Welcome to WS, Guamgirltx! Nice first post and quite informative! You are a good friend.
The laptop was subsequently stolen, correct? Do you know the date his things were stolen from the motel? Was the laptop entered on NCIC?
Since you were the owner of the phone, I have to assume you had access to all the records and have gone over everything including ping data. Anything come up there?
If Eric was upset women were hitting on him, it goes against the grain for him to fall so quickly for the married ex-girlfriend with or without talk of having a daughter. She must have been convincing especially since she never divorced her husband and they are together currently.
I still find it so odd that Eric looked up her husband to find her and no one thinks that was a problem. In all of my years online, I have never ever contacted the wife of one of my old lovers in an effort to "get in touch" because the ex lover had hidden his identity. It is the first red flag I saw with this case.
If she was sharing behaviors and interests that disturbed her, but they did not disturb her enough to leave long before her daughter turned 16...it means she either accepts them or is into the same behaviors and interests. They stated the marriage was open to affairs/trysts/different partners so their game of cat and mouse was nothing out of the norm. How did Eric feel in general about open marriages and the behaviors she discussed?
If she admitted being with so many men in her past especially while married, how could he conclude the daughter was probably his? Why didn't he insist on DNA testing?
Was Eric having emotional issues prior to going to MI? It sounds as if Eric was ill prepared to cope on his own with many things. Knowing this relationship and his involvement with his possible daughter evidently failed miserably, was he at a point of no return?
Thank you, Seriously Searching.
The laptop was sent to him after the incident when he came back to the hotel to find that someone had been there and taken things. He was still using the laptop to post to Facebook up to the point that he went offline to start his life with KF and the girls. I don't have any knowledge of where it went afterward.
As for the cell phone account, I tried contacting the provider company to ask for the data, and I was surprised to be told that the police had to request the data, that although I was the responsible party for the bill, the phone had been used by someone else with my permission and they have a right to privacy. I communicated with Det. Waterman regarding it and sent a detailed message to him giving full access to the account and any data that could be provided from it, from texts to locator information and anything else that they wanted. I very clearly indicated that I wanted nothing barred from their investigation as available through the account records. Obviously, we don't know where the phone itself ended up.
Please don't misunderstand my comment about the women propositioning him. Eric didn't mind anyone flirting with him, and he flirted just as openly. He made it clear, however, that it was just flirting. He never hid that he was married, and he never made it a secret that he was not looking to cheat or be cheated on. He expected the boundaries to be clear on both sides.
I can't comment to what went on between Eric and his wife during all this. I do know that once the decision was made to separate, it was clear it wasn't a trial separation. Given the state of affairs KF had indicated about her own marriage, it was implied if not stated that she was looking at terminating her marriage and moving on (though I was not involved directly in those conversations, only what was relayed to me), and the intention to meet his daughter suddenly had an added possibility of resuming a relationship with a person he'd regretted losing so long ago.
Convincing is one word for it. Manipulative is another, but then again I was already suspicious of the way she interacted with him. My opinion was that she repeatedly made him revisit the way their relationship had ended before, and she seemed to need to make him feel shame and guilt for having not been able to keep her happy back then.
I don't recall the specifics of it, but I believe that Eric had been acquainted with J back when he was involved with KF. As I mentioned before, when Eric got into Facebook, he was pretty avidly looking for old friends from over the years, and I believe that was why he sought J out. I don't think (though I can't be positive) that Eric knew J and KF had ended up together. It's my understanding that Eric looked up J as simply someone he used to know. The added benefit of them both having known KF could well have been just another person to reminisce with about "the one that got away". I think it was a bit of a shock and then an awkwardness when the marriage was disclosed, but I wasn't part of that conversation and don't recall a detailed recount of it.
I don't believe Eric was given to understand it as an open marriage. I believe he told me it had been an unhappy marriage for many years, during which one cheated and the other did so as well in retaliation. I think Eric was hopeful that if KF still had any remnants of old feelings from the past, he might perhaps be able to explore that with her and maybe build something to last, something unlike her existing marriage (that she was supposedly getting out of anyway).
Maybe it sounds odd to some, but at heart, Eric was a romantic. He was a flirt and a very direct person, but when he let someone in close to him, they got a lot of benefit of the doubt. He put on a lot of tough guy talk with the general public, but it seems to me that when he loved, he wanted to love completely. KF was the one he'd done so with first. When he lost her, he never quite let himself be completely in love with anyone else. He tried, he wanted it, but I don't know that anyone else was ever able to get all the way through like KF had.
Again, his kryptonite.
DNA testing...that wasn't really something he felt was needed. Given the daughter's birthday and the time frame of the breakup, and the fact that he believed KF when she said that she hadn't cheated back then (this relationship happened when they were both very young), the probability that the daughter was his was extremely high. Seeing pictures of her made it clearer still, and then interacting with her in person, learning some of the random shared idiosyncrasies...well, there just didn't seem to be a need.
Emotional issues? We all have those, but no, Eric was not distraught in the way you mean. Without knowing Eric outside of this patchwork portrait of a small slice of his life, you couldn't know that Eric was ironically an optimist. He could be pretty pessimistic in commentary, he might get down about a tough day, but the fact is he kept getting up every morning. He kept looking for the next day to be better, he kept looking for new opportunities.
I guess that's the hardest part of this, painting a clear picture of Eric for people who have never met him. He wasn't perfect. No one is. Still, there are aspects of Eric that you can't have any insight of because you haven't interacted with him personally. It's easy to piece together a rough profile of someone based on what you hear from others, but that's never a complete picture.
Vee could share much more with you about Eric than I could in most ways. Even though things didn't work out, she WAS married to him, so at some point she found things in him that were lovable. When things go badly in a marriage, a lot of things are said, a lot of hurt is inflicted and reciprocated, so I'm sure there's plenty should could say that would make him sound terrible, too.
Very few people on this particular forum are aware of the other aspects of Eric's life. How many know about the times he worked in homeless shelters? How many know about some of the people he genuinely befriended from those shelters, not out of pity, but out of recognizing a person's worth beyond their wealth or lack of it?
Eric and I spent plenty of time cheesing around, chatting about inconsequential things and ridiculous humor, but we also spent time discussing current events and social injustices that he was passionate about, ideas he had about changing the world, making things better. I used to give him grief about how he ran his mouth like he was some bitter old pessimist and an antisocial curmudgeon, and yet he'd come to life when discussing equal rights and personal accountability.
I wish there was a way I could show everyone what a good person he was, but instead he's just gone. Vanished. There are so many things he's left undone, so many contributions he wanted to make to the world. Now, at least here, it seems like his life has been reduced to hashing over a period of time that included a few bad choices and moments of vulnerability that brought him to rock bottom while he was fighting to create the life he hoped he could bring to fruition.
I like that he is in our corner and willing to help. We need 50 more just like him. (At least, I get the vibe it is a male)
