Dance With The Devil

Toni: I get a phone call, like, 2:00 in the morning.  And it's Barbara in hysterics.  And the whole conversation I'm saying, "What?  What?  What?"

The story Barbara Bentley told Toni over the phone was jaw-dropping: That in a D.C.-area hotel bathroom, her husband John Perry had tried to smother her to death with ether.  John was now in jail, being investigated for attempted murder, while Barbara flew home to California.  Toni arrived at the airport to pick up a broken woman.

Toni: Her face was so scarred, and so scratched up.  And she looked like she was going to pass out.  And so she just came running to us, and we ran to her.  Everybody's in tears. 

Back home and with raw wounds in her heart that ached worse than her face, Barbara methodically dug through piles of paper, and each item she found tore down the false edifice of the life she thought she had, and the man she thought she'd married.  She found forged signatures - unauthorized withdrawals in the exact amount of John's supposed teaching salary - John's Department of Psychology contract, which he'd cobbled together from university stationery doctored with White-Out.

And -- something that put ice in her veins -- John's plane tickets from his surprise appearance on Barbara's Indianapolis business trip:

Dennis Murphy: What do you think was supposed to happen on that trip?

Barbara: I think he was going to try to kill me. He would kill me by ether asphyxiation. And he was always saying, "Now, if you died on a business trip, you'd get a lot more money from the company, right?"  And I said, "Yes, John.  Yeah."

Barbara saw clearly for the first time those other strange events of the past year -- that tumble down the stairs, the odd car crash, the gun stuffed into John's briefcase in Florida.

Dennis Murphy: Certainly three attempts, you believe, but maybe four, maybe five?

Barbara: Yes. 

There was no escaping it -- there'd never been a diplomatic mission to Egypt.  And that ether attack had nothing to do with John having cancer -- or wanting to commit suicide.  Barbara's husband of eight years, the man she stood by, supported and loved, had ruthlessly tried to murder her.  

And now with everything in question, Barbara needed to know: was her husband really a rear admiral with the Navy?  She placed a call to another admiral they once socialized with.

Barbara:  When I called him, he says, "Well, don't you know about the FBI?"  And I said, "What do you mean?"  "Well, they're investigating him for impersonating an officer.  He's not a retired rear admiral."

Dennis Murphy: So now this question, that you've asked periodically in your marriage, almost in a rhetorical kind of fashion, "John, who are you?"

Barbara: "John, who are you?"

Dennis Murphy: Becomes a very valid question.

Barbara: Right.

Dennis Murphy:  "Who are you, john perry?"

Barbara: Right.

Not only that, the detective investigating the ether attack told Barbara that her husband had used several aliases in the past, including Calliet Delvin, Guy D. Delvin, Daniel F. Malley, Robert Lee Stuart, and Thomas John Mudge.  He also told Barbara that John Perry -- whoever he was -- had been arrested in the past for auto theft, passport fraud, and multiple counts of credit card fraud.   

Dennis Murphy: Did you feel like you'd been an awful fool all these years?

Barbara: No.  No.  Why should I be a fool if the navy was fooled, if friends were fooled, if family was fooled?  Nobody ever came and said, "Hey, this guy is crooked.  This guy is evil. This guy is, you know, you shouldn't be with him, he's gonna try to murder you." Nobody said that.

In fact, Barbara's friends were as flabbergasted as she was. 

Pam: We were good friends.  And so how could he do this?  How could he do this to her? 

Don:  I just didn't think that he would be capable of something like that.  There was no indication. And all of a sudden it just totally came unraveled in a heartbeat.  And that's the shock.

Now Barbara knew who her husband of more than eight years wasn't ... but she had nothing concrete to fill the void.  And in typical fashion, the cipher once known as John Perry wasn't talking. But he had one last card to play, one his defense attorney to would use at his trial for attempted murder.  What would a jury believe?

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