The Boiling Water

Almost a year ago to this day I had to flee my ex’s house with my two week old son and not much more than the clothing on our backs.  (I was still bleeding from child birth) I felt like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water on my head.  How could I have been living with a man capable of such terror?  What had I missed?  Did I really know this person I had been sleeping next to, I had been engaged to, and with whom I shared a child?  Who WAS this stranger?  As I looked at Lucifer (that is what I will call him for the sake of this blog – “Luc” for short) he even looked like a monster.  He flew into a rage scarier than I have ever seen in just an instant.

If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will jump out; however, if you put that frog in a pot of cool water and slowly bring it to a boil – well, you are going to have one dead frog.

So yes, the crazy was always there with my ex but at first his charm was able to completely disarm me.  I was an endangered frog in no time.  He was able to lie as easy as it was for him to breath.  He told me about his budding music career and how he was signed by a major record label and about to release his first album.  (I know…it sounds unreal…because it is)  He also told me he had a software business as a side business while he waited for his music career to take off.  He was raising his pre-teen son alone as the mother had been in an accident and passed away. (I later learned that she had been murdered)  He was full of stories about the people he had preformed with and the adventures of his life.  He told stories in such extreme detail that it left anyone wondering if it would even be possible to lie about such a grand and verifiable event/story.  He owned a large house in the suburbs and a luxury car.  Every so often he would disappear for days and tell me he was going to “the studio”.  He would accept phone calls from a publicist (whom I later learned did not exist) and constantly talked about how he was on the brink of success.

This glamour show went on for quite a while (several months).  He poured on the charm and told me just what I wanted to hear.  He even asked my parents for my hand in marriage after only a few months of dating.  I was so taken and intrigued by him, I ignored some of the oddities.  For example:

–  How come none of this stuff about his music career was actually happening?  He told people he was on tour with Rihanna, but never actually went to any of the concerts.  (Later, during one of our trials, his son’s therapist even indicated that his son had told her we all had gone to see his father in concert.  This never occurred unless he had somehow drugged me and I have forgotten, but you would think one would remember seeing their then fiance on stage performing with Rihanna.)

–  How come when his son’s grandparents took him for the weekend they would meet and exchange him at a police station?  (Luc always claimed this was because he was afraid of them.)

–  Why did he stay home so much if he was responsible for a business?  Where were his employees?  How come he couldn’t go into that much detail about his software product?

–  Where was his family?  Friends? (I later learned that his family had disowned him after blaming him for the death of his own mother.)

–  Why did he dress like a thug and refuse to cut his hair (or his sons hair)?

 

Over time, the rages started.  Unfortunately, by the time the mask started to come down – I was already pregnant.  In the middle of the winter he would shut the heat off in the house telling me that he was low on cash and that if I needed heat I needed to pay for it.  In the summer, when I was 9 months pregnant – he would shut off the air conditioning and ask me to rub HIS feet.  When I would ask for a foot rub in return, his response would be, “I don’t do that.”  To an outsider who was thrown suddenly into something like this, they might see that there was something wrong with the man.  I was already knee deep in shit (and clearly a blind frog as well).

The closer I was to giving birth, the weirder things became.  His son went to school and accused him of child abuse (even had a bruise on his back to prove it).  Luc swore his son was lying.  Luc’s mood was also becoming extremely dark.  He wasn’t sleeping, he refused to leave the house, and he certainly wasn’t working.  He had excuse upon excuse about why his career hadn’t taken off, but it was becoming clear that there was something amiss with his story.  That being said, I still couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He even tried to claim he had had a mild stroke at one point (after I began asking questions about why he was home so often).  Illness was often his excuse for sitting around the house.  Whenever I would ask him to come somewhere with me or why he hadn’t done any work, he would feign a terrible and debilitating migraine.  (While I can’t prove that he doesn’t have some sort of medical condition causing the migraines, looking back on this situation, it appears suspect that one would always occur when he was faced with meeting my friends or hanging around my family.)

Finally, reality punched me in the face – hard.  A few weeks after I gave birth, this man sexually assaulted someone in my family.  To this day he claims it was consentual.  Based on what I know, I don’t believe this for a second.  One of the major reasons I do not trust that this event was consensual is because every single time Luc recounted his version of what took place that night – it changed.  For example, Luc told the police that my sister was “hesitant and reluctant” but had eventually agreed.  The, during our custody trial he acted as if it was him who had been raped.  My sister went to the hospital and the rape kit showed that she had internal and external injuries.  That doesn’t tend to happen when sex is consensual.  I have, however, learned that the police in Virginia do not often recognize rape unless a man jumps out of the bushes with a ski mask and assaults a victim he does not know.  I digress…

The night I learned of what happened, I took my baby boy and left Luc.  (And subsequently stoped paying Luc’s bills)  In the weeks that followed, I learned that I didn’t know this man at all.  Here are some things I did learn:

1) The mother of his older son was murdered.  About six months before his son’s mother was murdered, Luc changed his name to his son’s name and then claimed the woman’s life insurance policy was intended for him.  This murder has gone unsolved for nearly ten years.  An officer from the Manassas City Police Department named Luc in open court as the prime person of interest in this murder.

2)  His own mother was found in his home with a bag pressed to her face (he collected several hundred thousand on her life insurance policy – this is what he was living off of when I met him)

3)  There was no music career or software company.  He hadn’t worked a day in his life…or at least had no proof of ever having had a legitimate job.  During one of our custody trials, Luc was asked when the last time was that he “earned” money.  He responded by citing that he had collected an insurance settlement in 2002 after having been in a car accident.  I guess he misunderstood what my attorney meant by the word “earned”.

4)  He is 14 years older than he originally told me he was.  He told me that he was 26 when we met, however, he was actually 38.  Potentially more disturbing is the fact that when he changed his name to his son’s name, he also changed his year of birth from 1972 to 1977.  1977 is the date of birth he put on my son’s birth certificate.

5)  The only “business” that we were able to find him connected to was an internet porn site he created to exploit women (some who didn’t even agree to be portrayed on the site).  While he denied any association with pornography during the custody trials, he testified under oath during other court proceedings that he did own this online pornographic material.

So I left and never looked back.  This incident happened almost a year ago today.  Time often heals wounds, but sometimes I feel just as angry as I was the night I left.  I have learned that emotional wounds are worse than physical ones.  Physical wounds heal and while they might leave a scar, the scar might just turn into a story you tell a friend while waiting for the bus one day.  Emotional wounds change you.  This situation has seriously rocked my entire being.  While in the past year I have been able to come to the realization that I was just a mark and never someone Luc cared about (as true psychopaths are incapable of true feelings), I am still angry.  I feel emotionally robbed.

So the above story was my boiling water.  The pot is still boiling to a degree, as I attempt to detangle myself from this monster, but at least now I know its boiling.

Lot’s of people try and claim their ex is a psychopath.  Well, mine really is.