I wanted out of the marriage, but I didn’t know how. I was so sick. I felt stuck, dependent and distracted. And I was really afraid of Eric. I have a hard time admitting that.
—Kim Williams
If her head had been clearer, if she’d taken a step back to consider, maybe Kim would have read all the signs and realized who Eric had become. One afternoon in the pantry beside her stash of two-liter plastic bottles of Coca-Cola, she found a bag holding $6,000 in cash. When Kim asked for an explanation, he matter-of-factly told her that he kept it “in case I need to get away quickly.” She didn’t ask why he would ever need to disappear.
Then there were the guns.
Over time, Kim came to realize that Eric had built a formidable collection. Wherever they went, he wore a holster with a loaded gun. At her parents’ house, Eric put whatever pistol he carried on the table, where it sat while they ate. Don Johnson, Kim’s dad, didn’t seem bothered by it, and the two men often talked about guns throughout dinner.
Kim’s father, however, didn’t know what Eric said to his daughter when no one else listened, including several occasions when, in an unemotional tone, as if talking about grocery shopping, he told Kim, “If I ever decide to take everyone out, I’ll kill you and then myself.”
At first, Kim just thought it was an odd thing to say, that he couldn’t possibly mean it. But slowly she began to suspect Eric might be capable of murdering her. One such day she lay on the den couch watching TV, while Eric cleaned a rifle on top of the white counter at the kitchen bar. Kim stood up and walked toward the kitchen to get a glass of water. As she passed Eric, the rifle discharged in a loud crack, a bullet whizzing past her and slicing into the wall behind her. “He almost hit me,” she said, her voice filled with a sense of wonderment even years later.
“I’m so sorry,” Eric said, but he didn’t appear at all upset.
As a boy, Eric climbed on the roof of his family home to shoot stray cats. Late some nights on Overlook, Kim and Eric’s dogs barked. Such nights, he grabbed his .22 and walked out the back door, toward the field behind the house, saying he was going to “kill whatever needed killing.” Trying to remain calm, Kim focused on the television, not wanting to acknowledge what unfolded just over her back fence. She turned up the sound, but still heard the gunshots.
A while later, Eric returned, acting as if nothing had happened.
One such night, Kim printed out labels, getting boxes ready to ship for her small eBay company. It hadn’t done well, but she kept it going, as much as anything to have something to do. Again that evening, the dogs barked and Eric disappeared out the back door. After she heard shots, the dogs quieted. Then Eric returned to watch the television, as if nothing had happened.
A while later Kim brought her boxes outside. Walking toward the mailbox, she saw a cat in the street. “Kitty, kitty,” she said, reaching down to pet it. The animal didn’t move. “Oh, man,” she whispered, when she realized it was dead.
On the driveway, Kim saw a trail of blood. “It was like drip, drip, drip, from our backyard all the way to the street.”
In the house, a shaking Kim told Eric, “If you ever kill anything, I don’t want to see it.”
He laughed.
Another day, Kim passed Eric in the garage, as she carried a bag of trash. Again, a gun he held suddenly went off, the bullet hissing past her, piercing her car tire. An accident? Kim didn’t think so. “He wanted me to know he could get me at any time. He was warning me.”
Was he angry at her? Annoyed by her illness, the disappointment in their marriage? Considering the possibilities, Kim thought about how Eric coddled and nurtured his anger, never letting go of any perceived injustice.
After the incident with Judge Ashworth, the one when he questioned Eric’s billing, Eric muttered about Ashworth. Although he and the judge still went out to lunch regularly, Eric never forgave the older man for what he saw as disloyalty. One day Eric stopped at the cemetery and e-mailed Kim a photo of the headstone the judge had installed over a plot he’d purchased for his eventual burial.
For years at Christmas, Kim and Eric had their annual argument about putting up a Christmas tree, Eric complaining that he had no use for the holidays and preferred not to participate. For some reason, that year, 2007, Eric covered the house in lights, so many that Kim wondered if it could be seen from outer space. At times, when she looked at it lit up at night, reminding her of the perfect Christmas card, she wondered if Eric had done it to spite her.