Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty by Jerry Oppenheimer

Author:Jerry Oppenheimer [Oppenheimer, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Retail, Johnson and Johnson
ISBN: 9780312662110
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

36

Betty Johnson’s marriage to Eugene Gillespie was in trouble almost from the start. Not only did her children and members of the larger Johnson dynasty despise him—unjustifiably for the most part—but Betty herself had come to the realization that she had not gotten over the loss of Bobby, and had clearly made a mistake leaping again so quickly into a second marriage.

“She was still so wrapped up in Johnson and Johnson and still clearly in love with Bobby, and Gene was saying that it was driving him crazy,” says a person who was close to the couple. “He told me, ‘I can’t get Betty to come out and be social. I can’t get her to move, and I can’t get her to stop thinking about the fact that her husband died.’ He also was concerned because Betty would not cry, and Gene said that if she just let all that emotional stuff come out she might heal. He felt she was still emotionally paralyzed. He was just trying to make her part of his life, but was getting sort of fed up.”

For Betty, it would only get worse, much worse.

In the third week of March 1975, around St. Patrick’s Day, her sons, Woody, now twenty-seven and involved in a land and condo development business in South Florida, and twenty-six-year-old Keith, who was still doing drugs and living self-indulgently, were together on a ten-day cruise aboard the Sea Prince in the British Antilles where Keith had a small circle of friends, some of whom were thought to be involved in the drug trade.

On Sunday, March 23, Woody would later tell the police, the brothers returned by plane through Miami, and Keith rented a car to drive them back to Fort Lauderdale where Woody was now living.

The next day, Monday, March 24, Keith, who had decided to move back to the mainland presumably at Woody’s behest, drove to an apartment complex at 90 Isle of Venice Drive—one of the palm-tree-lined fingers of land surrounded by water with docks off of Los Olas Boulevard, in Fort Lauderdale—to look at a small, furnished first-floor motel-like apartment. With Keith was a well-to-do friend, Roger McMullen, who suggested that he rent the unit from the owners, Tracy and Catherine Geiger. He signed the lease on the spot rather than move back into the guesthouse at Bay Colony because he was still very much at odds with his mother over her marriage to Gene Gillespie.

The following Thursday, March 27, Keith and McMullen returned the rental car to Miami and picked up Keith’s Mercedes that he had stored in a warehouse in Port Everglades.

That night, Woody, whose twenty-eighth birthday was just a few days away, had dinner with Keith.

It was the last time he would see his brother alive.

The next morning, Good Friday, March 28, Keith moved into his new rental.

During the day on Saturday and into the early morning hours of Easter Sunday, Keith’s television could be heard blaring nonstop. Concerned, his landlady, Mrs. Geiger, and her husband knocked on his door, asking if he wanted to go out for breakfast.

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