Desperate Housewife
A lonely woman looking for love, a handsome Army sniper, and a husband murdered in cold blood
Back in Fayetteville, Diamond became distraught. Their on-again, off-again relationship was off, once again. On Monday, he wrote: "Michelle, I am sorry you have forsaken us. I do really love you, but I guess your love just wasn't there. You lied quite well, you fooled me. I signed my life insurance over to you two weeks ago." He threatened suicide, then the next day wrote her that he drove "out to someplace secluded and three times I tried to pull the trigger" but couldn't. Of Marty Theer, he wrote, "He makes you miserable [yet] you still want to be with him. Why?" Finally: "I wait painfully for your call. I want so badly to see you and be with you. . . . Eternal love and devotion."
Diamond tried frantically to reach Michelle by phone but couldn't. He called her office and complained that Theer had abused Michelle. "She had him believing that Marty was physically abusing her," Harbin says. "That is so incredulous, so incredible." On either Friday, December 15, or Saturday, the 16th, Diamond and Michelle met at a restaurant near her office. Michelle says that she finally just buckled under the pressure and agreed to meet Diamond. But investigators say the two lovers had met to finalize their plan to kill Marty Theer on Sunday night, December 17.
THE EXECUTION OF MARTY THEER
Ralph Clinkscales, a Fayetteville police detective, was home asleep that Sunday night when he was awakened by the phone. It was 11:15, 11:20. His boss, Sgt. William Mitrisin, was on the line. A man had been shot to death at 2500 Raeford Road, the offices of Harbin & Associates. Mitrisin, already at the scene, told Clinkscales to get over there, pronto--he would head up the investigation. Clinkscales splashed some water on his face, threw on some clothes, rushed out into the freezing darkness, and drove 6 miles to the scene. He arrived at 11:45.
Clinkscales, now retired, remembers that the back parking lot of the two-story building was "already congested" with other investigators, uniformed officers, and paramedics. Marty Theer lay dead at the bottom of the outside stairwell. The paramedics had tried to revive him, but it was hopeless. He had been "executed," Clinkscales says. "There was a large amount of blood coming from the body," he would later testify, "the head portion to be exact."
On that night, his thoughts flashed back to Vietnam, where he had served as an Army military policeman. Marty Theer was an Air Force man, and more than once Air Force pilots had saved Clinkscales and his buddies from terrible injury or even death. The Viet Cong, positioned on a mountain, would "pound us with rockets and stuff," he recalled in an interview, and the Air Force "would send their planes in, and they would just wear them out for a while."
Clinkscales, soft-spoken, allows his feelings to pour out: "Here he is, lying in the streets of Fayetteville, you know, murdered, assassinated. . . . It just kind of hurt me that way. He didn't deserve to go like that--he sure didn't." The detective and other police officers, working with Army and Air Force investigators, began piecing together the facts--how a night that began with a festive Christmas party ended in brutal death.
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