Love Me To Death. Steve Jackson
censored on the airwaves when released in 1990.
Although a lovely young woman, Jennifer Tate never thought that she’d have a chance of getting to go out with him. She was petite—her nickname was “Baby Half-pint“—and she didn’t think that she compared to the “supermodels” who fastened onto the man they called “Wild Bill Cody” as soon as he came in the door. But on her nineteenth birthday, September 29, 1992, he strolled over to the stage where she was dancing and laid out $1,000 in $1 bills. Then he asked her out.
Tate had made it a policy not to date customers. If “date” was what you’d call what most of them wanted. Usually their line was something like, “I’ll give you five hundred dollars to go to bed with me.” But Cody was different. He was never so crude as to suggest a simple exchange of money for sex. He was much more subtle than that.
So she broke her rule and went out with him. He picked her up and took her to a Chinese restaurant, a type of food that she didn’t like, but it didn’t matter because she did like the way that he talked to her. She knew from dressing-room gossip that he was good at getting the girls to sit down and tell him their life stories. With dancers, that always meant some sob tale: life was rough, or they had family problems, or they were insecure about their looks. But, as Tate discovered, he always knew the right words to say. He made her feel like she was an angel from heaven in his eyes. She wanted to be with him.
Like many of the other girls, Tate had her own hard-luck story. Her father had walked out on her mother and her when she was three. Then there’d been a succession of other men in her mother’s life, many of them abusive, until she was six and her mother remarried.
Tate didn’t like dancing or the men who wanted to buy her affection. Nor did she like the lifestyle that went along with strip clubs; most of the other girls were into cocaine, something she associated with a bad childhood. She wanted nothing more than to be married; then there’d be no more dancing. She’d have a man who loved her for something other than sex. They’d settle down in a little house and raise their children in a stable, healthy environment.
Two days after her nineteenth birthday, she found herself hoping that this handsome man might be the answer to her dreams. He was older than she was, but he acted like he owned the world. Besides, she thought he looked real good in a tight pair of blue jeans.
At dinner that night, he seemed aware of her fondest dreams, as though he could read her mind. He challenged her to use her chopsticks to pick up an ice cube from his glass. He said that if she could do it on the first attempt, he was going to fly them both to Las Vegas to get married that night. She was disappointed that it took her two tries.
Two days after their first date, she moved in with him. For all his extravagance in public, he lived in a tiny apartment with mismatched furniture, including two reclining chairs but no couch in the living room. She didn’t care. His money had attracted her attention, but it was Wild Bill Cody she wanted.
He was part owner of a security company, Dynamic Control Systems, which is where she thought he made his money. It had to be a good business. He always had a new car and continued to spread cash around on partying like fertilizer on a farm.
Cody was very romantic. He’d fix her bubble baths and spread rose petals on their bed. He bought her nice clothes, including sexy little negligees, and liked to take her out, spending wildly on their nights on the town. His place was her place, he said, with one exception, a closet that he kept locked and she was not to go into.
He was secretive about his past life in general. He hardly mentioned his family, except to note that he was very close to his mother. But he did tell her that he’d been married three times before; he even bragged how he put his third wife in the “loony bin” after she tried to kill him. He also said he’d been in the army, a member of the elite Airborne Rangers, who taught him the wilderness survival skills that would allow him to live in any type of country indefinitely.
Tate used birth control and he used condoms, but she was soon pregnant anyway. It wasn’t long after she found out that she first saw another side to the Wild Bill Cody she loved.
A gay friend asked her to go out to dinner with him. She knew Cody was a little jealous; he didn’t even want her to see her old girlfriends. He warned her often that all that other men wanted her for was sex. She thought it would be OK to spend the evening with a gay man.
But she didn’t know that William Neal didn’t like gays, or blacks, or Hispanics for that matter. When she got home, she found that he’d packed all of her possessions into two garbage sacks and was kicking her out. Nineteen years old and two months pregnant, with nowhere to go, she begged him for forgiveness. She said she would do anything to make him happy.
Angry, he drove her down to his office at Dynamic Control. He made her sit in a chair in the middle of the room and began the inquisition. While she was out that night, he’d gone through her things and found a list of the boys she’d slept with in high school. It was just a list and she’d had no contact with those lovers since. He told her it was proof that she was no good.
“Don’t you know how this hurts me?” he screamed. Then he said something that didn’t make sense at the time. “I was molested by a preacher when I was young!” he yelled, and she had just betrayed him again. “You’re a slut. . . . A whore.”
Tate was terrified. He didn’t seem like the same man. She cried, but he responded by frightening her further. “If you’re scared now, you don’t know how evil I can be,” he snarled. “You don’t know meaning of scared.”
After he was through lecturing her, he took her back. All of her high school yearbooks and diaries disappeared, never to be seen again, and the relationship was never the same. “You don’t know meaning of scared” became a favorite saying, and Tate thought of his office as “the punishing zone” because he took her there to berate her whenever she’d “been bad.”
Yet, he could behave anyway he wanted. He liked to go to The Stampede, a country-western bar, where he’d throw money over the railing onto the dance floor below and laugh as he watched people scramble to pick up the cash. But that’s not all he liked at that bar. While patrons were picking up bills below, he’d have his hand up their waitress’s skirt in full view of pregnant Jennifer Tate.
She had quickly learned that Cody’s sexuality wasn’t all bubble baths and romantic evenings. His favorite television programming was pornography, which he insisted she watch with him. She also learned fairly quickly that he was still seeing some of the other dancers she thought she’d won him away from, though he would always deny that he had been unfaithful. If she complained about his dalliances, or anything else for that matter, he’d kick her out, force her to move back in with her mother. Sometimes he’d leave her there for weeks before calling to tell her she could come home.
Still, he married her when she was five months pregnant, at which time he demanded that she stop dancing. It was all that she had ever wanted, and she hoped that with the exchange of vows, he would trust her more, realize that she was his and his alone. However, the pattern of accusations and kicking her out of the apartment continued.
When she was nine months pregnant, he kicked her out again. Lonely, she agreed to go “cruising” the main boulevard of the town with her sister. They were stopped in the middle of the street when a young man ran out and gave her sister a kiss. For once, Cody’s spying failed him, but only by degrees. She’d only been home for a few minutes that night when he called and demanded to know who she had been kissing. Fortunately in this case, he somehow had photos of the kiss, which demonstrated that the recipient was her sister. Obviously, he was having her followed.
It only got worse. He gave her $1,000-per-week “spending money,” but she wasn’t allowed to go anywhere unless chaperoned by himself or one of his sisters who lived in Denver. She wasn’t to go grocery shopping or to the laundry on her own. Break the rules and it was a quick trip to the “punishment zone,” or pack her bags for her mother’s house.
There were always more rules. She was to leave him alone at work. She wasn’t to question where he went at all hours of the night, though he’d