October 30, 2023
Nebraska Department of Correctional Services Board of Parole
Re: Parole of David [redacted]
Honorable Members of the Board of Parole,
There are certain events that impact a person so severely that they stay with them for the rest of their lives. I hope that my time with David isn’t one of these instances, but I fear he will be a thorn in my side far into the future. I call my time with David my Lifetime Movie moment. David and I were on the periphery of each other’s lives for a decade. We knew of each other, but never formally met. Then one day, I stumbled on David’s dating profile. I always felt like I should have known better, but I accepted his connection. This remains one of the largest regrets of my entire life. From our first conversation together, I was smitten. He swept the rug from under my feet.
So you have a little context, I grew up in a home [redacted]. I felt like someone was finally seeing and hearing me.
I realize now that this is his typical form of manipulation when beginning a new relationship. He mirrored everything I had ever wanted in a partner in order to make me fall hard and fast in love with him. This was a cunning plan set it motion with the knowledge he had gained about me through years of conversations with our mutual friend. In summary, he had heard my name quite often and knew who I was, what I did for work, what my relationships were like, the emotional trauma I went through, my anxieties, fears, and desires. He was calculated in his efforts to make me fall for him. I didn’t have a single clue of his true intentions or that there was a massive game being played on my mind. Red flags look like all other flags when viewed through rose-colored glasses. I felt like David was a gift for all the terrible relationships I had been through. Finally, I was gifted a prize. According to him, we were always meant to be together. It was kismet that we had been on the periphery of each other’s lives for ten years.
A seemingly short - to everyone else except me - nine months later, on a Sunday night/Monday morning, our relationship ended with him telling me to call the police because he intended to kill me. He had just spent the previous six hours verbally and physically assaulting me, had wrecked his car, destroyed my house, and attempted to set the pieces of my home on fire in my garage. I will never forget walking through my wrecked home, every room covered in sprinkles of David’s blood, up to my bedroom to fall asleep on blood-spattered pillows.
The catalyst of the fight had been that Friday. I had financially cut him off after I found out he was attempting to sleep with a rekindled childhood friend of mine. He was telling her the same things he said to me when we started talking nearly nine months prior. I told him he was no longer going to receive any money from me. Sunday afternoon, after an unsuccessful weekend of poker-playing, he [redacted]. After hours of fighting and tearing my house apart, he fought me for his keys, took his car, and crashed it into several mailboxes and a parked car in my neighborhood. When the police showed up, I assumed he was going to be booked into jail as he was on felony probation. I was told they were going to take him to the downtown station as he refused a breathalyzer. Instead, I was called to a parking lot of a different station and when I showed up, he was being released from the back of the police car. He shook the officer’s hand and was given back to me, smiles on everyone’s faces except mine. Just a couple hours later, a different set of officers were at my house with a forensic van, taking photos of everything and taking my statement. He shouldn’t have been released to me in the first place, but there I was standing outside of my house, bruises all over my body, and a soulless set of eyes staring back at me while being put into the back of an officer’s SUV.
To be honest, I don’t think I realized I was being abused until David went to jail. [redacted]. Somehow, I must have woken up in someone else’s life. What happened to me? How could this happen to me? Just a few months prior, I had promised to marry him in September should he stop the cheating and the physical violence. I am not sure how my bar got so low. I’m even more saddened that he couldn’t keep the promise. I [redacted]. Where did my prize go? Where was this man who told me I was his everything?
For the first few weeks after David went to jail, I had daily debates about whether or not to bail him out. I debated dropping the protection order my friend pushed me to immediately file. I was scared he blamed me. I didn’t want to suffer the repercussions of his anger should he have been released by other means. I wanted to do my best to smooth it all over so that he could see it wasn’t my fault, even if I was the one to finally call the police. I slipped right into my standard trauma response - to do anything and everything to soothe it over and minimize the wrath. I obviously didn’t bail him out. I was suggested a great book, Psychopath Free, and in it there was a tip for victims. I was to write a long list of all the terrible things he did to me to keep the abusive things I went through at the front of my brain when I start to reminisce about the “good times.” It’s to help break the trauma bond - the mix of love and pain that ran so deep. I wrote the list. There are 98 items on that list for the 270 days we were together or 2.7 unacceptable actions toward me each day. This list includes all of the cheating incidents I found during our time together, every time he broke something of mine, each time he touched me in anger, every shove, kick, spit, drink and food toss, slap, choke, push, and the times he sexually assaulted me - [redacted]. The list also includes a lot of the verbally abusive statements that still stick with me today. He’d tell me I was stupid, a taxing example of humanity, and would make me feel like worthless trash. There were times he nonchalantly brought up a lie about how he knows the cartel and all he’d have to do to make someone disappear is send a simple text. This was told to me in order to instill fear and the fear that he will simply make me disappear still resides deep in my psyche today. It also included losing my [redacted].
Over the course of our relationship, scattered among the long, verbal fights, there were four violent ones. [redacted]. Sprinkled among these horrific times were the most loving and attentive times. That’s what keeps the trauma bond going. He would apologize after every incident, hold and caress me. He would tell me that it would never happen again. [redacted]. He would tell me that he would be lost without me. He would thank me for supporting him and his dreams. He would talk about how amazing I am, how he doesn’t deserve my goodness, and make me feel like I was his prize, not the other way around. As time went on, the “loving” parts became sparse until they stopped existing and the callous, angry parts of David were all I saw and felt.
David knows he is a narcissist. I would ask him to work on changing his toxic traits and he would argue that I was trying to change who he fundamentally is and refused to do anything about it. [redacted]. If he can’t smother you in a false sense of love to get what he wants, he will simply take it. If he isn’t in a position to take what he wants, he will resort to blackmail. After he went to jail, I spent over 36 hours looking through his user account on my computer. I found messages of him attempting to blackmail the probation-approved therapist he saw while we were together. They had sexual conversations back and forth and he expressed the desire to give her the only thing she ever wanted and couldn’t seem to have - a child. When she got scared and pulled away, he attempted to blackmail her into having his baby, threatening to go to the board if she didn’t let him impregnate her. At the same time he was doing this, he knew I couldn’t conceive and told me he never wanted children.
I found messages from 2012 where he attempted to make someone his sex slave. [redacted]. I found messages from 2017 where he encouraged a girl to kill herself, [redacted] while she pleaded for him to leave her alone and ignore her. Among these disturbing and terrifying messages, I stumbled upon his porn history. He has an affinity [redacted]. Lastly, one of the other unfathomable things I found were his love letters. There are three different love letters, tinkered to the uniqueness of each woman he sends them to. From 2015 to 2020, he has sent these letters to seven different women. Each letter is changed, ever so slightly, to make it personable. They revolve around love and have the clear intention of making the woman feel as though no one will ever love them like David did. They are visions of a woman walking along the beach, twilight over her body, sand between her toes, while he explains that she is the woman he envisions in this dream. A new dawn has come for new beginnings with the wonderful love they’ve cultivated. They’re beautiful, poetic letters of manipulation so that he can keep ties to all his past lovers. He enjoys keeping them on puppet strings for him to tug on whenever he needs narcissistic validation and/or sex.
David didn’t become this way overnight. This is a lifelong practice of manipulation and deceit, [redacted]. One doesn’t simply stumble upon violent porn or [redacted]. [redacted]. You cannot find rational justification for any one of these actions. This is a pattern. This has been ongoing. David was an incredibly successful, powerful, and intelligent man prior to his addition to cocaine and the subsequent loss of his job and home. He could get away with most things. He was accused and found innocent of assaulting a woman at [redacted] and went on to become a lawyer. He was suspended from practicing law for inappropriate behavior with a client, but still went on to be a successful ticket broker. He assaulted women, played games with them, treated them like animals and got away with it because he had money and with money comes power and control. However, with me he didn’t have money, a job, nor a permanent home. He held very few assets. He had to lean on me for everything. I became his greatest challenge and he took it all. I [redacted], wasn’t allowed to say no to him in the bedroom, and gave him every ounce of love and affection, empathy and care - so much that I lost it for myself. He wanted for nothing and in return, [redacted].
I am proud of the healing I’ve done over the last 3.5 years, but I’ve dreaded this day. I will never be the same. Sometimes, I reminisce about the person I used to be prior to the abuse he put me through. I am curious about the woman I’d be today should I have simply ignored him and kept him out of my life. I had started traveling, bought my first hime, held a wonderful job at a thriving corporation, and was in school [redacted]. Devastatingly, that’s not life played out. Instead, I was put through constant psychological, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse while running my finances dry to help take care of a man who claimed to love me - all while still finishing my degree and switching career-paths. No one can say my determination is nonexistent. I was just as resolved to make my life the best I could as I was to stay with someone who made me feel like the worst human being to walk the earth. [redacted].
I ask that you do not grant David’s parole. I can assure you the only concern of his during his time in prison has been getting out and repairing his image. I am sure he has come up with the most perfect alibi and story for why he’s disappeared, pinning me as the reason - his latest crazy ex-girlfriend. [redacted]. I know he has made himself look like the exemplary inmate. I know he has checked all the boxes and has probably even woo’d someone into giving him empathy. [redacted]. I can guarantee that he will be lying to you at the parole hearing and I’m certain that one or more of you will want to believe him.
David will reoffend. It’s inevitable. What he did to me was heinous for many reasons, but the top being that it was fun for him. He had options. He could have truly broken up with me instead of threatening it every argument. He could have moved out at any time and lived with his father, a friend [redacted], or used the money he stole from me to get his own place. Instead, he chose to stay and drain everything about who I was in order to utilize my entire life for his personal and financial gain. That’s malicious. I wasn’t the first person he attempted to destroy and I am saddened to say that I won’t be the last. [redacted].
It’s incredibly hard for me to think about what he could do to me if and when he’s released. Those worries drag me into a black hole of panic, one I’ve finally been able to set aside after a long time spent in fear. I know how angry he was at my request he wear an electronic monitor while furloughed from prison, [redacted]. [redacted]. I am in the process of selling my home because [redacted]. I’ve filed yearly protection orders and will continue to do so, indefinitely. [redacted]. If you choose to parole him, I ask that you place harsh restrictions on him, including an electronic monitor for the duration of his sentence. I have a protection order, but what else are you going to do to help me stay safe? What are you going to do to protect me so that you take that burden off my loved ones? [redacted]. What’s going to happen if the next woman can’t call the cops like I did? Will she even be around to fight for herself through the next court process? [redacted]. I care about the safety and security of any future woman that crosses David’s path. Because of this, and because I hope you do, too, I ask that you do not grant David parole and have him serve the remainder of his sentence in prison.
Respectfully,
Rhegan