At 29, Vicky Cushman was a striking young woman with pouting lips and eyes that could melt a man's heart in an instant. Bright and articulate, she had graduated from the U.S. Army language school and could speak four languages, including Farsi, which she used from time to time to converse with the Iranian-born UPS driver who used to deliver packages to the Alpine Ski and Sport Shop in Warwick where she worked.

Todd Barry in court (AP/Wide World)

From time to time she dated a bartender from nearby Narragansett and also a carpenter named Todd Barry from Warwick, and, according to her friends, she dreamed of someday settling down and raising her own family. But much of the time, she spent alone with her cats, in the tiny apartment next door to the ski and sport shop.

It was there that she first saw Scott Hornoff. She later told him that she was looking out her window one Sunday morning in July 1989 and saw the handsome young police detective in the parking lot with some of his friends. A member of the Warwick police dive team, Hornoff was a regular at Alpine. He bought his scuba equipment there and regularly showed up to have his air tanks recharged.

The minute she saw him, she later told him, she knew she wanted him.

She found a way to meet him. The athletic young cop, with a young wife and a baby son at home, had mentioned to a few people at Alpine that he planned to run a road race as part of the annual Blessing of the Fleet festival in nearby Galilee. Afterwards, he might down a few beers at the Coast Guard House, a popular local nightspot.

"I was surprised," he later said. "I thought one of the guys from Alpine would be there." But instead, Victoria Cushman showed up and the beautiful young linguist left no doubt what she wanted from Hornoff.

"That was the first time she propositioned me," he told Crime Library.

At first, Hornoff says, he was cool to the idea. "InitiallyI tried to avoid her and get away," Hornoff said. "I just wanted to stay out with my brothers and relax a little bit."

But Cushman was determined. Perhaps loneliness played a part in it. Though he had been married since his early 20s and was the father of a then-7-month-old son, Hornoff rarely saw his wife, Rhonda. She worked the day shift at a local insurance company and he worked the four-to-midnight shift as a newly appointed detective on the Warwick police department. Maybe the macho attitude that permeated the department affected his judgment. "There is a lot of testosterone," he says. Or perhaps it was, as he later put it, simply the fact that "I was young and stupid." Whatever the reason, Hornoff finally relented.

It was hardly a torrid, long-lasting romance. The furtive couple had only three or four encounters, all of them secret, even from Hornoff's closest friends, and only two of them were sexual, according to Hornoff's lawyer, Joel Chase, before Hornoff decided to break it off.

If Vicky Cushman was crushed by the fact that Hornoff had decided to return to a life of monogamy and fatherhood, she didn't show it, Hornoff said. When he told her that their clandestine liaison was over, "she curled her bottom lip and she put on a sad face. But she wasn't overly distraught," he said.

It may have been that Hornoff underestimated Cushman's distress at the end of their affair. As authorities would later learn, she went home and penned a letter to the married cop. In it, she told him that she understood that he had a beautiful wife and son and that she didn't expect him to ever leave them, certainly not for her. All the same, she wrote, there was something special between them, and she pleaded with Hornoff to continue the affair.

She sealed the letter inside an envelope and she left it on a table in her apartment not far from the antique jewelry box that had been handed down to her from her great-grandmother and the Rolodex that contained the names of her other boyfriends.