True Crime Campfire - Payback: The Murder of Ted Ammon, Pt 1

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

As much as most of us might try to live easy, conflict-free lives, sometimes you just can’t avoid an uncomfortable interaction. Maybe an unpleasant neighbor gets in your face about nothing at all, maybe someone behind a counter gives you all kinds of attitude, it’s more or less inevitable that sooner or later, someone will throw some grit into the smoothly turning gears of your life.  And most of us just deal with it and forget about it. Most of us don’t have actual “enemies,” but the main character in this week’s story made enemies like it was her full-time job. She would burn down years-long friendships over the smallest imagined slight, and if there were an actual, real betrayal—well, she’d burn down your whole life. Join us for part 1 of a story of explosive rage and revenge, set in one of the richest neighborhoods in the world. Sources:Almost Paradise by Kieran CrowleyFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. As much as most of us might try to live easy, conflict-free lives, sometimes you just can't avoid an uncomfortable interaction. Maybe an unpleasant, neighbor gets in your face about nothing at all, maybe somebody behind a counter gives you all kinds of attitude. It's more or less inevitable that sooner or later someone will throw some

grit into the smoothly turning gears of your life. And most of us just deal with it and forget about it. Most of us don't have actual enemies, but the main character in this week's story made enemies like it was her full-time job. She would burn down years-long friendships over the smallest imagined slight, and if there were an actual real betrayal, well, she'd burn down your whole life. This is Payback, the murder of Ted Ammon, part one. So, campers, for this one, we're in East Hampton, New York, a place of huge mansions and staggering wealth out on the far edge of

Long Island, Monday, October 22, 2001. The late afternoon's sun glinted off a helicopter as it raced from Manhattan toward East Hampton. Inside were Mark Angelson and Milton Masias, respectively an investment banker and a chauffeur. Both men had the same boss, multimillionaire Ted Ammon, and they were worried about him. Ted hadn't answered the door that morning when Milton drove out to Long Island to pick him up. He hadn't answered the phone all day. In fact, no one had heard from him at all since Saturday night. This wasn't like Ted at all, especially not with Mark Engelson, who was Ted's friend as well as a colleague. They talked every day.

When Ted hadn't picked up his twin children after school for a scheduled visitation, Mark knew something was seriously wrong. East Hampton is rich but tiny, and ten minutes after touching down at the airport, Mark and Milton were outside Ted's house on Middle Lane, a sprawling $10 million mansion. disguised from the front to look like an English country cottage. Ted's Porsche and Audi were parked in the driveway. The only sounds came from Ravens, calling in the trees. Mark knocked on one of the big garage doors. It swung in slightly. It was open.

He stuck his head in and called out for Ted, but there was no answer. They went inside, expecting nothing good. Milton took a pair of gloves out of his pocket, put one on his own hand and gave the other to Mark to wear. They moved cautiously through the house, calling Ted's name. They found him upstairs in the master bedroom. Ted Ammon lay naked on the sysel carpet beside the bed, in a pool of blood from terrible head wounds.

There was blood all over the walls, all over the sheets. Hands shaking, Mark pulled off his glove and took out his cell phone to call 911. Ted Ammon had been murdered, and immediately Mark, Milton, and everybody else who knew and cared about Ted thought they knew who was responsible. His soon-to-be ex-wife and world's most ironically named human, Genarosa. Genarosa Rand was born in 1956 in Long Beach, California. Her mom, Marie, was kind of a party girl, and she'd hooked up one night with an Italian sailor at a dance while she was on a break from her second.

husband. The sailor barely spoke in English, but they weren't really doing a lot of talking. He was gone within a week. Marie kissed him goodbye on the dock, and he gave her a snapshot of himself with an Italian mailing address written on the back. A few weeks later, it was obvious he'd given her more than just the photograph. Marie was pregnant, and she wrote again and again to the Italian address to let her sailor know. He never wrote back. When the little girl was born, Marie gave her the sailor's name, Generosa. Her family, embarrassed by the whole thing, usually just called her Joe or Jen. Generosa did not have a happy childhood. She was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of either a family member or a family friend, and Marie seemed more

interested in keeping up her party girl lifestyle than taking care of Generosa and her older sister Dolly. Marie, always flighty and given to fits of anger, started getting even stranger, and there was a reason for that. In 1965, Marie had discovered a lump in her breast. Her family had a history of cancer, and this scared her really badly, but the fear just made it less likely that she would seek help. She just didn't want to find out if she had cancer. Some people are like that. They just feel like, if I ignore it, maybe it'll go away. And the lump didn't hurt, after all. She just started going out more, dancing more, drinking more. A couple of years later, she found herself so weak she couldn't stand up. She could barely

breathe. She finally went to the doctor, but it was too late. The cancer had spread all through her body and her brain. For the last few months of her life, Generosa and Dolly watched their mother waste away to a hollow-cheeked shell of her old self. Her pain could only be handled by heavy doses of morphine that made her sleep most of the time. And when she was awake, she was increasingly weird and incoherent. A few weeks after she had emergency surgery to remove some of her brain, Marie was dead, and Jenna Rosa and Dolly went to live with her Uncle Al and his wife in a gated community in Orange County.

Not long after, the sisters were looking through family photos, and Dolly showed Generosa one of a handsome blonde sailor. She told Generosa this was her father that Generosa had been named after him. Generosa had always thought she and Dolly had the same father, a war veteran who had been institutionalized for most of her life.

The identity of her real biodad was a secret that apparently everybody knew except her. Which definitely wouldn't give someone a complex. I feel like we see this in a bunch of cases where somebody was adopted. Bundy is one big example.

Yeah, Ted Bundy. It's like just be honest with your kids, okay? That'll help you in the future. When Marie died, Generosa was only 10 years old and she had already had a complicated relationship with her mother. A child's reaction to grief often has a lot more to do with emotion than logic. To Generosa, her mother's death was an abandonment. Her mother's weird anger must have been about her.

the fact that she was born out of wedlock and her biological dad had left them. Young Generosa twisted her grief into a shape that she could deal with. She was glad her mother was dead. She'd tell people later that it was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Wow. It's probably not going to surprise you to hear that Generosa was kind of a troubled kid, prone to lying and explosive anger. Her aunt and uncle were reasonably well off,

but they had a small house and their own kids, and Generosa clashed with everybody. Her aunt had a wealthy friend Jane who owned a big horse ranch in the Santa Yines Valley. And when she heard of the trouble Generosa was having after her mother had died, Jane offered her a home. For a while, Generosa was happy, and no wonder. She lived in luxury, in a beautiful house

with a pool and stables, and she rode horses every day. She was suddenly living a rich girl's life. She took piano lessons, she had her teeth fixed, and for a little while, everything was good. But it's part of the circle of life that children can turn into moody adolescence, and that was twice as true for Generosa. Her furious rages came back,

and she was intensely jealous of her guardian's own kids. Jane and her husband had taken Generosa in, more or less on a whim, and once she started being difficult, they gave her up just as easily. A private jet flew her up to San Jose, where she was met by her older half-sister, Terry, and her husband. They had a beautiful house in what's now called Silicon Valley, a four-bedroom place

in the middle of an orchard, but there was no pool and no horses, and Generosa made it very clear that she was unhappy with this sudden absence of luxuries and started clashing with Terry's own kids. Things did calm down after a while, but like a lot of people in the family, Terry suffered from bipolar disorder, and she soon fell into a long, painful depression. Even at her best, General Generosa was a high-maintenance kid, and the worst Terry felt, the more often Generosa seemed to needle her. It was clear to both Terry and her husband that Generosa was having a significant negative effect on her older sister's mental health, so Generosa was soon on her way to Los Angeles to stay with Fran Thomas, a distant relative with teenage daughters. Generosa didn't know any of the family at all. She was 13 years old, and in the three years since her mother had died, this was her fourth family. Wow.

I don't think you can blame her for having kind of an attitude by this point. She was, yeah, she was 13. You can't expect 13-year-olds to calmly control their behavior for their own good, especially when, you know, hit by the, like, sudden traumatizing death of your mother after years of neglect, and then the trauma of finding out that the guy who you thought was your father wasn't your father, and you've been lied to by everyone. Like, that's traumatic. End of story.

Yeah. And by the way, this does not excuse her later behavior. She was a kid at this point. Fran's daughters went to a Catholic school called St. Mary's Academy. And when Fran told her she'd talk the nuns into accepting Generosa, she wasn't impressed. I want to go to a boarding school where they have horses, Generosa demanded. But what she got was St. Mary's, and she very nearly managed to get herself kicked out for no other reason than her smart mouth. And you have to wonder what kind of wussy nuns these were that, like, were that ready to give up on a kid just because she had a little attitude. Like, where would we be if the priests and the exorcist had had that kind of attitude? Those were some punk-ass nuns if he asked me. And I know, I used to teach at a Catholic school, and those nuns were terrible.

I know. I wouldn't mess with them. They have a reputation to uphold. What were they thinking? Like, everyone I know that went to Catholic school is still terrified of nuns. Mm-hmm. The ones I dealt with definitely could have handled Generosa. So Fran tried to talk Generosa into playing nice with the sisters, and for once in her tumultuous young life, Generosa listened. She behaved herself at school and finally had a family that stuck. She only left Fran and her family in 1975 when she started. started art school in Irvine. Generosa was a skilled artist, but her childhood had left deep scars.

She was suspicious, finding it hard to truly trust anybody, and once someone lost that trust, they were dead to her. She fell out with her aunt over some tiny little thing and didn't speak to her for like years afterward, and it was really minor. I don't remember what it was, but it was this really petty thing. She was also laser-focused on having Scrooge McDuckian levels of cash, like she wanted to be swimming in it. And I don't think it's hard to pick apart the psychology of that. She'd never had any real stability or security in her life, so at least in theory, money could provide that. Generosa was pretty, blonde, and witty in a sarcastic kind of way. She didn't have much trouble finding dates. She also had very little understanding of how to

act around regular human beings, so she had a lot more first dates than second. Like, when When one date was driving her up to L.A. to see a show, Generosa started interrogating him about what he planned to do with his life and how likely he was to succeed. And it wasn't just the date she was interested in. What does your family do? She wanted to know. And she wasn't going to be put off by vague answers.

She wanted dollar amounts on how much this guy's parents made and how much they had in savings. This dude wrapped up their first date as quick as he could and there was no second one. Don't blame him. After art school, Generosa moved to New York, determined to make a big splash in the art scene there. Once there, she shrugged off her Californian past as easily as taken off a coat. Almost none of her West Coast friends and family ever heard from her again.

Her sister Terry sent her letters trying to reconnect, and they were returned unopened. Genarosa wrote on one envelope, I don't want to hear from you again. woof like that I mean I'm sure there would be exceptions but to me that's a little bit of a red flag isn't it like just being able to cut people off that easily in New York where nobody knew her Gennarosa was free to reinvent herself

as if her brief taste of luxury in the Santa Ana's Valley had been the full reality of her childhood she sold herself as a rich trust fund brat whose passion was her art Of course, unlike real trust fund brats, Jenna Rosa needed to work, so she got a gig selling high-end real estate. Gena Rosa had a high opinion of herself and a low one of almost everyone else on the planet. Blonde Californian snob was a role that came naturally to her.

The only difference between her and the real thing was the thinness of her bank balance. She was good at the job. And in 1983, a high-flying lawyer wanted to look at an apartment on the Upper East side. and called up the agent, Gennarosa. She stuck in his mind because of her unusual name and because her voice sounded light, almost childlike. He arranged to look at the place after work, but then he got swamped and just blew off the appointment.

And the next day, Gennarosa called him up and ripped him a new one over the phone, telling him off for wasting her time and not showing her any respect. That sweet little girl voice was now sharp as broken class. I think lawyer might be. be the profession with the highest proportion of people who really kind of enjoy arguments and confrontation. Like, I used to be friends with a lawyer couple who I swear to God used to fight his foreplay. And this dude was intrigued. He apologized and agreed to come look at the place that

evening. And when he did, he was pleased to find out that that little girl voice was attached to an attractive, smart young woman. The lawyer didn't take the apartment, but he did ask Generosa out for dinner. His name was Ted Ammon. Ted was born in Pittsburgh in 1949 and apparently had the kind of idyllic suburban upbringing that you mainly see in shows from the 1950s. His dad was an executive in a steel firm and the family never lacked for anything. Ted excelled in school, both academically and athletically, and his dad expected him to follow his footsteps into the corporate world. Ted wasn't so sure about that. In fact, although very smart and a hard worker, Ted wasn't great about making any kind of

solid decision. In college, he changes major five times before settling on a weird double of arts and economics. Well, talk about the two halves of your brain trying to fight each other, right? Yeah, right. Ted was popular in college, both with his frat brothers and with the ladies. He was 6'4 athletic and Kendall Handsome, and despite his procrastination, he was a high-achiever, pretty much a college golden boy. And like so many golden boys before him, after graduation, he trained in international banking in San Francisco. One of his fellow trainees was a cute, smart blonde named Randy Day, and before long, they were dating. After graduating, Randy got a job in London, and Ted went with her. They got married there in 1974.

Ted's college habit of changing his mind about what he wanted to do stuck with him. Turned out, international banking wasn't that exciting. I know. I'm as shocked as you are. Now, Ted wanted to be a lawyer. Trouble was he'd never been to law school. Never mind, Ted had always learned better by teaching himself. He cracked the books, hired a tutor, and soon, without ever having to be.

set foot in the legal classroom, passed the English equivalent of the bar exam, and got a job with a firm specializing in maritime law. Damn, that is impressive. Randy soon got transferred to New York and Ted repeated the trick there, teaching himself and passing the New York bar exam

on the first try. He got a junior associate position at a fancy law firm, and before long, he was bored again, which I could have told him. I've not met a single lawyer that doesn't wish they didn't go into law. In fact, I know a guy who started his own business in lawn care because he mows lawns every day and he loves that more.

I don't think I know any happy lawyers honestly, and I know a lot of them too. If you're a happy lawyer, let us know if you're happy with the law. They're literally just like, every time you're like, how's your job? They're like, it starts with that. Like every time. They're like that, It's a living from Flintstones. And so he was bored, but this wasn't for lack of activity.

Both he and Randy worked incredibly long hours. In fact, it got to a point where they hardly saw each other. It probably shouldn't have come out of the blue when Randy told him the marriage wasn't working, but it did. He was shocked and begged her to stay and try to work things out. But Randy had made up her mind. They separated, and in 1983, just a little while before Ted would meet Generosa, they had an easy, amicable divorce. Yeah, don't get used to that, man. This story is like a horror movie where you see the main character running right toward the danger and you're like, no, don't go in there.

But sadly, there was nobody there to warn Ted off of Generosa. Within a month of meeting, Ted and Generosa were living together. They were a good match, both smart, both ambitious, and frankly, both kind of snobs. Yeah. The kind of people who like to swill wine around and then spit it into fancy silver cups and say stuff like, I can taste the notes of chocolate. And like, you know, I don't mind that.

It's just when they make it my problem that I mind it, where they're like, you drink, you drink $5 wine. And it's like, yeah, dude. But they were coming from different places. Ted had just been through a divorce and wasn't in a hurry for a heavy relationship. Generosa, on the other hand, wasn't the kind of person to waste time when she decided on what she wanted. And she wanted a ring. In February of 1984, she told Ted, either we get married or I'm leaving, which is the kind of ultimatum where you need to be real sure of the response you're going to get.

Yeah. Ted said, okay then, bye. And they broke up. But then they bumped into each other in October at a fancy do at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And there were clearly still sparks between them. Generosa hadn't changed her mind about what she wanted, but after a few months alone, Ted was more willing to give it to her. He dated around since they broke up, but hadn't met anyone who fit him as well as Generosa. Might have been a good idea to spend more than the length of one baseball season before diving into a second marriage, but some people just can't stand being single.

Ted had made one big change since breaking up with Genoosa that first time. He was successful as a lawyer but bored with the work, so he took on a role with the investment firm Colbert Kravis Roberts, working on leveraged buyouts. Yeah, these are, in my humble opinion, gross. Leveraged buyouts involve identifying corporations that, for one reason or another, were undervalued on the market. KKR would secure massive bank loans to take over the corporation and then pare it down to the bone, selling off assets and property and closing down divisions

until only a barely functional husk of the business remained. It was a practice that made a lot of money for a very small number of people and caused a lot more people to lose their jobs. In the 80s, not many people in finance would have argued with Gordon Gecko's whole, read his good stick. Eich. being well off to becoming stupid rich. And it was a good thing, too, because Generosa was determined for her wedding to be a fancy, elaborate, expensive work of art. She decided that this was going to be her main role in the marriage, creating beautiful, perfect spaces and events for her and Ted. She also put some more polish on a previous creation, the illusion of Generosa

Rand as California Trust Fund kid. She and Ted flew out west to meet Generosa's Uncle Al, who lived comfortably enough but whose wealth was way below Ted Ammon levels. His son, Al Jr., felt like his dad and his cousin were working together to pull the wool over Ted's eyes, to give him the impression that Generosa came from real money. Al Jr., as it happened, had married Generosa's best friend from childhood, Sally. Generosa wanted Sally to be her maid of honor. She and Al Jr. were pretty much going to be the entire contingent of Generosa's previous life in California. She'd cut everybody else off. The thing was, Sally was in the middle of a difficult pregnancy and her doctors had told her she couldn't fly. She and Al Jr. would have to drive across country instead

from California to New York, which meant they would miss the wedding rehearsal. Generosa was furious and berated them both for putting some minor risk to their unborn child ahead of the most important thing in the world. Generosa's meticulous planned wedding. She got even madder when Al Jr. and Sally balked at her demand that they rent a tux for their three-year-old son. Come on. Sally knew full well that when Generosa was riled up, she was mean as a snake and decided

she wanted no part of the wedding. She stayed home, and Al Jr. flew alone over to New York the night before the ceremony. Ted met him, and they chatted for a while in his office. Al Jr. liked Ted quite a lot more than he liked his cousin. He and Generosa had grown up together, and although Al Jr. was two years older, he'd always been kind of scared of her. He carefully tried to warn Ted about Generosa's temper, but Ted just laughed it off. When Al walked into the rehearsal, Generosa stalked right up to him with a furious, like, cartoony, evil scowl on her face and said, You and Sally have shown me disrespect. I'm a New York socialite now, and you can't.

You can't disrespect me. I'm a New York socialite now. You can't disrespect me. Oh, honey, hold my beer. It's the least socialite thing she could have said. I know, right? Yeah, real old money socialites are never going to be caught dead losing their shit in public. Oh, no.

They will make you feel like dirt with snide remarks and throwing around world ending. amounts of money. Like that's how they make you feel like, you know, the scum on the bottom of their shoe. And this is like, this is the socialite equivalent of that scene and inglorious bastards where the spy holds up three fingers wrong and tips off the Germans

that he doesn't belong. That's what this is. Absolutely. That is such a good analogy. Al Jr. said, I'll show you disrespect when I leave this room. I'll leave the door open and he walked out. He went and picked up his stuff, got a cab to the

airport and flew home the same night, thinking his crazy cousin was even more nuts than she was when they were kids. He felt sorry for Ted. He'd never speak to Generosa again. Another piece of her past just cut off completely. That little scene, by the way, comes from Karen Crowley's book Almost Paradise, which I would definitely recommend if you want to know more about this case. I mean, it's a complete shit show, and there's tons of stuff we had to leave out. So, read the book. after their wedding ted and generosa moved into a fifth avenue townhouse right beside central park and set out on their new lives as a new york power couple t m they threw big fancy parties it was good that they always met new people because generosa made and discarded friends like other people buy lottery tickets with ted's new wealth they now had a staff ted had a limo and a driver milton and generosa employed a personal assistant slav Butler named Stephen, as well as his boyfriend Bruce as a cook. Stephen was an astrologer and self-proclaimed psychic,

and Bruce claimed to be a spiritual medium, and Generosa ate up all the various flavors of Wu that they offered her. She liked to cultivate an image as a sensitive artist, despite everybody who knew her thinking she was a terrifying hard ass, which to me is actually pretty true to life. Like the tightest wound people I've ever met in my life are always the ones that want to come across all crunchy and spiritual. Like just in my experience, those are the tightest wound people I've ever met. She even had Stephen do star charts for her and then nudged her star sign from Aries to Pisces because she thought that better fit her image of herself, which is just, that is classic Genoosa.

No, no, no, no, no, I'm not Aries. I'm a Pisces. Yeah, fix it. Move the stars for me, Stephen. Oh, my God. That is actually like a little bit of socialite behavior, even if it's unhinged. Oh, yeah, that is definitely. That's where she, but like, she's learning. She's learning.

She's getting there. Generosa's wit had always had an edge of cruelty to it. And after her wedding, she just got meaner and more sarcastic. I guess now that she was miss money, she didn't feel any urge to play nice anymore. Ted apparently enjoyed listening to Generosa's entertaining bitch sessions, but he was surprised and hurt when she started turning that acid tongue onto him. Yeah, you better get used to that, man. Generosa remodeled their townhouse, something she had a genuine talent for,

but when it was done, she felt kind of blue and empty. So they got a new townhouse and she started again. Rich people, rich people are weird, y'all. Generosa had never been great at understanding how other people worked. In fact, she probably had never given the subject more than a moment's thought. And because of this, she started to get a reputation as just kind of weird. Like, in their new place, she started a campaign to force a store down the street to build an enclosure for their trash, rather than just leaving the bags out. Everyone on the block cheered her on.

She paid to have trees planted down the street. street and everybody on the block cheered her on. When the Jewish Museum on the corner of Fifth Avenue put up a big banner advertising their new exhibit, she campaigned to have it torn down. And everybody on the block was like, yikes, really? Yeah, that was the record scratch. It was like, yay, yay, yay. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, I think that's clear from the stories we've said so far is like she just didn't really get the like motivations of other people. like, you know, demanding that her friend with a high-risk pregnancy come all the way to New York from California. It's crazy. That's crazy behavior. No one with a working understanding of human behavior would be like, I'm being reasonable right now. It's main character syndrome. Yes.

I mean, that's what it is. She would make a killing on Instagram these days, dude. No kidding. Gena Rosa had always had issues with trust and secured. and what happened next shook her up badly. Expecting a grocery delivery one afternoon, she answered the doorbell. Two men in ski masks rushed in and slapped duct tape over her mouth before she could scream. They hauled her down to the basement, taped her to a chair, and blindfolded her.

Genarosa was terrified. Sure, they were about to kill her. Instead, they shoved her into a utility room off the basement, turned off the light, and closed the door. Ted found her there hours later. Their safe had been cleaned out and all of Generosa's jewelry stolen. No one was ever arrested for the crime. Generosa, understandably, got paranoid to the extreme. The guys had seemed to know their way around the townhouse exactly.

They must have been there before. It was months before Generosa felt even a little comfortable being alone. Ted turned the townhouse into a fortress and hired armed guards. All the negative aspects of Generosa's personality, became more pronounced. She was even more suspicious, more sharp-tonged, more frequently angry. She could blow up at nothing and nobody was safe. Generosa and Ted wanted to start a family together, but after a dangerous ectopic pregnancy, Generosa discovered she couldn't get pregnant again. So in 1992, they adopted a pair of two-year-old Ukrainian twins, Gregory and Alexa.

When Generosa had seen their pictures, blonde and chubby toddlers, they'd looked just like her own baby pictures. And this part of Ted and Generosa's relationship was a success. Grego and Alexa were smart, happy kids. And for a few years, with this new expanded family, Ted and Generosa were happy too. Ted was good at most things he tried, but he usually got bored after a few years. And he was now bored of his enormously profitable career as a corporate raider. To the shock of everyone he worked with, he quit his job at KKR and set up a printing company, a field he had zero experience in, but he thrived by investing in risky internet companies,

writing high on the dot-com boom with his wealth swelling from $50 million to $400 million. Of course, later on, that boom would be renamed the dot-com bubble, so cue ominous music, I guess. Generosa, meanwhile, wanted a new project. She wanted to build a new home for their family, and she wanted to be immersed in the hoity-toity society set that she simultaneously sneered at and also yearned to be part of. She bought a house on Middle Lane in East Hampton, Long Island, a $2.7 million fixer-upper.

This was to be her ultimate project, her magnum opus. She would make a glorious home that would make her new millionaire, neighbors just sick with jealousy. She would more or less succeed at that. She would also more or less break her own brain in the process. Generosa hired a young architect named Jeff Gibbons to bring her plans to fruition. Jeff would be paid a lot of money and also have a showpiece he could display as his first solo project. So he thought anyway. As far as Generosa was concerned, she was telling Jeff what she wanted and that meant she was designing the house. Jeff had taken on the job because he was used to and comfortable with dealing with rich, difficult clients.

Again, so he thought, anyway. He'd never met Genoosa. The front of the house would be mostly preserved, but in back it would be expanded to 6,000 square feet. Geez, Louise. The kids would have their own wing. There would be a wine cellar and a panic room. East Hampton is about as free from violent crime as you can get. get in the U.S., but understandably after her, you know, scary experience, Genarosa was

taken no chances. She obsessed over the Hampton's house. She'd be up before dawns, scribbling notes for her contractors or Jeff. She would call poor Jeff at 7 a.m. and tell him to get up. Initially, before he got a good look at her temper, they were pretty chummy. One time she was driving Jeff out to the Hamptons and he casually called her Jenny. Never call me Jenny, she snapped. deadly serious. Jenny is the name of a mule. Okay. Oh boy. As the house slowly took shape, Genarosa threw at least one tantrum per day.

Everything had to be perfect exactly as she had it in her head. She could go from apparent calm to a screaming rage in a millisecond. One time she yelled at Jeff pointing at a light socket. He couldn't see anything wrong with it. The screws, she shrieked. They're crooked. What she meant was that the little screws holding the plate to the wall all had to be neatly aligned, either perfectly vertical or perfectly horizontal, one or the other,

and all the screws had to be aligned exactly the same way. Holy shit. The contractors put up with Generosa's rants because they were making a lot of money. They'd often do some work exactly as she told them to, and then she'd change her mind and had to. have them tear the entire thing back to how it had been before. During the project, Jeff's mother became terminally ill, and he went back to Pennsylvania to be with her. Irritated at the interruption, Generosa said to a friend, hasn't anybody in his family ever died before?

Yeah. She was like that with everybody who worked on the place. Generosa had a gardener plant a bed of golden tulips out front. She had an exact, crystal clear image in her head of the color she wanted and she picked it out. Okay, keep that in mind. The gardener tried to warn her that tulips change color depending on the time of day, but Generosa waved him off. No, no, this is the one I want. And he planted 600 flowers just as she instructed him to. The flower bed was stunning, gorgeous. The gardener drove out to the Hamptons that weekend to appreciate his own work, but as he went up the driveway, there was Generosa on her knees in the dirt. Her hair all wild, her face twisted up in a rage, yanking up bunches of tulips and flinging them over her shoulder.

They're the wrong shade! She demanded the gardener replace all the tulips at his own expense or she would sue. Oh my God, shove those tulips up your ass. This was practically a hobby among certain types of rich douchebags in the Hamptons, screwing over contractors with a threat of an expensive. lawsuit. Because, you know, they could afford it, and the contractors couldn't. The house was finished by Memorial Day of 1995, and Jeff Gibbons was glad to be done with it. He left the project having made a lot less money than he expected, after Generosa decided on

a whim to accuse him of defrauding her, and threatened to sue him unless he accepted a lower payment. And Ted, ew, backed up his wife. They could afford to keep an expensive lawsuit going forever and Jeff couldn't. He had to take what they gave him. Generosa also threatened to sue Jeff if he tried to claim credit for the design of the house. Ted and Generosa failed completely to slip into the Hampton social scene because everyone thought Generosa was crazy. Hmm. The eccentric artist was now just plain weird. Her temper exploded over nothing. She became a caricature of a snob. At one party, she used. At one party, she used. flat out refused to talk to a couple because they lived north of the Montauk Highway that ran through

town, where you could sometimes buy a house for as little as a measly million dollars. Oh my gosh, she's a cartoon. Like, that's like something you'd expect Mrs. Howell to say on Gilligan's island. It's just like, how are you a real person? Without contractors around to yell at, Ted and the kids started to be the target of her temper more and more. Having effectively infinite wealth, built a family, and built her dream house, Generosa was clearly far less happy than she had been when Ted had first met her. She was also increasingly less able to control her behavior. Generosa invited one of her best friends to come and stay at the New Hampton's Beach House,

but the friend already had other plans. Generosa screamed and cursed at her over the phone, then hung up. Months later, at a high-class charity event, the friend saw Generosa an approach, hoping to patch things up. Get away from me, Generosa screamed. You get away from me. Wow. She also started interfering with Ted's work.

Generos was already telling everyone she made all the important decisions in Ted's business and did her best to turn that into reality. Every morning, she gave him a printed list of what he needed to do and who he needed to talk to during the day. Ted's sister told him to just toss the list of the trash when he got to the office,

but that wouldn't work. Generosa called him constantly throughout the day to check up on what he was doing and grilled him when he got home. If he was vague, Generosa would call up his personal assistant and make her spill what Ted had been up to. Wow. Ted admitted to his sister that he was thinking about leaving Generosa, but was hesitant both for the sake of their kids and because he knew how explosively Generosa would take a divorce. And I think that second reason carried the most weight. Ted was straight up scared of his wife. At a parent-teacher night at school, Ted chatted for a few moments with the mother of a fellow student. The lady happened to be very pretty, and when Generosa saw her talking to Ted, her face went the color of an heirloom tomato, and she marched right up and yelled at her in front of everybody.

Stop flirting with my husband. Oh, God, those poor kids. Gena Rosa had dialed the wrong number here, but she had the right area code. Ted was having at least one affair. Lori Finkel was a banker Ted occasionally worked with professionally. She was blonde and pretty, Ted's type. In fact, she and Generosa looked almost enough alike to be sisters. Except that Lori was younger and, you know, didn't scream at Ted like a damn lunatic at the slightest provocation.

Wall Street types trading in their wives for a younger model was a cliche, and it's hard to believe that thought wasn't going through Ted's mind. He and Lorry began their casual affair in 1995, right about the time Generosa was putting the finishing touches on her dream home. By 1998, with the relationship between Ted and Generosa fraying to a thread, she was more and more suspicious of him. She asked her psychic butler, Stephen, to use his powers to divine whether Ted was cheating. He was, Stephen said, either taking a guess or just having the people reading skills that Generosa lacked. Ted denied it. Yeah, and Generosa didn't believe him. Her calls to his office were now less about telling him what to do

and more about just yelling at him. She'd literally scream over the phone, forcing Ted to hold a receiver way away from his ear and letting everybody else in the room hear exactly what she was saying. I'll have you killed, she yelled one time. And while it's obviously never great to have somebody yell, I'll kill you in a heated argument, I think I'll have you killed.

is a lot more sinister. When Ted told a colleague what Generosa had said, he was advised to see a good divorce lawyer right away. But instead of taking out a hit on her husband, Generosa made one last attempt to make the marriage work. They should move their family to England, she said. Get a place in the country entirely separate from their New York lives. They could rebuild their marriage there.

It was a plan that fit Generosa perfectly, a woman who'd burned every bridge she'd ever walked across. Just tear everything down and start again. Genarosa had first brought this idea up a couple years before, but Ted had waved it off. He was more eager now, and not necessarily from the best of motives. He'd still have to fly regularly to New York for work, and with Generosa and the kids safely ensconced in the English countryside,

he could spend time with Lori more openly. His relationship with Lori was rhaps. rapidly becoming a more urgent matter because she was pregnant. Their affair was about to get a lot harder to hide. He knew just how to make the English proposition irresistible to Generosa. They'd buy a huge old manor house called Coverwood, doesn't that sound so British, about 35 miles from London, and Generosa would get to renovate the interior. For a while, the Ammons lived the sunny lives of the English upper crust,

like they'd just stepped into the pages of a P.G. Woodhouse story. They played croquet on the lawns. Generosa went riding around the grounds. Alexa and Grego were sent off to a posh boarding school. Genarosa and Ted went cycling through the country lanes, and she was engrossed in remodeling coverwood. She was as close to happy as Generosa could get by this time, but for once in her life she was insufficiently suspicious.

Because whenever he went back to New York, Ted was spending every free minute with Lori Finkel. She'd just had his son. Ted was in the process of buying her a house. New York and London are obviously both huge cities, but the population taking Concord flights between them is a lot smaller, which Ted found out at Kennedy Airport when he ran into a friend of Generoses in the Concord lounge. Her name was Sophia, and after a few pleasantries, Sophia said,

I hear you're looking at a new house on 91st. First Street. Uh-oh. Ted apparently didn't know how loosely the tongues of the upper crust wagged, and he was visibly shaken by this. I bet. This was the address he was buying for his banker baby mama. He kind of stuttered a little bit and said, well, Generosa doesn't need to know about

this, and then ran off to change his flight. Real smooth, my dude. Real smooth. Sophia figured out immediately what was going on. She didn't actually tell Generosa, but she did spread the gossip far and wide when she got back to New York, so she told everybody else. In 2000, Generosa once again got the wrong number, right area code when she found out Ted had met with his ex-wife Randy a few times at a London hotel. Randy was going through a tough divorce from her second husband and wanted advice from Ted because they'd stayed friendly. Ted gave her a sympathetic ear. Oh, and also a million dollars.

to support herself through the divorce, which was like nothing to him. I mean, can you imagine just being like, oh, here, like I would loan a friend 50 bucks. That's what a million bucks was like for Ted. I just can't even imagine. It's unreal. Generosa was pissed. And, I mean, I can see why, you know, because I don't care how rich you are. Giving your ex a million bucks is probably something you need to clear with your current spouse first, right?

And Generosa, of course, when she found out about the money, she thought they were having an affair. The concept of staying friends with an ex was completely alien to her. Generosa called friends back in New York asking about Randy. Nobody knew anything about that, but Ted certainly had been seen out and about an awful lot with Lori Finkel, who'd just had a child, and nobody seemed to know who the father was. Generosa was terrifyingly angry. She went to Ted's study and smashed open the locked drawer of his desk. She found a bill from an attorney in London

and a quick phone call told her they specialized in divorces. She also found paperwork on the house Ted was buying in Manhattan. Everything suddenly became clear to her. Ted was going to ditch her for Lori Finkel. He'd already had a child with her. He was already buying a house to stay with her in. Everyone in New York knew. It was utterly humiliating.

The next day, Generoso went to see a divorce lawyer of her own. He told her that a divorce in England would net Generosa far less than one in New York. She was immediately convinced that was why Ted wanted to move there. And who knows, maybe she was right. Ted was anything but dense when it came to finance. She was back in New York as soon as she could get there, pulling the kids out of boarding school.

They'd been happy there, mostly free of parental drama and didn't want to leave, poor kids. And I just have to point it out, it's kind of ironic that she ended up doing to her kids what was done to her, like pulling out. them out of a boarding school where they're happy, but instead of, you know, because of their behavioral reasons, it's because of her own selfishness. Absolutely.

It's just, it's, I mean, this isn't the first time or last time this is going to come up in this story where it's like this bitter irony. It's just, it's crazy. In August of 2000, she filed for divorce. Betrayal, real or imagined, had always been the biggest trigger for Generosis Fury. And this was a betrayal of epic proportions. Her anger was equally epic. She didn't just want to divorce Ted.

She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to absolutely ruin him. Did she want to kill him? She didn't say so to anyone, but I bet she thought about it and thought about it a lot. She moved to an eight-story townhouse and demanded Ted give her a million dollars to renovate it. For people who had been friends with both Ted and Generosa,

it was tough because Generosa demanded they take sides and show her absolute loyalty. If anyone even spoke to Ted, they were dead to her. One couple took Ted out to lunch to commiserate with him. A few days later, they ran into Generosa on the street and asked how she was holding up. She didn't say a word, just scowled furiously at them, then spat right in their faces and stormed off. Oh my God, bitch, you spit on me and we are going to tangle. That is so unhinged.

It's so trashy, too. Like, you want to be a socialite and you're spitting on people? It's just, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. Everyone's citing with Ted because he's got all the money. She whined to her friend Ronnie. And I'm sure that was true for some people. But I'm also sure Ted wasn't hawk and lugies right into people's faces.

Ted versus Generosa wasn't that hard of a decision for most of their friends to make by that point. Right. I think it's also, I think we all know that like couple where you tolerate one person because you like the other person. and I think that was absolutely the case here. It was like, well, she's a crazy bitch, but I like Ted. Thank God that's over. Ted had just gotten a new puppy, and Generosa told Ronnie who ran a grooming business that she wasn't allowed to work with the new dog.

For God's sake. Worst of all, Generosa constantly badmouthed Ted to the kids. If they tried to stand up for their dad, Generosa screamed at them. Your father wants to kill me, she told them. And not only her, Ted was going to kill their dog buddy, too. He was bugging their rooms. She pointed out the window to the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art across the street. There were detectives up there right now spying on them, she said.

One day they would kidnap the children on Ted's orders. How much of this was just to turn them against Ted and how much Generosa actually believed is impossible to say. She had waved bye-bye to Mr. Verifiable. reality some time ago. Yikes, man. So that loyalty, you have to pick sides and it has to be me. That even extended to the children. That is just evil.

It's sick. Sick. By now, the dot-com bubble was bursting and Ted's fortune, although still huge by any normal human standard, was rapidly dwindling. To get as much out of the divorce as possible, it was in generous interest to get to settlement as soon as possible. But every time Ted's lawyers thought they were close, Generosa backed out and made steeper demands. She wanted the divorce and the discomfort it caused Ted to go on as long as possible.

She'd always obsessed over her projects, and now her project was vengeance on Ted. Before long, a distraction entered Generosa's life that would propel Project Vengeance on Ted into overdrive. That distraction was a young electrician that Generosa met, along with another contractor at the bar of the pricey Stanhope Hotel, where Generosa and the kids were staying during the renovation work. His name was Danny Pelosi. He was right out a central casting for charming, kind of oily New York Italian, and he flashed Generosa a smile as they were introduced. How you doing, he said. Within a year, his and Generosa's lives would fly so far out of control that there was no chance whatsoever of putting them back together. But as you've

probably guessed by now, that's going to have to wait a week. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have part two for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Cindy, Kevin, Elise, Rebecca, Barbara, and Joanna. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back.

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