Worth More Dead

never bargained for. They sought love and lifetime commitment only to find that they had married someone who, through the looking glass, was a man they did not know. There is nothing funny about the story of a real-life desperate housewife that follows. It is certainly rife with secrets and mystery, but the denouement is grim, and too many real hearts broke before it was over.
    I will admit that I could not talk to the victims’ friends or read the documents that accompanied this case without crying.

Every neighborhood seems to have one couple that appears to be enjoying an ideal life. It’s easy to like them and at the same time to envy them. Their homes are too neat, their yards and gardens wonderfully manicured and alive with blooms. Their children always seem to be well behaved. While the rest of the block’s residents have weeds in their yards, peeling paint, dogs that bark in the middle of the night, cars that need to be washed, and kids who break windows, miss the school bus, and rarely, if ever, get straight A’s, the perfect couple avoids those problems. If they have arguments, they usually manage to do it behind closed doors. A marriage with no bumps at all is impossible; and who wants to be part of such a union, anyway? Still, it’s a challenge to try to emulate people who seem to do it with so little effort.
    To the casual observer, the couple in this case, Robert and Carolyn Durall, had a good marriage. Both held prestigious jobs with high incomes. After work, like most young couples, they shuttled their three children to and from soccer, baseball, church activities, Cub Scouts, and all the organized classes and clubs that are so important to youngsters growing up in an era when achievement and being the best have become more important than just playing. Kids don’t play hide-and-go-seek or kick-the-can anymore. They don’t climb trees or go fishing or read adventure books.
    Robert and Carolyn Durall’s children were no different: their parents wanted them to have a running start at success in life.
    Even though the Duralls looked happy, at least to those neighbors who didn’t know them very well, there was danger simmering there, little fires occasionally breaking out that might destroy their family if they took hold. Perhaps it was easier to hide their unhappiness because they had a nineties kind of life.
    To a closer observer, there was an undercurrent that whispered trouble ahead. But even those who knew them well could not possibly have foreseen the terrible way the Duralls’ marriage would implode.
     
    Carolyn Durall was born on December 1, 1961. She was a truly nice little girl who grew up to be a woman who brightened any room she walked into. When she was eight, she made a birthday cake for the woman who lived next door. Nobody suggested it to her; she just wanted to be sure that her friend had a special birthday. She loved to bake even then, and her enthusiasm for cooking grew as she did.
    Carolyn loved life, her family, her pets, and nature. She wrote poems when she was in grade school. Many of them were based on the changing seasons:
    Autumn Leaves
    When Autumn leaves whirl
    In a neat little swirl
        They fall from a pretty tree,
    To meet the ground with glee
    And birds fly south
    To feed their mouths
      And when the wind is blowing
        It makes the snow snowing.
    Carolyn always loved to cook, but ironically she married a man who ate only health food, organic vegetables, and no red meat at all. She went to extra effort to find sugar-free recipes and other ingredients acceptable to him. Since she couldn’t very often bake treats for her husband, she baked things for her children, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Every birthday of anyone remotely close to her was an occasion for a cake, and she often brought warm scones with raspberry jam to her office at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and left them on her friends’ desks. Her weakness was chocolate, anything chocolate.
    As a child, Carolyn was captivated by horses, and she learned to ride at a young age; not just to ride but to show in competition, which included jumping and performing intricate movements around barricades. For most of her life, she had her own horse. When she was 36, her horse was named Drizzle, and she kept him in stables near her house and rode him whenever she could. She also loved ice-skating.
    Whenever anyone describes Carolyn, they begin, “She was always smiling—always.” And when you look