OFFICER'S PRIVILEGE: THE COL. GEORGE MARECEK STORY

Faithful to You, Jirga

"Darling...I keep thinking of you all the time and I wish I were together with you over there, but it will be soon. Trust me. I have to rush. I am sending you a kiss and I love you terribly."

A handful of hastily scrawled words, a love letter it seemed, one of several written in her husband's hand, signed with the diminutive of his name in Czech - Jirga, all in a language Viparet Marecek couldn't understand.

The way prosecutors have always described the events, Viparet had stumbled across the letters in the house, and unable to read Czechoslovakian, she turned to a friend for help. That friend was the Czech born wife of Marecek's Army buddy, Russell Preston. It just so happened that the woman taught Czechoslovakian at the Special Forces school at Fort Bragg.

North Carolina map with Fort Bragg locator

Chalk it up to "Special Forces brotherhood," as Preston's wife later told the CBS news magazine "48 Hours," a brotherhood that, it seems, was stronger than the bond between military wives, but for whatever reason, the woman refused Viparet's request.

Instead, according to court documents, the woman told her husband. He in turn told Marecek. According to the court documents, Preston called the retired Colonel, a man, who by Preston's own account, had been his hero, and "told him on the phone in Czech that Viparet wanted the letters translated because she wanted to use them in a divorce proceeding."

Marecek, according to the court papers, enlisted Preston's aid. He asked his former comrade to try to get the letter from Viparet. He failed. "Preston called Viparet and asked her for the letters but Viparet said, 'No, no, don't call me here'," the court papers continue.

Later, authorities would claim that Viparet was frightened. In fact, a friend of the woman's from the neighborhood was reported to have urged Preston to be careful. "You don't want her to get in any trouble," the woman reportedly told him. "She's very scared about this."

Perhaps, authorities would later claim, she had good reason to be. They noted that in January of 1991, six months before her death, the colonel took out an insurance policy on his wife that would pay $150,000 upon her death and $150,000 more if the death was the result of an injury.