Murder or Divorce? The Sociopath’s Dilemma

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Why bother with a divorce when you can have it all? For a certain type of male sociopath, the calculus is simple. I say this because I knew one.

Fifty years ago, on a blazing Saturday in June, Duane Frye beat his wife Betty to death in their Denver-area garage two weeks before I was to marry their son. That morning I was one of the last to speak to Betty. Two hours later, she was dead. A couple of hours after that, I encountered Duane at the karate studio where my fiancé was teaching. Between the time Betty was murdered and her body was found, I was with him for more than an hour. And, of course, we were together that evening with cops crawling through his house, during the preceding weeks and months, and over the nine years I was married to his son.

That Mother’s Day, Betty had confided that she was worried about Duane. She told me he blew up on the telephone at a woman from the phone company. This was unsurprising. From Duane’s preference for automatic transmissions which eliminated human error, to his kids’ mandatory reading lists featuring Atlas Shrugged, to his diatribes against Texans buying up prime Colorado land and East Coast cabals (a/k/a Jews) taking over the media, the Frye dinner table was a minefield. In May 1973, the person Betty should have been worried about was herself.

But Duane showing up at the karate studio that Saturday was a surprise. Betty hadn’t mentioned him coming, and a spur-of-the-moment forty-mile drive to Boulder hardly seemed in character for a Martin Marietta efficiency engineer whose nickname was Mr. Work-the-Problem. Even more surprising were his strangely dark clothes, the ugly bruise on his forehead, and the warm six-pack of beer he gave us. I later learned he told the cops he’d stopped at a liquor store to buy it for a barbecue he planned that day. So why give it to us? The lighter fluid he also said he bought for that barbecue disappeared along with the clothes he was wearing before the murder.

I asked Duane about the bruise. He and Betty were doing spring cleaning, he said, and a lawn chair had fallen on his head. After the karate class, slumped with his head in his hands on the daybed in our apartment, he looked exhausted. No wonder.

Later that afternoon, Betty’s body was found sprawled near barrels filled with loot in what looked like a burglary gone wrong. The lead investigator noted Duane’s hair trigger, that he could erupt and three or four minutes later all was fine. I put up with it for eight or ten years, Duane told them, I had no reason to kill her. The only time he was caught off guard was when they asked if he wore clip-on sunglasses. Duane didn’t realize he’d accidentally dropped them in one of the barrels while he was staging the scene.

My own mother was tough, but not immune to Duane’s domineering thrall. Two days after the murder, she flew to Denver and we took a trip to the foothills with Duane and his mother. Years later, mom told me Duane said things she would’ve hesitated or felt funny about saying herself, but that she thought he was right and she would have been wrong. She was also struck by his intense closeness to his mother.

In 1973, Duane was indicted for murder but the charges were dropped. In 2005, he was reindicted. The cops had The Right Man, in more ways than one. But who was he?

For starters, the sustenance of profilers and forensic shrinks. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) offers a potpourri of intermittent explosive disorder, repressed rage, pathological narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder—the garden variety toxic male. But there had to be more to the Svengali my mom had glimpsed, the man who at all costs needed to be right. It took a Canadian novelist, A.E. Van Vogt, to dub him The Right Man and identify his character arc.

Researching male aggression for The Violent Man, a thriller he planned to write, Van Vogt noted a pattern in certain highly dominant men: a boy whose father is detached, missing, or overly strict, and a mother who becomes the boy’s ally-antagonist, a role women will play throughout his life. A passive, submissive woman completes him, but The Right Man’s downfall is his wife. If she challenges or crosses him, he withdraws in smoldering rage and then erupts into violence. Paradoxically, if she leaves him, he must die.

In A Criminal History of Mankind, British author Colin Wilson picked up and expanded on Van Vogt’s work. Connecting the supremely rational Right Man to the apparently irrational decision to murder his wife, Wilson notes that a decision to succumb to rage can be a conscious choice. He writes, “[The Right Man] feels justified in exploding, like an angry god.” Because he feels no shame or guilt, afterwards it’s as if nothing happened. But The Right Man is nothing without The Right Woman. In Betty, Duane thought he’d found her.

Svelte and gorgeous, Betty was the only blonde out of eight girls on a wheat farm in northwestern Kansas where she and Duane grew up. Duane was attracted to Betty’s physical perfection, but she had bipolar disorder. After her funeral, he railed against the opportunities her illness cost him and claimed she’d tricked him into conceiving their sons.

When the murder charge was dropped, Duane started dating a former neighbor. Darkhaired, dowdy and with heavy glasses, Barb was Betty’s physical opposite. She was also married to a colleague of Duane’s at Martin Marietta. Six months later Barb divorced her husband and become Duane’s new Right Woman. Thirty years later, by the time the cold case rolled around, Barb was a slim, stylish blonde.

The cold case traveled the courts. It appeared Duane might walk, but Van Vogt had nailed his arc. Barb suffered a stroke and went into rehab. Through illness, Betty had deserted him; now Barb was abandoning him too. Who was he, without their adoring reflections staring back?

Shortly before the fortieth anniversary of Betty’s murder, The Right Man raised a shotgun to his head and fired. The note he left didn’t even mention her.

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