Love Her to Death
By John Glatt

The crime:

Darren Mack was the wealthy owner of a Reno, Nevada pawn shop who stabbed his second wife, Charla, to death. They had been going through an acrimonious divorce, the terms of which were just being finalized. Angry at the settlement, Mack also shot the judge, Chuck Weller, who had presided over it. Weller was injured but recovered. Mack then fled to Mexico, but soon gave himself up. At trial, after much legal dancing around, he pled guilty and was sentenced to life.

The book:

This is a St. Martin’s Crime title, and I don’t want to knock them because I find them to be in general both highly readable and trustworthy, but they can also be pulpy and scattershot. We could start with the title here, which is just a catchy headline that doesn’t capture anything of the nature of the relationship between Darren and Charla. Darren was a full-blown narcissist who only loved himself, and he killed Charla out of rage at having to pay her a million-dollar divorce settlement. And even cornier is the broken string of pearls on the cover. What does that have to do with anything? Chandra wasn’t wearing pearls when she was killed; it was 9 in the morning and she was dropping her daughter off. And of course there’s a bubble promising “8 pages of chilling photos.” None of the photos are chilling, and they are mostly just tiny screen grabs from television coverage of the trial, poorly reproduced.

There are also quite a few typos, some of which led to real confusion. Like saying “employers” where “employees” is clearly meant, or an incidental victim describing herself as being “in the wrong place at the right time.” I suppose that might have been what she really said, but if so then she was confused.

That said, the writing is lively and the chapters short, which helps when dealing with what was a pretty standard, however tragic, case of domestic violence that only came to national attention because of Mack’s attempt at killing the judge and his subsequent run into Mexico. But it was never much of an “international manhunt,” and the media attention at Mack’s trial (Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, etc.) was wasted on what was an open-and-shut case that ended up with a plea deal. Nevertheless, the trial takes over the latter part of Love Her to Death, filling over 100 pages at the end of a 400-page book. There’s too much detail and quoting of transcripts here, especially with regard to arcane procedural matters that were of no consequence. But this is a trap many true crime authors have trouble avoiding.

A final point I’ll mention, and one that is of more substance, has to do with the difficulty I had in figuring out the actual timeline of the murder, and how it fit with the evidence. Breaking the fatal events down: Mack killed Charla in his garage, then shut the garage door, went into his house, and showered and changed his clothes, as it had been a very bloody business. He also dressed a wound he’d received on his hand. He then went back out and drove Charla’s car into the garage (she’d left it parked on the street in front of the house), while somehow leaving the inside of her car splattered in blood, both Charla’s and his own. Where did this blood come from? Also, there was a man in the house taking care of Mack’s daughter who left in a hurry when he saw Mack first come back inside after he’d killed Charla. But this same man says that when he left the house Charla’s car was already in the garage and the garage door closed. I’m sure somehow this all makes sense but I couldn’t get it straight.

I’ve said this was in many ways an unexceptional crime story but for Mack’s sniping at the judge. But if you wanted to find some deeper meaning in it I’d focus on his adopting the banner of the men’s rights movement. There are some legitimate concerns that this addresses, but Mack made a very poor poster boy for the cause, being the sort of whiny victim that fit into the predominant grievance culture of the time. Just listen to him inveighing against the injustice of the court system on a Web TV show (what we’d call a podcast now) just before killing Charla:

“For me, this is probably what people felt in Nazi Germany, where things started to slide very subtly, and then all of a sudden you find yourself being whisked away to concentration camps. That is the family court system, [and] my experience of it under Judge Weller reminds me much more about what I studied in school about Nazi Germany.”

In the years to come we’d hear a lot more of such nonsense, as every time things didn’t go our way we would blame fascists or Nazis, with every exercise of the rule of law bringing us one step closer to the gulag. The shamelessness of this posturing would be underlined by Mack in the three-hour (!) personal statement he made at his sentencing hearing. “The thing a lot of people don’t recognize,” he would tell the court, is that “I lost a wife too.”

The lack of self-awareness here is next level. His original defence was going to be something along the lines of temporary insanity, which was such a longshot even his attorneys had little confidence in it. The only diagnosis I came away with was that he was a narcissistic sex addict, but that doesn’t let you beat a murder charge. The only thing it leads you to is more of the same sort of behaviour that got Mack into all his troubles in the first place: blaming everyone else for mistakes that he made. We see this thinking everywhere today, and even the legal system can’t always effect a cure.

Noted in passing:

Mack was a narcissist of truly impressive proportions. I mean, he had both a personal assistant and a life coach, though I can’t see where any of them had much to do. He was also an amateur bodybuilder and at one point came in fifth place in a Mr. Reno competition. I wouldn’t have thought this too impressive a finish, but I guess it was Mack’s Mr. Olympia because he celebrated by commissioning “a life-size photo portrait of himself flexing his muscles, which he placed on the wall directly above the urinal of his master bedroom.”

I know what you’re thinking. It’s weird. I mean, a life-size photo? Mack was 5’11”. The photo must have taken up the whole wall. When the police came to search his house they found it notable.

“It was right above his toilet,” Detective Chalmers said, “so literally as he’s peeing in the morning he can look at himself in his Speedos, flexing. That was one of the first indications to me that this person is obviously very egotistical.”

What took me aback almost as much though was that he had a urinal in his master bedroom. I’ve only seen urinals, which are a fixture for standing urination only, in public restrooms. I’ve never seen or heard of one in a private home. But then the detective later calls it a toilet so maybe this was just another case of sloppy editing and Glatt meant to say toilet the first time. The Mr. Reno competition is also later referred to as Mr. Nevada so it’s hard to tell which is right.

In any event, it’s very strange but fits with my own observation that the homes of rich people are almost always decorated in tacky and tasteless ways. And on the subject of the homes of rich people, the McMansion Darren and Charla lived in together was valued at around $1.5 million and had monthly mortgage payments of $8,300! Whew!

Takeaways:

Mack did do some rudimentary planning, even making up a rather damning “to do” list before killing Charla that euphemised her murder as “END PROBLEM.” In a moment of curious detachment he even initialed a change made to the list, as though altering a legal document. He also staked out the judge’s office and pre-selected the best place to set up his sniper station, while buying a plane ticket to Mexico in advance (he’d end up driving) and filling a suitcase with $40,000 in cash to effect his escape.

But after that his planning hit a wall. A pro would have known how to disappear. Mack just ran to one of his favourite swinger resorts and tried to get laid. And how long was that $40,000 going to last anyway? He didn’t even know how to speak Spanish. At least the gormless teens in Let’s Kill Mom tried to escape to Canada.

You often hear it said of such people that they “wanted to get caught.” I don’t think that’s the case. It’s just that not everyone capable of planning a murder can really imagine being a killer, and all the work that it involves.

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