Winners & Losers
Life was tough before Mack Metcalf and Virginia Merida won a $65.4 million Powerball jackpot. Then it got even tougher.
By Ian Aldrich
Something wasn’t right.
For years, Mary Jo Watkins had been greeted each morning with the sight of her neighbor’s black Lab and Scottish terrier romping across the 200 yard of lawn that separated her ranch house, on a hillside above Kentucky Route 8 in Cold Spring, from her neighbor’s residence farther up the hill, a sprawling half-million-dollar geodesic dome home that looks out over the Ohio River. But in late November 2005, the dogs stopped appearing. They belonged to Virginia Merida, a petite, 51-year-old blonde who went by the name of “Ginny.” Merida was shy but had a sweet disposition. “She never talked about any friends,” says Watkins, who formed a brief bond with Merida after she purchased her home in October 2000. “She struck me as a real loner.”
It’s certainly not for lack of an interesting story to tell. The eldest child of Dempsey Merida, a convicted drug dealer, she had known hard times for much of her adult life, stringing together a series of menial factory jobs to raise her son and deal with an on-again, off-again drug problem. That is, until July 22, 2000, when her estranged husband, Mack Metcalf, a 42-year-old Florence man who eked out a living as a third-shift forklift operator, found himself the sole winner of a $65.4 million Powerball jackpot. After splitting the winnings, the couple set about doing what most people who suddenly come into a lot of money do: quitting their jobs, buying lavish houses and new cars, and embarking on a future that seemed to promise an end to the struggles each had endured. But it wasn’t quite that simple.
By the fall of 2005, Metcalf had passed away and Watkins had not seen her neighbor in two years. That was not out of character for Merida. However, her son, who regularly dropped by, hadn’t heard from her in a week. After several unsuccessful attempts to reach his mother by phone, Jason, who is 32 and lives nearby in Wilder, stopped by to check on her around 8 p.m. on November 23.
It was Thanksgiving eve; the night sky was clear and unseasonably cold. Two things immediately struck Jason as odd: his mother’s car was pulled as far as possible to the end of the driveway, and her Scottish terrier was running loose in the yard. When he entered the house he discovered the black Lab, several piles of dog feces on the white carpeting, and a rancid, overpowering smell. The scene he encountered was so horrifying, it took all he had to run out of the house and call 911.
When the police arrived, they found Merida dressed in a red sweatsuit and resting on her right side on her bed, her legs partially covered by a quilt; a cordless phone, TV remote, and magazine lay next to her. Her state of decomposition was so
severe that the first responding officer, a Campbell County
patrolman who’d only been on the job a month, mistakenly
reported that she’d suffered a gunshot wound to the face. (The coroner quickly corrected the report and police soon ruled there had been no foul play; however, they estimated Merida had been dead for at least a week.) It was a gruesome sight even for veteran emergency officials. In order to work, Campbell County police and medical personnel, who remained on the scene for four hours, had to coat their masks with Vicks VapoRub.
In the sink of the master bath, detectives found a white towel with spots of dried blood on it, which they suspect came from a small cut found on Merida’s forehead. From her nightstand, the coroner retrieved three containers and a plastic sandwich bag containing prescription pills. Underneath Merida’s body, they uncovered a single sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" paper. If there was a note written on it, the body’s advanced decomposition had made it illegible.
The rest of the house was in a state of disarray. Unopened boxes from the Home Shopping Network were stacked all over the place, the walls were grimy, dirty dishes were piled in the kitchen, and the carpets appeared to have not been cleaned in months. Campbell County Police Lieutenant David Fickenscher chooses his words carefully when describing what he saw that night at Virginia Merida’s home. “It looked,” he says, “like her life was quite dysfunctional.”
TALES OF POST-LOTTERY self-destruction are, of course,nothing new. As our national appetite for the gameshas grown, so has our obsession with the stories oflottery winners whose lives have gone awry. Fasci-nation certainly accompanied the downfall of Mack and Ginny. Following Merida’s death, local and national newspapers, from the Kentucky Post to the Lexington Herald Leader to The New York Times, pored over any detail they could get on the couple’s demise, serving up stories with headlines like “Instant Millions Can’t Halt Winners’ Grim Slide.” Not surprisingly, this media frenzy angered friends and relatives. When contacted for this story, many—including Merida’s son, mother, and her siblings—refused to talk on the record.
“What’s so interesting?” said one agitated Merida family member, who refused to be identified. “He was an alcoholic, she was a dopey. There you go.”
There’s more to it than that. The money may have alleviated the financial strains that once dominated Mack and Ginny’s lives, but it did nothing to wall them off from their pasts. If anything, it exaggerated the problems they already had. Their personal troubles certainly ran deep. For Metcalf the sudden jolt of wealth was particularly life-altering. Born New Year’s Day 1958, he was the youngest of five children whose father drove a coal truck and later worked in a paper bag manufacturing plant in Covington. From an early age, Mack proved to be a defiant soul. When he was 13, he and a friend secretly hitchhiked to Florida for a few days in the sun; later he made up his mind that he didn’t care about getting a high school diploma and quit. “He just wanted to go his own way,” says one close family member. “He didn’t want to go to school, so he didn’t. He was pretty independent.”
At first glance, Mack didn’t intimidate. He was short with a wiry build and usually some form of facial hair. On his left forearm were a couple of tattoos—one that said “Mom,” another a simple cross—that a friend scratched into his skin when he was 14. He looked rough, and older than he actually was, which matched up well with his rowdy reputation. “He was wild,” says one old friend. “He run the roads all the time. Broke into people’s houses. Stayed drunk. Stole cars.” He also liked to gamble with the little money he had, traveling down to Corbin, Kentucky, a small community on the Tennessee border, to see buddies and play poker. “He was quite a good player,” remembers one friend. “And he probably would have won more if he didn’t drink so much.”
Life for Merida followed a different course. She too was born in Northern Kentucky, but by the time she was 10 her family had moved to Houston, Texas, where her father, Dempsey, an imposing former Marine who had fought in Korea, became a successful businessman. On paper, the elder Merida, who had thick white hair, ran a chain of small transmission shops. But fixing cars was not how he fed his family.
By 1980, Dempsey, who also went by the aliases Frank Bacon and “Big Un,” headed up the Dempsey Merida Organization, a drug trafficking outfit that dealt in large quantities of cocaine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, heroin, and marijuana. With its own fleet of aircraft and manufacturing labs, its reach extended across Texas and into parts of the Southeast and Southwest, as well as Mexico, Belize, and Panama. But in April 1983, a team of Drug Enforcement Agents stormed Dempsey’s Houston home and arrested him and his son, David. That autumn, after an eight-week trial, a San Antonio jury found Dempsey guilty on 21 counts and handed him a 30-year sentence in federal prison.
After the trial, Ginny, her mother JoAnn, and various younger siblings moved back to Northern Kentucky, where both Dempsey and JoAnn had family roots that went back nearly 200 years. By 1986, Ginny, a single mother with a 13-year-old son, was living with her mother in Bellevue and working the third shift at Hopple Plastics in Florence—where she met a brash coworker named Mack Metcalf.
It’s unclear when the two began seeing one another, but by 1987, with Metcalf freshly divorced from his first wife, they were married, kicking off what would be an often contentious relationship that would see them repeatedly break up and get back together. On her own or with Metcalf, Merida struggled to make ends meet, at one point getting evicted from a Bellevue apartment that she and her mother rented from a family friend named Carolyn Keckeley. But by early 2000, she’d settled into a job at Indy Honeycomb, an aircraft supply manufacturer specializing in engine seals, filters, and structural components, where she made about $9 an hour cutting strips of corrugated metal.
“She was articulate, smart, always reading, but you got the impression that she just wanted to be left alone,” remembers Indy Honeycomb owner Steve Barnett. “We would talk and when she was done, she’d just smile and not say anything more.”
WHO DO YOU want to start?” asks the pretty young woman with big green eyes and long brown hair. “Mom usually goes first, then I come in.”
It’s a Friday evening in late April and I’m sitting at a small wooden kitchen table in the house that Mack Metcalf’s 22-year-old daughter, Amanda, shares with her mother, Marilyn Collins; her half brother, Eric Starks; and her mom’s fiancé, Gaylain McFarland. It’s a comfortable, well-kept ranch house with a big backyard and a Coca-Cola rocking chair on the front porch. A clock with the face of Jesus hangs in the kitchen, and the refrigerator is covered with nearly 200 magnets, some with sayings like, “If we are what we eat, then I’m fast, easy, and cheap.”
There’s an easiness in the mother-daughter dynamic, a camaraderie that, in between the drags they take on their Marlboros, could almost be classified as girly. They’re accustomed to talking to reporters. As we start, Collins produces two manila envelopes containing past newspaper stories and a list of names and phone numbers of journalists and photographers they’ve dealt with. “I keep everything because you never know when somebody is going to say [who] they’re not,” she says, examining my driver’s license.
Short and round, with oval-shaped glasses that frame her face, Collins, who goes by the nickname Tiny, has for the last year relied on the help of her daughter as she recovers from a hip replacement. “The doctors say I’ve got the bones of an 80-year-old,” she says.
Collins is 39 now but was just 13, a full 10 years younger than Metcalf, when the two began dating. The sister of Mack’s best friend, she shared her boyfriend’s passion for partying and listening to heavy metal. By the winter of 1984, Mack, who had found steady work at Hopple Plastics, and the 17-year-old Collins, a junior at Ludlow High School, were a regular item. They were also about to become parents. “He was excited,” she recalls. “He said, ‘We need to get married.’ I just knew we were going to be together forever.”
It didn’t turn out that way. Amanda was born in October 1984 and, as Collins puts it, “that’s when the fun began.” After attending the birth of his daughter, Mack went out to celebrate and didn’t return for three days. For the remainder of their short marriage this was his modus operandi. He’d disappear for weeks at a time, leaving his wife and child with no money. Eventually Collins had to move in with relatives in Ft. Wright so she could take a night-shift job at White Castle. In December 1985, Collins ended the marriage. “I don’t think Mack and I would have ever gotten divorced if I hadn’t signed those papers,” she says. “I don’t know if he would have made the effort.”
Under the agreement, Metcalf was ordered to pay $50 a week in child support. He rarely did. Instead, he bounced from one living situation to another: an apartment in Covington that he was evicted from, a house in Independence, an old school bus in Erlanger. Every few years he’d resurface, spend several weekends with his daughter, then disappear again. And yet, it didn’t faze Amanda. “There was never any, ‘Why haven’t you called?’” she says. “We just picked up where we left off. I never wanted it to be uncomfortable.”
So it went until about 10 o’clock one morning in late July 2000, when Collins, who had by now moved to Corbin and was working part-time at a local barbecue joint for $5.15 an hour, got a call from her ex-husband. He wanted to know how much child support he owed her. “You owe me about 30 grand!” she yelled. “And when you get off your drunken ass to give me my money, I’ll take it!”
No problem, Mack said. Then he explained why: he’d just won the Powerball. Trembling, Collins hung up the phone, hopped in her sister’s beat up Chevette, and headed for the dumpy two-bedroom trailer she and Amanda were living in at the time. She was so excited that when she got there, she bounded out of the car while it
was still running. As she ran up to the trailer, the Chevette rolled across the yard, narrowly missing several trees before coming to a stop. “We’re never going to have to worry about money again!” she hollered out, embracing her daughter. “Your dad’s going to take care of you.”
After the Kentucky Lottery wired the winnings into Metcalf’s checking account, he trekked to Corbin to see his daughter. She was waiting for her school bus one morning when a sparkling new white Chevy Tahoe pulled up next to her and out popped her father, dressed in his new leisure uniform—cowboy hat, jeans, T-shirt, and sunglasses. With her mom’s blessing, Amanda spent the afternoon with her dad in Cincinnati. She got $500 for a shopping spree and then they went out to lunch—“to McDonalds,” she says, laughing. She vividly recalls tagging along with her dad to the bank, where executives heaped praise on him and handed her free T-shirts, pencils, and pop. More than that, though, she remembers how much her father smiled and laughed—something she’d rarely seen him do before—as he talked about the future, which included moving to Corbin to be closer to her.
“He was really, really happy,” she says. “We were living everybody’s dream. I was going to see my dad all the time. This was really going to change things for the better.”
WORD OF METCALF’S Powerball jackpot didn’t reach Merida right away. Whether it was their lack of money or sheer laziness, legally the two were still married. But the law was about the only thing that made their relationship legitimate. They now lived in different towns, and Mack had recently moved in with a longtime girlfriend. Still, within days of discovering he was a millionaire, Mack called Ginny to let her know. She refused to come to the phone. It took a conversation between Carolyn Keckeley and Merida’s mother to get her to take his call. “She better talk to Mack because he’s won the Powerball,” Keckeley informed JoAnn.
When she finally did talk to him, Mack told her about how he’d bought a $3 Powerball ticket with a cash option at a Pilot Travel Center along I-75 in Walton and that when he checked the paper during a break at work, he noticed that the numbers matched. (“I clocked out right then and I haven’t been back since,” he later told lottery officials.)
The couple quickly agreed to split the money 60–40. Opting to take the winnings in a lump sum, rather than receive the entire amount over 20 years, reduced the jackpot from $65.4 million to $32 million. After taxes were subtracted, that left Merida with $9.2 million and Metcalf with $13.9 million. The couple shied away from publicity, instead issuing a few short statements through the Kentucky Lottery about their win. Mack had plans to move to Australia and buy a home on the beach; Merida simply expressed shock over what had happened. “I still am having trouble believing this is real,” she said. A little over a year later, they divorced, quietly.
Merida may have been stunned, but not unkind. One of the first things she did was return to Keckeley’s home and repay the $1,000 in rent she owed. She also gave $5,000 to a former coworker to help him get a better car. Next, she set out in search of a house, turning to Cathy Wecker, a real estate agent and a family acquaintance, for help. Merida instructed Wecker that there was no price limit and that she desired a little land and lots of privacy. She found it immediately. The first place Wecker took her to see was a 4,775-square-foot geodesic house that sat on nearly eight acres high above Route 8 with views of the Ohio River and Riverbend Music Center. The two-dome home featured high ceilings, seven sliding glass doors, and a large wrap-around deck. On October 6, 2000, Merida paid $537,500 for it and moved in with her mother.
“You could tell she’d had a pretty rough life,” Wecker says. “But she was just so appreciative of things. I thought, this is great.”
AS MERIDA SEARCHED for a new house, Metcalf’s Australia plans were shelved. His legal problems made sure of that. Just two days after the couple claimed their prize at the Kentucky Lottery headquarters in Louisville, a caseworker from the Kenton County Attorney’s office recognized Metcalf during a televised news story. At issue: his $31,494 in unpaid child support. To secure his winnings, Metcalf was ordered to put up the money, plus place an additional $885,000 into escrow for future payments.
There were other problems, too. In June, the soon-to-be millionaire had been arrested for driving under the influence, leaving the scene of an accident, and not having a license, after striking a vehicle several times with his 1995 Nissan sedan outside a Florence sports bar. On August 7, the day he received his money from the lottery, Metcalf, in a drunken stupor, agreed to give $500,000 to an ex-girlfriend, Deborah Hodge. That night, he got into an altercation with two acquaintances of Hodge’s outside another Florence bar and was hauled away in handcuffs by police on public drunkenness charges. On August 9, he failed to show up at Boone County District Court for a hearing on the June incident and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Two days later, he turned himself in, plead guilty to the DUI charges, and spent a weekend in jail.
None of this kept him from spending his new money, though. That summer, he relocated to Corbin and purchased a five-bedroom houseboat on Laurel Lake, where he and a posse of friends partied well into the fall. It was hard to mistake their presence as they shot off guns and zipped around the lake on new black Jet Skis. When his home became too small for the crowds, Metcalf purchased a second, three-bedroom houseboat that was docked nearby.
By October Metcalf decided he needed a house. He had befriended Dale Greer, a successful local trucking company owner from whom he’d bought his first houseboat. When he saw Greer’s home in north Corbin, a large Colonial complete with a greenhouse and an indoor pool, he was eager to buy the property. But it wasn’t for sale. Unwilling to take no for an answer, Mack nagged Greer for several weeks, upping the offer until his friend couldn’t refuse. The deal: $450,000 for the home and practically everything in it. “Just grab your personal [effects], clothes, [and] pictures,” he told Greer.
He lived in the Greer house for just a few months before setting his sights on Fox Run Farm, a four-bedroom neo-Colonial estate with two wings that was the home of Corbin attorney Robert Hammons. Set on 43 acres of woodlands and white-fenced pasture that tumbled down to Laurel Lake, the property perfectly suited Metcalf’s wannabe cowboy lifestyle. Hammons, who had built the home in the early ’80s, first met Metcalf in 2001 when the two discovered they had a mutual interest in Indian artifacts. Hammons had converted a part of his house into what he called the “Wigwam Room,” featuring a collection of rugs, spears, and arrowheads, and he invited Metcalf over to see it. Mack viewed the collection, took a tour of the property, and promptly asked the owner what he would take for it. Like Greer, Hammons demurred, but eventually the two struck a price: $1.25 million, a sum that included much of the furniture, the contents of the Wigwam Room, a herd of cattle, and several horses.
Fox Run quickly became a running party scene for Metcalf and his ever-expanding crew. The group included a trim, dark-haired Texan named Betty Holmes, whom Metcalf met soon after moving into his new house. A single mother of three, Betty had been divorced twice and was between jobs. In Metcalf she found a man who shared her love for the outdoors, partying, and a deep affection for T-shirts and jeans. “It was like BAM!” she says. “I had more in common with Mack than with any guy I’d ever been with.” On their second day together, Betty moved in with him.
She wasn’t the only one. Hordes of people streamed through Metcalf’s home to drink his booze, drive his four-wheelers, sleep in his beds, and shoot his guns off at all hours of the night, much to the chagrin of his new neighbors. “The biggest problem I had with Mack,” says one man who lived down the road, “is that his nighttime was his daytime.”
Often, the crowds, which sometimes numbered as many as 75, left no room for Betty and Mack to sleep. For the first six months of their relationship, the couple slept at the farm only once. “We’d open up [our bedroom] and there’d be cousins on the bed and kids on the floor,” she says. “There were people sleeping on the dining room table. It was total chaos.”
THE MORE MACK’S life seemed to slip out of his own control, the more unhappy he became. Much of his frustration lay with his friends’ constant pleas for money and his unwillingness (or inability) to turn them down. He constructed an iron gate at the head of his driveway to stanch the flow of visitors, but they still came, writing their requests on Styrofoam cups and staking them to the poles. Amanda remembers her father showing her a shoebox he kept under his bed filled with IOUs, some of which were for six figures. “He couldn’t say no,” she says. “People would just come, give out their sad stories, and he’d help them.”
Of course, he was spending money on himself, too. Hundreds of thousands of dollars hemorrhaged from his checkbook for dogs, campers, pontoon boats, and dump trucks. His additions to the Wigwam Room included a python and two tarantulas. He bought more cattle, more horses, and more vehicles. He eventually acquired more than 30 cars, including six Chevy Tahoes and five Corvettes. On weekends he’d park the collection on his front lawn for neighbors to admire.
Still, his attachment to his purchases was fleeting. In one incident Metcalf returned home from a short trip to find that someone had chained his gate shut. Unable to pop the lock, he totalled his Tahoe trying to blast through. No problem; he just ordered a new one the next day. “I told him he was going to piss all his money away,” says a friend. “He said, ‘I got three dollars invested in it and that’s all I need.’ He didn’t care.”
Less than two years after winning the Powerball, Metcalf yearned for his old life as a forklift operator. “The only problem I had then was waking up in the morning,” he told Betty. As his depression grew, he stepped up his drinking, trading beer for Jim Beam. According to Betty, there were stretches where he’d consume three fifths of whiskey a day. Mack’s excessive consumption only fueled an increasing paranoia that people were trying to steal money from him. To protect himself, he roamed around town with a small army of bodyguards, all of whom carried loaded weapons (including their employer). “All those Tahoes following him around, you’d think it was the President,” says his friend, Dale Greer.
Soon, Metcalf’s health began to fail. “He looked like this dried up fella, shriveled up and frail,” remembers one Corbin court clerk. He was only 45 years old. In early April 2003, Betty rushed him to the hospital after he complained of severe stomach pains and hallucinations. He was kept there for three weeks, as doctors sedated him, put him on a respirator, and detoxified his body. After he was discharged, he and Betty slipped off to nearby Williamsburg to get married. His turn-around didn’t last long. By the fall, Metcalf was drinking hard, addicted to painkillers, and hallucinating more.
According to Betty, Mack became convinced that she was leaving a series of notes directing people to hurt him, and one night that November, at 2:45 a.m., he woke her up and announced he was going to kill her. She leapt out of bed and sprinted out of the bedroom just as Mack raised his .44 caliber Smith & Wesson and fired it at the door. The bullet went through the wall, grazed a light fixture, and entered a bedroom on the other side of the hallway, not far from where Betty’s 10-year-old son, A.J., was sleeping. Metcalf was arrested, charged with two counts of endangerment, and released on $15,000 bail.
It was his final encounter with the law. Early on the morning of December 2, 2003, Betty, who’d returned to take care of her husband, went upstairs to check on him. He’d been experiencing more stomach pain but was refusing to go the hospital. When she turned on the light, she could see that he wasn’t breathing. Frantically, she called 911, taking instructions over the phone on how to perform CPR. For a brief second it worked.
“He came back, took a deep breath, and looked up at me like he was going to kill me—[as if to say], ‘Don’t do this,’” she recalls. “And then his eyes just glazed over again.” When he died, Metcalf had $26,344.30 left in the bank.
VIRGINIA MERIDA’S LIFE After the lottery was a much more tame affair. She didn’t buy expensive cars, throw wild parties, or live ostentatiously. Among the communities of Cold Spring and Silver Grove, she was virtually invisible. At the BP station just down the road, her death was the talk of morning coffee after it happened, even though nobody could recall meeting her. When I told the store manager that Merida had had a tough life, she said, “You’re describing basically everyone who comes in here.”
At an electrical contractor’s shop and a tavern a few miles down the road, the reactions were much the same: Virginia who? But there was one place Merida showed her face regularly: the Duck Creek Country Club, a friendly neighborhood bar less than a mile from her house. Often on Thursday nights, Merida could be found at the bar enjoying some chicken wings, a glass of white wine, and the live music. “She was pleasant and always in a good mood,” says one of the bar’s co-owners, John Caudill. “But I don’t remember her interacting too much with others.”
While she may have had a testy relationship with Mack, Marilyn Collins, Metcalf’s first wife, says the two women got along well. This “understanding of our boundaries” as Collins describes it, included Merida’s fondness for Amanda. It wasn’t out of the ordinary, even when Mack and Ginny weren’t together, for Collins to get a call from Merida, asking if she could take Amanda out for ice cream or a trip to the park. “She was really good to me,” Amanda says. “She fed me, took care of me, even when dad wasn’t around.”
When it came to her immediate family, Merida was proud. She was known to tell acquaintances about how well her son had done in high school and talked frequently about wanting to take care of any needs her nieces and nephews may have. She also had a deep attachment to her father. After 20 years in prison, federal authorities granted Dempsey Merida his release in 2003, but by then he was suffering from severe heart problems and was eventually diagnosed with lung cancer. Dempsey didn’t let on how sick he was when he got out. Instead, he came back to Kentucky to live with his wife and daughter in the house on Route 8, creating what one friend describes as “the grand homecoming” where “everyone was going to be back together again.”
It was short-lived. About a year later, Dempsey was dead of cancer. Ginny was stunned. “What led to her downfall was not that she fundamentally changed—family was still her number one priority. But when her father died, she was devastated,” a friend says. “She didn’t know it was coming.”
Seemingly unable to cope with her father’s death, her life began to unravel. She dropped out of contact, her mother moved out, and in January 2005, police rushed to her home when her boyfriend overdosed on cocaine. Drugs also seemed to be a part of her life. According to police, her son Jason told them she had once been a heroin user and that he believed she had become addicted to Xanax, an antidepressant, before her death. It was not unusual, he told police, for his mother to “stay up for days on end and finally become exhausted enough to sleep.” (Pathologists were not able to complete a full toxicological exam after Merida’s body was discovered due to its deteriorated state, but a non-lethal amount of Valium was detected in her system.)
This taxing lifestyle was matched by continued family strains. In May 2005, Merida had an argument with her brother, David, in which she alleged he tried to kill her. The two siblings soon agreed to a mutual restraining order. Her attorney in the case, Michael Bouldin, recalls how gaunt she looked, giving him the impression there were drugs involved. “Whether they were prescription painkillers or otherwise,” he says, “she did not look healthy.”
Around this same time, Merida went on an uncharacteristic shopping spree via the Home Shopping Network. For about a month straight, packages, sometimes as many as 20 a day, were delivered to her home by her postal carrier, Philip Eilers. Merida was often still dressed in her bathrobe when she answered the door—“like she had just woken up or something” Eilers says—and would joylessly direct him to stack the boxes inside. When he’d come back the next day to deliver a new batch, they’d still be sitting there. “She didn’t even take them out of the box,” he says.
Merida’s death shocked her old family friend Carolyn Keckeley, who remembered her former tenant as “happy-go-lucky.” A little lazy? Perhaps. But issues with drugs? That surprised her. “She just went ape, I guess,” Keckeley says. “They say that these people who win all this money, they don’t know what to do with it and they go ape.”
THESE DAYS, THE woods and lawn are overgrown and Merida’s giant domed house, with its wide, dark-stained deck, looks like an abandoned ship.
Part of the neglect has to do with the fact that Merida’s estate has yet to be settled. Unlike her ex, Merida didn’t leave a will. But she didn’t spend all of her money, either. According to court documents, in addition to her home in Cold Spring and a second investment property in Price Hill (a duplex estimated to be worth $75,000), she had $3.2 million left—all of which will probably go to her son.
The Metcalf estate is another matter. Owing to a protracted legal battle between Betty and Mack’s sister, Vickie Tanner of Warsaw, Kentucky, whom he had named the executrix of his will, the money from his properties has yet to be distributed. His biggest asset, Fox Run Farm, was sold in June 2004 to a local boat dealer, who paid $657,500 for the property and subsequently dumped another $75,000 or so into fixing it up. Walls were painted, wood floors renovated and replaced, the iron gate was taken down, and the walls upstairs, which still had the holes from the time Mack tried to shoot Betty, were repaired. Under the terms of an agreement still being hammered out by their lawyers, Betty is trying to collect a third of all money from real estate assets and half of the money from the sale of the rest of the estate. The remainder would go to Tanner.
Curiously, aside from a $500,000 trust that was invested in stocks, which she will collect when she turns 25, Amanda inherited few of her father’s belongings: one bandanna, three shirts, three pairs of jeans, and three old photographs, including a black-and-white shot of Mack as a boy that she keeps on her dresser. When she wants to remember him, though, she heads out to Highland Park cemetery in Williamsburg, where she had him buried. On his headstone are inscribed the words she believes are true: “Loving father and brother, finally at rest.”
Originally published in the January 2007 issue.