...And Never Let HerGo

would not have listened to an obvious incompetent, written a “Dear John”
note
(not even a letter,) and then run out of town so I wasn’t even available to comfort you in your most desperate hours.
    Tom had told Kim Horstman, of course, that he and Anne Marie were best friends. One could only suspect that he had also been “best friends” with Susan Louth, Linda Marandola, and the other women he saw regularly. But, wisely, he mentioned none of those women in his fourteen-page reconciliation letter to Debby.
    “Do not forget,” he wrote, “that no one has ever loved you as I have, despite my many failures. Do not think that those who come after me will ever approach the depth of love bordering on adoration that I have given you.” And after four more pages of similar sentiments, “I beg you to do me the kindness of writing at least one more time and explaining why you did what you did and are doing, as well as [not] responding to these letters from my heart . . . I do love you and I always will and I can’t give it up . . . Adoringly, Tom.”
    Tom wrote Debby three letters on February 26, as passionate as the hero of a romance novel, as pitiful as a dying man’s last request. He was concerned that neither he nor Nick Perillo could get her on the phone. But a deeper worry gripped him when he
did
get her on the phone. Debby told him that Bergstrom had asked to see his letters. Tom was horrified. He had just ordered her to get another attorney when the prison phone line went dead.
    “He must have thought I’d hung up,” Debby recalled. “But I didn’t. His phone time was over and they would cut off conversations in the middle.”
    “Why would he want my letters?” Tom wrote minutes later, even though he knew it might take days for Debby to get this letter. “More importantly, why would you consider giving them to him, regardless of what he says? Now there’s
him
to contend with?”
    There was, indeed. And Tom had good reason to be worried. On February 26, he filled eight pages with his small, precise handwriting as he told Debby what she must do. “There is only one way now,” he wrote, “for you to prove your love clearly, completely, and unequivocally and also to demonstrate that your act [of] abandoning me when I most needed you was not something you will ever do again. This is my ultimatum and this is your choice: me or your lawyer. You cannot straddle the fence. You must choose between us.
    “Lawyers are a dime a dozen,” he wrote. “True love is rare. . . . To prove that this is no momentary flash of a broken heart, I make the same offer to prove my love for you. I will fire Charlie, Joe, and Gene . . . who are all my friends . . . [even though] I am imprisoned and will soon go on trial for my life.”
    Reading his bizarre ultimatum, Debby finally saw what she had to do. “Sometimes,” she recalled, “I didn’t even read all of thoseendless letters he sent. And I would just agree with what he told me to do on the phone—because he wouldn’t stop talking until I did. But I got the message in this letter, and I knew I wasn’t going to fire Tom Bergstrom. I never believed he would fire his attorneys.”
    Debby liked the Bergstroms and felt protected for the first time in many long years. They were no-nonsense people who were demonstrating that they cared about what happened to her. Dee, particularly, was intuitive about Debby’s feelings. Women
know
how other women feel, although it is almost impossible to explain this to a man.
    “Still,” Debby said softly, “and I don’t know if anyone can understand this—I still loved Tom and I still wanted to believe in him. Even at that low point, I couldn’t hear the things in his voice that I heard later.”
    On February 27, Debby and Tom Bergstrom met Wharton, Connolly, Alpert, and Donovan in Wharton’s office in the Carvel building. With Bergstrom’s approval, Debby agreed to cooperate with the prosecution team. She would answer their questions truthfully. Although she hated the thought, Debby also agreed to have a recording device attached to her phone, and henceforward Tom’s letters suggesting that she lie about evidentiary matters would be read not only by her attorney, but also by Connolly, Wharton, Alpert, and Donovan.
    In addition,
all
of Tom’s mail would be copied—in and out—and would be saved, without being read, until such time as that might become necessary.
    Dee Bergstrom understood Debby’s anguish and