Posted on 02/15/2003 12:49:09 PM PST by buffyt
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Blue Moon is owned by a chatty Rubenesque woman named Bobbi Bacha who wears long black or purplish dresses with granny boots and talks in such a cheerful, singsong voice that people who call her for the first time often mistake her for a teenager. The 43-year-old is not exactly a portrait of the hard-boiled detective: She always keeps a stack of decorating magazines in her car in case she needs something to read during stakeouts. Because she wants her clients to feel at home when they visit, she has given her offices a distinctly feminine touch, lining the walls with serene photographs of the moon, placing long-vined potted plants and small, gurgling fountains next to the windows, and burning cinnamon candles on her and her employees' desks. To soothe her clients' nerves, she serves them Constant Comment hot tea, never coffee.
Bobbi understands that marriage is an often flawed and disastrous institution. The daughter of a Galveston police officer, she began working as a secretary at a private investigative firm in the early eighties after her husband, her high school sweetheart, left her for another woman. After a second failed marriage, she began working nights for another private investigator to keep food on the table for her three children. Occasionally, when no baby-sitters were available, her children sat in the back seat of the car doing their homework or leafing through comic books while Bobbi tailed cheating spouses. She was good. After word got around about her lying under a dining room table with a tape recorder to catch a wealthy married man with another woman, she had full-time job offers from many of the dozen or so private-detective agencies in the Houston area. But sensing an opportunity to make her own mark in the mushrooming southern suburbs, she opened Blue Moon Investigations in 1995, taking out large ads in the area Yellow Pages with the headline "Need a Clue? Call Blue."
Today, her business is thriving. On the various days that I visited with her, she was involved in the case of a wife wanting to know if the "thera-stress consultant" that her buttoned-down insurance executive husband was visiting was actually a massage-parlor prostitute, a husband wondering if his wife was having sex inside the family Suburban with cowboys she was meeting at a country-western bar, and an astronaut's wife who thought her husband was making out with a secretary on his lunch break at the NASA complex. She has 38 assistant investigators, most of whom are younger women who work part-time, doing surveillance jobs at night after spending their day taking college classes or toiling away as schoolteachers, executive assistants, or salesclerks. Bobbi admits she prefers female investigators—"I think we are so much more naturally observant," she says—but she does want people to know she's an equal opportunity employer. Her chief investigator, Jeff Moore, is a former male stripper. And when Bobbi is overbooked, she gets her third husband, Lucas, a brainy Boeing engineer, to do surveillance work for her, despite the fact that he's a bit of a Mr. Magoo who at restaurants will often circle the dining room a couple of times on his way back from the restroom because he's forgotten where his table is located.
On the afternoon of January 27, 1999, Bobbi was about to leave the office when the phone rang. A man named Chuck Knight told her that he needed someone that evening to watch his wife, Julie, and her best friend, Gail Bridges. Chuck and his wife lived one neighborhood away from Gail and her husband, Steve, and the two couples were good friends. They went to the same church, Bay Harbor United Methodist. Their boys played on the same soccer team. They drank champagne together every New Year's Eve at the Knights' house. But for the past year, Chuck said, neighbors had started coming to him and Steve, asking why Gail and Julie spent so much time together—going to lunch, taking tennis lessons, sitting around at one or the other's homes—while the husbands were away at work. Chuck said he began to have suspicions himself after watching Julie and Gail hugging and, he says, fondling each other when the two couples went out to dinner. The more time passed, and the more their marriages soured, the more Chuck and Steve thought they realized what was going on: Their wives must be lesbians. Chuck told Bobbi that he and Steve would be watching the children that evening so their wives could go shopping at the Baybrook Mall for a couple of hours and that he wanted the two of them followed. According to Bobbi's notes, Chuck said to her, "But I bet they will go to a hotel. Or they might just pull over on the side of a highway to do their business. Gail has a boob job, and my wife will not be able to wait to touch those puppies."
Bobbi sighed. She had promised her husband and children that she would get home early to fix dinner, and all of her investigators were already booked. But she did not want the male-owned-and-operated Turman and Associates, her chief competitor in the suburbs, to get Chuck's business if she turned it down. She took his credit card number over the phone—Blue Moon charges $55 an hour, with a four-hour minimum, for a surveillance job—and she drove over to the Knight house in the Harbor Park subdivision of League City, where she waited for Gail and Julie to drive off in Gail's Navigator.
Out came Julie, a curvy blonde with startlingly blue eyes, wearing blue jeans and a red Tommy Hilfiger top. Out came Gail in blue jeans and a pink top. The two women drove to the mall and visited a few stores, with Bobbi following at a safe distance. When they lingered at a Nine West shoe store, Bobbi walked in and sat near them, trying on shoes, including a pair of stiletto heels. Meanwhile, the two women swapped stories, laughing loudly, before finally heading back out of the mall, driving through a McDonald's for soft drinks, and going home.
The next day, Bobbi told Julie's husband, Chuck, that they had acted like Wilma and Betty from the Flintstones and that there was nothing at all lesbianlike about their behavior. The only time they got physically close, she said, was when their heads briefly moved toward each other in the car.
According to Bobbi, Chuck asked her to "inflame" that part of the report and make it seem worse than it was. (Chuck says he never asked Bobbi to inflame anything, nor did he refer to Gail's breasts as "puppies.") "Mr. Knight, you do know that women are different than men?" asked Bobbi in response. (Besides her ability to hide in closets and sneak onto hotel room balconies, Bobbi also likes to think of herself as a kind of therapist who can help her clients better understand human behavior.) "Even if two women kiss or hug, it doesn't mean they are sexually active with one another. Not at all." Chuck hung up, and so Bobbi filed the case away and turned to her next piece of business.
Then, in mid-July 1999, Julie and Gail showed up at her office. As they sipped hot tea, they told Bobbi that they had both filed for divorces from their husbands within a week of one another, and they went into all the standard horror stories about bad husbands that Bobbi had heard thousands of times. Among their complaints was that their husbands had been threatening to expose them in court as lesbians, which they said was preposterous. They thought their spouses might be using the lesbian tactic to force them into agreeing to out-of-court settlements that would leave them with less than their fair share of the community property.
Julie said she wanted her husband tracked to see what he might be hiding. (Gail backed out of hiring Bobbi at the last minute, saying she wanted to try to keep the peace between her and Steve during their divorce.) Bobbi had one of her investigators tail Chuck, who began noticing that he was visiting the house of a friend down the street and that another woman was showing up at that house about the same time. Then Bobbi's investigator caught Chuck and this other woman flying off to Tampa, Florida, for a weekend trip. The woman was Laurie Wells, a part-time baton-twirling instructor and the wife of Steve Wells, a respected suburban remodeling contractor. When Bobbi brought in Julie and Gail to deliver her report, the two women's mouths dropped open. The three women and their husbands had once been good friends. Gail had met Laurie at a Lamaze class and then invited her to Bay Harbor Methodist.
Before too long, all three couples—the Knights, the Bridgeses, and the Wellses—were finalizing their divorces, and it was not pretty. The spouses kept trooping off to court with accusations of all sorts of misbehavior, sexual and otherwise. They got into shouting matches at the mall and left threatening messages on each other's voice mail. Julie found her house vandalized, which she blamed on Chuck and Laurie and Steve Bridges. Chuck occasionally followed Julie in his car. During one episode, Julie claims he stuck his middle finger out of his driver's side window while she stuck a camera out of her sunroof, snapping photos of him to show to a divorce judge. And in one of the more heated court skirmishes, Gail and Julie accused Chuck and Steve of taping their phone calls and then splicing the conversations together so that the two wives would appear to be swapping sexually suggestive comments about such activities as eating ice cream. After Julie and Gail paid a visit to the district attorney's office, both men were indicted on felony charges of illegal wiretapping. (Charges against Steve were later dropped, but charges against Chuck are still pending.)
By late last year, everyone was officially divorced. Chuck and his new girlfriend, Laurie Wells, both of whom had gotten little property in their divorces, moved into a small apartment together. Steve Wells had full custody of the Wellses' two girls, in part because Laurie had called him and said she was going to teach the children to hate him, a phone call that he taped and later played before a judge. In her divorce settlement, Julie got full custody of her and Chuck's two children, but she was continually returning to court to ask for protective orders against Chuck, who she claimed was stalking and harassing her and the children. As for Gail, she got custody of the two youngest children while Steve got custody of the eldest. She and the two kids moved into a smaller house nearby, and then Gail got a job at Space Center Orthodontics.
IF THERE WAS ONE MAN who did not seem likely to get involved in an affair, it was David Harris. "I'm not exaggerating this. He just didn't look twice at another woman," one of his co-workers told me. He was a little vain—he wore a toupee to keep up his looks—but he was never the kind of guy who wanted to go out drinking with his buddies or flick the channel over to HBO to watch Real Sex when his wife wasn't in the bedroom. He and Clara were devoted members of Shadycrest Baptist Church, where David played the drums in a contemporary Christian soft-rock group, the Colemans, providing the backbeat on such songs as "Sing Hallelujah" and "You Make Me Complete."
David had been divorced before, though infidelity reportedly had not been the cause of the breakup. His wife claims that she left him because he had been too focused on his career. After his marriage to Clara, his career had indeed taken off. Besides building his own practice, in which he was putting braces on hundreds of kids and some adults, including Bobbi Bacha's husband, Lucas, he had purchased seven other dental practices in the area and put together a management team to staff and supervise them. By 2001 his income was skyrocketing. He was clearing as much as $35,000 a month from Space Center Orthodontics alone, and he bought a piece of land in a more upscale shopping area so that he could build an enormous, six-thousand-square-foot new office. Once the building was finished, Clara was going to move her practice there so they could be closer. When his daughter, Lindsey, who worked at Space Center Orthodontics in the summer, told him that her goal in life was to become an orthodontist too, he told her that there would always be an office available for her to come work with him.
Why, then, after having built such a life for himself, did he want to put it into play? Some of David's friends wonder if he felt a typical middle-aged need to shake up his daily routine. They think he was at that place in life where the attention of a new woman was suddenly tantalizing. He had, after all, been telling his friends that he sometimes felt unappreciated by Clara, who was consumed with the children and with her own business. On the other hand, some of the women in his office believe he simply fell under the sexual spell of a woman they think was clearly out to snag him. "I remember watching Gail bend down in front of David to get some papers out of a filing cabinet," one woman told me. "But instead of bending at the knees, like everyone else, she bent at the waist so that her butt would stick up. And I thought, 'Uh-oh.'"
Around Space Center Orthodontics, it is hard to find someone who does not think that Gail saw David as her ticket back to the lifestyle to which she was once accustomed. But Gail's closest friends said that for the first several months she worked there, she never said a word to them about feelings she might have had for the orthodontist. Obviously, they said, attention from any man must have felt good to Gail, who had been embroiled for so long in a vicious divorce and who couldn't go to church or her children's school without people whispering that she was a lesbian. And, they admitted, Gail could be cute around a guy, turning on her high-school-cheerleader personality. But none of them really believed that she would get into an affair, until Gail began to mention that David was taking her to lunch. She told them that he had confided to her that he was staying in his marriage only for his business and the children. Then she told them that David had said he loved her.
No one from David's circle believes that the orthodontist was really in love with her. "If anything, he was infatuated with her for a while, nothing more," said a close friend who asked not to be identified. "He was never going to leave his wife."
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Nevertheless, by early this summer, the employees were getting worried. Everyone was whispering about David and Gail's lunches at Perry's. And when someone saw the two of them apparently fondle each other in the office when they thought no one was looking, "the cat got out of the bag and started running all over the floor," said one worker. About that time, David's brother, Gerald, Jr., a psychologist who teaches at the University of Houston, had installed a video camera in the office to identify ways to improve patient-staff interactions. One worker kept turning off the camera because she didn't want Gerald to see scenes of David coming up to flirt with Gail.
Over the July 4 weekend, roughly four months into the affair, the Harris family took a vacation to Jamaica. A few of his closest co-workers were hoping that David would come back determined to save his marriage. When David returned, they decided to confront him. He was open with them, but when someone suggested that Gail be fired, he paused. He said he still loved Clara and did not want to end the marriage, but he had gotten emotionally involved with Gail.
Clara still knew nothing and presumably had no suspicions of what David was doing. No one from his office had said anything to her. But perhaps worried that the word would leak out anyway, David sat down with his wife on Wednesday morning, July 17, and confessed. He told her about the lunches at Perry's and the nights at the same Hilton hotel where they had held their wedding reception. Clara became hysterical. The two went to the office, where Clara confronted Gail, telling her that she was fired and that she could never come back. Two days later, on Friday, she allegedly called Gail so many times, ranting about what kind of woman she was, that Julie Knight reported to the police that Clara was making "terroristic threats" on Gail's life. One of Clara's friends, however, says she had only called Gail to thank her for opening her eyes.
Those who saw Clara said she looked ravaged in the days after learning about the affair. She quit eating and lost ten pounds. She walked into the office of the plastic surgeon who was next door to Space Center Orthodontics and made a $5,000 down payment on a liposuction procedure and breast implants. She hired a personal trainer and started going to a tanning salon. And she told people in a fervent voice that she was going to win David back. One day, the two returned to Space Center Orthodontics holding hands after having had lunch. "We're going to make it," David said to a friend.
In fact, by the start of that next week, David and Clara had sat down with his parents and his teenage daughter, Lindsey, and told them about the affair. David asked for their forgiveness. "It really was a time when healing had begun," David's father told me. As part of that healing, David told Clara, he wanted to sit down with Gail at a restaurant and tell her that he was sorry. What happened wasn't her fault, he said. He couldn't just break off all communication with her.
Clara reluctantly agreed. In fact, according to a close friend, she told David that if he stuck by their marriage, he could continue some sort of friendship with Gail. But as the day when David was scheduled to have dinner with Gail came closer, Clara began to worry. She flipped through the Yellow Pages and saw an ad with the headline "Need a Clue? Call Blue." Bobbi Bacha was about to get another case.
BOBBI WAS MEETING WITH SOMEONE else when Clara came in on Tuesday, July 23. Clara told the woman at the front desk that she needed someone to follow her husband the next night. She explained that he was going to meet his mistress at Perry's Restaurant and that she wanted the investigator to get close enough to overhear what he said. As she began to feel more comfortable in the Blue Moon offices, she started chatting about the other woman. She described her as "evil." She said she had been hearing in town that this woman had a lesbian lover and that the two lesbians might have come up with a plot for one of them to seduce David to get at his money.
On a form she filled out for Blue Moon, Clara wrote down the woman's full name: Belinda Gail Thompson Bridges. When Bobbi briefly glanced at the form, she didn't make the connection. She assigned the case to one of her part-time investigators, Lindsey Dubec, a blond, pigtailed 25-year-old criminal justice major at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Dubec jumped into her gray Toyota Camry and drove over to Space Center Orthodontics to tail David. But David didn't go to Perry's. He drove to the Hilton, where he met Gail inside at a restaurant. Dubec couldn't get close enough to hear what they were saying, but according to Gail's friends, David became distraught and told her that he wasn't ready for it to end, that he still loved her, and that he could arrange for them to still see each other. Gail then told him that she wanted no part of the relationship while David was still married. Then she got up and walked out to her car. David followed her. They talked for a few more minutes outside. Obviously, something between them changed, because they then headed upstairs to a room. Dubec returned to her car and positioned herself so that she could watch the front of the hotel and David's car in the parking lot, then pulled out a video camera to capture the couple on tape when they next appeared. Bobbi always instructed her girls to capture their "subjects" on videotape whenever possible. Then, assuming she was in for a long night, Dubec called a girlfriend, who drove over to the Hilton with some soft drinks and fast food to keep her company.
While Dubec and her friend were chatting away about the pros and cons of an elopement versus a big church wedding, Clara Harris and her stepdaughter, Lindsey, were pulling up to the Hilton. Wondering what David might be doing, Clara had been unable to sit at home. She had asked Lindsey to go along with her to search for him. They drove to Perry's, walked inside, and couldn't find him. They went to another restaurant where David said he had sometimes taken Gail and then went to Gail's house. Finally, Clara called Blue Moon and got through to Bobbi's husband, Lucas, who was taking the nighttime emergency calls. She demanded to know where her husband was. Lucas called Dubec, then he called Clara back and said her husband was with the other woman at a hotel. Clara knew exactly what hotel that would be.
When Clara and Lindsey arrived at the Hilton, they spotted Gail's Navigator in the lot. Clara drove up to the car, got out, and busted the Navigator's taillights and scratched it with her keys (Dubec, who was staring at David's car several parking spaces away, never saw Clara). Clara and Lindsey then parked in another area of the lot before walking to the front desk of the Hilton and asking for the room of David Harris. An employee said that no Harris was listed. Clara came up with an idea: Both she and Lindsey called David from their cell phones and told him that one of the twins was sick and begged him to come home. David told both that he and Gail were at Pappadeaux (a restaurant Clara and Lindsey hadn't visited) and that he was on his way home. A few minutes later, the elevator doors opened and out walked David and Gail.
And just a few minutes after that, Lindsey Dubec of Blue Moon, sitting out in the parking lot, saw a frantic David and Gail rushing out the doors. "So anyway," said her friend, "just think of all the money you would save if you just went to a justice of the peace." "Hold on," said Dubec, turning on her video camera. Moments later she heard the loud roar of an engine. Through her viewfinder, she saw a flash of a Mercedes. Then David Harris was flying in the air. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" the two women screamed.
CONSIDERING THAT A JURY IS no doubt going to watch David Harris' death replayed many times on a television screen in the courtroom (the tape has not yet been made available to the public), George Parnham might have only one defense to make for his client at her trial, which is scheduled to take place in January: that she had gone insane in the heat of the moment. He hinted at such a defense during an interview with CNN's Paula Zahn back in July, when he somberly said, "Who knows what happens to a loving wife, obviously a loving mother, a person who wanted to maintain the sanctity of the union with her husband, when, unexpectedly, she is confronted with the picture and the reality of the very fine man that she loves in an embrace with another female?" It certainly didn't hurt Clara's chances of staying out of prison when David's parents said that they had forgiven her for what she had done to their son. "What David did outside his marriage was a tragic mistake, and what Clara did was a tragic mistake," Gerald Harris, a retired public school administrator, told me. "But these were mistakes made by two of the finest people I know. And if God can forgive us of our sins and our mistakes, then why should we not be able to forgive the sins and mistakes of others? Clara has been a good mother and a good wife and a good person. We hope she'll be able to raise her twin boys in honor of our son, and we will do everything we can to help her."
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine jurors acquitting a woman who kept turning her car around in a parking lot so that she could run over her husband again and again. If she was in such an uncontrollably insane rage, why didn't she keep driving around the parking lot until she found her rival, who was on the other side of the Lincoln Navigator, and plow into her too? If Parnham could not persuade a Houston jury to believe that Andrea Yates was insane, it's doubtful he's going to find a way to persuade a jury that Clara was. What's more, no matter how badly David Harris acted that night, no juror is going to be able to get out of his or her mind the fact that Clara murdered him in front of his own teenage daughter. According to people who have talked to Lindsey since her return to Ohio after her father's funeral, she's still utterly traumatized by that night, haunted by the fact that the last words she said to her father, as he stood with his mistress, were "I hate you"—and haunted too by the thud of the Mercedes slamming into her father's body and knocking him backward while she watched through the windshield. What she says in her testimony could very well decide what kind of prison term her stepmother serves.
As for Gail Bridges, she has tried to get back to a normal life, becoming a room mother at her children's school, but she has trouble looking other mothers in the eye. "People forget that she too is grieving over the death of a man she loved," her attorney told me.
To add to her problems, her still bitter ex-husband, Steve, showed up at a civil court asking that his and Gail's divorce decree be changed to allow him to have full custody of all three of their children. He claimed that as long as Clara Harris was free on bond, she might want to harm Gail and maybe even the children. He then resurrected the lesbian claim, and for good measure, he added that Gail "may not be mentally stable at this time." Chuck Knight quickly followed his friend's lead and filed his own claim trying to get full custody of his and Julie's two children. He theorized that as long as Julie and the children remained close friends with Gail and her children, then they would be in danger if Clara Harris came around. When Gail and Julie were forced to make a court appearance regarding the matter, the media crush was so intense that both of them were nearly knocked to the ground. Steve's motion is still pending; Chuck dropped his but plans to refile. More than two years after their divorces became final, it is hard to believe that these fights are still going on. Love and destruction: two sides of the same coin.
One day I went by Bobbi Bacha's office to find out what she thought about the way all these events had turned out. She was busy as always, with a stack of "domestic investigation" files on her desk. But she stopped what she was doing for a few minutes to philosophize. "Well, the moral to this story is very simple," she said. "If you are going to have an extramarital affair, then you ought to wait until after you are divorced to have one. Does that make sense to you?"
It did, but before I could answer, her intercom buzzed. It was the woman at the front desk: "Bobbi, there's a new client here to see you."
Not only that, her husband was murdered. The poor woman.
Those poor little boys
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