But there was another side to Goldstein, as prosecutors would later point out. According to court records, as detailed in the Associated Press report, Goldstein often clashed with neighbors. There were disputes over barking dogs, and some neighbors complained about harassing phone calls from the podiatrist. There was even a murky allegation that Goldstein may have been involved when cash went missing from a friend's safe. None of those complaints ever rose to the level of criminal or civil action.
But there were more clues to the darker side of Goldstein's nature. Nowhere was that more apparent than in his volatile relationship with his wife.
The couple, who married in 1998, shared a mutual passion for firearms and explosives, Hardee, the dentist, later told authorities. They would often go shooting together, and at home, they would huddle in the kitchen, tossing together the ingredients for homemade bombs the same way most suburban couples throw together a low-carb salad. Even later, Hardee told authorities, when Goldstein began mulling aloud the details of his plot to blow up the Muslim Center, "Kristi was almost always around, knew everything and never questioned anything." As Assistant U.S. Attorney Colleen Murphy-Davis later put it, according to an Associated Press report of Kristi Goldstein's sentencing hearing, the Goldsteins lived a "bizarre lifestyle," which had, as one of its centerpieces, building homemade bombs and detonating them in their backyard. "This is what they did for fun," Murphy-Davis was quoted as saying. "They called it, 'moving the dirt around.'"
Their relationship, however, was not all hearts and flowers and nitrogen and glycerin. As Kristi told authorities after Goldstein's arrest, Goldstein had an explosive temper and more than once threatened to kill her. Kristi Goldstein even got a domestic violence injunction against the doctor, though she didn't file those papers until after the plot, and her role in it, was uncovered.
In fact, authorities later said, it was the couple's stormy relationship, as well as Goldstein's deteriorating mental condition that first led them to the Goldsteins' townhouse, where the plot was discovered.
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