Texted Lies, Whispered Truths: Jason Collier's Story by Terri Browning (great novels to read .TXT) 📗

to me. A little while previous, our daughter had started counseling, something she’d said she wanted to try. M and I had just thought it was the typical stress that most teenage girls seemed to go through. But that day during her session, she finally felt comfortable enough that she admitted what was really going on with her.

While high one night, O’s son and one of his friends…hurt my baby girl.

Author Disclaimer

This is an ongoing case, so we are ending this chapter here. Because of the nature of the crime, and that it involves a juvenile victim, we feel we cannot give you more details regarding it without harming the case.

What we can tell you:

It is ongoing.

Per what Jason has told us, he was not allowed in the interview when his daughter was being questioned and giving her report. Due to the fact that he had been in the same house when the alleged crime occurred but did not witness the incident, there was talk of Jason being charged with failure to report as he was a police officer at the time.

There have been delays that we do not fully understand nor have we been given a real explanation for. As per Jason, he hasn’t been given any real explanation either.

We have just as many questions as you do.

10

As expected, this put pressure on my marriage to O.

I wanted this boy in jail. She would even agree with me when I would tell her what needed to happen, but then she would turn around and coddle her son.

The thing about O is, she hated my daughter. My daughter is so much like her mother, and O didn’t like that. But I considered it normal. Stepparents and their stepchildren rarely got along, from what experience I had with it.

Thankfully, my stepson moved out into a house with some friends after graduating early. The house was a party central, though, and I heard drugs were always available there. As time went on, he went through multiple jobs, and every time he lost one, his excuse was, “They cut my hours.” But we lived in a small town, and I knew many of the employers he worked for. So, of course, I asked what was going on and why hours were being cut when there were still HELP WANTED signs in the windows.

Each time, they would tell me the same thing. The boy just walked off the job.

The last job he was able to get, he told us he was laid off due to COVID. One day, I was approached by one of the deputies, asking if I’d seen my stepson, and out of courtesy, he told me why he was looking for him.

The boy had kept the business credit card from his last job, which he’d been fired from—not laid off, as he’d said—and he had been using it to put gas in his friends’ cars. He would put up to a hundred dollars in their tanks, and then they would pay him a portion of that money in cash, which was how he was getting by.

O paid off her son’s ex-employer so they wouldn’t press charges for the credit card fraud.

The money she was spending to keep her son out of trouble was yet another issue putting pressure on our marriage. O had a good job that paid very, very well. But between the trouble she was constantly paying to keep her son out of, her shopping addiction, and all the bills we had, money was tight. When I asked where all the money was going, she would get upset with me and yell that I shouldn’t worry about it because it was her money.

Everything we owned was hers. The house, our vehicles…everything. I wasn’t on her checking account—but both of her children were. Yet, she had insisted that her name be put on my checking account. It seemed what was hers was only hers, and what was mine was hers too.

Which she held over my head when things would get rocky. If she was angry with me, she would throw at me, “This is my house. That’s my truck you’re driving!” But when things were good, she would gush, “I love our home. You look good in your truck.”

Our sex life was turning nonexistent. Despite how our relationship started, O was becoming more and more withdrawn in the bedroom. One of my turn-ons was I liked to see her in lingerie, but O hated to wear it because her first two husbands made her feel like she was undesirable. But I loved the way she looked in it. The more I would try to build up her confidence, however, the more she would seem increasingly inhibited.

We tried counseling through our church for a while, right before I took the police chief position in Stinnett. Our relationship felt like it was slipping away. I wanted to hold on to it, but nothing seemed to be working. If anything, she made me feel less and less like the man of our household, and I had zero respect at home.

Back when O and I had first started dating, those who knew her well had told me she wasn’t a nice person. Most would even go so far as to call her a bitch. I was starting to see just how right they were.

I’m not trying to excuse what I did next. I know I messed up in the worst way.

I just wanted some respect.

To feel like I was wanted and needed again.

11

Disclaimer

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.

The game all started in November. That was when I first opened up a Plenty of Fish account. I was on the site for a few weeks, just chatting with several different women, before I went on my first date with Linda.

We chatted through the app for about five days before I drove down to Lubbock, Texas, and met her on her lunch break. This was about two weeks