I Dated a Criminal — The Story of a Nice Beverly Hills Girl and a Bad Boy

In the beginning of my freshman year of college, I met a guy that was everything I wanted when I still liked bad boys. He was tall, blonde and handsome with flirtatious, blue eyes. He was quick-witted with a dry sense of humor. His left eye twitched when he lied. I was nineteen, and he said he was twenty-one. He later told me he was twenty-three, but he thought I wouldn’t date him if I knew. He was right. I learned about the second lie when a school friend told me she saw my boyfriend playing tennis with a beautiful blonde in a park in San Francisco. He had told me he was spending the weekend with family friends.

Her name was Barbara, and they had come out to Northern California from Barrington, Illinois; she to work for an advertising firm in San Francisco, and he to enroll in Foothill College in Los Altos Hills and mess with my life. I bought his lie about Barbara just being a friend until we both were pregnant at the same time. She showed up at my apartment one night to share the news. She said I could have him, and he said so, too. So I went home to Beverly Hills that summer to terminate my pregnancy, while she flew to Japan to take care of hers. Abortion was illegal in the U.S. in 1967.

At the end of my Sophomore year, we had our plans in place to go to U.C. Berkeley together in the fall. My father had other plans for me which didn’t include staying in Northern California close to John. He would pay my tuition, room and board, as long as I went to college in Southern California, a shorter distance to my home in Beverly Hills. I transferred that fall, and other than one weekend ski trip to Tahoe and one visit to accompany me to a Valentine’s dance, we went our separate ways.

I would hear from John from time to time through the years when he’d come to L.A. for a business trip; although, I never really understood what type of business. Some time during 1978, I received a call that he was flying into town and an invitation to dinner. He told me he was writing children’s books but didn’t go into detail. When it was time to pay the check, he put down his credit card. When I noticed the card was not his, he told me it was the pseudonym under which he was writing. When he went to the men’s room, I took a look in his wallet and found that he carried a driver’s license with this name, too. When we got back to my apartment after dinner, he asked if he could stay. I told him no. We argued a bit about it, and then he left.

A few weeks later, I received a call. John told me that he had sent me some clothes that were supposed to have arrived during the time he was in L.A. He told me he couldn’t tell me too much or it would get me in trouble but something to the effect that he had sent these clothes to my apartment, and he wanted me to call him when I received them. I had no idea what he was talking about, but of course I suspected it wasn’t good.

Another week passed before there was a knock on my door. The man standing outside was an Agent with the DEA. He asked me if I knew someone by the name of Dennis while showing me John’s photo. He produced handwriting samples and asked me which one I recognized as John’s. Did he know I hadn’t been involved with John since college? Did he know I never tried cocaine? Did he know my father was a Beverly Hills attorney? Yes, he knew every single detail of my life that he wanted to know. He told me the clothes that John had referred to had been confiscated. He told me that I would be testifying against John in the Federal Court. When I told him I was afraid and didn’t want to testify, he told me I could be subpoenaed. We had several more visits together.

Most of you readers already know, because surely not many of you would have been quite as naive as I was, John was involved with cocaine smuggling. The other defendants were already incarcerated and had pointed their fingers at John, who stood trial, and was convicted. He was sent to Terminal Island, a low-security United States Federal prison for male inmates in San Pedro, California. Still one to make bad decisions, I visited him and brought him his favorite sandwich from Nate N’ Al Delicatessen in Beverly Hills. We took photos together, and he had the nerve to ask me to marry him so that he would be granted conjugal visits. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, whose murder case inspired the best-selling book “Fatal Vision,” was a prison mate; John told me he found me attractive.

They moved him to another prison in the mountains northeast of Santa Barbara, The Federal Correctional Institution, Lompoc. (Lompoc is where all the politicians went after the big Watergate scandal. Though they’ve recently gotten rid of their tennis courts, they still enjoy volleyball nets and eucalyptus groves.) He told me he was lonely and wanted some company. I felt sorry for him. The day before my visit, he called and asked me to do him a favor and pick up a “goody bag” from a friend of his. I was smart enough to call the friend before I made the drive and ask him about the contents of the bag. His friend warned me not to get involved. I drove 150 miles to visit John this time, and he was not pleased when all he saw me carrying was his favorite turkey sandwich. That was my last visit.