It was almost like a game first.

Like one of the loved-soaked fantasies they'd play out during their little getaways.

They're naughty escapes from the California Conservation Corps.

She started to make it seem as a joke.

She, of course, was the love of his life.

Patty Prespa, the 40-something married mother of grown children.

And he, Jaime, was the trusting 21-year-old so smitten with her, so moldable,

who listened intently to every word, as she told him about her horribly abusive husband,

her rapist husband.

It became something that was our way of coping with the fact that he raped her.

Raped us, I should say.

Yes, raped us.

Like Patty was her, Jaime.

And hadn't she told him that they were a we now and us?

It was in that little cone of intimacy where she began to fill his head with ideas about

all the dreadful things they could do to that abusive husband of hers.

She starts coming up with these ideas of breaklines, you know, him going off a cliff.

Started talking about how he likes to work around the house.

And if he just so happened to fall off a ladder and land on a rebar,

I was sticking out from some foundation, things like that.

When you, Jaime, said he didn't take any of this chatter too seriously,

it was just a kind of dark humor, really.

...