He pulled himself away from the bar and ambled over to Betty’s table. Looking directly into her eyes, he said, “I’m only going to ask you to dance with me one time, so you better say yes.”
A smile curled Betty’s lips as she peered up at the dark-haired man, and a look of surrender softened her face. When the guitar player began strumming the introductory chords of the Tennessee Waltz, Threlkeld extended his hand, and she stood up slowly, placing her small hand in his.
“You’ve got to be new around here,” Threlkeld said.
Betty spun as he twirled her. “Just moved here last week. Don’t have any friends.”
“You’ve got one now,” he said, and smiled, then drew her closer.
She snuggled her cheek to his chest.
“You a single gal?”
“I’m divorced. I have a little three-year-old boy,” she said, not mentioning her other five children, her second marriage or that she had shot Bill Lane.
“Well, I’m divorced, too, but don’t have any kids.”
“So what do you do?” she asked.
“I’ve always been in sales, and for the last several years I’ve been selling automotive parts. Everyone needs replacement parts for their cars.”
“I’m working as a cashier at a local Seven-Eleven,” Betty volunteered. “Everyone needs last-minute items.” They both laughed. “It’s just something to do ’til I find a job I really like.”
“I can’t believe how upbeat you are. You’re so much fun, even though you have a job you’re not crazy about, and a kid to raise.”
“I can pay my bills and I love my son more than anything. Why shouldn’t I be happy?”
Around midnight they walked out into the parking lot on a chilly November night in 1973.
“Look at this new Cordova,” Therlkeld said. “You are amazing, with your beginning job, as you call it, you do very well. I like the maroon color. Kinda hot and sexy, just like you.”
“Don’t say sweet things to me,” Betty cautioned. “I melt easily.” She looked up at him, and he bent down and kissed her lips. She stretched her arms around his neck and kissed him again. “Sure hope you don’t think I’m a fast woman if I invite you to come home with me,” she said.
“Ma’am, that’s an invitation I’ll gladly accept.” From that night on he began living in her little house. Betty was thirty-six, and Threlkeld thirty-three.
Over the next four years, they shared many romantic and happy times. Betty was never without her CB radio and she adopted the handle “Tiger.”
“That name sure fits,” he told her. Whenever Threlkeld came within her CB range, he’d call and ask, “How’s the Tiger in that tank?”
But woven into the happy times, any relationship with Betty was bound to be feisty. This one proved no exception. They had heated arguments when Threlkeld treated her roughly. Betty did not act docilely, but took revenge by slashing all of Threlkeld’s tires. After another confrontation, she went after him with a tire jack.
Betty complained to Threlkeld, “People take advantage of me, especially my own children. They’re always wanting me to do things for them.” A month later, she surprised him by saying, “I want to move back to Dallas. I really miss my kids.”
He saw Betty as a puzzle of contradictions, and the pieces didn’t fit. Within an hour’s time, she’d change her mind and deny what she had told him earlier. But she showed great patience with Bobby, and he knew she worshipped the ground he walked on. That made Threlkeld think she was a good mother.
Being able to put aside the highs and lows of Betty’s personality, Threlkeld wanted to be with her. But he had a decision to make. He had always lived in Little Rock, and his parents, a host of aunts, uncles, cousins, and many friends lived nearby. Nevertheless, he followed Betty. A salesman’s a salesman, he reasoned. He could sell automotive supplies anywhere.
They moved to Dallas and married in February of 1978. Shortly after the wedding, Threlkeld began feeling tied down, and decided he still had wild oats to sow. He drank and shot pool with the boys while Betty stayed home taking care of Bobby.
One time when he came home drunk, he quietly let himself in the back door only to be surprised to find Betty waiting in the kitchen. She stared at him in disgust and said, “There’s got to be a good man out there who’s looking for a good woman like me.”
Betty’s family continued to see changes in her. Keeping herself slim, trim, and attractive became an obsession, and she gobbled increasing amounts of Dexatrim. Her mood alterations were obvious. Bobby, now twelve, told a friend, “One moment we got along fine, and the next thing she’s a different person. It was like she got hateful all of a sudden, and I mean all of a sudden.”
He questioned his mother about these abrupt changes, but when she came out of the distressing moods, she had no recollection of them.
Bobby noticed it didn’t matter whether or not she had been drinking, she would change in the middle of a sentence. Her features tightened and her voice grew strangely deep and coarse. She even used harsher words. Betty, not given to cussing freely, now would say “fuck,” a word her children had never heard her utter. Two different people lived inside of Betty.
The family had heard stories of Betty’s mother who had spent time in mental institutions. They didn’t want to think that their own mother had inherited any of their grandmother’s psychological problems.
The move to Dallas gave Ronnie Threlkeld the opportunity to know all of Betty’s family. He marveled at how Betty’s daughters—Faye, Connie, Phyllis, and Shirley—could so easily upset her. Although the young women weren’t living with them, Betty complained, “The girls are always getting into trouble, then coming to me asking for money to bail them out of their jams.”
Betty also saw her daughters as competition. She became jealous when they were around her husband, so jealous that she accused Threlkeld of sleeping with the girls.
Then one ominous night, he sat at the kitchen table having a drink when one of Betty’s daughters sauntered into the room wearing a robe. Whether she intended to tease Threlkeld or to spite her mother, the young woman stood before him making idle chatter, while slowly untying the silken green sash around her tiny waist. The robe dropped to the floor. With timing from hell, Betty came into the room at that moment and saw her daughter standing completely nude in front of her husband.
“You sorry son of a bitch,” Betty screamed at the top of her voice. “I knew something like this was going on. You were always giving my girls the eye. But to do something like this right here in my home! Well, that takes it all.”
Threlkeld tried to protest, but Betty’s screams drowned out his words. Her daughter had grabbed her robe as soon as she spotted her mother, and trying to cover herself, frantically dashed out of the kitchen.
When Betty stopped to inhale, Threlkeld said, “Now wait, Betty, it’s not what you think. There’s never been anything between me and your daughter. With none of them for that matter.”
Betty refused to listen, and as she unleashed her tirade, Threlkeld got the unmistakable message that he’d just been given his walking papers. Dating Betty had been a lot more fun than being married to her. She had changed from the upbeat, happy girl he had first met, to the sullen, negative woman, given frequently to venting her rage. Because of her metamorphosis, he found it easy to leave the hellcat nobody messed with.
Had Threlkeld known that Betty had shot her last husband, he might have been more concerned with what Betty would try doing to him.
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