HIGHEST PRAISE FOR M. WILLIAM PHELPS
“M. William Phelps dares to tread where few others will: into the mind of a killer.”
—TV Rage
“Phelps is the king of true crime.”
—Lynda Hirsch, Creators Syndicate
THE KILLING KIND
“In this true crime book, Phelps focuses on unrepentant killer Danny Hembree . . . [who] seizes the chance to take center stage with lurid confessions of a decades-long career of violent robbery, assault, rape, and murder.... Fans of the author’s Discovery TV series, Dark Minds, will be rewarded.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Phelps presents in-depth research and interviews that allow for vivid descriptions of characters and events.... Fans of true crime, forensics, and serial killer activities will all find something of interest here.”
—Library Journal
OBSESSED
“True-crime junkies will be sated by the latest thriller from Phelps, which focuses on a fatal love triangle that definitely proved to be stranger than fiction. The police work undertaken to solve the case is recounted with the right amount of detail, and readers will be rewarded with shocking television-worthy twists in a story with inherent drama.”
—Publishers Weekly
BAD GIRLS
“Fascinating, gripping . . . Phelps’s sharp investigative skills and questioning mind resonate. Whether or not you agree with the author’s suspicions that an innocent is behind bars, you won’t regret going along for the ride with such an accomplished reporter.”
—Sue Russell
NEVER SEE THEM AGAIN
“This riveting book examines one of the most horrific murders in recent American history.”
—New York Post
“Phelps clearly shows how the ugliest crimes can take place in the quietest of suburbs.”
—Library Journal
“Thoroughly reported . . . the book is primarily a police procedural, but it is also a tribute to the four murder victims.”
—Kirkus Reviews
TOO YOUNG TO KILL
“Phelps is the Harlan Coben of real-life thrillers.”
—Allison Brennan
LOVE HER TO DEATH
“Reading anything by Phelps is always an eye opening experience. The characters are well researched and well written. We have murder, adultery, obsession, lies and so much more.”
—Suspense Magazine
“You don’t want to miss Love Her To Death by M. William Phelps, a book destined to be one of 2011’s top true crimes!”
—True Crime Book Reviews
“A chilling crime . . . award-winning author Phelps goes into lustrous and painstaking detail, bringing all the players vividly to life.”
—Crime Magazine
KILL FOR ME
“Phelps gets into the blood and guts of the story.”
—Gregg Olsen, New York Times best-selling author of Fear Collector
“Phelps infuses his investigative journalism with plenty of energized descriptions.”
—Publishers Weekly
DEATH TRAP
“A chilling tale of a sociopathic wife and mother . . . a compelling journey from the inside of this woman’s mind to final justice in a court of law. For three days I did little else but read this book.”
—Harry N. MacLean, New York Times best-selling author of In Broad Daylight
I’LL BE WATCHING YOU
“Phelps has an unrelenting sense for detail that affirms his place, book by book, as one of our most engaging crime journalists.”
—Katherine Ramsland
IF LOOKS COULD KILL
“M. William Phelps, one of America’s finest true-crime writers, has written a compelling and gripping book about an intriguing murder mystery. Readers of this genre will thoroughly enjoy this book.”
—Vincent Bugliosi
“Starts quickly and doesn’t slow down.... Phelps consistently ratchets up the dramatic tension, hooking readers. His thorough research and interviews give the book complexity, richness of character, and urgency.”
—Stephen Singular
MURDER IN THE HEARTLAND
“Drawing on interviews with law officers and relatives, the author has done significant research. His facile writing pulls the reader along.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Phelps expertly reminds us that when the darkest form of evil invades the quiet and safe outposts of rural America, the tragedy is greatly magnified. Get ready for some sleepless nights.”
—Carlton Stowers
“This is the most disturbing and moving look at murder in rural America since Capote’s In Cold Blood.”
—Gregg Olsen
SLEEP IN HEAVENLY PEACE
“An exceptional book by an exceptional true-crime writer. Phelps exposes long-hidden secrets and reveals disquieting truths.”
—Kathryn Casey
EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE
“An insightful and fast-paced examination of the inner workings of a good cop and his bad informant, culminating in an unforgettable truth-is-stranger-than-fiction climax.”
—Michael M. Baden, M.D.
“M. William Phelps is the rising star of the nonfiction crime genre, and his true tales of murder are scary-as-hell thrill rides into the dark heart of the inhuman condition.”
—Douglas Clegg
“An intense roller-coaster of a crime story . . . complex, with twists and turns worthy of any great detective mystery . . . reads more like a novel than your standard non-fiction crime book.”
—Steve Jackson
PERFECT POISON
“True crime at its best—compelling, gripping, an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Phelps packs wallops of delight with his skillful ability to narrate a suspenseful story.”
—Harvey Rachlin
“A compelling account of terror . . . the author dedicates himself to unmasking the psychopath with facts, insight and the other proven methods of journalistic leg work.”
—Lowell Cauffiel
Also By M. William Phelps
Perfect Poison
Lethal Guardian
Every Move You Make
Sleep in Heavenly Peace
Murder in the Heartland
Because You Loved Me
If Looks Could Kill
I’ll Be Watching You
Deadly Secrets
Cruel Death
Death Trap
Kill For Me
Love Her to Death
Too Young to Kill
Never See Them Again
Kiss of the She-Devil
Bad Girls
Obsessed
The Killing Kind
She Survived: Melissa (e-book)
She Survived: Jane (e-book)
I’d Kill For You
To Love and To Kill
ONE BREATH AWAY
M. WILLIAM PHELPS
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
HIGHEST PRAISE FOR M. WILLIAM PHELPS
Also By M. William Phelps
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
PART TWO
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
PART THREE
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
CHAPTER 91
CHAPTER 92
CHAPTER 93
CHAPTER 94
CHAPTER 95
CHAPTER 96
CHAPTER 97
CHAPTER 98
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
If You Only Knew
Teaser chapter
Copyright Page
This book is dedicated to: Tim Samaras, Mindy McCready,
Jenni Rivera, Russell Armstrong, Gia Allemand,
Phil Harris, Shain Gandee, Roy Garber, Rodney King,
Joey Kovar, Julien Hug, Jennifer Lyon, Frankie Abernathy,
Anna Nicole Smith, Pedro Zamora, Mark Balelo,
Cheryl Kosewicz, Joe Cerniglia, Mitchell Guist,
Najai Turpin, Nathan Clutter, Rachel Brown,
Bobbi Kristina Brown, and Tobias Strebel.
All reality stars.
All dead.
Many from suicide.
I knew none of them personally.
Was there a limit to what he could endure? It seemed not. He was more vulnerable to suffering—and at the same time, paradoxically, he had a greater capacity for it....
—Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
IT WAS ONE of those telephone calls in the middle of the night we all fear. The kind that jolts your heart, puts a pit in your gut, and startles you awake—your adrenaline pumping the moment you open your eyes.
Somebody’s dead!
Quickly roused from REM sleep by a voice calling out, letting her know there was someone on the phone, Rachel Robidoux had no idea that everything in life, as she knew it, was about to change. Nor would her life, or that of one of her children, ever be the same again.
She got out of bed and put the phone to her ear: “Hello? What is it?” Rachel could barely get the words out.
That time of night, hell, you’d expect bad news on the other end of the line.
The day preceding the telephone call, however, had started out like any other Sunday in forty-year-old Rachel Robidoux’s life.
* * *
Rachel woke up at her usual 5 A.M. hour to get ready for work. It was October 24, 2010, the weather rather balmy for this time of the year in St. Petersburg, Florida. As Rachel opened the door to leave, a wall of humid, almost wet, tropical, 75-degree morning air hit her in the face.
Within Pinellas County, St. Petersburg is a rather large city, a population of about a quarter million, give or take. With Tropicana Field downtown, home to Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays, St. Pete, as locals call it, still holds on to that resort-town feel its founder had intended back in 1888 when the city was born.
Rachel Robidoux worked at Denny’s on Thirty-Fourth Street North, downtown. She’d been there for well over a decade. Normally, on Sundays, Rachel worked the day shift: seven to four. To this mother of five, although she’d gotten used to it by now, St. Pete might as well have been New York City. Rachel had been born and raised (mostly) in a one-stop-sign, one-intersection, everybody-knows-everybody, small New England town.
As the end of her shift on that Sunday approached, Rachel took a call from one of her five daughters, Ashley McCauley, who had turned seventeen that past April.
“You want to go to Crescent Lake Park with Grandma after you get out?”
This sounded like a good time, Rachel thought. “I’ll pick you two up soon,” she said.
Crescent Lake Park is in an area of St. Pete where families and lovers and kids hang out on those seemingly endless, perfect Florida days, with skies that warm color of robin’s-egg blue. People flock there and enjoy the ducks and geese and swans, as well as the company they keep. Rachel needed this comforting space in her life. Not that things had been chaotic or all that difficult lately, having been through some rather extremely tough times in her life, same as just about every working-class family in the country. However, she’d had some issues over the past few years with her oldest daughter, Jennifer Mee. Jen had turned nineteen in July. Her life, as Rachel later put it, had not gone along a trajectory Rachel and her husband, Chris, Jennifer’s stepfather, would have liked. Jen was Rachel’s firstborn, a child from a failed relationship when Rachel was twenty-one. In fact, Jen was just eighteen months old when Rachel met Chris, Ashley three months old—their other children, Kayla, Destiny and McKenzie, Rachel and Chris had together. As far as the oldest girls were concerned, however, Chris Robidoux had always considered himself their father.
A little over a year ago, some weeks before her eighteenth birthday, Jennifer had moved out of the house and was out on her own. Before that, she had one foot out, anyway, often staying with one friend for a month, or babysitting, or staying with other friends for a few weeks here and there, maybe at a motel or even on a park bench. All this happened after Jennifer had garnered international fame in the days beyond January 23, 2007, for experiencing a bout with the hiccups that lasted for about five weeks. Still, with Jennifer moving out and “changing,” as Rachel liked to say, it wasn’t a major problem between Rachel and her daughter. For Rachel, it was more about the people who had flocked to Jennifer after her star rose—on top of the guys Jennifer had been dating for what was about four years.
“Thugs,” Rachel called them.
Although Rachel and Jennifer spoke as much as two to three times per week, their conversations weren’t like they used to be. It was definitely not the personal talk that mothers and daughters have. These days, Rachel understood (though she later admitted some denial on her part) that Jennifer was shielding parts of herself and her chosen lifestyle. Just a look at Jennifer’s Myspace page, back when that gulf between mom and daughter had begun to grow, had given Rachel and Chris an idea of where Jen was headed: My love is nt a game im real n dnt wnt a fake lien cheaten azz nigga.
“I guess I should have known with the signs,” Rachel recalled. “But I didn’t. Jen was
into some ‘activities’ and later she [said she] was ashamed of it all.”
Rachel had no idea to what extent Jen had become involved in that street life, ripping and running with a group of hard-boiled, seasoned ruffians and tough street kids her own age. Jen had become somebody she had actually once said she despised. Maybe some naiveté existed on Rachel’s part, or perhaps it was just a mother struggling to keep up with a middle-class lifestyle while still having three young kids at home. Whatever the reason, Rachel lost that close touch with Jen. As they drifted apart, Rachel felt her daughter was old enough to begin carving out her own life, make her own mistakes, and take responsibility. Besides that, Chris and Jen had been at odds for a long time now, butting heads like rams. Both Rachel and Chris knew they couldn’t change Jennifer, or tell her how to live. They had been through so much during Jen’s hiccup period. Both were tired, frustrated, and ready to move on.
CHAPTER 2
DOWN AT CRESCENT Lake Park, after Rachel stopped and picked up her mother and Ashley, they sat and enjoyed the early evening. They fed the ducks, talked, and caught up on each other’s lives. That early-morning humidity and warmth had turned into a scorching afternoon sun. During the week, Rachel lived at her mother’s house just outside downtown St. Pete. Rachel and Chris and the kids had a house about ninety minutes out of town in the north, so it was more feasible and less expensive if Rachel stayed with her mother and father during the workweek. Chris collected disability—a stay-at-home dad, watching the kids, tending to the household chores. He had suffered several ailments, some psychological, others medical. The situation of Chris being home with the kids had been by design, in some ways, Rachel said. It happened after an incident some years back that greatly disturbed the entire family’s trust in anyone else being around their children.
Throughout that afternoon at the park, Rachel had called Jennifer several times. She hadn’t been able to reach her. Rachel, of course, wanted Jen to join them, but Jen wasn’t responding to her phone calls, texts, or voice mails. And although Jen had changed and lived what Rachel and Chris saw as an unhealthy and dangerous lifestyle, they were not estranged from one another. They disagreed about things, but they always talked and tried to see each other when they could. Jen not answering her phone and not calling back was out of character.