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Tuesday, August 13, 2002

By L.A. Johnson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Here at the Post-Gazette, we wondered what kind of bizarre/interesting breakup stories were going untold in the Pittsburgh area. So, we asked readers to share a few of their own end-of-the-affair stories with us.

A killer story

"My girlfriend left me for a serial killer during the middle of his murder spree," wrote recent Pittsburgh visitor Peter Apanel, 51, of Pomona, Calif.

In the fall of 1977, Apanel was dumped by a young woman who worked at the same hospital as one of the Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi. She dated the killer only a couple of times and never was harmed.

"Obviously, no one knew at the time who he was, and he wasn't caught until a year later, after he had moved to Washington state and killed two more women," Apanel said.

Even after his friends learned the truth a year later, they kept it from him, fearing it would upset him. When they finally told him the whole story some five years later over drinks in a bar, he found the news hysterically ironic.

"Before me, she was seeing a repo guy who had just gotten out of prison," he said.

Sexual identity problem

A woman we'll call "Maggie" met the man she thought would be her Mr. Right in Beijing when they were graduate students. During their two years there, she studied Chinese history and he studied the Chinese language.

They became engaged, but their bliss faded once they returned stateside. He started to expect her to become a super homemaker. He became angry because she didn't wash the kitchen floor after every meal.

"He was asking me to be Martha Stewart, and I was thinking, 'Who does he think I am?' " the 32-year-old woman said.

He became angry, too, when she wasn't as ecstatic as he was about going to Michaels arts and crafts store to buy dried flowers to arrange in their ceramic Chinese pots.

"As if somehow that was some indication of my lack of femininity," she said.

When they were in China, he encouraged her to buy a qui pao -- a tailored, traditional, Chinese mandarin-collared silk dress -- just in case she might need one for some formal occasion.

"As a joke, I would call him the straight gay guy," she said.

As time wore on, the difficulties increased, and they decided to break off their engagement but remain friends. One day, during one of their final are-we-or-aren't-we-breaking up conversations, she was bemoaning the fact that now she would be single in Pittsburgh and no one would ever want her.

"You can't go by me," he said, trying to reassure her. "I'm attracted to men."

She was shocked.

When she told her sister and a couple of other close friends, they told her they had suspected as much.

"I pride myself on having great gaydar, and here I was in a relationship with a guy for four years and had no clue," she said. "Now, I can laugh about it, but it was extremely painful in a lot of ways."

He moved away. She worked through her devastation, finding support through the local chapter of PFLAG -- Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

Today, they still talk from time to time. And she admits he definitely wasn't as bad as the ex who mailed her a dead scorpion from Belize.

Bridge to nowhere

Years ago, a meek and mild-mannered man smitten with Joyce Blackhall followed her from Pittsburgh to Butler, taking an apartment across the street from hers. He repeatedly asked her out, and she repeatedly refused him. Then, in a moment of weakness or pity, she's not sure which, she agreed to hang out with him on a casual basis. She had relatives in that area. He didn't.

"He really kind of got on my nerves," recalled Blackhall, 48, of Troy Hill. "He'd shower me with presents and do things for me all the time, and I just sort of went out with him to be nice."

At her family's Christmas gathering, he surprised Blackhall, announcing to everyone that they would marry, and he dropped an engagement ring into her lap.

"I was speechless," she said.

On the drive home, she delicately tried to explain to him that this wasn't going to work, but he wouldn't listen.

"I lost it," she recalled.

As soon as she got through the Liberty Tunnels, she put him out of her car. Still furious, she tossed his cigarette case out the window as she crossed the Liberty Bridge.

"He called a week later trying to get it," she said. "The ring was in there!"

-- L.A. Johnson