Under Cover of the Night

by Diane Fanning

  When Wesley decided to propose marriage, he didn’t just pop the question. He filled a box with coins, added a note that read: “Marry me” and buried it in the ground. Then he got Jocelyn, guided her to the general area, and handed her a metal detector. She accomplished her mission, digging up the box and agreeing to become his wife.

  • • •

  In 1994, Wesley joined the coed city volleyball team in Lynchburg. One of his teammates was the nearly six-foot-tall Jennifer Landis, a former basketball player at Virginia Commonwealth University. He told her, “I’m engaged and my fiancée played basketball like you. You guys ought to have a lot in common.”

  Jennifer thought Wes was a bit socially awkward but he could be very funny and quite interesting, and she liked his competitive spirit on the court. Other teammates, however, found him intimidating. Most of the team would talk to one another about stupid plays, self-interested moves, and other faux pas during the game, but they were afraid to address Wesley about those matters. Jennifer played the front row with him and felt she had the right and the obligation to the team to express her concerns. He always got angry at any criticism she delivered. The rest of the group expressed surprise that she talked to him that way.

  The team always went to Taco Bell after games. Typically, Jennifer went to the restroom to wash her hands before ordering. One night, by the time she got to the table, there was only one empty seat and it was directly across from Wesley. “Okay if I sit here?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Wesley said, “but don’t get any ideas, I have a fiancée.”

  Jennifer was puzzled. She didn’t know if his remark stemmed from arrogance, stupidity, or if it was supposed to be a joke—but the expression on his face indicated that he was serious. She shifted subjects to that night’s game and snapped back, “Don’t try to hit through a double block, okay?”

  Jennifer started dating Bob Kerns, another member of their volleyball team, in February 1995. Wesley invited Jennifer and Bob to his and Jocelyn’s August 19, 1995, wedding, but scheduling conflicts made it impossible for them to go.

  Jennifer and Jocelyn finally met at a going-away party for Bob’s former roommate. Jocelyn was sitting in the kitchen, near the food, observing people come and go. Jennifer’s first impression was that Jocelyn talked a lot, but she certainly was friendly and bubbly, and within fifteen minutes, Jennifer wanted to get to know her better.

  Jocelyn soon joined the other three on the coed volleyball team, and the four became close friends. They frequently had dinners at each other’s homes, and often played basketball and paintball together, usually teaming up men-versus-women.

  Over the next year, the two couples got to know each other better. Jocelyn and Wesley joined Jennifer and Bob at the Kernses’ family cabin on Harris Lake, near the Georgian Bay area of Ontario, Canada, in the summer of 1997.

  Bob’s grandparents had built the cabin by hand in the mid-sixties. Originally, it had no electricity or telephone, but the grandparents installed both when they got elderly. There was no plumbing, requiring visitors to use an outhouse and bring jugs of drinking water for their stay. The quaint and rustic log structure blended naturally into its surroundings: a rocky coastal shore with big boulders, sparse cabins, and lots of pine and birch trees.

  The cabin was inaccessible by road, only by water. The closest town, Pointe au Baril, was a boat ride and a forty-minute drive from the cabin. It consisted of a little grocery store, liquor store, bakeshop, post office, and gas station. The Kernses’ place was a secluded retreat made for relaxation. Hiking, fishing, camping, swimming, and reading was the usual order of the day, but there were necessary chores, too. Jocelyn was an enthusiastic helpmeet, turning even dull chores into games. Jennifer recalled her and Jocelyn washing the windows together—one outside and one inside—and laughing themselves silly as they mirrored each other’s actions. The trip cemented the friendship between the two women. Jennifer said that Jocelyn was “like an M&M—a lot more on the inside than you see on the outside.”

  Jocelyn also began developing a close relationship with Jennifer’s seven-year-old daughter from her previous marriage, Emily. They went out hunting chipmunks, played with them in their hands, and sometimes dropped one into a pocket where the creature’s wriggling induced fits of giggles. The wildlife was an endless source of fascination for Jocelyn, and she developed an undying love for moose and loons.

  After the excursion, Jocelyn put together her best photographs of the area—interspersed with lines from her heart like: “The challenge is to see the beauty within others,” “A touch of nature makes the whole world smile,” “The key to happiness is having dreams—the key to success is making them come true,” and “Nothing is more powerful than an inspired landscape”—into a large artful album for Jennifer and Bob with an opening message that read: “We would like to thank you for giving us the experience of a lifetime. This gift is so that you, too, can remember the times there.” Jocelyn was clearly in her element up in the woods, far from the everyday comforts of her normal suburban life.

  ELEVEN

  Both Jocelyn and Wesley Earnest started night classes at Lynchburg College to obtain their master’s degrees. Jocelyn obtained her master of business administration degree and got a job with First Colony Life, which became a subsidiary of General Electric Capital Corporation less than a year later. Wesley got a master of education degree and started attending night classes at the University of Virginia in pursuit of a doctorate.

  Wesley took Jocelyn by surprise when he decided to become a Jehovah’s Witness. Neither she nor Wesley had been raised in religious households.

  “What is behind that?” Jocelyn asked.

  “It helps me have better control with anger management,” Wesley told her.

  Although Jocelyn had always wanted children, she’d had doubts about bringing any kids into Wesley’s household because of his temper and control issues. Now, she was absolutely sure that she didn’t want to do so. Wesley would want any children raised in his new faith, and Jocelyn was adamantly opposed to that. From that point forward, she would not engage in sexual relations unless Wesley wore a condom.

  Because of this shift in his life, Wesley developed a different group of friends. Although Jocelyn wouldn’t go to services, she would accompany Wesley to church functions like picnics.

  Their friends Jennifer and Bob Kerns got married in 1998. When they had their first child, Katelin, in 1999, Jennifer asked Jocelyn if she and Wesley would be the child’s godparents. Tearfully, Jocelyn said she had to decline, as Jehovah’s Witnesses looked down on infant christening as a Catholic conspiracy.

  The tenets that Jehovah’s Witnesses live by are quite strict, eschewing modern medicine and regarding all holidays as pagan. In fact, the only special day on the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ calendar is the Memorial of Christ’s Death, which happens every year at about the same time as the Christian holiday of Easter.

  Wesley took most of the prohibitions against holidays very seriously. But bringing these restrictions into her home life felt personal to Jocelyn. Wesley knew these days were always spectacular festivities in her family, loaded with tradition and fun. She wondered at his motivations.

  One year he agreed to go with Jocelyn to her family’s home in West Virginia for Thanksgiving. When they got there, though, he sat in the car while she had dinner with her relatives. Instead of staying over as she usually did so she could go shopping with her mother and sister on Black Friday, she climbed back into the vehicle with Wesley and they drove back to Virginia. Every year after that, she went to her family home without him.

  Jocelyn also continued to celebrate Christmas in West Virginia, and with friends like Jennifer, helping her put up the tree, decorate the house, and make cookies—all things Jocelyn wished she could do in her own home. She soon expanded her holiday activities with that family to include helping make Halloween costumes and going trick-or-treating w
ith their kids.

  Wesley celebrated one annual event, though: their wedding anniversary. On one of the earlier years, he bought Jocelyn a punching bag and hung it up for her from a support beam in the basement. Some couples would consider this a very odd, decidedly unromantic gift, but the athletic Jocelyn was thrilled.

  • • •

  The Earnests continued to accompany the Kernses on yearly trips to Harris Lake. They loved it so much that when an adjacent lot went up for sale, they considered buying it, but they didn’t act fast enough. Wesley had also fallen in love with Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia and suggested that they get a piece of property there instead.

  In the 2000 school year, Wesley got a teaching position at Heritage High School in the Lynchburg City Schools system. In August, he finished all the course requirements for his doctorate, and was formally awarded a PhD in administration supervision with finance and technology minors the following January.

  The couple now concentrated on finding the perfect place to build on Smith Mountain Lake. Driving through the rolling hills of the Virginia countryside with the glorious Blue Ridge Mountains as a backdrop, the trip to the Smith Mountain Lake home was a pleasure in itself. The peaks lack the majestic angles and stark faces of western mountain ranges but possess the more comforting, ancient beauty of timeworn edges and tree-covered tops.

  The drive from Lynchburg cuts through stretches of tall evergreen and deciduous trees and idyllic pastures. In many spots the cultivated areas were overrun by the undulating mystery of kudzu-shrouded landscapes, though an occasional tree manages to fight off the aggressor to stand tall and defiant, stretching its limbs to the sky. Once off the highway, the road winds past vineyards, ticky-tacky houses in need of paint and love and prosperous homesteads with miles of well-maintained wood fencing. In 2001, the Earnests bought the land they wanted nestled on the forested shoreline in the Hickory Point section of Clearwater Estates.

  They agreed on the choice of property but little else. Jocelyn envisioned a rustic, restful cabin like the one the Kernses had in Canada. Wesley, on the other hand, wanted an elegant, massive testament to his success—a home that surpassed all the others around him. That is just what he designed: seven bedrooms, each one with a sunset view of the lake, six and a half baths, a spacious deck, and a grandiose three-boat dock.

  By this point, Wesley had taken total control of all the couple’s finances. He put Jocelyn on a rigid shopping budget, which she only really minded at Christmastime. She wasn’t a woman of extravagant tastes, naturally habituated to shopping at Goodwill, thrift stores, and yard sales.

  In the summer of 2001, Wesley was unable to make the trip to Canada because he was too busy preparing for the new school year in his position as an assistant principal at Heritage. He didn’t want Jocelyn to go without him, but she did anyway. Being there without Wesley further deepened the bond between Jocelyn and Jennifer, who began feeling like a big sister with a ferocious desire to protect and stand up for Jocelyn, and not let her be bullied.

  Jennifer was beginning to see a side of Wesley she didn’t like. He seemed driven by greed and material goods. He was controlling, overbearing, and manipulative with Jocelyn, and he always seemed to be looking for others to validate his superiority. She felt his high self-esteem treaded on the edges of narcissism. Wesley, on the other hand, related to the troubled, misunderstood genius with a lousy childhood, the title character in Good Will Hunting. “That’s who I am. That’s me,” he once told her.

  In late 2001, Bob and Jennifer took their daughters over to the Earnest home for pizza. After the kids settled down in front of a movie, Wesley started being very touchy-feely with Jocelyn, who all of them knew was not comfortable with public displays of affection.

  “You see this?” Wesley flicked at the wedding band on Jocelyn’s finger. “This is the access code. This entitles me to access twenty-four-seven—and I’ll tell you twenty-four-seven is not enough for me.”

  Jocelyn tried to blow him off with a flippant comment: “If that’s what you want, you better look elsewhere.”

  Jennifer tried to distract him. “You talk like most men in America but twice a week is about all that is normal in a marriage.”

  Wesley seemed to ignore her comment and started talking to Bob about sports.

  • • •

  At Heritage High School, Wesley received a promotion into administration and got involved in Habitat for Humanity. The city required that there be a licensed contractor supervising the work. To save the school the cost of hiring one, Wesley and the head of the Building Trade Department at the school both obtained contractor’s licenses.

  Wesley worked as the general contractor for his Smith Mountain Lake home. He hired more than eighty subcontractors during the course of the work but did a lot of smaller jobs with his own hands and some assistance from Jocelyn. The house was supposed to be something Wesley and Jocelyn created together, but whenever there was a conflict, Wesley always overruled. Jocelyn wasn’t even able to assert herself on the color of the tile.

  By nature, Jocelyn was a helper, a problem solver, and a peacemaker. All good qualities—but when combined with a man possessing Wesley’s need to control, the end result was not desirable. She tried to make it work, going along to keep the peace. As she did so, though, a creeping resentfulness set in.

  Jocelyn later revealed that she’d been worried on her wedding day that she was about to make a serious mistake. It was more than last-minute jitters—she’d had lots of signals that life with Wesley wouldn’t be the partnership of equals that she’d always wanted to find in a marriage. But her family had made great efforts and gone to the expense in preparation for the event, and relatives and friends had traveled great distances to celebrate the day. She hadn’t wanted to disappoint any of them, so she’d said her vows and hoped for the best.

  It was starting to look like the best was not going to happen.

  • • •

  In the summer of 2002, Wesley and Jocelyn went west for a long camping and hiking trip in Oregon with Wesley’s brother, Tyler, and his wife. Jocelyn didn’t care much for Tyler, and by the time they went home, she had developed suspicions that he was physically abusive to his wife.

  While trekking through the wilderness, they ran across a yellow Lab who was in very bad shape. He won Jocelyn’s heart in record time and she adopted him on the spot. They named him Rowdie and flew him back with them to Virginia, where he lived comfortably for the few remaining years of his life.

  Jocelyn eventually adopted another Labrador, this time a black one, whom she named Rufus.

  • • •

  In the fall, they visited Wesley’s dad, Roger, at his farm out in the country in West Virginia. One day, the three of them set up targets in a field for shooting practice. Wesley went out with a shotgun and Jocelyn brought a Smith and Wesson short-barreled revolver that Wesley had given to her.

  Each one of them took turns firing the Smith and Wesson, using up a couple of boxes of ammunition. Then Wesley fired the shotgun and Jocelyn asked to try it. Roger showed her how to use it and she fired off a shot or two.

  Much to her father-in-law’s surprise, Jocelyn was a pretty good shot. She actually fired better than Wesley had. Roger kidded his son quite a lot about her outshooting him.

  TWELVE

  In 2003, Wesley and Jocelyn Earnest prepared their wills, each one giving the bulk of their property and possessions (which at that time included two homes, a boat, and three cars) to the other. They told the Kernses that they were mentioned in the will but did not explain how.

  That year was also the first year that Jocelyn started to stand up to Wesley instead of just doing whatever he said to keep the peace. Wesley blamed Jennifer’s influence. Jennifer thought he was probably right, and she was glad of it.

  Then Wesley took it a step further, accusing Jennifer of romantic feelings for Jocelyn. “You love her. Y
ou’d like to sleep with her.” Wesley had no real reason to suspect that, but like many controlling men, he probably did not want his wife to have strong relationships outside of the marriage and would stop at nothing to undermine those bonds.

  The relationship between Wesley and the Kernses was quickly deteriorating. That summer’s trip to Canada shattered the peaceful pattern of the past. Jennifer and Bob’s son, Joseph, had been born the year before, and a birthday party was planned for that week on the lake. Wesley was not at all pleased with the celebration and made it abundantly clear to everyone.

  That wasn’t the worst of Wesley’s behavior at the lake, however. One day, when Jennifer’s teenage daughter Emily and Wesley had both been drinking Diet Dr Pepper on the dock, Emily had left her can outside. Jennifer sent her back to the dock to get it. Emily retrieved the can but left it on the porch, and again, Jennifer ordered her back outside to pick up the can and crush it.

  Later that evening, Jennifer looked out a window and spotted something floating in the lake. Bob went outside to check it out and pulled out a crushed Diet Dr Pepper can. Wesley immediately lit into Emily, scolding her for her irresponsibility. Jennifer knew that Emily had brought in her can, and told Wesley to take responsibility for his own negligence.

  “No one is going to speak to me like this,” Wesley said. “I’m not going to stay here and listen to this.” He stalked outside and yelled for Jocelyn to come out. They stood by the water and talked.

  Jocelyn then came into the cabin and said, “I’m supposed to tell you that you have to apologize for how you talked to him and what you did.”

  “For you, I’d do it,” Jennifer said. “But do you think that will even work? If I do it, will he ever let this go?”

  Jocelyn said that she didn’t think it would work, and went back outside. When she told Wesley that an apology would not be forthcoming, fuming and pacing, he said, “Well, that’s it. We’re leaving,” and sent Jocelyn inside to gather up their belongings.