Worth More Dead

she felt inside, the tougher her facade grew. She didn’t want anyone to know when she was hurt or disappointed. She was a fighter, something she continued to be for the rest of her life. If she felt cornered, she didn’t cower; she lashed out.
    “She had a very tough childhood,” a woman who knew Teresa for a long time said. “She was never parented. She didn’t grow up surrounded by love and encouragement as other children are. That was the root of her problems.”
    By the time she was 14 and blossoming into young womanhood, Teresa was no longer mistaken for a boy. She was too pretty and had a lovely figure. Fortunately, at that point she found someone who truly cared for her.
    Teresa was taken into Patricia Wietzel’s Ohio home. For the first time she found a foster mother who was almost like a real mother. “She was a good kid,” Wietzel remembered. “She really was.”
    For two years, Teresa had a home, but then her father decided to have a reunion, and he moved her to Denver. Too much time had passed, however. Teresa couldn’t get over the sense of abandonment she felt when she was a little girl and her father picked his bride over his daughters. If he expected a perfect daughter, he too was disappointed. Their reunion didn’t take, and soon Teresa was on her own in Denver.
    She kept in touch with Patricia Wietzel, but she couldn’t go home again to Ohio. She wanted to have the kind of life she had never known, and she wanted a nice house, expensive clothes and a car. She soon realized that her looks attracted men, men with money and the means to give her what she wanted so badly. Almost all of her life, people had looked down upon the “welfare kid.” Teresa wanted to show them all.
    Inside her, a ferocious anger burned. She could have crumpled under the weight of her lonely, neglectful childhood. Instead, she directed her resentment and the feeling that she deserved much better to achieving her goals. And she did well—except when someone rejected her. She could not bear that; it infuriated her, probably because it brought back her bleak response to being deserted and reinforced it.
     
    Teresa was attracted to older men. It wasn’t something she faked. All of her life, she’d looked for a “good daddy” to replace the “bad daddy” who disappointed her. It was natural that older men appealed more to her than callow youths who didn’t have anything to offer her. They weren’t mature enough to care about her feelings, and they didn’t have the financial means to buy her much more than a hamburger and a movie. Still, ultimately, she took out her anger on the last “good daddy” she found.
    When she was 17, Teresa moved in with Bob Costello. He was fourteen years older than she was but at 31 still a young man. According to his statements to police many years later, they were married in 1981 and divorced in 1983. On October 2, 1983, Teresa bore Costello’s child, a daughter they named Lori.* Even after they divorced, the couple were together sporadically for a long time. Costello became someone Teresa could always turn to when she was troubled.
    But Teresa moved on. She was 25 in the fall of 1988 when she married Vincent Rieger, who was 66 and a successful real estate developer. He was a navy pilot in a war that ended long before Teresa was born. Rieger shot down a half-dozen enemy planes in World War II and had the medals and the documentation that proved he was a hero when he was only in his early twenties.
    At the time they married, Teresa was three months pregnant with Rieger’s child. That may have been why he went through the ceremony with her or he may have hoped that her temper—which he had seen flare before—would calm down once they were married. At any rate, he paid for the lavish wedding she wanted.
    Not even three weeks had gone by before the newlyweds separated and filed for divorce. Shortly before Teresa gave birth to a son, she and Rieger decided to give their marriage another try, but it didn’t work. Their son, Brent,* was born in June 1989; by October, they were again seeking a divorce.
     
    Along with Denver Police detectives, reporters from the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post carried out an exhaustive research of Teresa Garrett Costello Rieger Mansfield Perez’s background. There was a lot of information to be gleaned from the Arapaho County divorce court files about the end of the Riegers’ short-lived marriage.
    As loving and seductive as she