A Lady Dies in Boyfriend's Chimney (where do we start?)
The case is closed.
Either a lovesick doctor snapped as bizarrely as Lisa Nowak, the NASA astronaut, who drove nearly 1,000 miles with a wig, buck knife, and diapers to confront her rival. Or something sinister has happened. For now, this woman's death has been ruled accidental, and all we can do is reel.
The details, as they've been reported, mostly by the local police and The Bakersfield Californian (read more), are as follows: Her name was Jacquelyn Kotarac, 49, and she practiced internal medicine in Bakersfield. Last Wednesday, August 25, around 10:15 PM, she went to visit her on-again-off-again boyfriend, William Moodie, 58, who owns a petroleum engineering company. They had tickets to fly to Amsterdam two days later. But he didn't want to see her and, to avoid a confrontation, slipped out his back door.
Thinking he was still there, apparently, she tried to bash the door with a shovel. When that didn't work, she climbed an outdoor ladder to the roof, where she maneuvered herself over the chimney, removed the cap, and slid down, feet first. For anyone unacquainted with these structures (like me), rather than allowing a Santa Clause descent, they narrow and change direction. She got stuck.
Moodie, who spent the night somewhere else, returned the next day to find Kotarac's purse and car outside. He reported her missing. Friday, the police investigators searched the house. "There was no indication she was in there," says Sgt. Mary DeGeare of the Bakersfield Police Department, when I get her on the phone. "No odor, no evidence in the fireplace." Moodie left on the trip to Europe.
By Saturday, however, a woman who came to check his fish tank for him, was overwhelmed by a gruesome stench, and noticed fluids in the fireplace. When she looked up the flue, she saw the Kotarac, who had died, according to her autopsy, from lack of air.
DeGeare says the death was initially investigated as a homicide, but police have quickly concluded that Kotarac made her own choice to jump. Was it suicide? DeGeare pauses a long time before answering: "I don't think so."
The case won't be officially closed until the toxicology report comes back in six weeks or so (Kotarac had been seen drinking earlier that evening in a restaurant), but whether that could change anything? "No," says DeGeare, "It just might answer some questions."
And there are definitely questions. Take two scenarios...
ONE: The police got it wrong.
Let's not stop to dwell on the fact that Moodie's sneaking out to avoid a confrontation shows the emotional maturity of a sea slug. But isn't it odd that he split for another continent when his girlfriend had vanished so strangely? He'd known her for more than three years, he told the local paper, and it was thanks to her, that he he'd gotten new heart valve. According to one source, he had paid for her ticket to Amsterdam. So... what if didn't leave? What if, instead, he was on the roof when she arrived? Say he called her up the ladder to look at the moon. She's a little boozy; he gives her a little push? No marks on the body. Then, he's off to his alibi's for the night.
Okay, I'm watching too much CSI. For the record, Moodie told AP,"She made an unbelievable error in judgment and nobody understands why. She had her issues-she had her demons-but I never lost my respect for her."
TWO: The police got it right.
How likely is it that an intelligent doctor-she had a degree from UCLA Medical School-with a solid career, would suddenly turn so desperate?
It's pretty plausible, says Daniel Sapen, PhD, a clinical psychologist in Huntington, Long Island, who has seen many of his patients resort to extreme behavior over love. He speculates that Kotarac, feeling pushed away, had a "narcissistic" desparation to see Moodie. As competent as she was on the outside, on the inside, she would have felt she was nothing if he didn't "see" her and validate her in the way she wanted. "Narcissism means guarding a fragile bubble-image of yourself," Sapen says. "When the bubble is burst, you can be taken over by rage, desperation, and a willingness to risk life, limb, and reputation to try and win back the other person. "
"My educated guess," says psychotherapist Tina Tessina, PhD, "is that Kotarac was rejected as a small child by a man (her father left? or he was super critical?), and when Moodie spurned her, it triggered that hysterical little girl within to destroy herself and try and get him back." Tessina, author of It Ends With You: Grow Up and Out of Dysfunction, explains that we all have a rational mind and a "lizard brain"-the emotional part that takes over under extreme duress, which is especially vulnerable when there's been childhood trauma. Kotarac and Nowak, as well as the men who shoot up their workplaces, have snapped into the lizard brain.
The other possibility: Kotarac could have been drunk out of her mind. At least the toxicology report will answer that..
When I call my friend Ali Domar, who always helps me make sense of life (she happens to be a major PhD'd psychologist-head of the Domar center for Mind/Body Health, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, author of books like Live a Little!), she'd just heard about the case. "What I find interesting," she said, mulling it over, "is how there are so many stories about guys stalking and killing their girlfriends over jealousy, even their pregnant wives. We've gotten used to that. But when a woman does something like this, everyone's all over it. And women don't even hurt the men. They hurt themselves."
What do you think? Have you ever felt so desperate you would jump down a chimney?
For more on love gone wrong:
What jilted women have done to get revenge
[Photo Credit: AP Photo/The Bakersfield Californian, Felix Adamo]
