Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder

by McEvoy, Colin

  After about a year or two, Eric went back to living with his grandmother. His father had started dating a new woman named Thelma Jeanine Richardson, who went by Jeanine. The two were married in November 1978.

  The couple first lived in a motel together while Mickey Ballard was building a new house on his property. The one-room motel home wasn’t an appropriate place for a child to live but Eric did come over on Christmas that year, according to Jeanine.

  Once the house was built, Eric lived with his father and Jeanine during at least part of their marriage. Jeanine considered Mickey Ballard a hard worker. He liked to drink beer in the evenings but never missed a day of work, and he baled enough hay on the weekends that it essentially was a second job. Despite Mickey’s treatment of Eric in the past, Jeanine felt he was a good father who would put his son’s feelings before both his own and those of his wife.

  “I can’t find any fault in his fathering during the time I was with him,” she would later say.

  Jeanine described young Eric as “starved” for a mother, but said she was not really a mother figure to him. She had children of her own and thought of Eric more as her “buddy” than her son. She preferred to do fun things with him, like going swimming and driving around together looking for yard sales.

  At a later trial, a psychologist testified that some of Eric’s cousins had described Jeanine Richardson as a “barfly” who often was seen around the town half lit.

  There are reports of sexual assault against young Eric during this time in his life, according to the various therapists who would later analyze Michael Ballard. According to multiple reports, Ballard was molested by both a male and female relative when he was five years old. He never received treatment for this childhood sexual abuse, and it is a subject he discussed as little as possible, both as a child and later in adulthood.

  Additionally, when Eric was seven, another relative also lived at the house with the family. She would occasionally share a bed with Eric so they could both stay warm in the night. On at least one occasion, according to reports from sentencing specialists, she allegedly performed a sexual act while they were in bed together.

  These traumatic events in Eric’s childhood prompted him to beg his mother to come back from Hawaii and take care of him, though it is unclear whether she knew specifically about the sexual abuse. Nita returned to Arkansas in 1980 and, upon hearing that Mickey was drinking excessively and not caring for her son, successfully sought custody of the seven-year-old Eric in October of that year.

  Ballard would later say that life seemed to get better when he was living with his mother. She worked a lot and was not home very often, but his stepsister Arlene cared for him in his mother’s absence. Nevertheless, Ballard claimed he never felt a bonding or love for his mother. He was always suspicious and fearful that she would leave him again.

  His father was not doing much better. According to reports introduced in Ballard’s trial, his father was charged with making terroristic threats to kill another man in March 1981. He was fined and ordered to receive counseling.

  Despite their many problems, once Nita Ballard was back in town, she and her ex-husband reconnected. Mickey and Jeanine divorced after two years of marriage; Jeanine later said that she had suspected he still had feelings for his ex-wife.

  Mickey and Nita Ballard were remarried in 1984, but that did not seem to give Eric any more stability in his life. Several people said the couple drank and fought on a regular basis, and Ballard himself later told the sentencing specialist that his parents had drunken brawls where his father threatened to kill his mother. On at least one of those occasions, Eric had to physically intervene to protect his mother.

  Ballard also told Louise Luck, the sentencing specialist, that his parents had inappropriate boundaries—they lived in a very small house yet they would have loud sexual relations. He also said he was never shown any affection, never given a hug or kiss, never told he was loved.

  “There’s just so many levels of dysfunction in the home,” Luck said during a later court hearing.

  There were witnesses to some of the family’s violent episodes. Lavern Cook later testified that when Eric was older—long after he had lived with the Cooks—Lavern Cook said Mickey Ballard was drunk every time she saw him and was often an angry drunk. One time, Mickey came to her house drunk and brought a pistol with him. He sat down at her table, playing with the gun and saying, “One of these days I’m going to own the whole town of West Fork.” Then the gun accidentally went off and shot out one of Lavern’s windows.

  In 1981, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office had to be called to the Ballard house. A call came into the county dispatch center that Mickey Ballard had threatened his stepdaughter, Arlene. When Sergeant James Acker arrived at the Ballard home, Arlene informed him that Mickey had threatened her with an iron fireplace poker.

  Arlene explained that Mickey had run off to his mother’s house about a mile down the road. When Acker went to investigate, he found an intoxicated Mickey standing in the front yard. Mickey ran into the house upon seeing the officer, so Acker went around to a screened back porch adjacent to the house.

  Suddenly Mickey appeared in the doorway clutching a fireplace poker and yelled, “You’re going to be dead!” He charged toward Acker, whose first instinct was to draw his gun and shoot Mickey, but he resisted that inclination. Instead, Acker hit him on the head with his flashlight as Mickey charged toward him. That knocked Mickey to the ground, where Acker was able to handcuff him after some struggle.

  A terrified Eric Ballard watched the whole thing, hugging his grandmother’s hips and hiding behind her apron as his father was arrested.

  Mickey was charged with making terroristic threats once again and received a two-year suspended prison sentence and two years of probation in addition to counseling and a thousand-dollar fine.

  Some in town also thought Mickey Ballard was violent toward Eric. Several of his childhood friends remember him coming to school with bruises, welts, and black eyes, which they believed came from his father. One time, Eric had a group of friends waiting for him outside his house—Eric was not allowed to have friends over—and one of the friends, Rhonda Maples, heard Mickey Ballard call Eric a “no-good worthless bastard.”

  “You’re good for nothing,” she also heard.

  Ballard said that while his father hurt him emotionally and mentally, he never hurt him physically. With his rough-and-tumble personality, he would often fight with his friends, and he said that’s where the bruises and black eyes came from, not from his dad.

  “My father never hit me,” he later said. “I personally wouldn’t term it as being overly abusive. Were there abandonment issues? Absolutely.”

  Mickey Ballard taught his son how to fire a gun at age six, but according to friends and family, that was just part of the culture in rural Arkansas. Eric’s cousin Joseph Bearden, for example, fired his first gun at age three.

  Mickey Ballard apparently introduced a lot of things to Eric at an early age. When Eric was eleven, Mickey gave him a motorcycle so he would stay away from the family house as much as possible, according to Lavern’s son Justin.

  And when Eric was thirteen, his father got him drunk for the first time. Several of Eric’s childhood friends said he was a heavy partier from then on, drinking regularly as well as doing drugs.

  “Marijuana, meth, cocaine, acid—I mean, anything we could get our hands on,” friend Russell Drake later testified.

  Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, Eric was drinking at least two beers a day and regularly using marijuana and cocaine, he would later tell a psychiatrist. LSD was a summer hobby for him and his friends; he said he probably used LSD about one hundred times in his summers during high school and once got so high that they got lost and ended up in Texas.

  In addition to physically fighting other teens, Ballard also exhibited violence toward animals in his early teenage years. Once when drinking with friends, they found an opossum, which the
y tortured and set on fire. On his own, Ballard put one cat in a clothes dryer and another in a microwave oven.

  He would later say he had more remorse for the animals he had hurt than the people he had killed.

  As with drinking and drugs, Ballard also experimented with sex from an early age. He had been sexually active since age thirteen and once was chased by two cars full of guys because he had slept with one of the guys’ girlfriends. They waited for him at the end of his driveway and chased him up to his house, where they jumped him. When Ballard’s mother and father heard the fight, Nita Ballard encouraged her husband to get a tire iron.

  During another fight that his father witnessed, Mickey cheered his son on, then threatened to shoot the teens who were fighting Eric.

  “This was the environment I grew up in,” Michael Eric Ballard later said.

  Mickey Ballard always told his son to stand up and fight like a man. After that, he never wanted to be picked on or thought of as a loser.

  “He always wanted to be better than others and win his father’s favor,” a psychiatrist would later note.

  With more interest in drinking, drugs, and girls than in his education, Ballard skipped a lot of school. His high school transcripts indicate that he failed most of his subjects; by the second half of tenth grade, he was failing all of them. His school records also indicate he had trouble with language comprehension and oral expression in reading, as well as suffering from overall emotional problems.

  When he was in the eleventh grade, three of his friends were killed in a car crash. Ballard had been riding with them earlier that night, and was dropped off only minutes before the fatal accident. The traumatic experience made him value his life even less, according to later reports. He started taking more risks, and by the second half of eleventh grade he had dropped out of high school altogether.

  But by age seventeen, it started to look like Ballard’s life might turn around.

  On February 7, 1991, not long after dropping out of school, Ballard went to Springdale, Arkansas, and enrolled in the US Army. He was quickly transferred to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where he underwent basic training and was schooled in heavy-wheeled vehicle maintenance. He began training to become a “tank catcher,” using the massive M88 recovery vehicles to recover tanks and other heavily armored vehicles stranded during battle.

  Ballard found that he loved working with heavy machinery and vehicles, and the farther into his basic training he got, the more he felt right at home in the military.

  Coming from a home with so little stability, Ballard loved the structure and discipline of the life in the army. He was well liked by his superiors and became a leader during drills and exercises, even being permitted to lead his fellow trainees and carry the flag during runs. Ballard took particularly well to shooting and earned the distinction of a sharpshooter badge with an auto rifle bar.

  “I was an expert in everything I did,” Ballard later said. It was a much-needed boost of confidence for a teen who, throughout his childhood, never received any attention that was not negative.

  But Ballard’s newly found happiness was not going to last.

  In August, Ballard was called into his superior’s office and informed he was to be “cycled out” and discharged from the army because his enrollment was fraudulent. Unbeknownst to everyone, including Ballard, he had been on probation at the time that he enrolled. When he was fifteen, a lot of Ballard’s friends had been purchasing large sound systems for their car. Ballard could not afford one for his Jeep, so he stole one of his grandmother’s checks and filled it out so he could buy one. His grandmother would often give him her Sears credit card so he could buy things, and he felt taking the check was no different.

  “She spoiled the shit out of me, so I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Ballard later said.

  However, shortly after Ballard had purchased the sound system, the police came to his part-time job and removed the stereo equipment from his car. What Ballard did not know was that he was charged with writing a fraudulent check and placed on probation. According to Ballard, he never went before a judge, nor did he receive a letter or any kind of notice that he was on probation. When he joined the army, he had no idea.

  But that excuse mattered little to the military. Ballard was discharged on August 27, 1991, not even seven months after he had joined. And, because he was discharged, he was not eligible for any of the benefits he would have received otherwise. Worse than that, the structure, confidence, and sense of purpose that he had finally discovered, that he had lacked all his life, was gone.

  Looking for a fresh start, and a way to escape the rejection and bad memories of his home, Ballard decided to move out of Arkansas and head north to live with his father’s cousin in Allentown, Pennsylvania. But the contentment that he was seeking continued to elude him.

  “I was still lost as hell,” Ballard later said. “I had no direction, I had no goals, I had no ambitions, nothing. I wasn’t living, I was just existing day to day.”

  CHAPTER 11

  In the days following the quadruple homicide, Trooper Raymond Judge was tasked with retracing Ballard’s steps on the day of the killings. Ballard had obtained a job at Monarch Precast, an Allentown concrete company not far from the community corrections center. Judge interviewed one of Ballard’s co-workers there, James Shankweiler, who said that on June 25, the day before the killings, he had heard Ballard say over the phone, “Think about me, baby.”

  Judge also interviewed several of Ballard’s fellow residents at the Allentown Community Corrections Center, the local state-run halfway house where Ballard had been living since he was paroled in April. A bland, nondescript building made entirely of brick, the corrections center has no exterior clues to indicate what is inside; the only visible window is a large reflective one that is impossible to see through from the outside.

  Several of the residents there had also observed Ballard’s phone interactions. One claimed Ballard had told him that Denise hadn’t been calling him recently. He said Ballard referred to Denise as his wife, and to her kids as his children. During one phone conversation, the resident heard Ballard yelling into the phone, “What are you saying? What’s going on?”

  The morning of the killings, Ballard stayed in the area of the halfway house’s telephones from 8:39 to 11:41 a.m., constantly making calls or, it seemed, waiting for calls. Several residents and staff members told Judge they saw Ballard pacing up and down the hall, appearing anxious and upset. One of the residents claimed Ballard told him he was waiting for a call from his girlfriend, with whom he was having problems. Another said he saw Ballard slam the phone receiver several times.

  These accounts offered Judge a glimpse into Ballard’s state of mind that morning. He had called Denise and Marilyn Rivera multiple times in the twenty-four hours leading up to the murder—to the point of obsessiveness—and he seemed to grow more and more restless and furious with each call.

  Next, Judge used footage from the corrections center’s extensive system of surveillance cameras to review Ballard’s activity on the morning of June 26. Little of it was particularly alarming, although at one point Ballard appeared to grow agitated when he tried to check out of the facility and a staff member refused to let him leave with his paycheck. But then, just as quickly as Ballard’s temper had risen, he appeared to calm down.

  The trooper continued monitoring the tapes until 11:48 a.m., when Ballard checked out of the Allentown Community Corrections Center. Signing out at the lobby, Ballard was carrying a green backpack and a radio, and wearing a pair of jeans, brown boots, a blue-green baseball cap, and a light blue short-sleeved T-shirt with a Superman emblem.

  As it turned out, it would help police very much that Ballard wore that particular shirt. Not only was it obviously the same article of clothing they later recovered, folded neatly on an armchair next to Dennis Marsh’s corpse, but it made Ballard stand out to several witnesses whom he encountered in the hours before the killings.

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bsp; After Ballard checked out, surveillance footage showed him walking west on Hamilton Street, a main thoroughfare in downtown Allentown where the corrections center is located. Judge followed that path and discovered two pawnshops just three blocks to the west. With the security staff and metal detectors, Ballard would not have been able to have a knife at the corrections center, so the trooper suspected one of the pawnshops was the most likely place for him to have acquired one.

  Indeed, by reviewing city surveillance cameras, Judge found that Ballard had entered a pawnshop called Pawn America around noon, where he looked over the store’s collection of samurai swords and decorative daggers but didn’t buy any. Next Judge went to A-Town Pawn, just three doors down the block. A store employee explained that Ballard had pulled at least three separate knives out of the display case to look them over. He had been extremely deliberate about it, testing each knife for sharpness and balance.

  Ballard eventually settled on a Ruko Muela-brand knife. Judge now knew where Ballard had obtained the murder weapon, and the fact that he was so meticulous in studying the knives before the purchase only further spoke to the premeditated nature of the crime.

  “He seemed like an ordinary, average, everyday guy,” store manager David Toolan would later say. He remembered Ballard’s distinctive Superman T-shirt, but nothing else struck him as the least bit suspicious.

  With his pawnshop business completed, Ballard headed for the local bus station, first stopping to make a call at a pay phone outside of a 7-Eleven convenience store about two blocks from the pawnshop. When Judge later checked the phone records, he learned those calls were made to Marilyn Rivera, in addition to the several Ballard had made to her earlier in the day at the corrections center.

  After he had hung up the pay phone, Ballard bought a bus ticket from Allentown to Northampton borough, the scene of the killings. But as Judge learned from reviewing various retail surveillance cameras, he didn’t go straight to Denise’s house. First he stopped at Boxers Bar and Grille, a local watering hole next to the bus stop, and ordered a Long Island Iced Tea. It was a drink well known for its high alcohol content, but Ballard downed it in a matter of minutes.