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Three

September 1992, Denver, Colorado

She was just eighteen-years-old and a topless dancer when he came into her life and swept her off her feet with his money and style. All the other dancers at the club wanted to be with the charming guy in the black cowboy hat, who spent lavishly to keep beautiful young women surrounding him at his table. He tipped everyone—the doorman, the bartenders, the strippers—so well that every time he walked in, they played “his” song, “Strokin’,” a randy R & B song by Clarence Carter that was censored on the airwaves when released in 1990.

Although a lovely young woman, Jennifer Tate never thought that she’d have a chance of getting to go out with him. She was petite—her nickname was “Baby Half-pint“—and she didn’t think that she compared to the “supermodels” who fastened onto the man they called “Wild Bill Cody” as soon as he came in the door. But on her nineteenth birthday, September 29, 1992, he strolled over to the stage where she was dancing and laid out $1,000 in $1 bills. Then he asked her out.

Tate had made it a policy not to date customers. If “date” was what you’d call what most of them wanted. Usually their line was something like, “I’ll give you five hundred dollars to go to bed with me.” But Cody was different. He was never so crude as to suggest a simple exchange of money for sex. He was much more subtle than that.

So she broke her rule and went out with him. He picked her up and took her to a Chinese restaurant, a type of food that she didn’t like, but it didn’t matter because she did like the way that he talked to her. She knew from dressing-room gossip that he was good at getting the girls to sit down and tell him their life stories. With dancers, that always meant some sob tale: life was rough, or they had family problems, or they were insecure about their looks. But, as Tate discovered, he always knew the right words to say. He made her feel like she was an angel from heaven in his eyes. She wanted to be with him.

Like many of the other girls, Tate had her own hard-luck story. Her father had walked out on her mother and her when she was three. Then there’d been a succession of other men in her mother’s life, many of them abusive, until she was six and her mother remarried.

Tate didn’t like dancing or the men who wanted to buy her affection. Nor did she like the lifestyle that went along with strip clubs; most of the other girls were into cocaine, something she associated with a bad childhood. She wanted nothing more than to be married; then there’d be no more dancing. She’d have a man who loved her for something other than sex. They’d settle down in a little house and raise their children in a stable, healthy environment.

Two days after her nineteenth birthday, she found herself hoping that this handsome man might be the answer to her dreams. He was older than she was, but he acted like he owned the world. Besides, she thought he looked real good in a tight pair of blue jeans.

At dinner that night, he seemed aware of her fondest dreams, as though he could read her mind. He challenged her to use her chopsticks to pick up an ice cube from his glass. He said that if she could do it on the first attempt, he was going to fly them both to Las Vegas to get married that night. She was disappointed that it took her two tries.

Two days after their first date, she moved in with him. For all his extravagance in public, he lived in a tiny apartment with mismatched furniture, including two reclining chairs but no couch in the living room. She didn’t care. His money had attracted her attention, but it was Wild Bill Cody she wanted.

He was part owner of a security company, Dynamic Control Systems, which is where she thought he made his money. It had to be a good business. He always had a new car and continued to spread cash around on partying like fertilizer on a farm.

Cody was very romantic. He’d fix her bubble baths and spread rose petals on their bed. He bought her nice clothes, including sexy little negligees, and liked to take her out, spending wildly on their nights on the town. His place was her place, he said, with one exception, a closet that he kept locked and she was not to go into.

He was secretive about his past life in general. He hardly mentioned his family, except to note that he was very close to his mother. But he did tell her that he’d been married three times before; he even bragged how he put his third wife in the “loony bin” after she tried to kill him. He also said he’d been in the army, a member of the elite Airborne Rangers, who taught him the wilderness survival skills that would allow him to live in any type of country indefinitely.

Tate used birth control and he used condoms, but she was soon pregnant anyway. It wasn’t long after she found out that she first saw another side to the Wild Bill Cody she loved.

A gay friend asked her to go out to dinner with him. She knew Cody was a little jealous; he didn’t even want her to see her old girlfriends. He warned her often that all that other men wanted her for was sex. She thought it would be OK to spend the evening with a gay man.

But she didn’t know that William Neal didn’t like gays, or blacks, or Hispanics for that matter. When she got home, she found that he’d packed all of her possessions into two garbage sacks and was kicking her out. Nineteen years old and two months pregnant, with nowhere to go, she begged him for forgiveness. She said she would do anything to make him happy.

Angry, he drove her down to his office at Dynamic Control. He made her sit in a chair in the middle of the room and began the inquisition. While she was out that night, he’d gone through her things and found a list of the boys she’d slept with in high school. It was just a list and she’d had no contact with those lovers since. He told her it was proof that she was no good.

“Don’t you know how this hurts me?” he screamed. Then he said something that didn’t make sense at the time. “I was molested by a preacher when I was young!” he yelled, and she had just betrayed him again. “You’re a slut. . . . A whore.”

Tate was terrified. He didn’t seem like the same man. She cried, but he responded by frightening her further. “If you’re scared now, you don’t know how evil I can be,” he snarled. “You don’t know meaning of scared.”

After he was through lecturing her, he took her back. All of her high school yearbooks and diaries disappeared, never to be seen again, and the relationship was never the same. “You don’t know meaning of scared” became a favorite saying, and Tate thought of his office as “the punishing zone” because he took her there to berate her whenever she’d “been bad.”

Yet, he could behave anyway he wanted. He liked to go to The Stampede, a country-western bar, where he’d throw money over the railing onto the dance floor below and laugh as he watched people scramble to pick up the cash. But that’s not all he liked at that bar. While patrons were picking up bills below, he’d have his hand up their waitress’s skirt in full view of pregnant Jennifer Tate.

She had quickly learned that Cody’s sexuality wasn’t all bubble baths and romantic evenings. His favorite television programming was pornography, which he insisted she watch with him. She also learned fairly quickly that he was still seeing some of the other dancers she thought she’d won him away from, though he would always deny that he had been unfaithful. If she complained about his dalliances, or anything else for that matter, he’d kick her out, force her to move back in with her mother. Sometimes he’d leave her there for weeks before calling to tell her she could come home.

Still, he married her when she was five months pregnant, at which time he demanded that she stop dancing. It was all that she had ever wanted, and she hoped that with the exchange of vows, he would trust her more, realize that she was his and his alone. However, the pattern of accusations and kicking her out of the apartment continued.

When she was nine months pregnant, he kicked her out again. Lonely, she agreed to go “cruising” the main boulevard of the town with her sister. They were stopped in the middle of the street when a young man ran out and gave her sister a kiss. For once, Cody’s spying failed him, but only by degrees. She’d only been home for a few minutes that night when he called and demanded to know who she had been kissing. Fortunately in this case, he somehow had photos of the kiss, which demonstrated that the recipient was her sister. Obviously, he was having her followed.

It only got worse. He gave her $1,000-per-week “spending money,” but she wasn’t allowed to go anywhere unless chaperoned by himself or one of his sisters who lived in Denver. She wasn’t to go grocery shopping or to the laundry on her own. Break the rules and it was a quick trip to the “punishment zone,” or pack her bags for her mother’s house.

There were always more rules. She was to leave him alone at work. She wasn’t to question where he went at all hours of the night, though he’d often come home at 3:00 A.M. or later, drunk and accusing her of sleeping around.

Tate, a bright, quick-witted young woman, knew there was something very wrong with her marriage. But she was pregnant, and she’d always promised herself that no child of hers would grow up without a father. Cody knew that; he’d taken great pains at the beginning of their relationship to learn such things and used it to his advantage.

When she went into labor on July 24, 1993, Cody wasn’t around. She’d called him only to be told, “Goddamn it, I’m working.” So she’d gone to the hospital with her sister and her mom. Cody showed up about 10:00 P.M. She still hadn’t delivered, so he went to a bar and wasn’t seen the rest of the night. He did pick her and their child up the next morning. He took them home and left again.

The child gave Cody more power over her. He constantly threatened to take their daughter and disappear if Tate didn’t do as she was told. Even when she was home with the infant, he was sure she was seeing other men. Once she took a nap in the morning and accidentally knocked the telephone off the hook. The next thing she knew, there was the sound of their front door being kicked in. Then he was standing over her in the bedroom, sure he’d caught her in the act.

No matter how hard she tried, Cody wouldn’t let her be the wife that she wanted to be. She wasn’t allowed to cook dinner. Those occasions when he did eat at home, he just wanted to order pizza. The family life that she had envisioned never materialized.

The romance was definitely gone as well, replaced by sex on command, which he’d indicate he wanted by his code phrase “potty for Daddy.”

Sex was such a paradox with Cody, and he was constantly testing her. He’d ask what she’d do if he wanted her to have sex with another man. She’d say she didn’t want to. “But what if it would make me happy?” he’d ask. Fortunately, she saw the trap. Making him happy was one thing, but she knew if she gave in, he’d have thrown one of his temper tantrums and called her a whore.

Then there was the occasion he took her to an adults-only swingers motel. He insisted that she watch the videos piped into the room so that she could learn “to give a proper blow job” and be instructed on how to masturbate. After the videos, they went out to the pool area where another man touched her leg suggestively. She told Cody, but he said not to worry about it, “that sort of thing happens all the time here.” She grew more uncomfortable when other people started having sex in front of her. She was glad that Cody didn’t object when she insisted on going back to their room.

In the room, he was his old sweet, sexy self. Then he told her he had “a surprise.” First he insisted on blindfolding her; then he tied her hands above her head. She wanted to make him happy, so she went along with the moment, even when he suggested that he open the curtains to the outside so that others could watch. He had obviously been to the motel before as he explained “the code”: open curtains meant “feel free to watch”; an open door meant join in. She said the open curtains were OK, but she didn’t want to have sex with anybody else.

He began to make love to her and then paused. Then she felt someone had entered her and it wasn’t her husband. Tate started kicking and demanding that Cody get whoever it was off her. The other man seemed as confused as she was angry. “I thought it was OK,” he apologized.

Cody told the man to leave. He then tried to comfort his wife and finally took her home. The next day, however, he kicked her out of the apartment. He said he needed time to work and she needed to go see her family, but she knew the real reason.

Cody’s increasingly aggressive sexuality troubled her. More alarming was the day she left their daughter with him while she went on one of the few outings she was allowed with a friend. When she came home, everything seemed fine. Cody said that he’d given their daughter a bath and then put her to bed. It wasn’t until the next day when she tried to wash the child herself that a red flag went up in her mind. The child, who had always enjoyed “tub time” before, suddenly fought getting into the bathtub, crying and screaming.

Tate didn’t want to think that Cody was capable of molesting his own child, but she mentioned it to one of his sisters anyway. The sister told her to be careful. In the mid-1980s, Cody had come under suspicion in a case in New York where a little girl had been abducted from a gas station, raped, and killed. He’d been in the vicinity at the time and questioned by the FBI. His sister understood that he’d been dropped from the list of suspects, but what she didn’t tell Tate was that he had molested another little girl when he was young. She just cautioned Tate to be careful about leaving her brother alone with the child.

Shortly before Thanksgiving Day, 1994, Tate finally had it with her husband. She hadn’t seen him in three days. He’d left her and her daughter without food or diapers, and of course she wasn’t allowed to go get them. Then he called about 3:00 A.M. She could hear him talking to another woman in the background.

“Don’t forget to wear a condom,” she yelled. Right away she knew it was a mistake to challenge him like that.

Clearly angry, he yelled that he was on his way home. She was scared to death and called the police so that she would be safe to pack her things. He arrived, but with the police present he couldn’t do anything except glare and refuse to let her have a car to leave in. The police called a cab for her.

For once, Cody was in a predicament. He’d invited his mother up from Texas for Thanksgiving so that she could meet his wife and baby for the first time. He called Tate and asked if she would forgive him and come to dinner for his mother’s sake. She relented. “Just act like everything is OK between us,” he said when he picked her up.

Tate fell in love with his mom. The old woman welcomed her with open arms and doted over her grandchild. But Cody’s older sister, Sharon, who knew what was going on between the couple, took her down to the basement of her home and lectured Tate about being a better wife. Tate knew better than to argue; next to his mother, Cody loved his sister Sharon best.

When Thanksgiving dinner was over, Cody took Tate back to her mother’s house, where she remained until May 1995. Not that he lost track of her. He must have had someone watching her because he knew everything she did, whether it was shopping or going out with her sister. His calls, however, were always mushy and romantic. “I miss you, Half-pint. I love you, Half-pint.” She thought that maybe he’d seen the error of his ways and they might try to make their marriage work, but he said he wasn’t ready for her to come home yet.

In May he finally asked her back. They even moved into a new apartment. He told her that he’d narrowly escaped going to prison while she was gone. He’d embezzled close to $70,000 from Dynamic Control Systems and had been forced to hand over his share of the company to his partners to avoid prosecution.

She was more concerned with his womanizing. As they packed up the old apartment, he’d allowed her to look in the locked closet for the first time. It was stuffed with army duffelbags, but she couldn’t tell what they contained. The only thing he showed her were hundreds of photographs and letters from other women. She knew he was doing it to make her jealous, but he insisted that he’d been faithful throughout their marriage.

One day a blond woman who looked to be in her forties came to the apartment looking for Cody. She told Tate, who’d answered the door, that she would wait outside to speak to him. Cody seemed real nervous when Tate told him a woman was waiting for him; he practically ran to the door and ushered the other woman quickly back to her car.

It was obvious the woman was her husband’s lover. Angry, Tate swore at him when he returned and said she would never sleep with him again. She left, taking only her daughter and a diaper bag. She had no job, no money . . . but at last she was through with Wild Bill Cody. She left her marriage for her own sake, but even more for their daughter’s. The necessity for leaving him was driven home one day when a neighbor of her mother’s dropped by. He was wearing a black cowboy hat like the one Cody wore. Her daughter began to sob. “No, don’t make my mommy cry.”

The irony was that Cody divorced her in March 1996. She didn’t see him again until that July. It was their daughter’s third birthday, and the little girl had decided she wanted to see her daddy. In all that time, he’d attempted to make contact only twice: he’d sent two cards, one for Valentine’s Day and one for her birthday. Of the two years between their daughter’s birth and their divorce—if Tate totaled every minute, every hour, every day, that Cody spent with their child, it would amount to perhaps two months. In all of the photographs that she had of him and their daughter, he had an expression on his face that seemed to say, “Hurry up and get this over with.” Only when he was in public, trying to impress people, had he ever acted like the doting father. But Tate told her daughter they’d go see him.

She found Cody at a bar called Shipwreck’s, where she knew he spent a lot of time. He was surrounded by women and a few men, holding drunken court. He acted glad to see Tate and made a big show of taking his daughter around, even referring to Tate as “my wife.”

After she left, Tate felt good about how the meeting went. She hoped that things would work out so that her daughter would grow up knowing her father. Maybe, with the passage of time, she and Cody would be friends again.

Then she received a letter from him. It warned her: “Stay the fuck out of my life.” He said he didn’t want his friends to know she even existed.

Tate did as he requested, happy to walk away with nothing more than full custody of her daughter and his promise to pay $350 a month in child support. Otherwise, she thought she’d seen and heard the last of Wild Bill Cody Neal.