The One Who Got Away

by Caroline Overington

  ‘He’s obviously done it,’ said Dad.

  I didn’t disagree with him.

  ‘And it’s so obvious that there’s something they’re not telling us.’

  I didn’t disagree with that, either. I mean, how could I?

  Liz Moss

  ‘Exclusive tonight on Up Close with

  Liz Moss: Liz sits down with David

  Wynne-Estes. Don’t miss it.’

  Tweet posted by Fox9

  H ands up who has read To Kill a Mockingbird? Who remembers Atticus saying never ask a question when you don’t already know the answer? Every barrister I know has that memorised, but reporters treat those words as gospel, too.

  Don’t go into an interview without knowing most of the story. Go in ready to catch him off guard, and not the other way around.

  Long before I met him, I had an idea what David Wynne-Estes was going to say in our televised interview. He wanted to sit there under the hot lights and deny blame for anything and everything that went wrong in his marriage.

  He wasn’t to blame even for the adultery, because of course, men never are.

  My interview with David took place in David’s home town, Bienveneda. I’m a New Yorker and I hadn’t previously been out that way. Bienveneda is pure California, with blue sky and Dr Seuss palm trees. And the High Side is big homes behind stone walls, guys in convertibles, and hot moms in white jeans, carrying small dogs.

  It is not my cup of tea.

  For the record, my network, Fox9, didn’t pay for the interview. Given the size of the story at the time, we probably would have paid, but – despite being in what he was telling everyone was a poor position, financially – it seemed that David was not after money.

  He was in damage control.

  To give you a sense of the timeline, David had returned from Mexico and was living with his angelic blonde twins in the big house on Mountain View Road. Loren’s family – her stepsister, Molly Franklin, and her father, Danny Franklin – had also returned from Mexico to their homes on the Low Side of Bienveneda, and the tension between the two camps was palpable.

  ‘I’ve always admired you,’ he said to me, by way of greeting. Was I meant to be flattered? Maybe, but I’ve heard it a lot. I’ve been doing Up Close with Liz Moss TV interviews for, what, twenty-seven years? Good Lord. It’s a long time, and I’ve probably seen it all. Celebrities, sports stars, people triumphing over adversity, and plenty of people like David: flash rats caught up in horrendous crimes – think O.J. Simpson – trying to defend themselves in the court of public opinion.

  Terms were hammered out not with David directly but with two consultants from Sally & Sons (often spelled Sally $ Sons, with a dollar sign, because they charge like wounded bulls). Sally & Sons are crisis-management specialists. For a fee, they will help anyone manage their reputation online and in the traditional media. Their advice for David, who can’t have been as broke as he was claiming, was to get on the front foot. He had been trying a different tactic – say nothing to nobody – but then Molly had released extracts from Loren’s journal to the public, via the RealNews website, and bang. The story exploded, and why wouldn’t it? Releasing those extracts was such a good idea. Hardly anyone watches live TV anymore, so these big interviews are risky, but the journal extracts sent a million people – probably more – to the RealNews website, which is great for revenue. The demand was so intense, their server crashed. As their rivals, we couldn’t have been more thrilled. That it crashed, I mean. For a while there – twenty-four hours – everyone wanted the journal extracts but nobody could read them. How RealNews managed to underestimate demand quite so catastrophically, I can’t say. Demand was always going to be huge. This was a wife’s private diary, detailing her husband’s affair. People are obsessed with that stuff.

  I’m not ashamed to admit that I was one of the people trying to get on the site. I had been following the story in the news, and I’d seen countless photographs of Loren on her wedding day, or out on the tennis court, bouncing around in new white shoes and a ponytail, or making Play-Doh models with her cute kids in the amazing kitchen of their dazzling house. To my mind, Loren came across really well in her journal. She was driven and spirited. She believed in her marriage. Her bad luck was to fall hopelessly in love with somebody like David Wynne-Estes.

  By contrast, David seemed an absolute monster. He had refused to be interviewed by RealNews, and they punished him by including lots of clips of him running to his car with a hoodie over his head.

  Plenty of people seemed to agree with me. The public – on Facebook and via the TV chat shows – were calling for David’s scalp. He had to do something.

  We – meaning the team at Fox9 – immediately got in touch, offering to tell his side of the story.

  The deal we negotiated was for an hour-long interview, but we wanted something for our website, too, so we would also get David to write his version of what had gone wrong in his marriage, to post immediately after the interview went to air.

  Fox9 doesn’t have a studio in Bienveneda, so we had to make do with some rooms at the Bonsall, where David and Loren spent their wedding night. The Bonsall is your classic Californian hotel: flamingo-pink walls and cabanas by the pool. We asked the management to remove all the furniture except for a couple of overstuffed armchairs in front of a fireplace.

  I sat in my armchair with a clipboard on my lap. I had my face tilted towards the light, and a makeup girl with a tool belt stuffed with blush brushes and cans of hairspray was giving me a last-minute touch-up when David walked into the room.

  I watched as he stepped carefully over the cables strewn across the floor and settled into his armchair.

  The sound girl immediately stepped between us, to pin a miniature mic to his lapel, and by the time she was finished adjusting his levels, she was smitten.

  No, I can’t explain how, but David has that effect on people. He’s undeniably handsome, but there is also something of a little-boy-lost thing going on that women, in particular, find irresistible.

  My job is not to get suckered by anyone’s charisma. If I didn’t get suckered by Bill Clinton, I wasn’t going to get suckered by David Wynne-Estes (although, having interviewed them both, I’d say David might even give the old dog a run for his money).

  So there I was, sitting opposite David, going over the questions I intended to ask. Remember, it wasn’t for me to decide whether or not he was guilty, or even of what. That was for viewers to decide.

  For all his natural confidence, David seemed nervous, although I suppose that’s normal when you’re on TV for maybe the first time. He had turned up groomed like a stallion and in a suit so beautiful that even our network chief was seen peering into the TV monitor to get a closer look. To my critical eye, the suit was slightly too big for David, but don’t be fooled. That may well have been deliberate. Sally & Sons is not above putting a dodgy client into an extra-large suit to make him appear smaller and more vulnerable, like a little boy in a big-sized chair.

  Plenty has been said about David’s eyes. Are they really that blue, or does he wear coloured contact lenses? Having looked into them over an extended period, I would say that David’s eyes really are blue, but the effect is amplified by the tan and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes.

  My best guess is that David’s tactic in our interview would be to throw himself upon the mercy of our mostly female audience. Yes, he’d been a bad husband and a lousy partner. Yes, he was a cad, but he was not a killer.

  Would the audience buy it? I was dying to find out.

  I called out to our director. ‘Are we good?’ I said.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ she replied.

  I looked up at David and smiled. ‘You good?’

  He leaned forward and said: ‘Be brutal with me.’

  I’m confident it didn’t show, but that set me back slightly in my chair. Be brutal? Who says that?

  ‘I mean it. Ask me anything,’ David said. ‘I have nothing to hide.’

>   I looked over at the cameraman. He gave me the thumbs up to reassure me that we were recording. I kept my expression neutral and began.

  ‘Alright,’ I said, ‘then I guess we’ll start with your affair.’

  * * *

  ‘Your wife kept a journal.’

  ‘No, she did not.’

  Remember what I said about not asking a question if you don’t already know the answer? Perfect example right there. Not that we couldn’t edit it out, but getting a flat denial like that to something can throw you. His wife didn’t keep a journal? The whole world had read extracts from Loren’s journal on the RealNews website.

  ‘I’m sorry, you’re saying your wife didn’t keep a journal?’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said David, ‘my wife – Loren – did not keep a journal.’

  How great would it have been to have had a copy of Loren’s journal on the side table next to me? I could have picked it up and waved it, saying: ‘Then what’s this?’ That would have been good TV but bad luck because extracts from Loren’s journal had been published online and I didn’t have a printout.

  ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘what have we all been reading?’

  David moved slightly forward in his seat, the way Tom Cruise does when he’s being interviewed. Like he wants to get closer to you. Like he wants you to understand. My producer had specifically asked David not to do that because it mucks with the camera angles, but it’s a classic Sally & Sons tactic. It makes the talent appear honest and transparent. They’re moving in your direction. They’re giving themselves to you. In terms of body language, it’s the polar opposite of sitting with your arms crossed.

  ‘Loren’s journal isn’t a journal in the sense of her writing her thoughts down at the end of every day,’ said David. ‘What people have been reading, Loren wrote all in one burst over about three weeks.’

  ‘I see, and in your mind, that’s not a journal?’

  ‘Of course it’s not,’ said David earnestly. ‘What people have been reading are basically notes – notes and thoughts – that Loren took down after I confessed to my affair.’

  Again, classic Sally & Sons. David was throwing himself upon the mercy of the viewing audience by confessing the affair to them, with no prompting. No sallying. No dodging. But how truthful was he being?

  After all, he hadn’t confessed to his affair to Loren. He’d been caught out by a mom at Bienveneda Grammar, who had dobbed him in. Still, I let him continue.

  ‘Loren wrote those notes late at night during the most difficult time of her life. She was hurt and confused, and trying to make sense of things. Which makes the betrayal of Loren by her family that much worse.’

  That threw me. What on earth was David on about?

  ‘Loren and I were at a turning point in our marriage. She was trying to decide whether she could stay with me. It would be a tough decision and she was trying to sort things out in her own mind. We had a marriage counsellor – Bette Busonne, who invented the Busonne Method – who was urging Loren to put her thoughts down on paper. And I remember Loren laughing – bitterly laughing – through her tears at that suggestion. This was when we were sitting in Bette’s office, fairly soon after Loren found out about the affair. Loren was curled into her chair and Bette said: “Why are you laughing?” and Loren replied: “Because it’s not going to take very long to write down how I feel. I feel like crap.”’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ I said evenly.

  ‘Right,’ said David, ‘and Bette’s advice was: “If you start writing things down, you might find that it helps you sort out your feelings and that will help you decide whether you want to stay with David.” And that hit me like a hammer because my fear was that Loren would come down on the side of leaving me. So when Bette suggested that Loren go right back to the start of our relationship – right back to when we first met in New York City – and try to pinpoint when and why we fell in love and when things might have started to go off track, I was all for it. Because I thought, yes, that will help Loren see that my affair wasn’t the problem. My affair was a symptom of problems we already had in our marriage. That things were rotten before I strayed.’

  Oh, I see. Of course! We were already at the point where the affair wasn’t his fault.

  ‘Bette said: “Write everything down, don’t try to censor your thoughts. By the time you get to the end, you will have an answer as to whether you want to stay with your husband.” That’s what Loren was doing, she was writing down her deepest, innermost thoughts for the purpose of figuring out whether she wanted to stay with me. That’s not a journal. That is a sacred text and those words – those thoughts – they belonged to Loren exclusively. They were not for me to read, and I cannot imagine how Loren would feel knowing that her deepest, most private feelings have now been shared with the world and not by me, but by people who claim to love her.’

  Did I mention that Sally & Sons charge a pretty penny? Now you can see why. That little speech, right at the start of our interview, was a masterpiece.

  Playing it back in the privacy of the editing room a few days later, my producer said to me: ‘That gentle sound you hear? That’s the women of America, moving in to comfort this guy.’

  I wasn’t so sure. The women of America don’t approve of adultery.

  I decided to hit David with a few questions about his tacky betrayal. ‘Well, for the sake of this interview, let’s refer to Loren’s private thoughts as her journal. You’ve read the extracts. We all have. So tell us, how did it feel, having to read just how badly you’ve hurt your wife?’

  David didn’t flinch. ‘I didn’t need to read Loren’s notes to know how much I’d hurt her. Loren was my wife. I knew her intimately. I only had to look at her to see how much pain she was in.’

  Masterful. I pressed on: ‘And how did that make you feel?’

  ‘I wanted to do whatever I had to do to make things right,’ said David. ‘I was responsible for Loren’s hurt, and I was taking responsibility for that as we tried to repair our marriage.’

  ‘Yes, we’ll get to that,’ I said, ‘but how did you feel, reading Loren’s journal?’

  ‘Well, it was surreal, because I was there for many of the events she described, so I guess it was like looking at my life through a different set of eyes. The first time we met, the first time we broke up …’

  I raised my hand slightly off my lap, a signal I use when I want the talent to stop for a moment, usually so we can adjust the lighting or the sound, although mainly so I can interrupt.

  ‘Yes, let’s talk about that,’ I said, ‘let’s talk about the first time you met. You are thirty-two and Loren is twenty-three, and the two of you have just begun working at Book-IT …’

  ‘No,’ said David. ‘I was already there. I had been there more than a year. Loren had just arrived. She was one of the new graduates.’

  I smiled, and we started again. ‘Okay, the two of you have just met. Loren has just arrived in New York City. She’s landed a good job but she’s not earning much money. You’re a big shot. You’ve got the penthouse …’

  ‘It wasn’t a penthouse.’

  ‘Okay, it’s not a penthouse, but to cut to the chase, you’re a big deal, and Loren falls head-over-heels in love with you …’

  ‘Which I knew nothing about.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘That’s the problem with this journal,’ said David, leaning forward with his hands together and his fingers pointed in my direction. ‘It’s only one side of the story. And there are two sides to every story. Loren says that she fell madly in love and I dropped her and hurt her, but that’s only one side of the story.’

  ‘Alright,’ I said, smiling. ‘Okay. So what’s your side of that story?’

  At this point in the interview, we intended to show some photographs of Loren as she was at age twenty-three from David’s collection, including one in which she was crouched beside a small snowman in Central Park. It wasn’t a great shot – the pixels on those old dig
ital cameras weren’t great back in those days, and the snowman was pretty lame, with bent sticks for arms and a piece of fir tree on its head – but that was the point.

  Loren, when she met David, was still young enough to be making snowmen in Central Park, and she was so pretty. In the shot, she wears a woollen beanie, jeans and snow boots, and she’s got iPod buds in her ears. You can see the cords in her long, straw-coloured hair. She’s got a radiant smile and soft-pink lips.

  ‘Loren was gorgeous,’ David said, ‘but I don’t mean just physically. She was also unlike anyone I’d previously met in New York.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘She was shy. Shy like a deer, I used to think, like she was scared that the world wanted to hurt her, or something. I couldn’t understand why. To me, she was beautiful and talented and it seemed obvious that she had the world at her feet. It wasn’t until she told me about her parents’ divorce – how her father ran out on her to live with another woman who had a daughter about the same age – that I began to understand. Maybe your viewers already know this, but Loren’s family – her father, and her stepsister, Molly – have put themselves forward as the people who have Loren’s best interests at heart. In truth, Loren was betrayed by her father at a vulnerable age. He left his marriage to live with Molly’s mother, and Loren’s confusion about that – why was he living with another little girl and not me? – was something she carried right through to adulthood. She was extremely wary of getting involved with anyone, very wary of being hurt, and the manifestation of that was, she tended to play her cards close to her chest. So I had no idea that Loren had fallen for me until we broke up and she started to cry. She says in her journal that I was embarrassed by her tears, but in fact I was shocked. She’d never let on as to how she felt, or not to me, anyway. The idea that I was “The One” – you could have knocked me over with a feather.’