Worth More Dead

sometimes was, Teresa made a manipulative enemy. While living with Rieger in their high-end neighborhood—just south of the Denver city line—the couple had several drinks one evening. Teresa decided she didn’t want to cook, so she demanded that they go to a restaurant. While Rieger was getting ready to go, she sneaked away to a phone out of his hearing and called the police. Pretending to be a neighbor, she reported that a drunk was about to drive. As a good citizen she felt she had to report it. She gave her husband’s license number and described his car. As they headed out to eat with the children in the car, an officer pulled them over. Rieger refused to take a Breathalyzer test, which meant an automatic arrest. This led to his losing his driver’s license.
    In an affidavit filed during their divorce proceedings, Rieger also claimed that Teresa broke into his office to read his diary and steal documents, and that she had beaten him with one of his golf clubs. She sought ownership of their home but didn’t get it. She reportedly took her revenge by taking Rieger’s war mementos, medals, and log books, all that he cared most about from his glory days.
    Sometime later, Vincent and Teresa fought over Brent’s custody. Although no one who knew them—including Rieger’s grown daughter—ever said that Teresa didn’t love the boy, the Court felt she was not stable enough to be the custodial parent.
    Judge Lynne Hufnagel found Teresa to be self-absorbed, emotionally needy, lacking in empathy, and slow to forgive. “Her profile,” the Court wrote, “reflects a person who has difficulty in maintaining close relationships, who is reluctant to trust others, and a person who is vulnerable to feeling victimized.”
    Rieger’s daughter commented that the boy touched Teresa’s tender side. “She totally loved Brent, and she was as good a mother as she could be. She wanted only the best for him.”
    But Teresa had never had parenting models, and she herself was as hungry for nurturing as a child. It was too late for her to ever catch up. Try as she might, her emotional outbursts made her a less-than-perfect mother.
    In the end, Vincent Rieger was given custody of their son, although Teresa was allowed visitation.
    In 1993, Teresa took another husband: Mike Mansfield, a realtor, twenty years older than she. That union survived for three and a half years. A year later, she married her fourth husband, Mario Perez, 42.
    Teresa was 32 now, but her weaknesses had only been exacerbated; her temper was more likely to erupt than ever. Perez made a good living as an expert in finance who worked for an oil and gas corporation.
    Teresa drank a little too much and may have started using drugs at that point. She also had another, much stronger addiction that took over her life and signaled trouble for her marriage. She had discovered the rush that came to her when she gambled. She owed almost $10,000 to more than a dozen casinos before she married Perez. Armed with his credit cards, she became an even more frequent sight at the casino tables and machines. She was out of control, and before Perez realized it, she had maxed out his cards and put him in debt to the tune of $42,000. She also forged his name on checks and was looking around for a way to embezzle even more money.
    Within two hours one day, she withdrew $1,000 in each of five ATM transactions. Always an addictive personality, Teresa was obsessed with making a fortune at the casinos, enough that she would not need to depend on a man to survive. But at every casino, the House always has the advantage, and her chances of becoming independently wealthy through her gambling were almost nil. The judge warned her that she was in way too deep and that she had a serious problem, advising her to enter rehab to deal with it.
    She didn’t listen. Although her marriage to Perez had come to the end of the road, she had a backup plan. Her husband may not have known that Teresa had been unfaithful to him for two years before they ended up in divorce court. She was seeing an older man—a much older man.
    This time, her lover was forty years older than she was. And he was rich. He couldn’t marry her; he was already married and had been for decades. Still, Teresa believed that becoming his mistress would give her the status and the kind of life that would make up for everything she had missed out on. When she began with him, she didn’t know that she wasn’t his only lover.