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married.
    Whatever the reason, Karen felt something snap inside her, went into the bathroom, and impulsively stuffed her mouth full of her mother’s pills.
    “I swallowed them and went in the bedroom and lay down, waited to die, and after some time, they missed me. They came in and I was already out, [so they] called the ambulance and took me, pumped my stomach, and kept me there for two or three days.”
    Gene said Karen did not stay overnight in the hospital. Rather, he said, he followed the doctor’s advice and walked her around her family’s apartment on base for hours, until the drugs worked their way out of her system.
    “She got mad because, if I recollect properly, I spent too much time talking to her father,” Gene recalled. “She could not stand having to share her attention with anyone.”
    Karen later contended this was the only time she tried to kill herself, but Gene claimed Karen’s parents told him this was her second suicide attempt—the first being while he was back in the United States on emergency leave, shortly before this incident, when Karen was scared he would not return.
    Over the years and during interviews for this book, the perception of this and other events voiced by Wayne’s mother and other Ford family members varied widely—and often conflicted dramatically as accusations of abuse, behavioral problems, and moral and criminal wrongdoing were exchanged in the recounting of events deemed relevant in evaluating Wayne’s crimes.
     
     
    When Karen and Gene were wed, she was two months pregnant with Rodney, although she didn’t know it at the time. The ceremony took place in her grandmother’s town, Höchstadt, presided over by the mayor. Karen wore a midcalf dress with a black-and-white floral print.
    According to Karen, Gene’s sexual behavior toward her began to change on their wedding night.
    “I don’t remember the details,” she said later, only that Gene “was just going to do whatever he felt like doing, regardless of whether I wanted it, too.”
    In this case, she said, whatever he wanted to do wasn’t mutually acceptable, let alone enjoyable.
    “All I know is that I was very upset, and I locked myself in the bathroom, and I went to sleep on the floor that night,” she said.
    Gene said none of this ever happened. “We’d been having sex all along and our wedding night was no different.”
    Karen said the two of them made up afterward, but it wasn’t long before she felt that Gene just wanted her around for sex.
    “I realized that now I had married somebody very similar to my mother. He was totally dominating . . . I was his little girl.... I realized that I had jumped out of a fire into a bigger one.”
     
     
    When they were first married, Karen would want to go out dancing, and according to Gene, this caused some barroom incidents because she flirted with other men. One night in particular, he said, he told her he needed to go back to the barracks.
    According to Gene, Karen said, “You can go, big boy, but I’m staying.”
    So he picked her up, tossed her over his shoulder, and dumped her in the car. When a soldier on the street questioned his actions, Gene said he “punched him once and down he went.”
    Gene said Karen got physical with him on two occasions in those early months. One night, he said, Karen slapped him during an argument, drawing blood from his nose and mouth. Gene said he threw her on the bed with enough force that she rolled off the other side.
    The next time she tried something like that, he wanted to make sure she understood it wouldn’t happen again without consequences. She hurled something at him while he was reading, smacking him in the side of the head, so he took her by the shoulders and told her, “Don’t ever do that again or I’ll take care of it. You’ll put yourself in the place of a man,” he said, meaning that he would hit her back.
     
     
    Karen said she acted like “a little puppy” and a “good German hausfrau”