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YOUR HONOR, I’M NO MATCH FOR HIM

Their money was gone, their dignity in shreds, their children up for grabs. Then C.C. and Jim Parker met for the final showdown.
By Sally Giddens |

THIS TIME JIM AND C.C. PARKER WOULD walk into Judge Carolyn Wright’s courtroom alone. During the last five years, they had squared off many times with the help of high-paid, high-powered divorce attorneys. Some of the best in town worked on the Parker case-Bill Koons, Mike McCurley, Ken Raggio, Charles H. Robertson. A host of others had been consulted. But now neither Jim nor C.C. can afford the $250-plus an hour those attorneys command-not after all they’ve been through. And this is the most important hearing of their lives, for it will finally decide the fate of their six children.

Jim, as the petitioner, will begin. He is dressed conservatively in a gray suit. Just a little tight, it makes his round middle beg to return to his more familiar blue jeans, where that unruly paunch would be cinched into submission with a cowboy belt. Jim has been practicing up on his lawyering. He stands each time he addresses the judge as “your honor,” slipping up only occasionally, by calling her “sir” instead of “ma’am.” He appears to have the advantage with his businesslike demeanor and his respectable attempts at lawyerspeak. Obviously well organized, he keeps straightening his stacks of files in front of him, making sure all is in order. And it is.

C.C. sits erect in her chair, her one stack of loose papers balanced precariously in her lap. She is separated physically from her husband of sixteen years by the children’s court-appointed attorney. Aglaia Mauzy, another custody top gun. The three of them-Jim. C.C. and the ad litum-face the judge from the long oak tables in front of the witness stand.

C.C., a petite blonde with big blue eyes, looks much younger than her thirty-nine years. Though she once kept in shape playing polo for Willow Bend, lately she has been exercising other people’s horses for a few dollars each, making just enough to pay for the gas she uses to drive out to area ranches. When C.C. addresses the judge, she talks to her as she might talk to any new acquaintance-tenuous, respectful, but friendly. C.C. asks her questions and follows each one by glancing up to Carolyn Wright for guidance. Alert and skittish like the horses she rides, C.C. watches Jim’s every move; it’s obvious she doesn’t trust him one bit. And if you believe C.C.’s story-as at least one jury did- that’s easy to understand.



NOT ALL THAT LONG AGO, JIM AND C.C. PARKER WERE man and wife. Jim, forty-one, a graduate of Texas A&M, supported his growing family by working as a postal inspector. C.C., a high school graduate who dropped out of college to get married, stayed home to raise the children. The Parkers led a somewhat old-fashioned, middle-class existence. Jim was the head of the household: C.C, his helpmate. But they longed for more, so Jim went into real estate, first as a real estate broker and then, in 1977. as a partner with a custom homebuilder in Arlington. Next he joined Omega Development Company, a strip retail builder. And in 1982, Jim hooked up with Jack Atkinson, the man who would prove to be his ticket to the big time. Atkinson was in like Flynn with Don Dixon of Vernon Savings and Loan, so most of the deals that Parker and Atkinson did together were financed by Vernon, Parker says.

According to Parker’s résumé, from 1982 until 1985 Parker and Atkinson Real Estate Company Inc. had sales in excess of $100 million. In one year during the last real estate boom, Atkinson Land Company Inc., where Jim served as executive vice president, formed joint venture investments in excess of $200 million in land, shopping centers, hotels, apartments, and residential property. People in the industry say Parker’s and Atkinson’s specialty was land flipping-they would buy a piece of property and get the financing (primarily from Vernon) based on the buyer waiting in the wings. Jim Parker says that in 1983 and 1984. he and Jack Atkinson made Vernon Savings $20 million on land-flip deals.

Parker was in one of the higher circles of men who did business with the infamous Dixon, who has been charged with civil racketeering for some of his business practices. (Parker is one of several hundred people who have been questioned by the FBI regarding dealings with failed S&Ls in the region.) The Parkers, like many others in that inner ring, grew wealthy with the phenomenal growth of Vernon. Just a few years before, Jim had worked for mediocre wages as a postal inspector; after his alliance with Atkinson and Vernon, he was bringing in as much as $400,000 a year.

But as the Parkers climbed from a middle-class lifestyle in Arlington, where C.C. clipped coupons to make ends meet, to the world of Don Dix-on and his lush California party house, where C.C. and Jim were invited to stay on occasion, their marriage began to disintegrate.



OUR MARRIAGE WAS CRUMBLING IN ARLINGTON,” C.C. says, adding that part of the trouble was that Jim’s lifestyle had changed in Dallas, while hers at home with the children had stayed the same. C.C. didn’t work outside the home, but spent her time raising a brood of children that in 1982 ranged in age from two to twelve. She lived in a world of diapers and car pools, soccer and music lessons, while Jim lived in the high-intensity, boom-time world of real estate.

“I was pinching pennies and trying to make things work,” C.C. says, “and then I would find his American Express receipts from Dallas restaurants-$200 and $300 bar bills on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve when he said he was going to Dallas to work. He didn’t come home and say, ’We went to this bar.’ I found that out on my own. I thought that was underhanded.”

C.C. says that she had been making sacrifices for Jim for years. He always had a nice car, professionally starched shirts, expensive suits-and she never questioned the extra expenditures because “he needed these things for business. I went along with that, but he abused it and later I realized it,” C.C. says. “Ours was not an Eighties marriage. There was no equality. It was traditional where the wife was somewhat subservient. She cooked and cleaned and kept the children. He provided. He worked.”

But as Jim spent more and more time away from home, in Dallas “doing business,” C.C. became more and more suspicious. So she was somewhat relieved when in April of 1983 the family moved to North Dallas. There she could be closer to Jim’s business and social life. The home they bought on Woodstream, with financing arranged by Vernon Savings, sported a red Spanish tile roof-a trademark of Don Dixon’s Dondi Development. Dixon himself lived just down the road at the end of the cul-de-sac. It was the nicest place C.C. Parker had ever lived in, with a bedroom for each of the children and a big swimming pool in the back yard.

Though the Parkers didn’t socialize with the Dixons (Jim, sometimes called “the Captain,” was several levels below Dix-on’s higher-ranking generals), C.C. was close enough to see a new way of living-one that began at the top with Dixon and filtered down to the underlings. Once she had settled in Dallas, she learned the ways of real estate high rollers.

“All of the guys had girlfriends,” she says. “It was pretty blatant, and it was shocking to me, but at the same time I assumed it. That was my world: the guys had girlfriends, married or not. But Jim always told me he didn’t womanize, and I believed him.” Jim often described his friends and their womanizing behavior, C.C. says, always following the story with “but I never did.”

“They were your older drinking crowd, serious drinkers. They went to places like Les Saisons. And Jim said if they wanted girls, they just got them. They didn’t go out and pick them up.” C.C. says.

Sometimes Jim included C.C. for drinks or dinner with his friends and their girlfriends. It only took a few months in Dallas for her to be initiated into the ways of the fast-running crowd. That was when C.C.’s life began to change too, with the help of Jim’s new earning power. A lifetime horse lover, C.C. got involved with polo at Willow Bend, an expensive proposition with a $2,000 initiation fee, annual dues of $780, and $1,700 a year in greens fees. Then there were the horses, which can cost between $8,000 and $35,000, plus as much as $200 a month to board them. The better C.C. got, the more time she spent playing polo. She made new friends, and, she says, she started to see that other marriages were different from hers. Other women were more independent, and their ways started to rub off on C.C.

C.C. says she loved her newfound hobby and her more independent lifestyle. For the first time in a long time, she was having fun. But she says that Jim, used to ruling the roost, didn’t like the new C.C. who questioned his judgment and his orders. C.C.’s life was changing too quickly. Her older children were growing up fast and didn’t need her as much as they once had. She was having trouble adjusting and started to see a psychiatrist regularly. Her relationship with Jim got worse in Dallas, not better as she had expected. And she says that her arguments with Jim got rough and physical. As a result, in December of 1983. C.C. filed for divorce. Jim had left the house for a week, but when he came back on Christmas Eve. she says, they reconciled and she changed her mind about splitting up her family.

Three months later, in March of 1984, Jim filed for divorce.



HAD HAD ENOUGH.” JIM PARKER SAYS. “A COUPLE OF times she wanted to get a divorce, and a couple of times I wanted to get a divorce. But not too long ago we didn’t make $30,000 a year, and if you can’t live on $300,000 a year and be happy with me. then there’s not much more I can do for you.”

Jim says C.C. was irrational and impossible to live with, that she was prone to depression. According to Jim, he came home once to find his wife in the garage, where she had just smashed some things her mother had made for her and cut up a peacock-pattern afghan her mother had made for him.

“She had cut the heads of her father and mother out of the family pictures. She explained that she had been talking to her psychiatrist. Her parents were dead in her mind, and she had to kill them,” Jim says. Another time, Jim says, C.C. became so distraught she tried to slit her wrists with a knife in full view of the children.

Though Jim was making a lot more money than he ever had, his job was demanding more of his time. Eventually, Jim says, he saw the light with Dixon, felt that “something was wrong,” and parted ways with Atkinson. But in March of 1984, as the height of the Dallas real estate boom was approaching, Jim couldn’t deal with the time demands of C.C.’s “mental hassles,” which he says had been going on for a long time. Jim says that in 1980 a psychiatrist had recommended “adult confinement” for C.C. By 1984, Jim says, C.C. was seeing a psychiatrist three times a week on an outpatient basis.

“I tried to make things work,” Jim says. “I have a belief. I never knew Lyndon Johnson, but I am also a consensus kind of person. I believe I can make almost anything work if I can sit down with somebody and understand what it is they want and why they want it. Unfortunately, that’s what I tried with her. But it was kind of like the old thing about ’Hey boy, jump. No, you didn’t get high enough, try that again.’”



TIRED OF TRYING TO JUMP HIGHER, JIM AGAIN LEFT C.C. This time, he went straight to Bill Koons, a divorce attorney with the hot-shot firm of Koons, Rasor, Fuller & McCurley. Jim finally settled on Mike McCurley to represent him. Meanwhile, C.C. went to Ken Raggio of Raggio & Raggio Inc., an equally formidable gladiator in the divorce arena. Well armed, the two prepared to do battle. At the time, the Parkers had a substantial estate, valued at between $600,000 and $1 million. But the biggest stakes were the children-Jim, the oldest, was fourteen then; Liz, twelve; John, eleven; Julie, nine; Jaimie, seven; and Jack, the baby, was four.

McCurley and Raggio began to build their cases, and they found plenty of smoke, if not fire, on both sides. Jim blames the attorneys for perpetuating the anger and lack of communication between him and C.C-which was bad enough as it was. Venom in his voice, he describes the following scenario: “The attorneys tell you you can’t talk to each other. So you call your attorney and complain to him. He calls her attorney and they talk for a while-at $250 an hour. Then her attorney calls her to get a response and the whole thing comes back the other direction.”

But despite the smoke and heat, and what Jim considers some serious fanning of flames by the attorneys, the big Parker battle between McCurley and Raggio never took place. On August 27. Jim convinced C.C. to settle. He took her to her attorney’s office to pick up a Motion to Withdraw. Ken Raggio obliged, though he was curious about the timing of it all.

“Depositions were scheduled for that week. Things were fixin’ to get it on,” Raggio says.

Then, two days later, on August 29. Jim, C.C., and their four-year-old. Jack, drove together to the Old Red Courthouse, stopping on the way downtown to pick up Jim’s lawyer, Mike McCurley. The couple had been separated since February, according to Jim Parker’s testimony in court that August day. In reality, Jim had already moved back into the Parkers’ large North Dallas house that Monday. On that morning of August 29, 1984, just hours before their Decree of Divorce was entered into record, C.C. and Jim had awakened together in the same house. After all the sparks between them, after all of the torrid arguments in their marriage, the tone of their divorce turned suddenly friendly.

It was a strange transformation. And stranger still, after the divorce, C.C., Jim, and their youngest son went back to their home in North Dallas-together– and that night C.C. made dinner like any other housewife for her entire family, Jim included. This was not the end of Jim and C.C. Parker, but instead the beginning of their divorce nightmare.



AS WITH MOST DIVORCED COUPLES. C.C. AND JIM PARKER each recount the sordid events of their marriage and divorce much, much differently. Each can produce solid evidence to disprove some of the other’s claims (C.C. showed off a perfect, unpatched peacock-pattern afghan in court). But in talking to them and to their attorneys, friends, and associates, a consistently tragic story begins to emerge.

C.C. says that the “agreement” with Jim was to live in the house together as man and wife. She would receive $3,000 a month, “a guaranteed allowance,” she now calls it. That would be enough for household expenses, clothes for herself and the children, and her polo. This was to be a “modem” arrangement. C.C. says, a sort of open marriage. What was most important was that she would get to raise her kids.

That may or may not have been the spirit of the agreement. The letter of the law. though, was certain. By signing on the dotted line, C.C. gave up her custody rights to the children and to the community property.

Now her actions seem like naivete beyond belief-even to C.C-but she says that back in 1984 she was still vulnerable to Jim’s ruling hand. She explains that she agreed to this arrangement to prove to Jim’s mother. Louise Parker, that she wasn’t “after Jim’s money.” Later. C.C. says, after she had gained some credibility with her mother-in-law, she and Jim planned to remarry.

Jim concedes only a part of C.C.’s version of the story. He says C.C. didn’t want the children, just her $3,000 a month. He says she knew they would no longer be “man and wife.” And there would be no remarriage.

In any event, two days after the divorce, on Friday August 31, C.C. returned home after polo practice and found the locks being changed at what she still believed was her own house. A maid she had never seen before was in her kitchen, and Jim was sitting at the table eating with two of the children. She says he told her she could pack her bags and go quietly or he would throw her out. Stunned and without the energy to fight, C.C. packed her bags and left.



FOR THE NEXT MONTH. C.C. SAYS SHE was in shock. Not only had she been taken to the cleaners financially, but she had lost her children-the biggest part of her life. Jim and his mother bore the brunt of her anger. Jim tells of several ugly scenes where C.C. returned to the house screaming to be let in and verbally abusing his mother, who was helping him take care of the children. Once it took the police to make her leave. And when Jim began to bring his new girlfriend to the house on Woodstream, C.C.’s anger turned to rage.

Jim says that he was “looking for a companion” and had begun to see Bonnie W. Wiley, a woman he had known for some time. Wiley worked in residential lending at Vernon Savings. C.C.’s former attorney, Ken Raggio, says that he saw Jim Parker and a young woman on Friday, September 21-not quite a month after the divorce-on a flight to Denver. Raggio recalls Parker’s saying then that C.C. was already “breaking the agreement.” But whether C.C. had “agreed” to quietly give Jim the children or not, by September she had decided to fight for them with all she had.

That’s when she put her trust in Charles Robertson of Robertson and Merrill.

“I told her that what she was asking me to do was climb Mount Everest in tennis shoes,” Robertson says. If C.C. had known the law, she could have filed for a motion for a new trial within thirty days of the divorce, Robertson says, but since she didn’t, he had to find a new alternative. Proving that a smart lawyer can accomplish the near-impossible, Robertson devised an elaborate plan to fight for a Bill of Review-a legal tactic that is usually unsuccessful-which would get C.C. a jury trial.

Robertson got an SMU law student who had worked for him to search for precedent by which a Bill of Review could be granted. The woman finally found a case holding that if one person in a family law case has lied or misrepresented material facts that the other party has relied upon, then the other party is excused from having been negligent in the first trial. The judge was persuaded to grant the new trial.

Robertson felt that if he could only get C.C. in front of a jury, he could win. ’’C.C.’s got balls,” he says. “She’s tough and tenacious.” But in front of a jury, the tiny, beautiful C.C. would immediately be seen as the gentle, wronged underdog, Robertson says.

So the Parkers went back to court. But this time Jim used his corporate attorney. Randy Elliott, a move he now admits was a mistake. “By this time.” Jim says. “I knew that as soon as Vernon closed I would be bankrupt.” Jim couldn’t afford McCurley anymore, and Elliott didn’t have the family law experience of Charles Robertson.

By the time Robertson got C.C. her day in court, Jim had had custody of the children for more than two years. (One delay came in March of 1985, when Jim let C.C. move back into the house with him and the children. “I was a fool.” Jim says. “That didn’t work.” C.C. moved out in early August.)

On October 6, 1986, Robertson and C.C. walked into court loaded for bear. To their advantage, the paper trail in this divorce was beginning to appear odd. Ken Raggio’s Motion to Withdraw as C.C.’s attorney in the original divorce trial was written with an air of protest and disapproval. Raggio wrote that while his firm “is always encouraging its clients to work out their differences out of court and to settle cases, Raggio & Raggio Inc. feels that it cannot, in good conscience, be a party to the agreement that apparently [C.C] worked out with her husband.”

The wording of the motion, Raggio says, was meant to be a red flag to the judge: something was very wrong here. But the judge who accepted the Motion to Withdraw was not a regular, someone familiar with Raggio, but a visiting judge. The red flag went unnoticed. The Motion to Withdraw made that first divorce look fishy. Raggio became Robertson’s star witness. And Robertson was right. C.C. was extremely convincing as a witness. When it was all over, the jury believed her story in full and granted her a Bill of Review.

In Texas, a Bill of Review is a two-part trial. During the first part of that trial, temporary orders were issued for the oldest daughter, Liz, to remain with her father. C.C. would get the rest of the children. Jim got standard Dallas County guidelines visitation.

By this time, Jim’s financial world was beginning to crumble. As fast as he had risen with Vernon, he fell with it even faster. Jim had made some progress in his personal life, marrying Bonnie Wiley on March 7, 1986. That February, Jim and Bonnie and daughter Liz had moved into a duplex in North Dallas, and C.C., at least temporarily, moved into the big house on Woodstream with the other five children. Per the temporary order, Jim was to pay whatever child support he could. From the time C.C. moved into the house in February until the following May, Jim paid her approximately S650. Times, it seems, were suddenly lean. Soon, the house on Woodstream was foreclosed upon, and C.C. and the children moved into a small apartment. C.C. tried to make some money selling residential real estate, but had to turn to her mother and father for financial help.

“Here we were in February. Vernon was in a mess, and I was in a financial mess, and Cecelia and her attorneys are acting like I am Fort Knox,” Jim says. In the order that granted C.C. a new trial, Charles Robertson was awarded a $72,548.25 judgment against Jim Parker for C.C.’s attorney’s fees.

Parker is bitter about all of the money spent on lawyers. He says he has “written checks for more than $150,000,” including a $10,000 retainer for the ad litum, Aglaia Mauzy, of which C.C. paid $1,500. Like most of the other real estate guys who made their money flipping land, Parker was rich on paper only, and when the financing for his deals dried up, so did his income. He’s since been faced with foreclosure after foreclosure while having to meet his very real cost of living: $700 a month to C.C. for child support, plus living expenses for him and Bonnie and a new baby born this fall. Because the Bill of Review alleges fraud, and the second part of the trial-which would decide the fate of the children-was delayed until mid-October, Parker couldn’t sell property or file for bankruptcy until the whole case was disposed. His hands have been tied. He no longer drives a fancy car; he lives in a modest home in Richardson and ekes out a commission-only living as a mortgage broker.

C.C. rents a four-bedroom home not far from Jim’s, across the street from her younger children’s grade school. She works as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, making $1,200 a month. She keeps up with her children, and when she has time, she exercises horses. She is only beginning to realize that her wealthy lifestyle is a thing of the past.

Both broken and humbled, this summer Jim and C.C. tried mediation through Dispute Mediation Service of Dallas. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work. Jim claims that C.C. used the time in mediation to scream at him about old wounds. (“Cecelia wanted to have me in a room for two hours at a pop where she could make accusations and convince someone that she was mistreated,” Jim says.) C.C. says they had reached some agreements regarding the children, but Jim walked out for the last time when she brought up a condo that he still held title to in Colorado.



SO WITH THIS ALL BEHIND THEM, C.C. and Jim Parker went to court on October 10 of this year. Their divorce and settlement battle was finally nearing an end, five years after it had begun. But with their money gone, they would be without attorneys. This time they would represent themselves.

The majority of the hearing was spent on the custody issue. The key witness was another professional who had found her way into the Parkers’ private lives: Cheryl Portele, a social worker for Family Court Services who completed a “social study” of the Parker family-where she spent time interviewing each of the Parker children. Portele’s recommendations to the court were devastating to C.C: all of the children should live with Jim, she said. Though the Parker children are all high achievers-Jim, the eldest, was appointed to Annapolis Naval Academy this fall-some of the children were having problems. Portele said. Most disturbing. Portele testified, was that the children relied more upon each other for advice and guidance than upon either parent. Over the course of the summer. John and Julie had joined Liz at their father’s house. Jaimie and Jack missed their brother and sisters, Portele said, and she felt it was very important that all of the children be together.

It’s easy to see that the home Jim has made with Bonnie is more “complete” in the traditional sense than the one C.C. can offer. The father is present, and the mother works at home so she can be with her new baby. Cheryl Portele never quite spelled out exactly why she recommended the children be with their father, but she did say she gave weight to the fact that Jim and Bonnie had much higher earning power than C.C. did. The ad litum agreed.

Both Jim and C.C. presented their cases. Jim called his wife Bonnie, who. while comforting her baby, told the judge from the witness stand that Jim was a good father, that she and Jim had committed their lives to Christ and took the children to church, and that C.C. cursed terribly in front of the children. C.C. called her sister to the stand, who told the judge that C.C. was a good mother, that Jim had not paid much attention to the children before the divorce began, and that she had seen bruises on C.C. during the marriage. For three days it was tit for tat. C.C. tried in vain to find some property to be divided, but Jim showed conclusively that nothing was left but debt, which he offered C.C. freely if she wanted it.

By the end of the third day Judge Carolyn Wright had heard too much. She had lost her patience. Time after time she cautioned Jim and C.C. that they could not argue or discuss, that each was to ask the other, as witnesses, questions that should be answered directly. When Jim threw some documents at C.C, Wright almost came out of her chair.

Near the end, C.C. broke into tears, looked to the judge and asked, “How can I beat him? I just am no match.” C.C. said that it was incredible to her that she was in court fighting for her children. “They are my whole life,” she said.

When both sides had rested, Wright surveyed the reams of documents Jim had entered into evidence to prove he was broke, and the stacks of photographs C.C. used to show her children loved her. She looked at Jim and she looked at C.C., and based on their tales alone, she couldn’t decide. The judge wanted to hear it from the children.



ON TUESDAY. OCTOBER 18. 1988, JUDGE Wright’s small courtroom was filled with the noise of the Parker children. All of them were there but the oldest. Jim. who had not been told about the most recent salvos exchanged by his parents. They thought he had enough pressure to deal with as a freshman at Annapolis. The Parker children are freckJe-faced images of their mother-high-cheekboned, bright-eyed carbon copies. Eight-year-old Jack ran around the courtroom, stopping occasionally at the witness stand to make noises in the live microphone. checking each chair and movingon to the next. Jaimie, Julie, and John alternately told both their mother and their father about the day’s happenings at school Liz sat with Bonnie, a little apart from the rest of her family, and held Bonnie’s new baby girl

Liz went first into the judge’s chambers, accompanied by attorney Mauzy. When she emerged some thirty minutes later, she was wiping tears from her eyes. The other kids, who had eaten their candy bars and been downstairs to the restroom and vending area at least five or six times, didn’t seem wary because of Liz’s tears-except for Jack, who settled down next to his mother to play a con-nect-the-dots game. He stayed there until it was his turn, the youngest going last. One by one, the children came back out into the courtroom, and the family waited for the decision. But instead of a finish, more agonizing waiting was ahead.

“The ad litum has requested that we recall the case worker,” Judge Wright said.

The disappointment in the room was obvious. Each of the children sat still and silent while the judge flipped through her docket and set October 28 as the next court date.

But as October 28 approached, the divorce that wouldn’t die rose again. The court date was reset until November 8. and that day, testimony dragged on for nearly four hours. The ad litum rehashed in detail why the social worker thought the children should be with their father. C.C. asked question after question, following no discernible logical pattern, just attempting to show she was a good mother, that she deserved her children.

The judge recessed for ten minutes. Jim strolled triumphantly up and down the hall outside the courtroom. C.C. sat nervously awaiting the outcome. She knew that family judges rarely rule against the recommendations of the attorney for the children.

With Judge Wright’s first words. C.C. slumped in her seat. A picture had been painted in the courtroom. Wright said, of a woman gone mad as a result of a divorce. But then the tone of Wright’s verdict changed.

“It is unprecedented for me to make a ruling contrary to my ad litum and family court counselor,” Judge Wright said. But that’s just what she did. She ordered all the children back to the home of their mother. Further, she gave C.C. a $200,000 judgment against Jim. Wright said she just could not believe that Jim had become so poor so fast without some design and waste. Her implications were clear: Wright thought that Jim Parker had deliberately kept property from C.C, and that drastically affected her decision about the children. Jim may have been too smart for C.C., Judge Wright seemed to say. but he wasn’t too smart for her.

“Up until this moment, you have continued to hold onto a marriage that should have been over years ago,” Wright said. “Now let this divorce end.”

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