Both Jocelyn and Wesley Earnest started night classes at Lynchburg College to obtain their master’s degrees. Jocelyn obtained her master of business administration degree and got a job with First Colony Life, which became a subsidiary of General Electric Capital Corporation less than a year later. Wesley got a master of education degree and started attending night classes at the University of Virginia in pursuit of a doctorate.
Wesley took Jocelyn by surprise when he decided to become a Jehovah’s Witness. Neither she nor Wesley had been raised in religious households.
“What is behind that?” Jocelyn asked.
“It helps me have better control with anger management,” Wesley told her.
Although Jocelyn had always wanted children, she’d had doubts about bringing any kids into Wesley’s household because of his temper and control issues. Now, she was absolutely sure that she didn’t want to do so. Wesley would want any children raised in his new faith, and Jocelyn was adamantly opposed to that. From that point forward, she would not engage in sexual relations unless Wesley wore a condom.
Because of this shift in his life, Wesley developed a different group of friends. Although Jocelyn wouldn’t go to services, she would accompany Wesley to church functions like picnics.
Their friends Jennifer and Bob Kerns got married in 1998. When they had their first child, Katelin, in 1999, Jennifer asked Jocelyn if she and Wesley would be the child’s godparents. Tearfully, Jocelyn said she had to decline, as Jehovah’s Witnesses looked down on infant christening as a Catholic conspiracy.
The tenets that Jehovah’s Witnesses live by are quite strict, eschewing modern medicine and regarding all holidays as pagan. In fact, the only special day on the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ calendar is the Memorial of Christ’s Death, which happens every year at about the same time as the Christian holiday of Easter.
Wesley took most of the prohibitions against holidays very seriously. But bringing these restrictions into her home life felt personal to Jocelyn. Wesley knew these days were always spectacular festivities in her family, loaded with tradition and fun. She wondered at his motivations.
One year he agreed to go with Jocelyn to her family’s home in West Virginia for Thanksgiving. When they got there, though, he sat in the car while she had dinner with her relatives. Instead of staying over as she usually did so she could go shopping with her mother and sister on Black Friday, she climbed back into the vehicle with Wesley and they drove back to Virginia. Every year after that, she went to her family home without him.
Jocelyn also continued to celebrate Christmas in West Virginia, and with friends like Jennifer, helping her put up the tree, decorate the house, and make cookies—all things Jocelyn wished she could do in her own home. She soon expanded her holiday activities with that family to include helping make Halloween costumes and going trick-or-treating with their kids.
Wesley celebrated one annual event, though: their wedding anniversary. On one of the earlier years, he bought Jocelyn a punching bag and hung it up for her from a support beam in the basement. Some couples would consider this a very odd, decidedly unromantic gift, but the athletic Jocelyn was thrilled.
• • •
The Earnests continued to accompany the Kernses on yearly trips to Harris Lake. They loved it so much that when an adjacent lot went up for sale, they considered buying it, but they didn’t act fast enough. Wesley had also fallen in love with Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia and suggested that they get a piece of property there instead.
In the 2000 school year, Wesley got a teaching position at Heritage High School in the Lynchburg City Schools system. In August, he finished all the course requirements for his doctorate, and was formally awarded a PhD in administration supervision with finance and technology minors the following January.
The couple now concentrated on finding the perfect place to build on Smith Mountain Lake. Driving through the rolling hills of the Virginia countryside with the glorious Blue Ridge Mountains as a backdrop, the trip to the Smith Mountain Lake home was a pleasure in itself. The peaks lack the majestic angles and stark faces of western mountain ranges but possess the more comforting, ancient beauty of timeworn edges and tree-covered tops.
The drive from Lynchburg cuts through stretches of tall evergreen and deciduous trees and idyllic pastures. In many spots the cultivated areas were overrun by the undulating mystery of kudzu-shrouded landscapes, though an occasional tree manages to fight off the aggressor to stand tall and defiant, stretching its limbs to the sky. Once off the highway, the road winds past vineyards, ticky-tacky houses in need of paint and love and prosperous homesteads with miles of well-maintained wood fencing. In 2001, the Earnests bought the land they wanted nestled on the forested shoreline in the Hickory Point section of Clearwater Estates.
They agreed on the choice of property but little else. Jocelyn envisioned a rustic, restful cabin like the one the Kernses had in Canada. Wesley, on the other hand, wanted an elegant, massive testament to his success—a home that surpassed all the others around him. That is just what he designed: seven bedrooms, each one with a sunset view of the lake, six and a half baths, a spacious deck, and a grandiose three-boat dock.
By this point, Wesley had taken total control of all the couple’s finances. He put Jocelyn on a rigid shopping budget, which she only really minded at Christmastime. She wasn’t a woman of extravagant tastes, naturally habituated to shopping at Goodwill, thrift stores, and yard sales.
In the summer of 2001, Wesley was unable to make the trip to Canada because he was too busy preparing for the new school year in his position as an assistant principal at Heritage. He didn’t want Jocelyn to go without him, but she did anyway. Being there without Wesley further deepened the bond between Jocelyn and Jennifer, who began feeling like a big sister with a ferocious desire to protect and stand up for Jocelyn, and not let her be bullied.
Jennifer was beginning to see a side of Wesley she didn’t like. He seemed driven by greed and material goods. He was controlling, overbearing, and manipulative with Jocelyn, and he always seemed to be looking for others to validate his superiority. She felt his high self-esteem treaded on the edges of narcissism. Wesley, on the other hand, related to the troubled, misunderstood genius with a lousy childhood, the title character in Good Will Hunting. “That’s who I am. That’s me,” he once told her.
In late 2001, Bob and Jennifer took their daughters over to the Earnest home for pizza. After the kids settled down in front of a movie, Wesley started being very touchy-feely with Jocelyn, who all of them knew was not comfortable with public displays of affection.
“You see this?” Wesley flicked at the wedding band on Jocelyn’s finger. “This is the access code. This entitles me to access twenty-four-seven—and I’ll tell you twenty-four-seven is not enough for me.”
Jocelyn tried to blow him off with a flippant comment: “If that’s what you want, you better look elsewhere.”
Jennifer tried to distract him. “You talk like most men in America but twice a week is about all that is normal in a marriage.”
Wesley seemed to ignore her comment and started talking to Bob about sports.
• • •
At Heritage High School, Wesley received a promotion into administration and got involved in Habitat for Humanity. The city required that there be a licensed contractor supervising the work. To save the school the cost of hiring one, Wesley and the head of the Building Trade Department at the school both obtained contractor’s licenses.
Wesley worked as the general contractor for his Smith Mountain Lake home. He hired more than eighty subcontractors during the course of the work but did a lot of smaller jobs with his own hands and some assistance from Jocelyn. The house was supposed to be something Wesley and Jocelyn created together, but whenever there was a conflict, Wesley always overruled. Jocelyn wasn’t even able to assert herself on the color of the tile.
By nature, Jocelyn was a helper, a problem solver, and a peacemaker. All good qualities—but when combined with a man possessing Wesley’s need to control, the end result was not desirable. She tried to make it work, going along to keep the peace. As she did so, though, a creeping resentfulness set in.
Jocelyn later revealed that she’d been worried on her wedding day that she was about to make a serious mistake. It was more than last-minute jitters—she’d had lots of signals that life with Wesley wouldn’t be the partnership of equals that she’d always wanted to find in a marriage. But her family had made great efforts and gone to the expense in preparation for the event, and relatives and friends had traveled great distances to celebrate the day. She hadn’t wanted to disappoint any of them, so she’d said her vows and hoped for the best.
It was starting to look like the best was not going to happen.
• • •
In the summer of 2002, Wesley and Jocelyn went west for a long camping and hiking trip in Oregon with Wesley’s brother, Tyler, and his wife. Jocelyn didn’t care much for Tyler, and by the time they went home, she had developed suspicions that he was physically abusive to his wife.
While trekking through the wilderness, they ran across a yellow Lab who was in very bad shape. He won Jocelyn’s heart in record time and she adopted him on the spot. They named him Rowdie and flew him back with them to Virginia, where he lived comfortably for the few remaining years of his life.
Jocelyn eventually adopted another Labrador, this time a black one, whom she named Rufus.
• • •
In the fall, they visited Wesley’s dad, Roger, at his farm out in the country in West Virginia. One day, the three of them set up targets in a field for shooting practice. Wesley went out with a shotgun and Jocelyn brought a Smith and Wesson short-barreled revolver that Wesley had given to her.
Each one of them took turns firing the Smith and Wesson, using up a couple of boxes of ammunition. Then Wesley fired the shotgun and Jocelyn asked to try it. Roger showed her how to use it and she fired off a shot or two.
Much to her father-in-law’s surprise, Jocelyn was a pretty good shot. She actually fired better than Wesley had. Roger kidded his son quite a lot about her outshooting him.