(6 of 9)
There had been earlier telephone contact with Ellen and a second face-to-face, but Faye won't say when or where. She recognizes no rules but her own. Who knows when the FBI might be eavesdropping? They were parked right outside the doughnut shop for years, she says, taking notes every time she blinked.
There is one story Yager will tell you every last detail of, though, and it is the one that explains why this doctor's wife, who used to spend her Southern days with lady friends at teatime socials, is out here risking lawsuits and maybe even jail time.
It's her own story.
Her daddy had a feeling about Roger Jones, but Billie Faye had a streak way back then too, as a 17-year-old hillbilly girl in West Virginia. She just had to marry this boy, and they had a daughter before long, and everything was fine until the day Faye walked in and saw Michelle's little hand wrapped around her husband's penis.
Nobody believed Yager, of course, and her husband fueled doubts by accusing her of being delusional, a real sicko. Somebody please help her!
At her husband's urging, she was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit, dosed with Thorazine and given shock therapy. When she got out of the straitjacket, she dumped Jones and married a fellow patient with a drinking and gambling problem. She apparently hadn't yet developed her keen knack for character judgment. Faye lost custody of Michelle in court because she was certifiable now, tagged with crazy papers for life. But you don't put a foot to Billie Faye's neck without her biting your leg, so she grabbed Michelle and ran. The hell with the courts. She ran for Michelle and for herself and for women wronged, and only when Michelle developed gonorrhea did she come out of hiding, certain the courts would believe her now about what a pervert Roger Jones was and what fools they all had been. But they didn't. And Michelle was lost to her again.
Do you want more? Do you want the whole skinny on the depth of Faye Yager's rage? The second husband was a nut job too. A monster. He held a gun to her neck, threatened her, played with her, and when she finally told him to go to hell, he pulled the trigger and shot himself in the head.
Faye, who has segues like nobody else, married her dead husband's doctor. Howard Yager drove a Rolls-Royce and lived in a big house, and he and Faye have four children and live as normal a life as can be expected when sexually abused fugitive children may show up at the breakfast table and members of the Montana militia may call saying they know an attorney who can spring one of Faye's wronged "Sallys" from lockup.
"I told Howard he wasn't marrying no Donna Reed," says Yager.
She likes saying that as much as she likes saying she's been to hell and back, but she's got the burns to prove it. And there is one more squiggle to her story that explains everything.
That first husband, Roger Jones, became a hunted man, suspected of molesting countless children. In 1990 he went on trial in Florida for abusing a 13-year-old girl. Faye was there, wearing a black veil, to watch with icy glances sharp enough to castrate the bastard. And Jones, who earlier had become the first person ever to make the FBI's ten-most-wanted list for sex crimes involving children, was convicted of lewd and lascivious acts with a child, and will die in jail.