Amanda Lamb - Love Lies: A True Story of Marriage and Murder in the Suburbs

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright 2011 by Amanda Lamb
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email

First Diversion Books edition September 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62681-942-9

For Bella and Katie,
may you always be surrounded by people who love you.

I would like to thank Nancy Coopers loved ones for sharing their memories of their daughter with me. I would also like to thank them for sharing their candid exploration of how domestic abuse touched their family and forever changed the fabric of their lives.

I would also like to thank WRAL-TV for giving me the time and resources to cover stories like this one in my role as a television reporter and also as an author. In addition, I would like to thank Kelly Gardner for his insight into the story and for helping to format the photographs for the book.

My editor, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, deserves thanks for returning to this project fresh from maternity leave and shepherding it through the eleventh hour as the trial pushed right up against our deadline.

My thanks also goes to my agent, Sharlene Martin, for always believing in me, supporting me, and working hard on my behalf.

And finally, there are no words for my family who somehow put up with me being an author, a television reporter, a mother and a wife simultaneously. They are the best part of my day.

What God hath joined, let no man tear asunder.

MATTHEW 19:5

Sunday, July 13, 2008

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

Sunday, July 13, 2008, was one of those typical North Carolina summer days where it was already hot in the shade at seven thirty in the morning. Parents, eager to cheer on their children at the countywide swim meet, were setting up camp along the hill overlooking the pool. They had coolers, folding chairs, binoculars, sunblock, newspapers, and travel coffee mugs. Unfortunately, I was armed only with a slightly stale blueberry muffin and a single bottle of water. I was wishing I had brought more provisions for what promised to be an epic day of watching my oldest daughter compete.

I headed to the team tent where all of the mothers who had volunteered to help were setting up their gear. I was wrestling to take one of the finicky fold-up camping chairs out of its canvas bag when I heard the buzz. Someone from the neighborhood was missing.

As a local television journalist for more than two decades, I had become good at eavesdropping on conversations. Its part of the job. I had also become good at quickly discerning if a conversation was simply personal and had no news value or if it contained important information to which I needed to be paying close attention.

I looked around and noticed clusters of people were starting to gather and speak about something in solemn tones with serious looks on their faces. Missing. Jogging. Mother. I caught snippets of conversations as they floated through the air around me and tried to piece them together.

I decided to seek out the director of our swim club, Gail Lewis. Surely, she would know what was going on. She did. She told me that a local young married mother of two was missing, that she had gone running the morning before, and that she had not returned home. Lochmere, the Cary, North Carolina, neighborhood where the woman was from, was not the kind of place where joggers disappeared. Lochmere was a neighborhood lined with meticulously manicured lawns. It was a place where the sidewalk was always crowded with children riding bikes and people walking their dogs. There was virtually no crime in the town of Cary other than petty property crimes, and Lochmere was considered one of the safest places to live in the entire region.

The missing womans name, Lewis told me, was Nancy Cooper. It didnt register with me. I racked my brain, trying to make a connection between the name and people I had met at the swim club over the years. I immediately called my office, the WRAL-TV newsroom, and asked the women on the assignment desk if we were working the story. They told me a crew had already been assigned to cover it. A big community search was scheduled to take place that day in conjunction with the police search that was already under way. They were using a helicopter, dogs, bikes, boats, anything that would help them scour the woods and lakes in and around the subdivision. Volunteers were already plastering the neighborhood with fliers bearing Nancy Coopers picture.

I quickly pulled up our website on my BlackBerry to check out Nancy Coopers picture to see if I recognized her. In the photograph that filled my small screen, I saw a woman wearing a blue baseball hat, with shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, and a smile that showed a slight gap in between her two front teeth. She was a pretty woman with an imperfect smile that made her even more real than if shed had beauty queen teeth. Tears began to well up in my eyes and a lump formed in my throat as I imagined Nancy Coopers children without a mother.

She always wore a brown bikini with a skirt bottom at the pool. Her daughter, Bella, has almost white hair, one of the mothers said to me.

That was the trigger my memory needed. Suddenly, Nancy Coopers image became crystal clear in my head. Our paths had in fact crossed many times, though I never knew her name. Our daughters had swum together in the pool and danced together at a weeklong ballet camp that summer. We had chatted casually in the baby pool on several occasions. I remembered her as tall, thin, and athletic. It was funny, because the gap in her teeth in the photograph had thrown me off. I had never noticed it in person, probably because she was such a strikingly attractive woman.

I drifted away for a moment to a day just a few weeks prior when I had met my best friend, Amy, for coffee at a local restaurant called Java Jive. We sat outside and enjoyed the early summer sun, the kind of sun that warms you without making you sweat. It was a perfect day with a slight breeze and a cloudless sky. A few tables away sat the woman I now knew was Nancy Cooper, with a girlfriend. I didnt know her name at the time, but I had noticed her because she was wearing a pretty green sundress and flip-flops with the casual elegance of a woman who always looked good no matter what she put on. Her brunette hair was pulled back in a low, messy, short ponytail that made her look younger than she probably was. I had made a note to myself that I needed some sundresses like that to wear in the summertime.

As shed talked with her friend and sipped her coffee, Nancy Cooper had looked like a woman without a care in the world. Shed looked like a woman who had it all together, the kind of woman who made other women envious.

That was the last time I remembered seeing Nancy Cooper. Little did I know at that time that our lives would soon intersect in a very intimate way and that everything about her would soon become very familiar to me. And little did I know that while Nancy Cooper appeared totally carefree on that bright early summer day, her entire world was about to come crashing down on her.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Tears are the silent language of grief.

VOLTAIRE

On Saturday, July 12, 2008, Jessica Adam called 911 at 1:50 P.M. to report her close friend Nancy Cooper missing.