Part 26 (2/2)

” 'Well, after all these years, I couldn't get him, but G.o.d did. I hope he has a long, painful time. He deserves it.' ”

Mich.e.l.le Townsend* wishes her tormentor agony in equal measure, but lives in constant dread of him.

Her story begins in the autumn of her senior year in high school, when Mich.e.l.le, seventeen, was a slender, green-eyed schoolgirl.

Jack* was thirty-five, a Vietnam vet who managed the business where one of her sisters worked.

Mich.e.l.le at the time was unhappy and confused, still mourning an older sister who'd died in a car accident, and perplexed over her s.e.xual orientation.

”I didn't have much experience with men at all,” she explains. ”I found him both intriguing and mysterious. He was charismatic and attentive. Four days after we met, he proposed.

”I wasn't in love, but I saw this as a way to escape my problems. I thought I could eventually fall in love with him, and rid myself of feelings for other women.”

Self-destructive emotional currents guided her thoughts as well.

”I have problems with boundaries and saying no,” she says. ”I feel guilty when I say no, like there's something wrong with me.”

Approximately six weeks after he proposed, and one day after her eighteenth birthday, Jack and Mich.e.l.le were married by a justice of the peace.

”He was real attentive at first. I was like on a pedestal. I was his showpiece. He picked out and bought my clothes. He had me change my hair to blond, and grow it out. He had me start wearing makeup. He put me in mostly high heels and boots.”

Jack, who was large, over six feet, demanded total power over her.

”He controlled everything,” she says, ”everything that came out of my mouth, every thought I had.

”He said I was like a new book, and he was going to write all the pages.”

Jack and Mich.e.l.le spent a trouble-free first three months of marriage in the old farmhouse he was renting. Then one day she decided to clean and straighten Jack's ”War Room.”

”It was his personal shrine to two tours of duty in Vietnam,” she says. ”The walls were covered with certificates, maps, guns, ammunition belts, knives, and photographs of dead Vietnamese soldiers.”

As Mich.e.l.le was cleaning, she came upon a ratty old reddish pink suitcase in a closet. She opened it to find it stuffed with sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic p.o.r.nography, most of it depicting women being s.e.xually brutalized. She found Ace bandage rolls and scalpels in the worn suitcase, too. There also were broken arrows. She'd soon learn their use.

Her new husband walked into the room at just that moment-it might not have been a coincidence-and exploded in a rage. Jack roared that Mich.e.l.le had violated his privacy. He demanded an immediate divorce.

Mich.e.l.le pleaded that she'd made an innocent mistake, and begged Jack for another chance.

Suddenly he seemed to reconsider, and presented to Mich.e.l.le what she took to be a nonnegotiable demand. She could redeem herself by helping him act out certain fantasies suggested by the materials Mich.e.l.le had discovered. Or he'd find another woman who would.

Mich.e.l.le agreed to cooperate.

”I was told that what I'd discovered was practiced by all married couples, only not talked about,” she says. ”He told me that all normal people do these things, and he wanted to teach me all about it. He said it was a need of his that must be fulfilled every once in a while so that he could control his temper.

”I wasn't into it, and I didn't understand it, and I couldn't imagine being turned on by what appeared to be hurting one another. I felt there was something wrong with me, however. I didn't want to fail him as his wife.

”He a.s.sured me it was only a game, and that no one really gets hurt.”

Jack explained what he required in detail. He called his fantasy ”the Games,” and said they unfolded in five episodes: (1) Capture, (2) Struggle, (3) Torture, (4) the Final Kill, and (5) Postmortem Rape.

The moment he began describing what he wished for her to do, Mich.e.l.le had the feeling that Jack had done this many times in the past-that ”the Games” were really a reenactment.

”I always felt deep in my heart that he'd done this before, that he'd killed women,” she says. ”I felt I was rehearsing for my own death.”

In part one, ”Capture,” Mich.e.l.le was to costume herself in loose-fitting garments, such as an old dress, that would be easy for Jack to tear from her body. She was then to a.s.sume some sort of preoccupied pose, such as combing her hair, or dancing in a room by herself.

As she did so, Jack would creep up from behind-always from behind-and violently grab Mich.e.l.le, one hand over her mouth, the other around her neck, and pull her face to one side.

Then came ”Struggle.”

Mich.e.l.le was to respond in terror, communicating that fright with her eyes as she struggled with him, before falling into unconsciousness. Sometimes she was told to add verisimilitude to ”Struggle” by going outside and smudging her face and arms with dirt.

They rehea.r.s.ed the scene again and again, often working on it all day. Sometimes Jack would have Mich.e.l.le smoke a joint to relax. Sometimes they'd watch slasher movies together. Mich.e.l.le was instructed to carefully study the female victims for tips on how she was to behave.

Sometimes ”the Games” were played under strobe lights to the accompaniment of sixties-era hard rock. Mich.e.l.le remembers hearing Iron b.u.t.terfly's ”In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on the stereo again and again and again.

In the midst of ”Struggle,” Jack tested Mich.e.l.le for limpness, lifting and dropping her arms and legs and rolling her from side to side. The more lifeless she seemed, the better. Next, she was to regain consciousness and beg for mercy. Often, Jack would demand f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o at this stage. After she again begged for her life-”Please, don't kill me, master! I'll do anything!” according to the script she memorized-Jack would throttle her. Mich.e.l.le was to feign asphyxiation, and fall unconscious again.

Then ”Torture” began. Jack inserted the broken arrows so it would appear they'd been brutally jammed into her a.n.u.s. Then he'd carefully photograph her.

On one occasion, he purchased a plastic child's sword and modified the toy using a coat hanger so that it would appear Mich.e.l.le had been run through with an actual weapon. This Jack photographed as well.

Other times he placed his hunting knife between her legs and ordered Mich.e.l.le to grasp and hold its blade with her b.u.t.tock muscles.

After removing it, slowly, Jack ran the sharp blade over Mich.e.l.le's body, urging her to quiver and jerk as he did so, sometimes heightening the experience for him by smearing her and the weapon with theatrical blood.

Mich.e.l.le recalls that this routine occasionally was varied with threats to ”roast me like a pig.” Jack would insert a cold metal rod into her so that she resembled an animal to be roasted on a spit, and he'd talk of how ”tender and juicy” she was.

At last came ”the Final Kill” and ”Postmortem Rape,” in which Jack would pretend either to stab or to strangle Mich.e.l.le to death, usually as she hung nude from pullies over their bed, or from a large metal hook he'd installed in the living-room ceiling. This scene also was rehea.r.s.ed repeatedly.

Mich.e.l.le once more was to beg him for her life, wide-eyed with terror. Then she was to expire at his hands, realistically ”gurgling, begging, jerking, and quivering,” she says.

Although Jack at first said ”the Games” would be an infrequent thing, in time they became nearly constant.

The only interruption occurred when Mich.e.l.le conceived. Although Jack was unhappy about the pregnancy, for the period of time Mich.e.l.le carried Sarah* he was marginally less abusive. ”He pushed me around, but he wasn't as physical, as rough,” Mich.e.l.le recalls.

At about this time, according to Mich.e.l.le, Jack quit his job, or was fired-he never made it clear to Mich.e.l.le-and turned to dealing drugs. Once in a while, he allowed her to take jobs, but only temporarily.

He introduced her to group s.e.x with other women.

”We'd find them in bars, truck stops, once in a restaurant,” she says. Most of their recruits were young girls, to whom he'd introduce himself as Bill.

Some were brought home. Others were taken to motels. Jack's ultimate fantasy, he told Mich.e.l.le, was to kill one of the girls. Only one of them.

”He used to try to talk me into picking up a female hitch-hiker and having our way with her. He explained that when we were done, we would dispose of her body along the roadway. I always refused.”

Jack also mentioned from time to time his interest in providing Mich.e.l.le with a s.e.x slave, whose tasks would include serving as her surrogate during ”the Games.”

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