A Mother’s Tortured Life Ends in Tragedy : Families: Woman was haunted by daughter’s disabling pool accident.

That day last year, Dianne Bordeaux was sitting in her parents’ home in Huntington Beach explaining why she had agreed to talk publicly about the pool accident that nearly claimed her daughter’s life and was consuming her own.

Her daughter, Jennifer Dawson, then 3, lay stiffly across her lap. The child could not talk, walk, or even control her slightest movements. Her dark eyes were open wide, but her gaze seemed empty.

“I guess the reason I wanted to talk is because I feel like a lot of people were shocked by this,” Bordeaux went on to say about the pool accident. “People think these things only happen to the poor people, neglectful people who let their kids run around the apartment complex or something.

“Well, we’re a regular middle-class family. I look at myself and say ‘ I’m not that kind of parent.’ I want people to know that.”

And besides, she said at the time, her family would pull through. What the medical specialists called “listening to reason” was what Bordeaux called giving up. One neurologist at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles implored her and her husband to let Jennifer die. A psychologist told them that their marriage, then only 5 months old, would surely collapse under the strain of caring for such a child.

Although Jennifer’s father wanted to let his child die, Bordeaux and her new husband, contractor Bill Bordeaux, never wavered. They said no.

Dianne Bordeaux, 28, a model and aspiring actress, is dead now.

On Sept. 5, Huntington Beach police pulled a sobbing Bill Bordeaux, 32, away from his wife as she lay unconscious and bleeding in the street near their home. Police arrested him for assault with a deadly weapon--the family van, which Dianne had clung to the back of and fallen from as Bill tried to drive away during a fight.

She died later at UC Irvine Medical Center. Hitting her head on the pavement was listed as the cause of her death.

But Dianne’s agony started long before that day--it started in February, 1991, when Jennifer rode her tricycle into the pool of their Valencia home. It was only three days after the family had moved in; they had planned to install a pool cover but had not yet done so. “She would say, ‘Why wasn’t I watching her? I should have been there,’ ” says Dianne’s mother, Linda Wimberly. “She didn’t think she was a good mother. I would say, ‘Of course, you are. It was just an accident.’

“But the drowning, the incident, she couldn’t stop thinking of Jennifer in that pool, at the bottom, calling to her. She was wearing heavy sweats, and high-top shoes, and that helped pull her down. Dianne would think about it constantly. She couldn’t sleep.”

The first time he met Dianne, at Hollywood’s Hard Rock Cafe, Bill Bordeaux told a friend he had found the woman he would marry. She was separated from her first husband at the time and Bill, a father of two, had been divorced four years.

For their first date, Dianne begged her younger sister, Janine, to accompany them. Bill and a friend came to pick up the two women, then drove them to Van Nuys without telling them their plans. There they boarded a helicopter to make a grand entrance at the Santa Monica restaurant, DC-3.

The couple fell in love, Bill says, on New Year’s Eve, 1990. Dianne and her sister had rented a limousine to repay their dates with an extravagance of their own. The four partied all night.

“She wouldn’t let me touch her, but then at midnight, we hugged and didn’t let go of each other for about an hour and a half,” Bill Bordeaux says.

Dianne and Bill married later that year. But even back then, “volatile” is how Dianne’s mother describes her daughter’s relationship with Bill.

Eventually, Bill’s contracting business declined, and money became tight. Dianne despised avoiding bill collectors. Bill would tell her to be patient, that soon his clients would pay what they owed.

Then the couple’s daughter, Kori, was born. And Jennifer, a beautiful child crowned Baby Miss Orange County in 1989, fell into the back-yard pool two months later.

Dianne, who had found fulfillment as a mother, began a tortured journey that nobody could share.

“It was very hard on Dianne,” says her husband. “We were getting in fights every other day . . . . Dianne was a very, very hurt person, and I kind of hide my emotions a lot and I didn’t hurt enough for her.

“To get me to hurt, she would say horrible things to me, like, ‘This is your fault’ . . . That would get me upset.’ ”

Bill Bordeaux said that sometimes such baiting worked. He would cry and call her “evil” or worse, and once he destroyed the vegetable garden that she loved. Another time, he wrecked her stereo system.

But Bordeaux says that usually he would try to leave, to allow emotions to cool down. Then, he said, Dianne--afraid and furious at the same time--would try to keep him from walking out the door.

The commotion--screaming, shoving, wrestling and breaking objects--would usually send a neighbor to the phone. Bordeaux estimates he was arrested for spousal abuse 10 times, although no charges were filed. He says neither he nor Dianne hit each other.

After one fight not long ago, police took a hysterical Dianne for a psychiatric evaluation. She was checked and sent home.

The Huntington Beach police came so often to the Bordeaux home that Bill says he and his wife were warned that the next time they would be charged $1,000 for a nuisance call.

The next time, however, Dianne was nearly dead.

There has been little research about what psychological effects caring for a child like Jennifer can have on marriages and families. But experts say that, in general, very strong marriages may grow stronger and others may suffer unbearable stress.

“Only the strongest of the strong families survive something like this,” said Frank Carden, director of psychology at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. “And then even some of them don’t do very well.”

Bill Bordeaux says he and Dianne knew they needed counseling, but their efforts were unsuccessful. Dianne could never seem to last more than a few weeks in therapy.

“In time of great need, late at night, Dianne would call me,” says one therapist who saw the couple. “I would talk to her and calm her down and then call her in the morning. As soon as a crisis was through, she would think she could handle it.”

Clearly, she could not.

Passionate and dramatic by nature, Dianne had begun doing wild and dangerous stunts--grabbing the steering wheel as her husband drove, jumping out of the car in traffic, threatening to drive off a cliff.

Her best friend, elementary schoolteacher Paula Hines, said, “I’ve often been on edge wondering if something violent would happen to her one day. I wasn’t overly shocked by how she died.”

Bill Bordeaux says he figured he might die with his wife.

“All my friends, my father, they said, ‘Get away from that girl. She’s going to kill you, or you’ll kill her,’ ” he says now. “But I couldn’t leave her. If I would have left, I would have been giving up.”

For Valentine’s Day this year, Bill had Dianne’s name tattooed on his upper back, with a teardrop dotting the “i.” She discovered it the day before.

“She started crying, she was so happy,” Bill says. “I told her, ‘Dianne, I would have had it across my forehead, but my customers wouldn’t like that.’ ”

But the euphoria wore off. Dianne’s sisters and mother say they were advising Dianne that she and Bill should separate.

“They couldn’t be together, but they couldn’t be apart,” says her mother. “It was so good and so bad. There was never any in-between.”

But at least one problem seemed close to being solved. Jennifer and Dianne won a $1.4-million settlement from the insurance company of the previous owner of the Valencia home.

After attorney’s fees, and $10,000 went to Jennifer’s father, there was $7,000 a month to be paid to Jennifer for 15 years, and a total of $50,000 to Dianne.

“But the money from the lawsuit was heavy guilt,” says Bill Bordeaux. “Dianne was supposed to be acting and modeling, and I was supposed to be building houses.”

Moreover, Bordeaux says the depositions from the lawsuit forced them both to relive Jennifer’s accident in detail, day after day. They could never forget.

At Dianne’s funeral Friday, the Wimberly family made it clear that Bill Bordeaux would still be treated as one of their own. After initially refusing to talk to him, they overcame their anger when he came to Dianne’s bedside while she was moments from death. He went there directly after posting $10,000 bail.

“I’ve told Bill, I think it was both of their faults,” says Richard Wimberly, Dianne’s father. “I’ve seen Dianne jump on the car. I don’t think Bill would have driven off if he had known Dianne was there.”

On Friday, family members prayed over Dianne’s casket and tried to console each other.

The Wimberly family--Linda and Richard and daughters Janine, Nichelle and Cara and son Stephen--had been there for Bill and Dianne through their troubles, and they say they will continue their support for Bill.

Jennifer, who needs round-the-clock care, and Kori will stay at their grandparents’ home.