The Lives Of Kathleen Willey

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Kathleen Willey's life has not been a simple one. In high school, Kathleen Matzuk became pregnant and was sent away to Ohio for the birth. The child was put up for adoption, and Kathleen returned to school, explaining her absence as the result of having been in a car crash. She married a medical student named Richard Dolsey, with whom she had a daughter, but the couple split in 1970. Three years later, Kathleen married Ed Willey, a real estate lawyer with whom she had a son. Around 1990, moved at least in part by the death of the newborn son of her friend Julie Steele, Kathleen Willey sought the help of an agency to find the child she had given up years before. She discovered him in Pennsylvania, and when he came to visit the Willeys, they threw a party for him. She refers to his kids as her grandchildren.

The daughter of a Richmond, Va., machine salesman, Kathleen had married into the old money and Virginia politics of the Willey clan. Her father-in-law, one of the state's most powerful legislators, did not approve of the match, but her husband Ed loved her. Willey spent many of her married years working on Democratic campaigns, including Chuck Robb's senatorial bid and several of Governor Douglas Wilder's campaigns. As part of the constant round of political giving and receiving, Kathleen Willey met Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas, at a 1989 Charlottesville fund raiser. At a party following the 1992 presidential debate in Richmond, Willey was excitedly introducing the candidate to other prominent Democrats. "I don't think she missed an opportunity to be around Bill Clinton," says Michael Morchower, a Richmond criminal attorney who was once close to the Willeys.

While the family's political cachet ascended with Clinton's fortunes, its finances were caving in. In November 1993, Kathleen Willey became aware of just how bad things were--her husband owed the IRS $400,000, and he had stolen $275,000 from a client. Ed, who was also being threatened with disbarment, begged Kathleen to sign a note for the stolen amount to stave off his creditors. She reluctantly agreed but over the next two weeks hounded her husband for a plan to rescue the family. He had none. A meeting the Sunday after Thanksgiving with their children dissolved into a shouting match, and Ed moved out of their home. The next day Kathleen sought out her friend the President in the Oval Office. As she raced home from that controversial meeting, Ed Willey pulled his blue Isuzu Trooper off a country road and, after blowing a tire, walked into the woods and shot himself. "I deserve your eternal scorn," Willey wrote his wife in a suicide note in which he apologized for his financial misdeeds and enclosed a lottery ticket and a $100 bill.

He also left huge debts, chief among them a settlement he owed former clients, Anthony Lanasa and his sister Josephine Abbott, from whom he had embezzled the $275,000. After her husband's death, Willey lashed out at Lanasa. "She called me at 3 in the morning and said I killed her husband," he says. "She called two or three times until we got the warrant saying that she couldn't call us." Still, Willey's famous temper (her nickname "Irish" was on her license plate) would not be aimed at the President. Just days after he had allegedly groped her, the widow bragged to friends that he would attend Ed's funeral. He did not.