Betrayal In Blood. Michael Benson
attended.
“I don’t remember if there was a band or a deejay, but there was dancing. Most of the family was there. Gram was there. Grampa was there. He had to get in a tuxedo, his first ever. I remember he needed help getting dressed,” Samantha said with a laugh.
Unable to attend the ceremony were Tabby’s mom and stepdad, Ginny and Cleo Winebrenner. They had been to Tabby’s first wedding, but not this one.
“It was the day after Christmas, and, because my husband and I are disabled, we have an extremely limited income,” Ginny said, “We just didn’t have the money to go to New York. The times when we did go to New York was when we had managed to save a couple hundred bucks, or Tabby had sent us a couple hundred bucks.”
To the best of her recollection, the groom had never impressed Ginny much. Years later, she wouldn’t be able to think of anything nice to say about Kevin.
“Kevin has a lot of problems, both mental and physical,” she said. “But I never liked Kevin, so you can’t go by me. I never cared for him. I found him very cold and empty.”
Despite the lack of warmth between Ginny and Kevin, the two were always civil with one another. They did not fight. Kevin was Tabby’s choice and Ginny had to respect that.
“I didn’t have to like him. I didn’t have to live with him,” she said.
Kevin and Tabby honeymooned in the Cayman Islands.
Tabby wasn’t the only one of Ginny’s kids to marry in the 1990s. In 1999, Cyril lived with Ginny’s sister Sharon for a couple months and he was working at McDonald’s in Monticello, Minnesota. It was there that Cyril met the woman he was to marry.
Ginny doesn’t remember if the bride was working at McDonald’s or if she just came in because she knew someone, but Cyril and Patty met in a McDonald’s. Not too long after that, Cyril and Patty married. Next came a baby boy named Cleo.
Ginny recalled the time. “He’s named exactly after my husband. My son didn’t give his wife a choice on the name,” she said with a laugh. “We call him ‘Little One.’ Little One is a miracle for me. He looks exactly like Chris. And he has Cyril’s personality. He’s the perfect combination of the two. I keep telling Patty that she’s in for a world of fun when he grows.”
CHAPTER 12
The Brotherhood of Misogyny
Tabby found that being married to Kevin was a tough adjustment. She was used to hanging around with friends her own age. She ended up being around Kevin’s friends who were old and not all that friendly.
Ever since she had started coming around Kevin’s Penfield house, she could tell that Kevin’s housemates and friends didn’t like her. One of those friends was William Shero (pseudonym), a divorced man in his late sixties who had worked with Kevin.
Years later, Shero recalled: “Well, we were both attorneys at Hyatt Legal Services, a nationwide franchise out of Cleveland. I was the senior attorney and he was my protégé. I was the manager and he was an employee. We handled all kinds of cases. I worked there for five or six years in the early 1990s. Kevin was already working there when I got hired. We became friends. Kevin bought a house out in Penfield, and I was living in an apartment. I had just gotten a divorce. He had room, so I lived in his house with him for a time.
“Kevin and I mostly went out to dinner—and that was about it. We went to a movie every once in a while, but not too often. We didn’t really hang out together too much. I was there before she came into the picture.
“Kevin bought the house out in Penfield because his parents were out there and he wanted to be close to them. And his cousin lived with us. We were the three bachelors. Then when she came along, the cousin moved out. I forget his cousin’s name. He was a nice guy, a real nice guy. The cousin moved out and then I moved out, and left the two of them alone. And after that, I lost track. You know, I didn’t give a shit. If you are a bachelor, you can’t mix with the lovebirds. It’s a different world.
“So Kevin met Tabatha. She was a piece of shit. He met her and she was married. She was like a cheerleader. You know, a young airhead. She came into the house. He helped her get a divorce; then they got married.
“After she moved in, I moved out and moved back into an apartment, but for a time I was living there with the two of them. For about a month, and that’s about it. I was living in the house with him, and he, they lived together there before they were married.
“Kevin was a great guy. He is a great guy. He’s a piece of work, very intelligent. Unfortunately, he always had a problem—well, not always, but for as long as I knew him—we used to talk about relationships with women. I had had a divorce, and other friends had problems with women.
“He got married, and, unfortunately, it was to the wrong individual. During the month I was there, I couldn’t understand how he got hooked up with a lowlife like that. She had problems. I could tell she wanted to have a family or something. She had the first baby. She wasn’t much of a mother. She induced a premature birth by not drinking too much water. I remember Kevin told me she was fainting. She was, you know, she was weird. Then she had the second baby. Then she came to the office, bringing the two babies. Strange, strange. Then I guess she took up with this guy. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
CHAPTER 13
Root Canals and Crownings
One thing Kevin took care of right away was Tabby’s teeth. Because they were snaggled, they had never been given high priority on Tabby’s vanity meter. Neglect had caused her teeth to go from bad to worse. The nerve had died in one of the top front teeth, and that tooth had discolored. Many of her teeth now caused her constant pain.
Tabby needed a full dental overhaul, and so Tabby underwent a series of root canals and crownings. Her appearance improved tremendously. The new smile was just the first step in Tabby’s playing of her latest and greatest role, that of lawyer’s wife.
Her hair was cut and allowed to remain straight. And she completely changed the clothes she wore. According to Tabby’s sister, her behavior did not change when she married Kevin, but her dressing style sure did.
“I didn’t notice a change attitudewise,” Samantha said. “But she did feel that she had to be, appearance-wise, the lawyer’s wife. She wore a lot of suits. She really toned down, because before she dressed pretty wild. I don’t mean wild bad. I mean she liked to wear funky clothes. She had this pink dress. It came to . . . well, it was real short. And it had polka dots on it. She would wear big, long earrings that dangled down to her shoulders. She wore makeup and everything was real bright. After she married Kevin, she kept her old clothes in her closet, but I never saw her wear them a whole lot.”
Tabby’s mom agreed that Tabby loved the change in class her marriage brought. “For Tabby, the whole idea of being the wife of a lawyer, the whole persona, fascinated her,” Ginny said.
Persona was one thing, and real life was another. It didn’t take Tabby too long to realize that life in the big suburban house was not the heaven-on-earth that she had dreamed about.
“She loved it, but only up to a point. She was having trouble with the fact that she was never around people her own age. Everybody was Kevin’s friends,” Ginny said.
Infidelity entered the picture right away, according to Ginny: “She told me in the first six months that she was married that she thought Kevin was having an affair, but she couldn’t prove it. Something about a hotel room and bubble baths and champagne.”
Tabby attempted to gain information through cyber-sleuthing. She read her husband’s private electronic communications, Ginny said. “Then Tabby said she read his e-mail and she knew who it was—but she still couldn’t prove it, because she couldn’t tell if he was really having an affair or if he was just mouthing off on the e-mail. He wasn’t happy that she had gotten into his e-mail account.”
Despite