CHAPTER 5
HOT SPARKS
After having been dropped off by Dee Ann Wood at the Peachland condominium on Friday morning, April 19, Ann readied her three kids for a day of seclusion from everyone, especially John. She drove them more than forty miles to spend the day at Malibu Beach, being entertained on the way by an FM radio station playing current hits by Crystal Waters and Lisa Stansfield, or oldies from Creedence Clearwater and Fleetwood Mac. In weather still too cool for sunbathing, they were content to walk the surf line, inhale the invigorating salty air, pick up shells, watch screeching seagulls swoop over the crashing waves, and peer at the homes of rich and famous residents.
En route home that afternoon, Ann stopped at a pay phone to call Bob Russell, who thought she sounded “exuberant.” She also telephoned a neighbor and longtime friend, Brenda George, at her home across the street on Fortuna Drive. The two women sometimes swapped child care, with Ann watching Brenda’s son and daughter, about the same age as Katelin and Glenn. Brenda had noticed the moving van on the previous day, but didn’t ask questions, so Ann explained about her decision to move, then begged the woman not to tell John anything. They arranged for Brenda to drop by the condo for a visit.
Still trying to keep the children distracted on Saturday, and prevent John from discovering their new residency at Peachland, Ann delivered Katelin to the Valencia Hills clubhouse for a field trip to San Diego’s SeaWorld with her Girl Scout Brownie troop. She took Glenn and Joann to Magic Mountain, where breathtaking thrill rides diverted them for several hours. On the way back to the condo, Ann dropped off Joann to stay overnight with a friend.
A little later, Brenda George arrived for a visit as promised. She thought Ann seemed nervous but resolute in her decision. Ann once again appealed to Brenda for absolute secrecy about her location so that John wouldn’t be able to find her.
Kathy Ryan, Emi’s daughter, also called on Ann that day, showing up at about four-thirty. She spotted Ann outside, playing catch with her son, Glenn. Inside the condo, Kathy observed that boxes and suitcases still waited to be unpacked. She asked how everything was going, and heard about an incident that day that demonstrated Ann’s financial distress. At a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant, Ann had placed an order on the outdoor speaker, requesting three burgers, three orders of fries, and three drinks. When the attendant told her the total charge, Ann canceled it and drove out. She circled back around while Glenn figured out the cost of three small burgers, one large order of fries, and a single large drink. Ann stopped again at the speaker and placed the more thrifty request. The incident would have been funny except that it reflected Ann’s serious level of worry.
Other than that concern, and fear that John might still discover her new address, Ann appeared happy and excited. Kathy thought she seemed relieved at making the break and optimistic about the future. Ann confessed that she dreaded the appointment that evening with Pastor Thorp. John would be there too. “She did not want to go. She just felt sick to her stomach that she would have to be in the same room with John again,” Kathy later stated. At least she wouldn’t have to stay too long because she needed to pick up Katelin from the clubhouse a few blocks away when she arrived back from the field trip.
Despite her anxious foreboding, Ann kept the appointment. She and John arrived at Pastor Glen Thorp’s office in separate cars. In the meeting, John still expressed shock as he told about her leaving and his being served with divorce papers. He read aloud from a statement he had written, indicating that he would do anything to get Ann back, promising to help more around the house and making a commitment to be less frugal. It ended with an offer: If it doesn’t work out to your satisfaction after one year from today, I will leave in a friendly way.
Thorp later said, “We tried to find a way for the two of them to continue the sessions, with the idea that Ann would have a safe space, and I would meet with them on a regular basis.” He interpreted “safe space” as Ann being able to live where John couldn’t find her.
Before leaving, they agreed to assemble again, on the next day, Sunday, April 21, in the late afternoon. Ann said she planned to take the kids to church that morning, but afterward would bring them over to the Fortuna house for a visit prior to the counseling appointment.
Sunday morning dawned clear and bright, a perfect day for a drive to Malibu Beach. Ann made the distance in about an hour and arrived at the Presbyterian church on Malibu Canyon Road with a distant view of the ocean, and not far from the colorful redbrick buildings of Pepperdine University. (The sixty-year-old church burned to the ground in a disastrous 2007 fire that destroyed scores of homes in the area.) After the services, she stopped again at a public telephone to make a few calls. She spoke with her sister, Emi, and her brother Joji to update them on her situation. Next she told Bob Russell about a recent argument with her husband. Russell cheered her up with an invitation to join him at Disneyland on June 2 to celebrate his daughter’s fifth birthday. Delighted, Ann said she would love it.
Back in Valencia, she kept her promise to deliver the kids to John at the Fortuna house. Brenda George, Ann’s friend and neighbor across the street, noticed her white minivan pull into the driveway, and the brake lights stayed on while John stood next to the driver’s window and talked to Ann through a narrow opening.
Ann pulled out and John followed in his own car to keep the appointment with Pastor Thorp. In their session that time, Ann said she had made her decision and was going to stick with it. John once again read from a letter he had written, asking for another chance to reconcile. He said that nothing in his life had altered his feelings more than events of the past few days. He admitted being angry upon finding her gone on Thursday, but he acknowledged his own faults while complimenting Ann as a mother and wife.
Part of the discussion involved prearranged tile work to be done the next day at the Fortuna house. Ann agreed to show up there and pay for her portion of the expenses. They scheduled another meeting for Thursday, April 25. Before deciding to call it a night, Thorp suggested that Ann and John refrain from getting together alone under any circumstances, because sometimes things happen in the heat of the moment.
John departed, and Ann drove Thorp to his home. On the way, he made another plea for her to reconsider and asked her not to do anything rash. Privately he realized that her demeanor reflected noticeable fear. It was the last time the minister ever saw Ann Racz.
For dinner that Sunday evening, John took his three children to a local Chinese restaurant. Ann drove over to the Fortuna house to take the kids, and found a note taped to the door telling her where they had gone to eat. She picked them up from the restaurant at eight o’clock, after they had completed their meal, and took them back to Peachland.
That night John Racz called Thorp to reaffirm his hope that Ann would relent and return to their home. He said he might even consider asking Ann and the kids to move back in on the condition that he would move out in exchange for her giving up the idea of divorce. Thorp, of course, could make no promises.
With the children asleep in the condo, Ann found some private time to write a letter to Bob Russell:
Hello Dear Heart and gentle lover,
When I need a kiss, you kiss me. When I need to be held, you put your arms around me to embrace me with so much warmth and affection. You know just when to do the things I love you to do.
Ann’s expressions of affection continued with a request for Bob to let her know if her love ever became smothering. Their ability to openly communicate pleased her. Both of them, she noted, had learned from life’s experiences and she hoped the wisdom they had gained would contribute to warm compatibility for the remainder of their lives. She expressed deep gratitude for his emotional, physical, and mental support, and volunteered that she would do “anything” for him. Never, she said, in her fantasies or imagination, could she have imagined the fulfillment their relationship provided:
It overwhelms me beyond my wildest dreams. This is greater than fiction. Don’t worry, our dream will not end. We will be able to live up to each other’s expectations because we have such a strong bond of love.
The strength and power of their love, said Ann, would see them through “trials and tribulations.” In reference to her husband, Ann mentioned that his demands and control had only diminished her respect for him, and her pastor had made that point during counseling. A major factor in wrecking the marriage had been John’s continued reliance on control. Ann looked forward to a life with Bob that involved none of these wrong-headed tactics. She hoped he felt the same.
With her typical bubbly enthusiasm, Ann wrote of the fun she expected to have with Bob, and committed her perpetual, exclusive love to him. In the letter’s final paragraph, Ann turned even more personal:
I will never have sex with John again. I will not touch him again. You don’t know how good that makes me feel. I’m free. I want to celebrate this first victory, my first big step, by making sensuous mad love to you. I want to share my joy with you. I need you so much, but I’ll be a good girl and wait for the appropriate opportunity. The next time we get together everybody stand back or you will get hit by some hot sparks because I may get passionate right there where we stand upon our first embrace. Would you be embarrassed? I may forget I’m a lady. I can’t wait to stroll down Main Street with you.
Until then, or sooner, Ann
On a morning that would change the lives of many people, April 22, Ann Racz delivered her three children to their schools, without the realization that she would never be able to do it again. After walking Katelin into Ms. Dorrie Dean’s second-grade class, Ann handed the teacher a note written on blue paper. It informed Dean that Katelin would no longer take the school bus home to Fortuna Drive, but would instead be picked up by Ann. The mother also made a change in an information card kept on file for each student. Ann entered the name and telephone number of Dee Ann Wood as the person to be contacted in case of emergency or disaster.
Ann also dropped into Glenn’s classroom and told Ms. Lois Becker that the move had taken place.
She returned to the condo, did some housekeeping chores and laundry, then drove to the Target store. The VCR machine she had previously purchased there had malfunctioned, so she traded it for a new one, and left the store before one o’clock with the boxed appliance in the rear of her minivan.
Twenty minutes later, Ann cashed in a $13, 242.13 joint certificate of deposit (CD) at the Home Federal Bank. She withdrew the money in the form of a cashier’s check for $3,000, another check made out to John Racz for $8,942.13, and $2,000 in cash. Leaving the bank, she headed for the supermarket, where she shopped for groceries.
Inside the Hughes store, Ann purchased milk and ingredients to make the pizza she planned to prepare for dinner. Back in the condo, she placed the milk in the tiny refrigerator Kathy Ryan had given her, then laid a package of Boboli pizza crust on the counter, alongside a jar of red Ragú sauce.
At two-thirty that afternoon, she arrived at the Fortuna house and gave John the cashier’s check for $8,942.13 as his lion’s share of the CD, along with the separate check for $3,000 to pay her part of the tile work being done in the kitchen, as she had promised. She left immediately.
Within a few minutes, Ann walked into the First Nationwide Bank, and made a deposit in her Monday Flowers account, using the $2,000 in cash she had received at Home Federal.
The next stop took her to Wiley Canyon Elementary School and Hart High School, where she picked up Glenn and Joann. With them in the minivan, Ann drove to the Valencia Hills clubhouse, where Katelin’s Brownie troop usually met every Monday. She exited her car and walked toward the entrance, but she noticed an acquaintance hailing her in the parking lot. It was Douglas Krantz, a professional stagehand who drove to a Los Angeles theater most days to work on a production of Phantom of the Opera. His daughter was one of Katelin’s classmates and a fellow Brownie. Krantz said, “Oh, the girls aren’t here today. They have gone on an excursion. They’ve gone bowling.”
Ann said, “Oh, John must have forgotten to tell me,” nodded her thanks, returned to the minivan, and drove to the Fortuna house. Missing her youngest daughter didn’t bother Ann because she knew that her friend Carol Kuwata, whose child also belonged to the troop, would bring them as soon as the bowling ended. As transportation chairman for the Brownies, Kuwata frequently gave Katelin a ride to her home on Fortuna Drive. The two women also knew each other as fellow soccer moms.
Monday, April 22, 1991, has seared itself forever in Joann Racz’s mind. She later recalled getting out of school at about two-thirty, being picked up by her mother, and going over to the home from which they had moved. “We were going to have homemade pizza for dinner that night. But first, my mom told us that she needed to talk to my dad. They were going to have a talk and we were to go in the house and wait.”
Don Pedersen, the retired neighbor on the opposite side of Fortuna Drive, had been curious ever since the moving van incident four days earlier, and he kept an eye out to see what might happen next. In the middle of the afternoon on that Monday, he noticed Ann’s white minivan pull into the Racz driveway, and stop about halfway into the garage. Pedersen could see Ann in the driver’s seat and the kids inside. He watched as John emerged from the house and talked to Ann through the driver’s window. Their conversation, Pedersen thought, lasted about twenty minutes, while the children remained seated. Ann’s foot apparently never left the brake pedal because Pedersen could see the brake lights illuminated the entire time. At last, Joann and Glenn emerged and scampered into the house. John and Ann continued to talk perhaps twenty more minutes.
According to Joann’s recollection, the conversation between her parents lasted long enough for the kids to get hungry. Even if they went over to the condo right away, it would take some time to prepare the pizza. “So I came out to the garage, said I was hungry, and asked when we were going to eat. Mom said she would go to McDonald’s, up on hamburger hill, and bring something back for us.”
She left at about four o’clock. It would normally take only a few minutes to reach the McDonald’s fast-food restaurant, no more than a mile from the Racz home.
In Pedersen’s memory of events, Ann backed out and drove downhill toward the cul-de-sac exit. Still watching, Pedersen observed John retreat and enter the house through the front door.
Inside, John announced to his kids that he was going to McDonald’s to get them some food too.
Meanwhile, Ann drove only about three houses away and parked in a driveway, where another resident, Thomas “Tom” Deardorff, stood outside.
Deardorff’s daughter and Katelin, the same age, often played together, and Joann sometimes babysat with her. So, like other neighbors, Deardorff had also been surprised when a moving van appeared at the Racz home a few days earlier. It amazed him even more to hear that Ann and the three children had left John and had moved out. Deardorff wondered if Joann still planned to keep an appointment that Monday night to babysit. As he washed one of several cars he restored as a hobby, he spotted Ann leaving and waved her over. Ann pulled partly into his driveway, and Deardorff asked about Joann’s availability that night, at about seven-thirty. Ann said, “No problem, she will be there,” and commented that she was on the way to get her kids some food at McDonald’s.
The brief exchange of words between them lasted only a few seconds before Ann pulled out again to leave.
Up the street, Pedersen still watched. Something else immediately caught his eye. “I seen John coming out of the garage seemingly in a hurry. Got in his car, backed out rapidly, and exited, started down the street. And . . . I looked down there and seen Ann’s van. It was just rounding the curve and John was right behind her. He seemed to be in a big hurry.”