Head Shot by Burl Barer Page B

later. I was pregnant, we had to go on welfare, and that welfare thing totally crushed him. It seemed to just drain all the confidence out of him. He started drinking more and more,” recalled Anne. “I kept telling him that if he kept drinking and acting like that, he was gonna go to jail. He didn’t listen to me, of course. He just kept pouring Rainier Beers down his throat one right after the other.”
    It wasn’t until after their six-month anniversary that Anne Webb glimpsed the first shadows of her husband’s dark side. She rationalized them away as mere manifestations of his stress and physical discomfort. “By the time I recognized the dark side for what it was, it was a total eclipse,” she said years later. “His dark side was so dark that even I couldn’t miss it. I’ll never forget it. I’d never seen anything like it. It started for me when we were enjoying a pleasant drive. We were just chatting away and I made a negative comment—not an insult or verbal abuse or anything like that—I was just sort of venting about stuff. All of a sudden, he began crying uncontrollably—I mean hysterical sobbing and weeping and wailing like he had just seen everyone he ever loved murdered or something. He went out of his mind. Scared the you-know-what out of me. That’s when I thought to myself, ‘What have I got myself into?’ The next event was worse, and they all kept getting worse; he lost his temper when we were in the kitchen. He tipped over the table, then went all over the room smashing holes in the wall with his fists. I was terrified. He suddenly walked out of the room and didn’t come back. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Everything was dead quiet. I finally found him. He was all curled up in the fetal position inside the cupboard underneath the bathroom sink! About three or four more times, I saw him do that—curl up in a ball and hide in the cupboard. Well, I knew then that I had married a first-class wacko. It was pretty obvious that I had to walk on eggshells around this guy.”
    Keeping peace with her volatile spouse kept Anne on her toes; maintaining a positive relationship with her Bible-thumping in-laws required remarkable flexibility.
    â€œOur in-laws could always find a way to make themselves right and everyone else wrong by bending some biblical reference to fit their personal agenda,” said Marty Webb. “A good example would be the time Andrew strangled his wife to death.”
    â€œAlmost to death,” clarified Anne, “but close enough. Picture this: Andrew is on top of me on the bed, and he’s wearing his nine-millimeter in a holster around his waist... . That’s where he threw me, we’re both clothed, and he’s wearing a gun. His hands are around my throat, and he’s strangling me as hard as he can. I can’t breathe. My own husband is murdering me, and I have no idea why—this happens without warning. What could be worse? My life flashes before my bugged-out eyes, and just when I think I’m about dead, he suddenly stops strangling me and leaves the room.”
    Without taking a breather, Anne Webb leaped from the bed, ran down the stairs, out the door, and to the neighbors’ house. She banged on the door until a young boy opened it. “I ran right past the kid into the house and up the stairs—I didn’t even really know these people—and I was screaming, ‘Lock the doors! Lock the windows! Don’t let him kill me!’ I found a closet, dove into it, and piled a stack of blankets on top of me.”
    Terrified and traumatized, she begged for divine intervention. “I bet I prayed with more intensity and sincerity in that dark closet than my father-in-law ever did in his entire life.” Twenty minutes later, she decided Andrew Webb wasn’t coming to strangle her in the neighbors’ hall closet. Crawling out from under the