No Happily Ever After in Real Life of Novelist

Romance novels never end this way.

Love conquers all, and the strong-jawed, mysterious hero is ultimately tamed, domesticated by the fair-skinned heroine with black ringlets. On the last page, he will pull her into his arms and kiss her lips ever so lightly. All around them, the wind will sing promises and the sun will slip between the sheets of the horizon and the sky.

And they will live happily ever after.

Nancy Richards-Akers, a heroine herself with long black hair, wrote 16 romance novels this way. All happy endings, except the one written in real life a few weeks ago.

Their two youngest children watched as her estranged husband--a lawyer, former Marine and decorated Vietnam veteran--shot her twice in the back of the head as she sat in a red Jeep outside their house in northwest Washington. He drove to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, called a friend to say he wanted to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, then put a gun in his mouth.

*

911 operator: What’s wrong?

Zeb: My mother was shot.

Operator: Shot?

Zeb: Yes, sir.

Operator: With a gun?

Zeb: Yes (begins to sob).

Operator: OK. Where was she shot at? Take it easy. We’ll bring you some help.

Zeb: OK. . . .

Operator: All right, I’m sending you some help, OK? Whoever shot her, are they still there?

Zeb: No.

*

Whatever happened between Jeremy Ray Akers, 57, and Nancy Linda Richards-Akers, 45, is dead with them. Friends say they can now only speculate about the truth.

“She moved out. She was afraid of him and now she is dead, and that is what can be said. It doesn’t get any worse.” says Mary Kilchenstein, a fellow romance novelist who writes as Mary Kirk.

Richards-Akers was the third romance novelist to be slain in a murder-suicide by a husband in the last three years. Pamela Macaluso was killed in 1997, Ann Wassall in 1996.

“This is not an uncommon tragedy,” says Kilchenstein. “None of us know why it happens, except to the extent that men shoot women all too often.”

Richards-Akers, once a political speech writer on Capitol Hill, began writing romance novels in the early 1980s: “Philadelphia Folly,” “A Season Abroad,” “The Devil’s Wager,” “Miss Wickham’s Betrothal” and her latest, “So Wild a Kiss.” The Washington Post named “Wild Irish Skies” one of the top 10 romance novels of 1997.

Friends say she did whatever she put her mind to, and what she did not know, she learned. She taught herself to write, and after she was finally published she taught others, arranging for new writers to meet her agent. She doted on her three children, Finny, 21; Zeb, 11; and Isabelle, 9. She was a good mother, savvy, well-bred--the kind of woman who would never have a tea party with paper plates.

“Nancy would suggest we use our china,” says Kathleen Gilles Seidel, former chairman of the Washington Romance Writers group. “She would adopt this outrageously fake accent--sometimes snooty accent, sometimes Irish peasant. She knew how to do things but also knew it wasn’t essential.”

Richards-Akers also knew how to promote her books. She posted her photos on the Internet and once told an interviewer that she could be found somewhere in her books.

“All my fiction is inspired by real life,” she wrote. “Nancy will never cease to marvel at the wonder of working at home to spin romantic tales of faraway places, forgotten times, heroic men and courageous, self-aware heroines.”

She was passionate about Ireland and was known for her accuracy in creating historical romances.

“A lot of people ask me if I’d like to write ‘real’ historicals, and sure, that would be a challenge . . . but I do love historical romance and especially as a genre for Irish historicals because history can be depressing and dreary, dark, cold, dank, unliberated and hopeless. But romance allows me to find the happy ending, to modify reality just enough to give it hope.”

*

Jeremy Akers, a Marine Corps captain from a small Alabama town, and Nancy Richards-Akers, a boarding school graduate who grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y., met more than 20 years ago on Capitol Hill.

Akers was working for a committee examining the assassination of President Kennedy. A friend introduced him to Nancy, who was working on another political committee. They fell into a lopsided kind of love, according to a friend, and dated on and off for several years.

“I always thought it was a very, very strange coupling. Nancy up until the end was very much in love with Jeremy and thought Jeremy was the greatest thing in the world,” says Tom Turchan, a friend of Akers’ who lives in Florida. “Nancy seemed to always be thinking of Jeremy as wonderful even when they were dating and he dated other people. Nancy would think he was wonderful and eventually they would get back together.”

Their wedding on Aug. 11, 1977, surprised many of Akers’ friends.

“It was typical Jeremy. He calls me up and says, ‘Come to Grace Episcopal tonight at 7:30.’ I said, ‘I’m not coming until you tell me what is going on.’ He said, ‘Turchan, I’m telling you to be there.’ He said, ‘I’m getting married.’ I got on the phone and called the guys in New York and Baltimore,” Turchan says. “He had forgotten to tell anybody. Everybody else on Nancy’s side knew about it, and very few people on Jeremy’s side knew about it.”

“Jeremy was strong physically,” says John E. Oxendine, a former roommate. “He had some strong opinions too. He wouldn’t take a lot of stuff from anybody. He had a short fuse.

“I won’t say he was a Napoleon type, but nobody would want to mess with him. The ladies liked him. He was possessive of his girlfriends,” Oxendine says. “If an ex-girlfriend ended up dating one of us guys, he would grill us to the nth degree. Even in those days, he was possessive.”

He was born in 1942 in Sheffield, Ala., and attended the University of Alabama. In the Vietnam War he received numerous medals, including a Purple Heart with a gold star, meaning he was wounded twice in separate incidents; a Silver Star for valor; and an Air Medal Star for missions flown.

When he returned home after the war, the country was not kind to him.

“He was the war machine,” says Oxendine. “He had been wounded, and he comes back from putting his life on the line, and people are talking about peace. That causes problems.”

Akers graduated from the University of Virginia law school in 1972. Turchan said Akers was happiest when he was working for the Justice Department. But later he struggled as an environmental lawyer who basically did research for the firms that were actually working on the cases.

“I think he wanted to be a good guy putting the bad guy away,” says Turchan. “And recently, he wasn’t doing that. He was floundering around professionally and obviously in his marriage.

“Jeremy had a lot of old-fashioned beliefs about honor. That tended to complicate things that happened. I think he got screwed up.”

Turchan says he saw Akers during the past year and he never mentioned that he and his wife were separated, that she’d moved into an apartment with a male friend.

In retrospect, Turchan says, “I think the whole thing was planned, not necessarily for that night. I’m sure he thought about it numerous times. This whole thing with Nancy living with someone else. His children seeing that. The dishonor of his wife leaving him.”

*

While Jeremy’s career seemed to be spiraling out of his control, Nancy’s was taking off.

“When she reached the goal she was trying to get, that is when the physical abuse began,” says romance novelist Barbara Cummings. “The mental and emotional abuse was there from the beginning. He didn’t want her to succeed. He didn’t really talk to us. He didn’t want to be involved with the writers’ group.”

Richards-Akers e-mailed a friend, saying she moved out to save her life and her children’s lives.

“If I had not left, they might have witnessed my death,” she wrote.

She later wrote, “He is violent, possessive, terrorist control-freak, and although I am out of the immediate path of his wrath he has spared nothing in his efforts to punish me financially and emotionally.”

She filed for legal separation on Feb. 18. The filing says they had lived “separate and apart” since Aug. 1, 1998. It claims cruel conduct, unpredictable and random acts of verbal abuse, taunting, insults, physical intimidation and death threats.

Akers’ counterclaim denies he abused her and charges that she abused him. He also alleges that he was abandoned and that she had engaged in “marital misconduct” while sharing a “one-bedroom apartment . . . [with] a male unrelated to Plaintiff.”

Nancy seemed to have found love again when she met James Lemke, who she said wrote children’s poetry and became her protector.

“The first time she introduced him to me, she introduced him as her bodyguard. This isn’t like she was having some midlife crisis,” Kilchenstein says. “She was not somebody who ran around having affairs. She was scared.”

Lemke answers the telephone at the apartment they shared a few blocks from her house on Reservoir Road. “She was a great woman,” he says. He is distraught.

Fellow novelist Seidel says it may be impossible to find parallels between Richards-Akers’ real life and those she wrote about.

“In romances, love solves the problem. It is never violence. Violence is never the answer. Love is always the answer, and so it’s hard to look at whatever drove Jeremy Akers to do this.”