Justice Delayed: The Robert Marshall Story

Double Down

But just below the surface, the reality was far less idyllic.

As Marshall's sister Oakleigh DeCarlo put it in the book, Tunnel Vision, Rob Marshall was beginning to feel trapped in his seemingly perfect life. "He was frustrated," she wrote. "Except for the boys, they did not have much in common.

"Maria was passive. Rob was active and often played tennis and racquetball; Maria went to ballet class once a week...She could sit on the beach for hours while Rob became restless after thirty minutes."

After 20 years of marriage, it seemed that a gulf was starting to develop between Maria and Rob. Still, as DeCarlo put it, Maria was a devoted wife.

"Maria knocked herself out for her family," she wrote. "She was up at 6 a.m. each day to make breakfast for the boys and do her domestic chores...by 10 p.m. every weekday, she fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV, just about the time Rob finished his business phone calls."

Maria & her sons

Marshall had made it a practice to get all his work done by Thursday night so that he could spend a long weekend each week with Maria and the boys. But Marshall, as it would later be said, was the kind of guy who always wanted more. "He tried many times to convince [Maria] to ease up a bit, or take a nap in the afternoon so they could have some time together," DeCarlo wrote, "but she always refused."

Perhaps it isn't surprising, then, that Rob Marshall looked for comfort, perhaps passion is more apt, elsewhere. And in the loamy suburbs in the indulgent '80s, he didn't have to look far.

In the McGinness book, she's called "Felice." In his book, Marshall calls her "Beth." Neither is her real name, of course, but because she has never been charged with a crime in connection with the case, Crimelibrary has decided not to identify her. Instead, we will indulge Marshall and call her Beth.

It's not clear when Rob and Beth first laid eyes on each other. In a socially incestuous community like Toms River at that time, people of a certain class seem to gravitate to the same places. Over the years, they had been fellow travelers in that world, and in fact, Marshall and Beth's husband often played tennis together.

There is, however, no doubt about just when Rob and Beth's orbits collided.

It was the weekend of the Fourth of July, 1983.

The way Marshall tells it, he and Maria had piloted the Double Down through the lagoons of Toms River to join up with some friends at a backyard barbecue.

"Most of the people who had arrived before us were talking under a yellow and white striped party tent," Marshall wrote. "Maria went into the house, while I headed for the bar. That's when Beth made her appearance. As I took a long pull on my drink, she walked up next to me and said 'Hel-lo' in sultry voice."

"'Well, hello,' I said as I turned to face her. She wore a dark red jumpsuit which was accented by silver jewelry and her dark wavy hair...Beth knew how to attract attention."

For a few moments, Marshall and Beth, a part-time aerobics teacher, and in her more-buttoned-down hours, an administrator at a nearby school, exchanged small talk. It was, at least as Marshall chronicles it, the kind of overheated small talk that typically must infuse all such bourgeois summer trysts, most of it, according to Marshall's account, focusing on the whereabouts of their spouses.

"We moved away from the bar and stood in the shade of the tent, talking," Marshall wrote, his story taking on a certain adolescent breathlessness, as if he were drawing his inspiration from the bottomless well of pulpy bodice-rippers that seem to pop up like dust bunnies on night-stands all over suburbia. "After several minutes, I said, with a wry smile, 'Are we ever going to get together?'

"She looked at me with her dark eyes for a thoughtful moment and said, 'I'm about ready for something like this. Why don't you call me at school?'"

A few days later, Marshall wrote, he called Beth and they arranged a rendezvous at a well-known restaurant 15 miles north of Atlantic City. They didn't stop to eat. Instead, they drove off to a nearby motel.

"She was sensitive and responsive to my passion and desire," Marshall wrote in his 2002 memoir. "We spent four hours together, taking occasional breaks for a drink or a bite to eat." In a phrase unabashedly florid and yet certainly an understatement, Marshall concludes, "I did not know it then, but that day marked the beginning of something that would change our lives together."

Later, when word of the affair was finally aired, not in the customary whispers that follow such indiscretions, but blared across the front pages of local newspapers as part of the coverage of Maria Marshall's murder, most people probably viewed it as a typically tawdry extramarital fling, made more noxious, of course, by Maria's death.

To hear Marshall describe it, however, he and Beth might as well have been Tristan and Isolde. They were star-crossed lovers, betrayed and tortured by the small-minded conventions of their society, Marshall wrote. "What had started as a fling quickly blossomed into an intensely romantic relationship," he wrote. "Each time we were together our feelings for each other grew to another level, closer in understanding and emotion. We seemed to be in harmony on almost everything."

The furtive affair was fueled by their secret meetings, further fanned by the sly little tapes they made for each other when they were apart, and scored by a sentimental and sappy soundtrack which included "their song," the saccharine "Lady" as warbled from diner jukeboxes all over America by Kenny Rogers. But it had become such an all-consuming passion, certainly for Marshall, who was now 45, and perhaps for Beth as well, that they both decided to leave their spouses.

The way they planned it, Marshall would leave home first. Beth would soon follow. Although they had planned to rent a condominium together, and even went so far as to open a joint checking account, they expected that everyone, including Marshall's three sons, two of whom were now on the verge of adulthood, all three of them desperately close to their mother, would simply assume that the couple had become involved after their marriages had officially crumbled.

It was during one of their encounters that Marshall made what may be described in hindsight as an ill-advised comment to his paramour. Speaking of his wife, according to court documents, Marshall told Beth that he "wished [Maria] wasn't around," and asked Beth if she knew of "anyone who could take care of it." Beth, it is alleged, offered him the name of a local resident who was reputed to have had some dealings with the seamier side of life in Ocean County. Beth would later insist that she did not take Marshall's question seriously, and had told him at the time that "she never wanted to be involved with him if he could do anything like that to his wife."

In time, that comment would return to haunt Marshall.