Evil Season (13 page)

Murphy remembered good times from that period. The brothers went out on Dean's boat, nocturnal fishing trips on Tampa Bay. About six months after Murphy's discharge, he met a lovely haircutter named Paula Cunningham (pseudonym), who would become his second wife. They met at Madeira Beach. As was Murphy's pattern, he fell in love almost immediately.

She and her family were vacationing. It was a holiday, but Murphy didn't remember which one. He ran into Paula and her sister and her girlfriend and they asked him if he wanted to play a game with them, some board game or something, so he went with them.

Brutus and Paula were married by a justice of the peace in St. Pete in 1987. The newlyweds decided to make a fresh start of it in a new town, where they would open their own hair salon and live happily ever after. They traveled around, scouting locations, visiting many towns and cities on a number of weekend trips. They visited Panama City, Tampa Bay, just looking around. Then they stopped in Tallahassee and Murphy had a real good feeling about it.

“There was something in the air in Tallahassee,” he said. Smelled like home. The newlyweds found a place and moved to Tallahassee in late 1987. Just as planned they opened their own shop in early 1988—Clippercraft Haircutters. It was very romantic. Paula would cut hair in the chair right next to her husband's.

The place had seven workstations. They rented them out. They didn't have employees, and they never had more than a few independent contractors at any given time. They had a tanning bed and a massage therapist. That is, they had a massage therapist until—fingers no doubt wandering—she fell in love with one of her customers and moved out of the state.

“The environment was just short of upscale and very relaxed. We played Top Forty music on the radio all day,” he said.

 

 

And that was the way it was. The Murphys were as happy as clams for just about seven years. Then the rent went up and up and up, $1,200 a month, until they were forced to change locations.

Murphy was proud of the new Clippercraft Haircutters because he did all of the work himself. “I built the walls, and all that stuff,” he said.

The space had been a skin care place, but he converted it. Took about a week. He was handy with tools, good with plumbing and electricity—and completely self-taught.

The old shop was already gone, so there was no income. They needed to open the new joint quickly. Refurbishment time was at a premium.

“When I look back, the new Clippercraft Haircutters was still a little rough around the edges when we opened for business,” Murphy said.

But it wasn't the interior decoration that hurt business as much as the location. Sure, the rent was cheaper, and it was another little space in another little shopping plaza.

“But cheaper didn't mean better,” Murphy said. Their steady customers weren't willing to go the extra distance to the new place. Plus, starting on moving day, there was a massive road construction project right outside, making access to the shop ridiculously complicated. Customers had to drive through rutted dirt to enter the new plaza's parking lot.

“We lost a hell of a lot of business,” Murphy said.

If Murphy had it to do over again, he would have stayed at the first site. Better to have high rent and a thriving business, he realized in retrospect.

It was around the time that the Murphys were struggling at their salon's second location that he began to express himself artistically. After Trevor, his son, was born, Murphy made paper airplanes. Then he graduated to cardboard and wood. He started experimenting with materials and found that he loved working with copper. He sculpted in metal, soldering and welding copper pipes into
objets
. Of course, not everyone appreciated Murphy's talent. Some only saw a weirdo collecting and mangling scrap metal.

He would find pieces of copper; he'd take copper tubing and flatten it out. He would hammer and propane it together; the next thing you knew, he had made a train! Encouraged by his early success, Murphy became more “progressive.”

To maximize his ability to work in this medium, Murphy took a night class in gas welding at Lively Vo-Tech in Tallahassee. The “Vo” stood for Vocational. Whatever it was you wanted to be, they could teach you. Want to learn to fly? Step right up. Massage therapy, turn right. Beauty parlor skills, turn left. Murphy was there to learn to weld better.

And he did learn, and Murphy's pieces of art grew, both in complexity and in size. His larger sculptures were made of steel, copper, and brass. He made sculptures that were all steel, all copper, or all brass—or any combination of the three.

It got to the point where making sculptures was all he wanted to do. Night after night, sometimes all night, he would weld. Whenever he had a day off from the salon, which was great, it gave him an opportunity to weld some more.

Most of the metals he used were scrap or junk. He would go to the scrap yard every couple of weeks or so and buy scrap metal by the pound. He would bring the metal to his workshop, where he had a wide variety of bending, cutting, and welding tools.

“Eventually I made a room about five hundred square feet in our hair salon, which I used as a gallery for my works of art, my metal sculptures.”

To advertise his gallery, he put a sign,
BRUTUS'S BONEYARD,
in the hair salon's front window, with a picture of one of his favorite metal sculptures: a skeleton made of pipes holding a spear.

Not all of his work was macabre. He made airplanes, trains, ships, automobiles, and whimsical fantasy creatures. He made an alligator and a flying machine. His all-time favorite sculpture was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Egyptian pharaoh made of steel.

Because of the floundering business at the hair salon, and perhaps a little because of all the time he was putting into a not-for-profit pursuit, Murphy was forced to take a second job, cutting hair at the Regis Hairstylists in Governor's Square Mall in Tallahassee.

Because Regis had such a great location compared to his own place, he moved all of his customers there and developed a clientele. There was always an influx of new customers, because it was in a mall and because Regis had a nationally recognized name.

Paula tried to make it on her own cutting hair at Clippercraft Haircutters, but there just wasn't enough money. So not long after her husband began working at Regis, the Murphys closed up Clippercraft for good.

For seven years the Murphys lived and worked together. Considering how much time they spent together, they hardly ever got on each other's nerves. They always remembered to take time for themselves. Paula went to the gym every day, and—when he wasn't working on sculptures—Murphy enjoyed long walks and bike rides. As the marriage progressed, Murphy spent less and less time getting fresh air, and more time on his welding “obsession.”

The best things that the marriage gave him were “two wonderful children”: Trevor and Darcie. One of the greatest moments in his life—maybe
the
greatest—came in 1989 when he watched Trevor being born.

“Trevor was born by Caesarean section and I watched the entire procedure,” he said. The most fascinating part was when the doctor removed his wife's uterus and set it down outside the body so he could sew it up and put it back.

The moment his son was born was “one of the most emotional times” of his life. It was incredible that he could feel so much love for someone, for another human being, whom he'd seen only for a moment.

He felt the same way in 1993 when his daughter was born. Although the same doctor delivered both of his children, Darcie was born of natural childbirth, so Murphy did not get to see his wife's internal reproductive system for a second time.

According to Murphy, he always got along well with his children. He is eager to let the world know: “I never spanked or whipped my children. I don't believe in it.”

He says he never “hit or slapped” Paula, either. Not that he was a perfect husband with no temper. “I admit that I was physical with her a few times. The first time was only a few months after we were married. I know that, at that time, I frightened Paula very much. What I did was throw her on the bed. Then I put my hand tightly over her mouth and told her to keep her mouth shut.” There were a couple of other times during the marriage when he did the same thing to her. That was the extent of the physical abuse he dished out. He didn't really hurt her, but he was aware that he scared the “wits out of Paula” each time he did it. After each time he felt awful, but he didn't remember ever apologizing. Years later, when their marriage was over, Paula told Murphy about how scared she became when he got physical with her, how she even “feared for her life.”

Murphy said, “Of all of the women I've been with—Paula, I loved the most! I really believe she is my soul mate. Even today.” He still frequently dreamed about her, even though they had been apart for years.

According to Paula, she and Murphy broke up when he became verbally abusive and threatened physical violence against the children and toward her. She said that Murphy had an inadequate-type personality. There had been an incident, she said, in which Murphy requested to watch her having sex with another man—and that, in fact, did occur.

Murphy admitted that it was true. “I had a strange obsession,” he said. “I needed to see my wife with another man. So after years of coercion, I finally persuaded her to do so. Eventually we did two threesomes, with an extra guy. And we did one foursome, with another husband and wife.”

Murphy found these group-sex scenes very exciting, but he came nowhere close to living out his most extreme sexual fantasies. “My swinging was on the low-key amateur level,” he said. “Usually we would discuss each other's likes and dislikes and go from there.”

He was always looking for new opportunities to bring fresh people into his marriage bed. He also convinced Paula that they should have an “open marriage”; that is, they were each allowed to have lovers on the side. So Murphy regularly found himself in bed with other women. Only once, however, did he tell Paula about it. “I told her before the encounter what I was going to do and who I was going to be with. Then, when I got home, I told her all about it. Paula seemed happy for me.”

Open marriages are most often a precursor to separation, and that was the case here. The sex-on-the-side scenario caused the marriage to come to a “bad conclusion.”

The beginning of the end came about eight months after he left Clippercraft. One day, as he was completing a haircut at Regis, he glanced up toward the reception area. He noticed a woman there, and she was holding a large manila envelope. She placed the envelope on the front desk and walked out. He completed the haircut and walked his client to the front of the shop and took her money. While there, he looked at the manila envelope and was surprised to see it labeled:
Elton Murphy: Personal and Confidential.
He opened the envelope right there in front of everyone; inside were fifty photographs of his wife and another man he didn't know. They were fully clothed, but they were kissing in one photo. The photos were taken in various locations, surveillance style. One location he recognized was outside the Legends Gym, where Paula worked out. Murphy was unnerved by the photos and found it difficult to concentrate on his work as he finished his shift. Even though he and Paula had an open relationship, she had never—as far as he knew—previously acted upon it.

That night he confronted his wife, saying, “Paula, how are things going at the gym?”

“Good!” she replied happily.

“What are you doing there?”

“I work out there. Why? What do you think I'm doing there?”

He said nothing, just handed her the manila envelope. Looking at the photos, she was flabbergasted.

“Where did you get these?” she asked.

“At Regis today,” he replied. “So, who's the guy?”

“That's Bobby Bill (pseudonym), my personal trainer,” she replied. “We're not up to anything. We're just friends. Who took these photos?”

Murphy admitted he didn't know. “So there's nothing going on between you two?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Well, somebody thinks there is, or they would not have taken these photos. Somebody takes you two seriously.”

Paula insisted that whoever thought that was wrong. Murphy was cool with that and decided to let the matter slide. About a month later, Murphy came home early from the salon and was completely overwhelmed by what he saw.

“I saw nothing! All of the furniture was gone,” he recalled. “I didn't even have a bed!” He walked from room to room in disbelief; then he sat down on the living-room floor and began to cry. He couldn't remember ever being so upset, before or since.

About an hour later the phone rang. It was Paula.

“I called you at work and they said you left early. As you can see, I've left you. I'm sorry you found out the way you did, but I wanted to avoid a conflict with you.”

Murphy was devastated.