Her flings with men lasted only six months, and she vowed to be a better mother to Libby. Her lifestyle changed dramatically from her days dancing in a lesbian bar and picking up men. Wanting a wholesome activity she could share with Libby, Darla joined Parents Without Partners in the late 1970s. She lived in West Seattle, and she attended group activities designed to help single mothers and fathers cope with parenthood and still maintain some kind of social life. Most of the group members lived in the south part of King County.

“We met in people’s homes for discussions, had potluck dinners, or went to dances at the Kent Commons,” Darla recalled. “Libby and I went on a lot of hikes and campouts with PWP. I was still drinking then, but we made a lot of friends and it was healthy for both of us to be exercising in the outdoors and up on the mountain trails. They were a good bunch of people.

“That’s where I met him—at Parents Without Partners.”

Darla had noticed the twice-divorced single father at other PWP functions and found him attractive, but he was living with another woman in the group. He had his son, seven-year-old Chad, on weekends and brought the boy to most of the picnics and hikes. He was obviously very proud of the little boy, who lived with his mother, Dana, during the week. He and Darla often signed up for the same activities where children were welcome so they could include Chad and twelve-year-old Libby.

One weekend, the group was hiking on trails in the Snoqualmie Pass foothills near Issaquah, and Darla found herself studying him. She thought he was quite good-looking, and muscular. He was about thirty, younger than she was by five years. “We found ourselves alone on the trail and we started talking. I found him very personable, and he was funny in a quiet way because he was pretty reserved. We both realized that we sort of hit it off, but he was still living with someone else so it wasn’t going to go anywhere.”

One evening that changed. “I started flirting with him, and he responded to me,” Darla remembered. “I came right out and let him know that I was interested in him. It wasn’t long before he broke up with the other gal. He moved out of her house, and moved right in with me. Just like that. That was in May 1981.”

He paid his share of the household expenses, and although he didn’t help her clean house, he did do yard work. Darla found him to be a very gentle man, although he wasn’t particularly sentimental. “I can’t remember that he ever brought me gifts, but I think he bought me a couple of cards.”

They didn’t have a lot in common. He never read books, and Darla was a reader, especially fascinated by true-crime books. She had read True Detective magazine from the time she was in junior high school. As far as she knew, he didn’t read them. He wasn’t interested in movies, but they watched television together in the evenings. Outside of PWP, he had very few friends, although he was close to one of his brothers. He often took Darla to visit his parents who lived a few blocks from Pac HiWay.

Although he had few interests, Darla found him to be an exceptional sexual partner. “I’d say his hobby was sex,” she recalled. “He wanted to make love at least three times a day.”

She didn’t object to that, although she was a bit embarrassed at first by his desire to have sex out of doors, in his car, or in places where they could easily be discovered. At the time, he was driving a burgundy truck with a white canopy, and he always kept a blanket in the cab in case they came upon an interesting trysting spot.

“I got so it didn’t bother me to have sex outside,” Darla said with a laugh. “One time we were camping near the Yakima River and we were making out on the bank and a canoe full of people came paddling by and saw us. They laughed and waved at us, and we waved back. By then, I felt so comfortable and so uninhibited with him that it didn’t faze me.”

Darla sometimes took his lunch to him where he worked. They often slipped into one of the huge semi trucks parked there to have sex in the cab’s sleeping area behind the driver’s seat. Nobody ever caught them.

He kept pushing the parameters of danger. He liked the Southcenter Mall area. Darla didn’t mind having sex in his truck in the Levitz Furniture Store parking lot, but she was very nervous when he told her he’d found a new spot. “There was this place where men were loading trucks at Southcenter,” she remembered. “There was a cement barrier, some kind of fence about ten feet long and fairly close to the ground. He insisted that we have sex on the grass right on the other side of that fence and I could hear the men working only a few feet away. They could have looked over and seen us, but he wasn’t worried about that.”

He was a passionate outdoorsman and he loved to camp and fish, although Darla couldn’t recall that he ever brought home any fish. Between them, they had collected all kinds of camping gear—tents, cooking grills, sleeping bags, and anything else they needed. Often, they camped for a week in the wilderness. Wearing nothing but a thin towel because he liked her naked, Darla cooked their meals on the outside stove.

Besides fishing, he liked to dig for old bottles alongside deserted railroad tracks. He drank very little and didn’t smoke. He seemed to her to be a perfect mate. “He was neat and clean and considerate. He was very, very muscular—very strong.”

They were completely open with each other in their discussions about sex, admitting fantasies they had. Both of them were experienced with any number of partners, although, as far as Darla knew, he was faithful to her while they lived together.

Once, when they were camping without their children in the Cle Elum wilderness in the Wenatchee National Forest, they agreed to try some bondage sex. Darla didn’t object to being tied to a tree or even to being “staked out” on the ground with her wrists and ankles bound, “as long as it was safe.”

He was excited about that, and even embroidered upon the basic concept by placing grapes and other fruit inside her vagina while she was helpless. They both found the innovative intercourse exciting, and he kept his promise not to hurt her. Theirs was certainly not an average relationship, but they were adults and it was nobody else’s business.

There were, however, aspects of this man that troubled Darla. He never told her he loved her in so many words. She would have liked that, but if she had to ask him to say it, it wouldn’t mean anything. More troubling for her, he wanted to go back to court and gain full-time custody of his son, Chad. “Chad was a good kid,” Darla said, “but he was hyperactive, and I didn’t think I could take having him around all the time.”

As her lover became more enthusiastic about getting custody of his son, Darla came to a decision. “I remember when I told him that I had to break up with him. It was close to Christmas in 1981. We were in our bedroom and I was sitting on the floor while he sat on the end of the bed. I told him that I could not emotionally handle raising Chad full time. I had four of my own children who weren’t with me, and I just couldn’t take on Chad.”

His head lifted and he stared at her, surprised. “And you never tell me you love me,” she added.

His eyes filled with tears. “But I do love you,” he said.

“I told him it was just too late to tell me at that point. He felt bad, I know, but he wasn’t angry. He moved out of my house and we broke up, but we were still friends.”

After he left, Darla’s daughter Libby told her that there was something about him that gave her “the willies.” She denied that he had ever molested her or said anything improper, but he had once come to her room to talk with her, and she just felt as if something was wrong. Darla was baffled; she had never known him to be anything but considerate and easy to get along with. She knew that Libby would have told her if he had made any untoward moves on her.