Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 26, 1993 TAG: 9309260112
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EVAN MOORE HOUSTON CHRONICLE
DATELINE: POTEAU, OKLA. LENGTH: Long
"Bill Cathey," he said. "I apologize for not having shaved."
Bill Robert Cathey, Ph.D., had recently been handed a life sentence plus 50 years for a shootout with police near here.
He still faces charges of holding a 22-year-old woman for two weeks in a bizarre "experiment" in his suburban Dallas home.
Cathey, showing the pleasant countenance he wore for nine months as "Preston Primm" in this remote part of southeastern Oklahoma, was optimistic as he awaited transfer to Muskogee for trial on charges of interstate transportation of motor vehicles.
"This has been quite an experience," he said.
Wendy Kay McKee was walking down a Dallas highway at 2 a.m. May 19, 1991, when a Lincoln Continental pulled up.
The car was spotless, the color of vanilla ice cream in the mercury vapor glow. The driver was slim, with curls of coffee-hued hair framing a boyish face.
Less than eight hours out of a drug treatment program, McKee had a few dollars and a destination - a house in Dallas where she would buy the cocaine around which her life revolved.
The driver took her to a seedy apartment building where she bought it, then to a bowling alley where she "fixed" in the restroom.
He said he was Bill, 49, a psychologist, writer and a karate expert. She told him her name and said she was practically nothing.
She was a tomboyish 22-year-old with a husky voice, a ready smile, an addiction, no real home or job and the fatalistic conviction that wherever you are is where you're supposed to be.
He waited again while she made a second cocaine buy. She, suspicious of him, placed the capsules in her mouth before getting back into his car.
Then, she said, he put a pistol to her head, shouted, "I'm the Dallas police," and slapped a pair of handcuffs on her.
He took her inside a house and removed her clothes, she said. He led her to a closet covered by thick carpet with a stool in the center and eyebolts sunk into the ceiling and floor. He chained her feet to the floor and hands above her head and left.
When he returned and loosened the cuffs, McKee tried to escape, and her head was rammed through the plasterboard wall.
The experiment had begun. Bill, she said, wanted to make her "the perfect woman." To do so, he'd decided to break, then mend her.
Strange music played constantly. She was left in the closet with clothespins dangling from her nipples for what seemed to be days. Then she was moved to the bedroom and chained to a brass bed.
Six times daily she had to assume yoga positions and recite the mantra, "I will obey. I will obey."
When she loosened the duct tape under her eyes, she could see video cameras on tripods. He periodically chained her on a deck so she could get a tan, but a camera in a tree was trained on her. He gave her vitamins, but no drugs.
He read to her from "Huckleberry Finn" and "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." He taught her to do mathematical equations in her head. They played word games. He told her he was going to buy her a wardrobe.
Eventually, he said, he would send her to college. By then she thought anything was possible.
"Then, one day he was . . . telling me to see myself out in a field of daisies, and I had this sort of vision," she said.
"There were two clouds. Then the clouds became two doors, and God was in one door and Jesus was in the other. Then the doors parted, and I went shooting through the middle. It meant I was going to get free."
McKee later told police her relationship with Bill remained relatively asexual. At night they lay curled together, as she was chained and blindfolded, and talked.
"I've seen a bunch of Bill Catheys," she said. "I saw the mean Bill Cathey, the funny Bill Cathey, the kind Bill Cathey - at least his idea of kind - and the crybaby Bill Cathey who'd talk about how women had always been mean to him."
Finally, on June 2, he took her shopping in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite, fashioning a blindfold with gauze and surgical tape to look like a bandage.
In a grocery, she decided this was her chance to escape. In the checkout line, she asked Cathey if he had remembered to buy a bag of Reese's candy.
"He went back for it," she said. "I was scared he wouldn't, but he left me standing there. I could just see under the blindfold, and I watched his feet walking away . . .
"I ran up to the booth and I was yelling to this woman, `Help me. Hide me. This son-of-a-bitch has kidnapped me,' but she just stared, so I ran behind some baskets then ran to the back of the store and hid behind the Coke cases."
Cathey ran to his car and sped away. Witnesses took his license number and called police.
Mesquite Police Detective Donnie James didn't know whether to believe her bizarre story. The license of the red Nissan her captor drove was registered to a tennis instructor who was nowhere near Dallas on June 2, the day she said she was kidnapped.
"The more we talked, the more I believed her," said James. "We checked Home Depot," one of the stores they had shopped in, "and Bill Cathey had paid with a check."
Investigators learned Bill Cathey was an adjunct English professor at the University of North Texas in nearby Denton; a former professor at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi; a respected former teacher at two other colleges, and a homeowner in Sunnyvale, a middle-class Dallas suburb.
On June 14, 1991, police arrested him. In his home they found the closet and stool McKee had described and a clumsily repaired area in the wall. They also found sex videos of Cathey with various women in bondage; methamphetamine; the Nissan, and two other apparently stolen vehicles.
They made another sinister discovery: In one of the videos Cathey and a woman appear with a couple whose weighted bodies were found in a lake in 1988.
Donnie James began to wonder what sort of double life this professor led.
He discovered Cathey had grown up in the upper-middle-class Oak Cliff suburb of Dallas, the son of a portrait photographer.
Cathey was an above-average student who was on the high school track team and the student council. He went on to earn a doctorate in English from the University of Iowa. He was married twice and had a son.
The professor was charged with aggravated kidnapping and was released on a $50,000 bond.
Before a July 20, 1992, trial date, Cathey was gone.
Monte Shockley was surprised by the appearance of the potential buyer for his 20 wooded acres in southeastern Oklahoma. The man, Preston Primm, said he had seen Shockley's ad in a Dallas paper.
Primm, stepping from a Lincoln, did not look like a man who would live on a remote plot in the Ouachita National Forest.
"And he just seemed to love it," said Shockley.
The newcomer said he was a psychologist whose wife had died in an automobile accident, and he wanted to be alone. He quoted Shakespeare and shared theories on religions.
Preston Primm moved a motor home, a pickup and a red Nissan onto his acreage. He rescued lost dogs, pulled mired cars out of mud holes, and seemed well on his way to becoming one of the more popular men in LeFlore County when a blazing gunbattle ended his residency.
Guards from a prison at Heavener, Okla., had become suspicious of a car with Texas plates parked near the prison on April 21.
They were checking the car when a smiling man pulled up in a pickup, identified himself as "Mr. Daugherty" and said it was his. When two Poteau policemen arrived and announced the car had been stolen from Paris, Texas. "Daugherty's" demeanor changed abruptly.
"He pulled out a 9mm pistol and said he was going to kill all of us," said guard Cecil O'Neal. "I believe he was going to kill us, except the other guard had slipped out the side of our truck and got away and he knew he'd have a witness."
The policemen opened fire. The .45-caliber slug that struck Cathey's chest knocked him unconscious but only broke two ribs because he was wearing a bullet-proof vest.
Preston Primm was identified as Bill Robert Cathey a day later. The motor home, truck and Nissan were stolen. Inside the motor home was methamphetamine, what appeared to be a silencer for a pistol, bogus identification cards - and news articles about Wendy McKee.
Awaiting his Oct. 4 trial in Muskogee, Bill Cathey is far from idle.
"I've had a great burst of creative energy since I was arrested," he said. "I've managed to write two screenplays, and I may begin work on a novel. This, jail that is, is a sort of challenge, a new adventure."
by CNB