He was Obsessed with Reality TV and His Wife Tried to Kill Him Twice
Matty Kerr is co-creator with John Brancaccio of The Working Experience. He is also a filmmaker and published author. Listen to our podcast on iTunes and Spotify and visit our website: theworkingexperience.com for videos, merchandise and more. You can also find us on Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, and Twitter.
The following is a true story. Look for the full account in our upcoming book about The Working Experience.
Aetna Life Insurance Company. A bleak, gray warren of soullessness: gray cubicles, gray filing cabinets, off-white drop down ceilings, fluorescent lights and gray employees. Typical. Banal. However, beneath the surface of this dingy lake of unfulfilled dreams lie pools, deep and still pools of delusion and depravity. It is drawn from the crushing environment, the endlessness of the office existence, the pointlessness of it all. But they also get donuts when they have to work on Saturdays and pizza if it goes past noon.
A man named Griffin, was a huge fan of reality TV, obsessed one might say. He watched all of the shows and would come in to work and tell Matt and other coworkers, talking passionately about the drama and plots and the different characters…he just loved it. Survivor was his favorite, the gold standard. It was his life’s dream, he would tell people, to get on a reality TV show and he would send in audition videos to all of them. Survivor was his ultimate goal but he would be on any one that would take him. He really believed in the power of the shows to transform lives, which seems to be very common but also very disturbing. And rather delude, according to Matt. Griffin was a sort of nebbish little man, kind of pudgy, not athletic. Matt pictured his audition videos depicting him in a leotard doing some sort of floor routine with a long flowing ribbon on the end of a stick, like the gymnasts use.
Griffin, unsurprisingly, had a rather neurotic relationship with his wife, Barbara. The office was in Connecticut and he lived about fifty minutes away in Massachusetts. Every day, at 4:01 pm the phone on his desk would ring. If he was still at his desk, he would answer it and she would then proceed to berate him for not already being in his car and on his way home. The commute was long enough that one would think five minutes would be easily explained by traffic or whatever else might happen on his way home. If he was still at the office, why answer the phone at all? Just get up and leave. And why didn’t she call him on his cell or shoot him a text message? Well, it was all part of the dance. They each had to play their parts in the psychodrama.
However, the psychosis proved much more profound than mere phone calls.
Griffin and Barbara went on vacation to a lake in Texas and rented a houseboat to spend a week cruising on the water, which was all her idea. When Griffin returned to the office he was sporting a broken jaw, missing teeth, a fractured ocular bone with a massive black eye. His story was that he and Barbara were on the top deck of the houseboat and he had had too many drinks and toppled off into the lake. He had woken up in the water and swam back to the boat.
This all sounded very dubious his coworkers. Griffin barely drank at all. And how would someone get so injured by falling into a body of water? What had his wife been doing? When asked, Griffin said he thought he may have hit something in the water but it still didn’t add up. However, there turned out to be an answer to the mystery.
Some months later, Barbara was arrested by the FBI for trying to hire a hitman to kill Griffin. She had approached a friend of a friend who, because he had an Italian last name, she thought had ties to organized crime and would know someone who would murder for money. The man went to the police who in turn contacted the feds and a sting operation was set up in which Barbara was recorded offering an undercover agent money to do in her husband. Apparently, the houseboat incident had been Barbara’s first attempt to kill the man. The feds seized her computer and found her searches for knockout pills or roofies to slip into his drinks and then they speculated that she hit him with an oar or some other blunt object and knocked him off the boat. This theory was much more consistent with Griffin’s injuries. When that didn’t work, she went to Plan B.
Faced with the evidence, she pled guilty and received three to four years in prison. Griffin sued the Massachusetts’s Attorney General’s office because the sentence was so low. He argued that if the situation had been reversed he would have received a much stiffer penalty. Nothing came of the suit and when she was released Barbara sued for custody of their two children which she did not get because she is a convicted felon who had tried to kill their father, twice.
I am not saying that I would excuse Barbara for trying to kill Griffin, but if I had been on the jury, I would have been somewhat sympathetic to her motives. If my partner had become obsessed with reality TV and getting on a reality TV had become their goal in life, I would be sorely tempted to cave their head in with an axe. I guess the District Attorney saw it the same way, hence the light sentence.
