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Ten He was just a wild man. The wildest person. A real free spirit. Crazy. Just a wild man. Not boring! Carollyn DeVore, describing Joe’s personality. Carollyn DeVore was at home on Rowena Avenue in Hollywood when the phone rang. The uso wanted her to be one of four young women to greet four soldiers flying into Los Angeles to help celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Junior rotc. Standing last in line because she was the tallest of the four women, and wearing high boots and a tight miniskirt, Carollyn watched as the first three girls paired off with the first three deplaning soldiers. Peering at the fourth solider she thought her eyes were deceiving her. “I didn’t have my glasses on and I’m very nearsighted—and I thought ‘No way. It couldn’t be that redheaded guy.’”1 The redheaded guy who’d flirted with her so outrageously in Vietnam in December of 1967. As tv cameras recorded Joe Hooper’s arrival, with typical brazen impulsiveness he grabbed Carollyn and “[he] kissed me like I have never been kissed.” For Carollyn “the world stopped again.” “Who was that man mauling you on tv,” her mother wanted to know. “It was pretty disgusting.” Not to them. From that moment on they were together, obsessed with each other, living, as Carollyn put it, “about twenty years in two years.” They first made love after a social function honoring John Wayne held at the Biltmore Hotel where Joe lived for several months. After sitting across the table from each other during dinner, “without saying a word, we both mingled and worked our way through the crowd and went up to his room.” Although Carollyn lived in a big two story white house with a marble staircase , Joe’s beautiful, romantic hotel room remained their love nest for many weeks because she did not want “to bring some man home, and have my son there.” Her son was Rolly DeVore II, who was born in 1964. Carollyn divorced Rolly’s father several years later, but she deeply loved her son. Raised in a strict Baptist home, Carollyn also worried about offending her parents. Carollyn didn’t know about another problem. Joe Hooper was married. His wife’s maiden name was Balbine Pauline Starte, though most people called her Sabina. Born in Germany in 1921, she married Anton Boenigk, who served in a German panzer unit during World War II. They had three children, two in the old country and one in the United States. The oldest was Christa, born in 1942. Reflecting her mother’s beauty and using the name Christa Speck, she was Playboy’s Playmate of the Month in September 1961, and ultimately Playmate of the Year.2 Four years after Christa came Rainer, and then after the family moved to America in 1956, Peter was born on January 20, 1957, in Los Angeles. The Boenigks briefly lived in Pasadena before moving to an apartment on Garfield Street in Glendale. Anton worked as a welder in an aerospace company until he died of cancer in 1965. To support the family after Anton’s death, Sabina worked two jobs. She managed the Garfield Street apartment building; the owners did not want the hassles of cleaning up, showing apartments, and doing the paperwork, so they hired her. And she worked in a bar. Which is where she met Joe.3 Exactly how this happened is uncertain, though Joe told his old Navy buddy Gary Foster they met by accident when he was driving a big Honda motorcycle and went into the bar to escape a rainstorm.4 After that Joe began hustling Sabina, who was fun-loving, gregarious, and still beautiful despite being in her mid-forties. Because she was seventeen years older than Joe, she resisted his advances. Then one night, Peter later learned from his mother, “some guy at the bar was drunk, and he was trying to give my mother a hard time and I think Joe threw the guy out of the bar.” After this display of conspicuous gallantry Balbine quickly succumbed to Joe’s charms. They married in July 1968, in Las Vegas.5 At the time Joe was a civilian. After being retained in service seven extra days for the government’s convenience, on June 11 he received an honorable CHAPTER 10 307 discharge. Joe claimed he was “self-employed” for the next six months, but was actually unemployed, leaving...

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