 1992. Humble is a little town about the same size as Steamboat Springs, just outside the north edge of Houston. The letter was a ten-page diatribe aimed at convincing him she had given birth to a baby and was caring for it.

She apologized for choosing Gerry as the father of her child, but accepted the blame on herself. She claimed she got pregnant before they were married. She said she made him deny the pregnancy to his friends, because that was the question they all asked immediately after the marriage. At first, she also denied the pregnancy.

She concluded that the whole marriage was based on a lie. But, despite all the efforts at a cover-up, Jill said, “I still ended up giving birth to an illiagamatee [sic] child.”

The long letter was generally composed with good sentence structure and proper grammar, but she made a few glaring spelling errors such as her trouble with “illegitimate.” Another word she had a surprising bit of trouble with, considering her unique marital history, was “marrying.” She spelled it “marring”—and perhaps that was closer to the truth than the traditional spelling.

Jill rambled on about what she claimed was her parents’ opposition to the possibility of giving Gerry joint custody of Lara. She claimed he never wanted a child, but she desperately wanted a little girl—and should have gone to a sperm bank instead of depending on a husband who didn’t love her and was a reluctant dad.

She promised to never file a paternity suit or seek child support. She promised not to try and get in touch with the elder Boggs couple even though she had already told them they could visit with their new grandchild. She referred to them as “Mother and Father Boggs.”

Repeating her accusation that Gerry kicked her out of the house, she claimed he told her to go to the bed-and-breakfast where Seth could take care of her until the baby was born. He wanted the child born at Routt Memorial Hospital in Steamboat Springs, but she insisted on returning to Greeley for the birth even though the due date was only about a week away.

Jill said Gerry may have been feeling a little guilty the morning after their titanic squabble because he helped her load some clothing for herself and the baby in her car before she started the long, arduous drive to Greeley. He even offered to permit her to stay at the house until she gave birth. She was uncomfortable and her back was killing her, but she gamely declined the last-minute offer of a reprieve. She also refused to ask her son to take care of her.

Jill said when she got to Greeley she became frightened because it was the semester break and her student neighbors were gone. So she drove to her son Andrew’s house in Denver. But he and his wife, Lynn, left for a visit to Mississippi, after she assured them that if she needed help she could call Gerry.

He telephoned her the next morning and screamed and threatened that if she refused to go to a doctor with him and his friend, Thane, he wouldn’t continue supporting her through her troubles with Carl, and he wouldn’t recognize the baby as his, according to the account.

Jill was drawing a tragic picture of a woman hounded by a cold and vicious man who drove her from his house only days before she was to give birth. She worried that she would be arrested for bigamy and Lara would wind up with a child protective-services agency. And she fussed and fretted because he told people he wasn’t even sure she was pregnant.

How could he wonder about that when her breasts had swollen from size 34D to 34EE, and her belly had grown about ten inches, she asked the lawyer in apparent amazement? Gerry had rubbed her back and gone through false labor with her; and then had the gall to say that maybe she wasn’t pregnant, that she was just getting fat.

Jill wrote about her lonely ordeal delivering Lara by herself at her son’s house about twelve hours after suffering through the abusive telephone call. It was an easy delivery; the baby practically dropped out, she said.

Lara had Gerry’s temper, and yelled so loud for her one o’clock breast feeding a couple of hours later that one of the neighbors across the hall asked her whose baby was squalling.

After noting that she had expended her “emotional enema,” Jill wrote, “so I leave you alone.” Then she typed four more pages.

According to Jill, her real friends, who knew her character, were lining up in her support.

She claimed her lawyer in New Orleans whom she didn’t name but identified as a “personal friend,” told her to forget about Gerry. She didn’t need the emotional stress and financial drain of another fight with someone, in addition to her ongoing legal troubles with Steely.

Her banker, who also was unnamed, also reputedly assured her she was a good person, a good mother, and a sound businesswoman.

She returned to Culver to see her friends there and seek out their moral support. They advised her to forget about Gerry and about Steamboat Springs.

Only her clergyman told her it was her own fault for getting herself into the mess, and if she was sincere when she took her vows she was married “until death do us part.” Jill noted she was concerned about her daughter’s religious upbringing because Gerry believed as much in Buddha, which she spelled “Buda,” as much as he believed in Jesus. He believed equally in all gods.

Jill also couldn’t resist taking a few more potshots at Gerry’s sexuality, claiming he was homosexual and married her only to provide cover for his secret life.

She also claimed he had what she described with typical college-classroom psychobabble as “a seasonal affective [sic] disorder,” that made him depressed and negative. He didn’t want to be around people.

Jill told the lawyer she could be contacted at the address in Humble for about a week. (She was staying with a relative.) She didn’t know where she and little Lara would be after that. The lawyer had been around the legal merry-go-round for a few years and had talked to Jill a few times. If he believed there was anything to her story about little Lara, it didn’t show.

In early December a bulletin from the Steamboat Springs Evangelical Free Church which Jill attended made hazy reference to problems in her personal life. Under a column titled “Prayer Concerns,” the first listing asked the congregation to: “Pray for our family of the week, Gerald Boggs.” Other prayer pleas printed on the same missive were made for a family that had lost two girls to a traffic accident and for the success of a church remodeling project.

Jill told people in Steamboat Springs and other Colorado communities, including an acquaintance in Boulder, that Gerry kicked her out of their house a few days before Christmas. Lara was her little girl by Gerry Boggs, but he refused to recognize her as his, she explained to the hairdresser. Lara was never brought into the shop for the appointment, however.

According to some reports, Jill showed up in Steamboat Springs at least once with a warmly-bundled-up baby. It was little Lara, she claimed. After the probe of Jill’s background and activities, investigator Judy Prier-Lewis arrived at a different theory about the infant that was shown around: the would-be mom paid someone to borrow a baby. Reporter Joanna Dodder of the Steamboat Pilot, speculated in a private discussion that she suspected the baby may have been a bundled up doll.

The terrible stories Jill was spreading about Gerry could be extremely damaging to someone who had been such an important part of the local business community for so long. The Boggs name, after all, was etched in the stone of one of the oldest and most impressive buildings in the very heart of the town’s downtown shopping area.

Gerry was devastated by what was happening to him, embarrassed for his family, and troubled by the nagging possibility, dim though it was, that Jill really had given birth to a daughter. He served two tours in Vietnam and acquitted himself with integrity and courage. But he had never dealt with someone like Jill and what appeared to be her hateful determination to ruin him and drag his family name through the mud.

The former Mrs. Boggs actually seemed to gather new vigor and energy from the marathon bickering. She was growing stronger and more cantankerous all the time. But the vicious wrangle was taking a dreadfully savage toll on her onetime husband’s self-confidence and emotions. He wanted it settled and over with.

“At the time I believed there was no child, and yet every time Jill came to Steamboat she would go around telling people that she had given birth and that I kicked her and the child out of my home,” he said in a deposition. “And needless to say, this upset me greatly, and I guess maybe that since hope springs eternal, I thought, well maybe she did have a child.”

Intellectually, Gerry found it hard to believe there was really a baby, but emotionally he still wasn’t sure. He was being cruelly whipsawed by his emotions, suspicions, and doubts. He talked a few times by telephone with Steely, and the Indiana educator assured him Jill had undergone a hysterectomy. It didn’t seem likely she could give birth to a baby, no matter how much she might wish to. Gerry observed that she had shown a baby, or what appeared to be a baby, around town, and even if she had adopted a baby, he would feel a responsibility.

“She really knows how to pull my chain,” he groaned. At other times he walked around, or stood shaking his head and muttering to himself, “What a fool! What a fool!”

Now working at Gerry’s request, his friend Judy Prier-Lewis beat the bushes in three states looking for a baby no one really expected her to find. She tracked Jill in Colorado, Indiana, and Texas. Jill had drifted back to the Lone Star State and was shuttling between the Houston area and Greeley.

The investigator checked with one of Jill’s ex-husbands in Indiana, and asked if he thought the Billiots might be taking care of the baby. He didn’t. By that time, Henry Billiot was living in the little farming and onetime glass-manufacturing community of Green-town just outside the east edge of Kokomo. Judy Prier-Lewis passed the information on to Gerry, and he telephoned his former in-laws to ask if they had the baby. He talked to both parents.

“Did Jill have a child by me?” he asked. They seemed to be taken completely by surprise. They said they didn’t know of any new grandchild. Jill hadn’t given birth to another baby.

Gerry was satisfied he had been told the truth. “I felt if anybody on the face of the earth wouldn’t lie to me about this it would be her parents,” he remarked.

At last his depression and uncertainty turned to anger. He had been lied to, made a fool of, and almost driven into a mental hospital. He was still worried that his former wife might find some awful new way to revenge herself on him by hurting his parents, but he decided it was time to strike back. He revoked the will he had prepared the previous year naming Jill and their expected child as beneficiaries.

And when Jill got word to him she wanted the deed of trust returned, Gerry refused to meekly hand it over. He was determined to hold onto it until he was absolutely convinced he was not the father of a daughter Jill had hidden away somewhere. It was his most important bargaining chip.

“I find out she had been married numerous times and didn’t tell me about it. She had been pregnant and not had this child, and things of this nature certainly led me to believe that I was not going to sign any document and give it to her,” Gerry reflected. “I think she knew perfectly well she was still married when we got married, when she married me. For reasons like that, I was not going to give her a signed document and let her walk off with it except in the presence of my attorney.”

The deed of trust was a powerful lever, the key element in Gerry’s defensive arsenal. Jill wasn’t a person who could stand for things to remain static in her life, especially anything related to her financial affairs. Money and property were to be used to make more money. But almost everything she owned, in real estate, other solid material goods, and on paper, was tied up in the Oak Street Bed & Breakfast. Gerry had her in a bind, and financial institutions wouldn’t consider taking new mortgages or liens on the bed-and-breakfast until the property was free and clear of the deed of trust.

Although Gerry had never provided the actual cash for the $100,000 loan to her, he had a legal document that said he did. And as long as he held onto it, he had a financial stranglehold on Jill. Seth’s investment was tied up as well.

Gerry wasn’t a cheat, and he didn’t want Jill’s money or Seth’s. There were other considerations he insisted she meet, however, before releasing his hold over her finances. And he wanted everything spelled out in firm, indisputable legal terms before he budged. It wasn’t a matter that Jill could any longer settle with idle verbal promises or softly uttered pillow talk.

When Gerry at last dug his heels in Jill responded with a new torrent of anger and abuse. She telephoned him so often at his house that he began taping the calls. Jill did most of the talking, but when he had a chance to get a word in he assured her he was willing to return the deed of trust once he knew for an absolute certainty there was no baby.

Jill filed a civil suit in the District Court of Routt County for return of the deed of trust and to settle other elements of the dispute. Seth was a co-plaintiff with his mother in the civil action over the deed. Jill was represented by attorneys Randall W. Klauzer and J. Richard Tremaine. The offices of their law firm, Klauzer & Tremaine were on Lincoln Avenue.

Gerry struck back by filing a counterclaim. In the document prepared by his attorney, he accused Jill of false representation, infliction of emotional distress, defamation, extreme and outrageous conduct, and asked for an unspecified amount of damages.

The defendant in the suit was named as “Jill Steely aka Jill Coit aka Jill Coit-Steely,” but referred to in the body of the document by the first of the names, Jill Steely. She was no longer referred to as Boggs, the name she had proudly laid claim to for such a short time. Once more, Jill and a man she had married found themselves and their lawyers in a nasty court fight.

Through his attorney, Gerry stated that Jill was living at an unknown location in Texas and was planning to remove a material portion of her property in Routt County in order to make it unavailable to her creditors.

On a more personal level, he accused her of lying to him about being a single woman available for marriage and of later lying about being pregnant and giving birth to a daughter he had conceived. He complained he had justifiably relied on her word, with the result being that he suffered damage and loss in time expended, effort, and money preparing for the birth of the daughter who never was.

He asserted that she told him and others he was not a good father to the child and caused him great shame, distress, and a baker’s list of other emotional damages and embarrassments.

Supporting the charge of defamation, he declared: “That since January 1992 to the present, Steely (Jill) has told numerous parties that Steely had a baby by Boggs and that Boggs disowned Steely and the baby. She and the baby had been thrown out by Boggs and ordered out of town and/or words to similar effect which gave the listener the understanding that Boggs was a bad and neglectful father…”

It was a mouthful, and it was couched in a typically awkward run-on sentence, but the message was clear. Jill was a baldfaced liar, who had been going around badmouthing Gerry. She was depicting him to friends and acquaintances as a rotten father who disowned his own infant daughter and threw his pregnant wife out of his house. Gerry invested considerable time and money in lawyers, investigators, and travel expenses in order to determine if he was, indeed, the father of a child, it was added.

He asked in the countersuit for a decree from the court stating that no child was born of the relationship between Gerry and Jill, as well as an order for a cash award.

Halvorson charged $140 an hour as his normal rate for services. Meeting his fee could translate into a whopping amount of sales of paint, nails, tools, and plumbing supplies at the hardware store. He put in a lot of hours working to sort out the legal morass his friend and client had gotten himself into.

Even before the suits were filed, the lawyers set to work exchanging a busy dither of telephone calls and legal papers—letters, proposed agreements, releases, drafts, and suggestions for a non-disturbance pact. At one point during the summer of 1992, Klauzer wrote to Halvorson and pointed out Jill was in Alaska, and he would deal with the issue of the non-disturbance agreement as soon as he could. She bought some real estate and picked up an Alaskan voter registration there.

On the subject of the non-disturbance agreement, Klauzer said he planned to modify the proposal to make it “somewhat more bilateral in its application.” Gerry wanted Jill to leave him alone.

He insisted she promise to no longer use the Boggs name. She was to confirm either that no child was born as a result of their union, or if a child was indeed born, that she would provide visitation, (in a more formal version, she was to acknowledge she never became pregnant by Gerry, nor had a child by him). She was to refrain from contacting him in person, by telephone, mail, or through members of his family, in any manner except through his lawyer. She was to agree that she, her heirs, or anyone representing her had no claims against him for money, property, support or inheritance. Finally, each of them would agree not to disturb the tranquility of the other, and agree not to enter the other’s residential or business properties.

The non-disturbance pact was central to obtaining the release of the deed of trust. It was Gerry’s position that one agreement was linked inextricably to the other.

Klauzer didn’t see it that way. He argued to Halvorson that the issues weren’t related. If the question of a child was truly an issue for Gerry, then that problem was a matter to be worked out by the Logan County District Court which handled the annulment, which he referred to in proper legal terms as the “invalidity action.”

“This issue is clear-cut. I cannot in good faith agree that they should be interrelated,” he wrote. Klauzer repeated his earlier request, that Halvorson send him a signed release for the deed of trust. Jill’s lawyer probably wasn’t at all shocked, when Gerry’s lawyer failed to comply with the request. Halvorson wrote in part in his reply:

“I further find it amazing that you have failed to confirm that there is a baby yet you assert that we can bring paternity proceedings. If paternity proceedings are appropriate, they are customarily brought by the mother and she has not done so to date. Indeed, such is one more fact which convinces us that there was no baby and any claims to the contrary were deceitful and outrageous.”

He also assured his legal adversary that Gerry preferred to minimize or avoid the stress and expense of litigation by reaching an amicable solution to the dispute with Jill.

The wish expressed in Halvorson’s letter to reach an amicable solution without resorting to litigation wasn’t to be realized. A few weeks later the lawyers broke off their efforts to settle matter by mutual agreement and filed the lawsuits.

Accompanied by her lawyer, Jill went to Halvorson’s offices in the Norwest Bank Building at 320 Lincoln Avenue early in January 1993 where she and Seth were scheduled to answer questions in depositions. A couple of weeks earlier, in the middle of December, Jill drove over the Continental Divide from Greeley to meet with her lawyer in Steamboat Springs and prepare for the proceeding. She stayed overnight, then made the exhausting return trip.

Seth was the first to be interrogated.

At the very beginning of the session, just after Seth was sworn in, he was asked what he did at the bed-and-breakfast. “I do everything,” he replied.

“You do everything? What is the nature of the duties you perform?”

“Cleaning toilets and fix breakfast.”

Taking Seth’s deposition was a trying process that was made even more difficult by Jill’s frequent interruptions. From time to time she broke into her son’s testimony to prompt him or to make remarks including: “He didn’t understand what you mean, Vance,” “What does litigation mean?” and “That was a guess, Vance. We were estimating it.”

Halvorson finally became fed up and asked Tremaine to keep his client quiet until it was her turn to talk. If that couldn’t be done, he was going to ask Jill to leave. Tremaine apologetically agreed that he understood the other attorney’s position. Jill quieted down, squinting and furrowing her eyebrows occasionally, but managed to hold her peace throughout most of the remainder of the process.

Significantly, when Seth was asked if he had siblings and what their names were, he replied that he had two. “Andy and Billy.”

“Do you happen to know whether or not your mother became pregnant during the course of her relationship with Gerry Boggs?” Halvorson asked.

“She’s too mature to be doing something like that,” Seth replied. “No. No.”

“Okay, she didn’t,” Halvorson acquiesced. “And how do you know that?”

“Because I think they usually swell at the belly.” Seth could respond to certain questions in a manner as disconcertingly neutralizing or peevish as his mother.

Seth indicated he and his mother never discussed the possibility of her having children with Gerry, and she never said anything to him to make him believe she was pregnant during the period she was with Gerry. “She has not had a child since 1968,” he said.

Although the lawyer didn’t go into the matter of the earlier phantom children, Seth’s statement would indicate there was no Thadius Brodie and no Tinley Metzger—as well as no Lara Boggs. Jill’s only children were Seth and the two Williams.

At one point when Halvorson was trying to learn the name of the girl in Indiana who filed the paternity suit against Seth, he pleaded that he was having trouble understanding some of the questions because of his dyslexia. His difficulties were audio-visual, and he sometimes had trouble with big words or round-about questions. “Just go right to it,” he suggested.

At another time when Halvorson was discussing possible fears that Steely would try and attach the Oak Street B&B to satisfy the court judgment in Plymouth, he asked if Seth had employed a lawyer.

“For my mental…?”

“Pardon?” Halvorson appeared surprised at the answer, but he didn’t follow up on the possible implications. Instead, Seth quickly recovered and explained in an obvious reference to Klauzer and Tremaine that they had. “Richard and Randy.” The local lawyer team had represented him and his mother in their business matters as long as they had known them.

Seth painted Gerry as a man who could be cruel and made his mother cry and said she used her money to meet the couple’s expenses. “My mom would spend money, Gerry would not.” He said their relationship was erratic. “Gerry has a different beat, a different drummer, a different attitude towards women. Up and down. Cold!” Seth didn’t know his mother’s friends. It wasn’t his business who they were. He had other things to do, he said.

The husky young man conceded he didn’t attend his mother’s wedding when she married Gerry. Halvorson asked if he approved of Gerry.

“My mom’s a big girl. She can do what she wants,” he said. But he agreed he didn’t like the way his mother was treated by the hardware store owner.

Continuing to respond to the lawyer’s questions, Seth indicated he didn’t want to sell the bed and breakfast. He had gotten to understand the business and to be comfortable with it, and he liked it. “I have people drive by and wave at me,” he said. “So I’m pretty happy where I’m at.”

Seth agreed the business may have been listed for sale at one time since he and his mother bought it; he wasn’t sure. But he didn’t want to sell it, and in fact he had bought his mother’s interest. Halvorson wanted to know how much he paid for Jill’s share of the inn, but Seth couldn’t provide him with an exact figure. He explained that she just took whatever she needed.

“Whatever she needs?” Halvorson asked in what appeared to be understandable surprise.

“Uh-huh!” Seth agreed.

“What was the amount that you have agreed that she needed?”

“She just—I just let her take whatever she wants,” Seth repeated.

It was a curious, and it would seem, a dangerously sloppy way to operate a business. It was especially strange for someone who was such an experienced businesswoman as Jill, and Halvorson asked if she took money out of the till on a regular or on an occasional basis. Seth said he wasn’t sure. He didn’t keep track.

When it was his mother’s turn to testify, she announced she wasn’t going to cooperate and stalked out. Halvorson later asked the court to order her to repay his client’s attorney fees for the lost time, and to force her to submit to the deposition.

Jill had a way about her of delaying the legal process when it was time to give depositions.

When Jill finally gave her deposition about three weeks later, it was a tedious and trying process. As Halvorson struggled to pin down specific information, Jill bobbed and weaved, pleading for an opportunity to check her records at some other time or cited problems with her memory. Her affliction with dyslexia made it difficult for her to keep numbers in her head, she explained.

Obtaining a clear picture of her financial arrangements concerning the Oak Street Bed & Breakfast was especially difficult and trying. Jill agreed she got a $47,000 loan from Carl, but said it wasn’t recorded. Some of the amounts she borrowed were recorded and some were not.

Halvorson observed she had said she got $135,000 from the First National Bank and $50,000 from Eldon Metzger. “It was [$60,000],” she corrected him on the Metzger loan.

“Well, that’s true. Then why does this say [$50,000] here?” the lawyer asked, pointing the sum out on a list.

“I don’t know. But it was [$60,000],” she insisted.

“And Henry Billiot, $20,000?” Halvorson asked, as he consulted the same list. “I think it was $35,000.”

“It was [$35,000],” she responded.

Later in the deposition process, Jill said she gave her father the T-Bird in return for the money he turned over to her. It was worth $35,000 in the condition it was in, she said. “To me it was worth a million.”

Halvorson wanted to know about other loans.

“Jules English,” he queried. “It says $20,000?”

“Okay, don’t touch it. Don’t correct it. I’m sorry…” Jill stammered.

“What was that loan?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to check the record,” she replied. Jill was having as much trouble keeping the amounts of her loans straight as she would later have explaining the dates of marriages and divorces with her husbands. It was all very confusing. Even the names of her creditors were turning out to be sources of confusion.

Halvorson said he assumed “Jules English” referred to Julie English, the maiden name of Seth’s wife. It wasn’t. He didn’t even have the gender right. Jules and Julie were two different people, Jill said.

“Oh, this is somebody else?,” Halvorson asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. Jules English. Who is Jules English?”

“A male,” Jill replied.

“Pardon?” The deposition wasn’t going as smoothly as it might have. Jill seemed determined to make the lawyer work for his information and wasn’t giving anything up easily.

“It’s a male. It’s not a female,” she said. If the lawyer wanted information, he was going to have to squeeze it out of her. Jill may or may not have been able to give a precise definition of obfuscation, but she knew how the process worked. She was expert at slowing down a line of questioning.

She agreed again in response to another question, that Jules English was a male, not a female. “Then tell me, what is your relationship to Jules English?” Halvorson persisted.

“He is related to Julie English,” Jill said. How were they related? “A relative!” Jill replied. That wasn’t the kind of answer likely to earn her a favorable mark in one of her college classes, but the lawyer wasn’t about to give up. He tried again to determine just exactly who the mysterious Mr. English was.

“Father? Son? Brother?”

“No, not father. She doesn’t have any brothers. I don’t know the exact relationship, but I will find out the exact one…”

Halvorson was still reluctant to surrender and admit he was proceeding down a dead-end path with the line of questioning. He asked if Jill could pin down her benefactor’s age a bit and speculate whether or not he was closer to twenty or fifty. Jill didn’t know. He was simply someone who had agreed to loan her money, and she wasn’t even sure about where he lived. She had a post-office box number for an address.

Twenty thousand dollars was an awful lot of money for someone to loan to a stranger, and Halvorson’s puzzlement over the odd transaction was understandable. But Jill either couldn’t or wouldn’t provide the answers he was looking for.

The lawyer at last dropped the subject of Mr. English, and asked if there was anyone else to whom she owed money.

“Oh, I owe lots of money,” she bubbled. Jill listed a few more loans ranging from $10,000 to $25,000, including $10,000 she said she obtained from her middle son, Andrew. Asked if she took out a note for $50,000 from R. L. Goodwin, Jill said she was going to get money from him but the loan was never concluded.

“Who was this Goodwin, R. L.?” Halvorson asked, sounding a bit like a military drill instructor barking names off the roster of his platoon.

“That’s a friend of mine in Mississippi.”

Halvorson asked if she sent Goodwin letters, and she replied that she did not. The lawyer abstained from further questions about her Mississippi friend before the exchange could deteriorate into the same kind of frustrating morass he got himself entangled in over Jules English.

Instead, he turned the questioning to more personal matters linked to her relationship with Gerry. Did Jill understand Gerry was remodeling his house in order to make more room for the baby? No, Jill said. That wasn’t her understanding.

“This comes as a surprise to you?” he asked as if her response was a shock to him. It was an eyebrow-raiser.

Jill told the story about Gerry undertaking the remodeling project so she would have room to park her car inside the garage. He had been keeping his weightlifting equipment in there, but “a garage is for parking,” she said.

Halvorson asked if she was saying Gerry remodelled the garage to accommodate her, not because he wanted the room for a child they were expecting.

“I don’t know why he was building a garage. I don’t know his mind. But it stands to reason, so I would be able to park in the garage.”

Halvorson asked her about a notation indicating a purchase made at Moonflower Birthing in Louisville, Colorado. Jill replied that when she and Gerry were in Boulder he bought a floral backpack. The lawyer wanted her to be more specific. “For a child?”

“Right,” Jill said. “I think it’s the only thing he really purchased for a child. When I was with him, anyway.”

“It wasn’t a home delivery kit, or anything of that nature, was it?”

Jill didn’t appear to be bothered by the very personal turn the questioning had taken. “I don’t know. I thought, to my recollection, it was a weird-looking floral thing. I thought it was rather feminine-looking, but it wasn’t for me. I usually brought presents, not Gerry.”

The question-and-answer session began to bog down again when the lawyer drew closer to her claims of pregnancy. Jill blamed the stories about being pregnant with a daughter on Gerry. And she used the opportunity to fire another salvo at what she continued to claim was his secret homosexuality.

He asked if during their life together she became pregnant.

“I was not pregnant with Gerry Boggs.”

The lawyer ignored the obfuscation and patiently established that she was not pregnant by anyone. He asked if she had claimed to be pregnant.

She agreed she had—because it was what Gerry wanted. Jill seemed to be trying to draw a picture of a compliant, loving woman who was manipulated by her husband into living a lie. She did it to help him create the virile, masculine, heterosexual image he wished to project for his neighbors. It made him happy.

Jill claimed at another time during the lengthy statement that although she had undergone what she termed “a partial hysterectomy” in New Orleans to have some abnormal cells removed from her uterus, she was still capable of becoming pregnant. She said she and Gerry used condoms when they had sexual relations to avoid the possibility of a tubular pregnancy. She even volunteered the brand name of the devices for her questioner.

Halvorson asked her about an earlier statement she made saying: “Anyway I am to blame. I slept with him and got pregnant before we were married.”

Jill replied that was what her husband wanted her to say. “But I did sleep with him, but I was not pregnant,” she added.

“So, basically this is a false statement. It’s a true statement that you slept with him, but it’s a false statement that you got pregnant before you got married? Is that a fair statement?”

A lot of references to “statements” were being bounced around the room, and Jill’s attorney, Tremaine, objected that she had already answered the question. Halvorson didn’t pursue it any further at that time and instead turned to questions about some of her business and banking dealings in Culver and Plymouth.

Jill became understandably confused at one point while Halvorson was grilling her about the judge’s order in Plymouth awarding Carl $100,000 and subsequent matters relating to the Indiana educator’s efforts to collect. Jill said she had attended a hearing with her husband, and Halvorson asked exactly when the hearing was.

“I have a question,” Jill said. “What hearing and what husband are we talking about?”

Her confusion was understandable to the lawyer. “That’s true. They’re hard to follow, aren’t they?” he commiserated.

“I sleep with them, I marry them, okay?” Jill shot back. “I could just sleep around.”

At another point in the grueling session, Jill said she repeated her vows with DiRosa about four times. “You married DiRosa four times?” Halvorson echoed in astonishment.

“Uh-huh! Every time we went away to an island we got remarried. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it was. I married W. C. six times.” She followed the amazing statement up with several remarks about her respect for DiRosa as an attorney and as an individual. “Whatever he sent me, I signed, okay. There were no hard feelings. I liked the man as a person.… I’m sure that—because he’s an attorney, whatever he’s done is legal.”

Halvorson asked if she read things that were printed above her signature, or if she simply signed whatever he sent her without reading it.

“Can I say something?” she responded. “Right now if he sent me something I would sign it. This man is not trying to screw me in any way.” DiRosa had brought presents to her children, she said. Just because their marriage didn’t work out there was no reason to be enemies. They were friends.

While discussing the promissory notes that surfaced during the process of the bitter divorce in Plymouth, Halvorson asked if Carl accused her of fabricating them.

“He accused me of fabricating everything in the whole world,” she snapped.

Halvorson observed that there was some whiteout on one of the promissory notes produced as an exhibit in the Indiana divorce trial and asked if she could explain why it was there. She couldn’t—but she had a suggestion: “Let’s scratch it off and see what’s under it?” No one scratched off the whiteout, and the deposition interview turned to other matters.

Jill and her former husband’s attorney clashed over a journal which Gerry had kept during their marriage. She said it included remarks about his thoughts, opinions and what she described as his shortcomings and failures—matters that disturbed him.

The journal was discovered to be missing from the house after she left. Halvorson included the journal among other documents he asked to inspect before permitting his client to give his own depositions. Jill agreed she took the journal with her when she left, and Halvorson’s plea to inspect it was a perfectly proper request to make as part of the discovery process. But Jill said she couldn’t turn it over just then, because it was apparently in luggage misplaced by Continental Airlines while she was traveling between Colorado and Houston.

Halvorson asked if she had a tag on her luggage, and she said she had one which she slid her business card into. She was careful to stress that it was “a pretty tag.” For a moment, she was Jill the pussycat. The Jill who was always intensely and happily feminine. It was a persona that was much more appealing and pleasant than some of the other Jills that Gerry, Carl, Clark, and other husbands had glimpsed at one time or another.

Jill had filed a claim with the airline over the luggage. And in response to a query from Halvorson, she agreed she once worked in the airline industry for six weeks. She knew a bit about the system of claims and payment for lost luggage. Jill was a woman who knew a lot about a few things and a little about a lot of things. An impressive amount of the knowledge seemed to somehow revolve either around husbands or money.

She apologized that although she couldn’t produce the journal just then, she promised if and when she recovered it she would be sure to make it available to Gerry’s lawyer. Halvorson wasn’t about to buy that story, and he made it plain in written remarks how he felt about Jill’s reputed difficulty keeping track of the journal. He wrote: “Alas, a shell game defense to discovery, first we have it, now we can’t find it, so you still can’t have it. But just wait because we might find it and then use it. But if it turns out that it supports your client, it probably won’t ever be found.” The lawyer said his client’s deposition should be held off until the journal and other information were supplied to him.

The court agreed and ruled that Gerry wouldn’t be forced to give his deposition until Jill had complied with the discovery process.

At long last, Jill’s deposition session was ended. But she wasn’t through with Gerry Boggs. Many traditional marriage ceremonies in this country incorporate the words, “till death us do part.” The maxim would eventually prove to have tragic application to the mean and spiteful quarrel between Jill and her onetime husband.

It’s unlikely that either Gerry, his lawyer, or Gerry’s family and close friends were unaware that the bitterness and acrimony were a long way from being over. It’s also doubtful any of them could have realized just how filled with anger and hate the quarrel between him and Jill had become. Unimaginable fury and savagery were about to forever blight their lives.