Edwards' "other woman" revives memories of a gruesome scandal

On Sunday, as I was sitting in my summer cabin in Vermont, completely absorbed in a New York Times story about John Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter, I began reading a paragraph whose message shot through me like a sudden bolt of electrical current. The story centered on Ms. Hunter's refusal to take a DNA test to determine the paternity of her 5-month-old daughter, but that was not what startled me. It was this: "Ms. Hunter was born in Fort Lauderdale. Fla., in 1964 as Lisa Druck and moved to New York City in her 20s, becoming part of a Manhattan social scene that included the writer Jay McInerney …"

Here, I jumped up and blurted loudly to my wife, Judy: "Good God! John Edwards was having sex with the daughter of the guy who taught Tommy Burns how to kill horses by electrocuting them!"

That single line in the newspaper brought back vivid memories of one of the most fascinating stories I ever worked on, a tale that led me to trooping through show-horse barns, talking sotto voce to lawyers and FBI agents, going out of my way to meet sources, including Burns, in various hidden caves, coves and coffee booths.

Indeed, in 1992, back in the days when I was an investigative reporter for Sports Illustrated, I spent weeks digging into reports that slowly evolved into one of the biggest, most gruesome stories in sports, a scandalous tale about a large group of rich and prominent horse owners -- millionaires, many of them -- who were then being pursued by federal and state law enforcement officials for conspiring to kill high-priced show horses to collect on their life insurance premiums. The story, called "Blood Money," centered on the career of Tommy "The Sandman" Burns, an otherwise cherubic 30-year-old drifter who had spent the last 10 years of his life traveling from barns to stables to horse shows and killing one expensive show horse after another.


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http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=munson_lester&id=3533725

Disgusting disregard for life.

Nevermind. My mistake.

In Story Of My Life, the main character, Alison Poole, based by McInerney on the Lisa Druck he knew, is dissipated and depressed and leading her burned-out life of too much sex, drugs and partying in New York because she's emotionally scarred because HER FATHER KILLED HER FAVORITE HORSE FOR THE INSURANCE MONEY.

Oh boy.