Poisoned Love. Caitlin Rother
bills for the boys’ private schools. He was to pay about $11,500 in debts and attorneys fees for Marie and was awarded all assets and debts from his medical practices and all personal debts he shared with Marie. He also got to keep his “over and under Franchi hunting gun.”
The divorce became final on August 6, 1985.
Bertrand and Jerome didn’t recall their childhoods being all that clouded by the divorce battle, at least not so much that they would discuss it with someone outside the family.
Bertrand remembered that they never had enough money after the split, but he chose to focus more on the positive outcome: The brothers learned early how to amuse themselves. They always played outside, doing something athletic, like riding dirt bikes, hiking, or thrashing around in the swimming pool at their apartment complex. They also learned how to be creative. They built forts out of palm fronds, waged dirt-clod wars, made up their own games, and built a BMX bike-racing course with jumps and ramps.
The brothers often played together, at least until Greg started working odd jobs and then was employed at a drugstore to help their mother support the family. Greg was sixteen or seventeen when he got a job at Longs Drugs, where Jerome joined him a year later, after working at another pharmacy. In the coming years, the two brothers would stay in close touch with their coworkers, Aaron Wallo and Bill Leger. Leger, whose father was the store manager, was over at the de Villerses’ apartment most weekends, playing tennis or hiking.
The de Villers boys never had allowances, so they’d have to ask their mother to give them money when they wanted something, and she would decide if they could afford it on a case-by-case basis. Greg and Jerome had to pay for their own orthodontia.
The brothers never understood why Marie had to struggle so much. They saw how much easier life was for other kids whose fathers were plastic surgeons, and they wondered why their father couldn’t help out more, especially when he had a practice in Monte Carlo, a playground for those with a glitzy lifestyle.
Yves and Marie always watched the evening news, and as the boys got older, their parents encouraged them to participate in dinner discussions about current events or whatever they were learning in school.
Marie taught the boys table manners: Don’t come to the table without a shirt, fork on the left, knife on the right, and sit up straight. Marie made her own salad dressing, shepherd’s pie, and ham and cheese sandwiches, which sound so much more sophisticated when called by their French names—Purée Parmanchiez and Croque Monsieur. She also taught Bertrand to cook, and he often started dinner when she had to work two jobs to make ends meet.
With the boys at soccer or tennis practice and with Marie and Greg working late, the family might not have sat down to dinner until 9:30 P.M. But they always ate together. It was just something they did, and it helped keep the family together.
“We are a team,” Marie would tell her sons. “Everybody has a role to play. If you want to win the game, everybody has to keep his position and to play the game. But don’t forget, I am the captain.”
Marie was a strong woman with a deep sense of pride, and once she’d made up her mind, it was difficult to change. But she could also be gentle. Her children were the primary focus of her life.
Jerome and Bertrand recalled their parents staying in regular contact but admitted those days seemed a bit blurry in their minds. They remembered spending summers alone with their father soon after the split, saying that in later years, Marie would come along, too. When Yves still had his practice in Thousand Oaks, they would summer there and hang out at the YMCA or go to the beach while Yves was at work.
Sometimes Yves would rent a cabin for two or three weeks at Mammoth Lakes or take them camping there, a summer trip that gradually became a family tradition.
One summer Yves took the boys to a dude ranch in Wyoming for two weeks. There they learned how to lasso a goat and do other rodeo tricks. Greg made a leather belt with his name on it. And he and Jerome got to go horseback riding, but Bertrand had to stay behind because he was too little.
During the rest of the year, Yves visited the boys in Palm Springs some weekends and over the holidays. They would go hiking together, and he’d take them to church on Sunday.
Marie worked in various clothing boutiques and then high-end department stores in Palm Springs, selling clothes and helping to put on fashion shows. Later she studied massage therapy, and after Bertrand went off to university, she moved into a town house Yves was renting in Thousand Oaks. Eventually, she opened her own massage business, called Somacare, at the Hyatt Westlake Plaza hotel.
The boys grew up knowing that Yves was supposed to pay child support and alimony. They also remembered that the checks often didn’t come on time, which made it difficult for Marie to make rent. Sometimes, they said, Yves would buy things for the family instead.
Asked recently about the financial situation back then, Yves claimed he gave Marie “more money than [he] was required to” and never had to be reminded to do so by those enforcing the custody arrangement. “I did struggle, for obvious reasons, but I worked very hard,” he said.
Nonetheless, Marie had to ask friends to help out her family. In a January 1984 divorce filing, she listed debts including $18,400 in personal loans from friends for living expenses, $2,500 in unpaid rent, $1,280 in medical expenses, and $9,500 in attorneys’ fees.
The boys attended a number of different schools, some of them private and run by the Catholic Church, but scholarships weren’t always available. All three brothers attended the four-year public Palm Springs High School, where Jerome and Bertrand played on the tennis team.
Marie was strict but understanding, and she used her own unique disciplinary techniques. She stopped letting the boys stay the night with friends once they became teenagers. And when they did go out, Marie would tell them to call in. She’d ask for the phone number, then she’d call them back to make sure they were where they claimed.
Greg, being the eldest, got his own room. His brothers looked up to him as a fix-it guy and arbiter of sibling spats. Interested in the mechanics of things, Greg would take his bicycle apart, surround himself with its pieces, then put it back together. He also felt very comfortable with computers.
Jerome and Greg were close, though they competed with each other on many levels. As they got older, Greg was more shy and less experienced than Jerome in the ways of meeting girls, so he relied on his younger brother’s expertise. One day, when Jerome was fifteen and Greg was seventeen, they went to the mall together and discussed the best technique. Greg had seen his brother at work. “You give them the eye,” Greg noted. It was a private joke between them for years to come.
Greg wasn’t a great student like Bertrand, but he managed to keep a decent grade point average in high school, even when he was working at Longs. After graduating from high school in 1991, he spent two years at the College of the Desert, a community college in Palm Desert, apparently because it was cheaper than a four-year college. He earned enough credits for an associate’s degree, though there is no record he applied for one.
In 1992 and 1993, Greg and Jerome went to stay with their father in Monaco for the summer. Bertrand and Marie came over and joined them later. Both years, Greg got an internship there at the International Atomic Energy Agency Marine Environment Laboratory, where he used his computer skills to analyze data related to marine radioactivity and pollution levels in the Mediterranean Sea.
As his sons got older, Yves wasn’t around as much, but when he was, the boys increasingly felt he overexerted his role as an authority figure. Yves could be a very sweet man, but he seemed elusive to his sons.
“It’s hard to know who he is exactly,” Jerome said. “He’s a real smart guy. He likes having his own space.”
Yves was very particular about his belongings. When the boys were young and he came back from a trip, he would know if one of them had moved something in his room. He kept a detailed journal, recording everything from expenditures to details of conversations. Jerome adopted these practices and employed them years later as he investigated Greg’s death. Bertrand, who later went on