An interview with Michelle Theer: 'On the lam'
A. Yeah.
Q. Did you live in a cottage down there?
A. Yeah.
Q. Where did you get your money?
A. Marty and I, we had always invested, we had always invested a regular part of our income, and that is what I lived on after he died.
Q. How much do you think you had in terms of savings?
A. It would be really hard to say. I can tell you that the stock market crash ate up a lot of it because I had left it all where it was.. . . We had IRAs, too. I cashed out the IRAs. . . .
Q. So, you think you had as much as 100 grand?
A. Yeah. . . it was probably around that, with our IRAs. Of course, I was never planning on touching the IRAs, but I did.
Q. That would keep you going?
A. I don't really remember all the details because I really didn't know what I was doing when I decided to leave. It was something that I had been thinking about for months because just the tension of having this over my head. . . I was under an incredible amount of stress. I had become pretty much agoraphobic. I never went out, certainly couldn't go out at night. I went out and got myself a gigantic dog to protect myself, I was paranoid. . . . I had gotten threatening letters from John [Diamond]. . . .There were a lot of reasons why I eventually decided that I had to just disappear, that I just had to leave, because my life was no longer a life. . . .
Q. What did he say in these letters?
A. That I was going to be sorry, that he had insurance, quote unquote, he always had a backup plan, and he had insurance to take care of me, that I better watch my back. . . .
Q. So, when you got to Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, is that when you took up with this young fellow, Dana Horton?
A. It was, yeah, not too long after I was there. . . .
Q. He thought you were Liza Pendragon?
A. Liza, yeah, yeah. I lived about two blocks away from the beach. There is a little kind of restaurant on the corner. . . two sides of it were open, open air. And in the corner. . . there was like a little bar area. And they had decent food. . . . Every now and then, I would walk up there and get something to eat. . . . They had a couple of regulars there, always sitting at the bar. . . . They had gotten to where they recognized me, and they would say, hello, and one day when I was walking up there, he [Dana Horton] was there with several of his friends, and I guess it was his birthday, or something, and they convinced me to stay and have a drink, and then you stay for a little while longer, and that's how that happened. . . . I had lived there a couple weeks before I met him.
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