Love Me To Death. Steve Jackson
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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