Piper Rountree, Fred Jablin's ex-husband: I was a student. He was a teacher… and I was the classical neophyte who looked up to him. He was just, you know, brilliant.

Piper Rountree, the undergraduate student, and Fred Jablin, the professor, met at the University of Texas in the early ‘80s and got married, almost on a whim, when, later, she was studying law in San Antonio.

Piper Rountree: He just said, “Well, let’s get married this weekend,” and I said. “Okay.” That was about it.

As Piper tells it, she and Fred—the man who would end up slain in his driveway—were both driven careerists.

She taking on a job, first, as a young assistant district attorney in Hays County Texas, then a position advising school boards across the state.

Fred, meanwhile, threw himself into his work at the university.

But by the time a second child came along, the 60-hour workweeks, the juggling of home and career was too much for both.

Piper Rountree: Something needed to be done. And that’s when Fred looked around. And he said, “Well, look. I’m the more mobile of the two of us. Why don’t we try to, you know, move somewhere else?”

So they moved from Texas to Virginia where Fred accepted a teaching job at the University of Richmond.

They found a house here in the western suburbs of Richmond but if “relax a little” had been the idea, that didn’t happen.

Before long there were three children, two cats, a dog, a ferret, and an activity list that would have exhausted Hercules—walks before school, piano, soccer, tennis and art classes after.

Piper Rountree: I was mostly an at-home mom. I was dedicated to the children doing everything that I could for the children. I cooked everything, I mean absolutely from scratch. I canned went berry-hunting. My neighbor referred to me as the Martha Stewart of motherhood.

The more she became Super Mom, Piper recalls, the less her husband Fred seemed to be around at all.

Piper Rountree: He was never really a be-around dad. He spent even more time with the university, and gave more of himself to the university.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: Did you think he was stepping out of your little family circle a little bit?

Piper Rountree: Yeah.

Murphy: Did you feel you were on your lonesome?

Piper Rountree: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Murphy: When do you sort of do a reality check on the marriage that we’re heading in different directions?

Piper Rountree: We had been in and out of counseling after we got to Richmond for a number of years. I kept saying you know, he needs to be a little more active in the family, just showing up at dinner time is not sufficient.

Ultimately, the cracks in Fred and Piper’s marriage couldn’t be repaired.

Divorce papers later would have Fred accuse Piper of having an affair with a married doctor.

Piper’s sister Tina, a nurse practitioner, involved herself in the divorce by drawing up a scorched-earth character analysis of Fred that portrayed him as an abusive narcissist who at one time had smoked marijuana with his students and wasn’t fit to be a parent.

Piper e-mailed that toxic document to Fred’s colleagues,  to their children’s scout leaders, to members of the PTA—the family’s dirty laundry was now hanging out for the whole community to see.

Murphy: How painful was the divorce?

Piper Rountree: Extremely painful. I had been through every type of litigation in my life. You know big corporate litigation, split-up mergers, child custody. I’ve been through trials—you know, just heartbreaking trials—nothing, nothing have I ever read about in stories could have come close to what went on in this divorce.

When all the bitter divorce ammunition had been expended, Fred Jablin was left standing as the overwhelming winner.

He was awarded primary custody of their three children and kept the house.

And with Piper now having TO go back to work—stay at home mom no more—the judge ruled that she’d have to pay Fred almost $900 a month in child support.

Murphy: Did you have any idea as you saw this divorce working its way out that you would lose primary custody of the children. Did you ever think that could happen?

Piper Rountree: No. Not at all.

Murphy: So here you are seeing now—what? -- The children on a scheduled number of weekends and summer visitations and that whole kind of thing?

Piper Rountree: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

A whirlwind of a mother without children’s daily attention, a onetime lawyer who’d let her career lapse, Piper Rountree limped home to Texas to tend her wounds, to Houston, where her older sister Tina took her under her wing.

Murphy: You guys are close?

Piper Rountree: Yes, very close. She’s wonderful. She’s one of the best healers I’ve ever known. 

But despite her sister’s help and support, Piper, who had given up her career for the kids, was having hard time finding work as a lawyer.

She scrounged together a job researching oil field lease records.

Piper Rountree: I had absolutely no money. From the divorce, I had a car and a set of bedroom furniture. I needed a house. I needed someplace to start working out of and  had to start making money quickly. 

But Piper fell so far behind in her child support payments, that she attempted to file for bankruptcy but her ex, Fred Jablin, thwarted her.

Piper Rountree: For awhile, I honestly couldn’t make the payments at all, because I didn’t have any money.

But gradually, Piper Rountree cobbled together a new chapter in her life.

She found a boyfriend who tried to help her get back on her feet financially. There was a lawyer friend rented her an office...

... And the greatest support of all: her sister Tina who ran a wellness clinic for women.

Through all her travails of getting back on her feet, Piper was still Mom—though long-distance Mom—to her three children.

Piper Rountree: I was mom on the phone every single day helping them through homework, helping them resolved fights. You know, “Can I go over to somebody’s house?” They would call me, especially my son, we had call, talked to each other almost every night just to hear each other breathe on the phone.

Now, two years after the divorce, Piper says, she and Fred had finally settled into a routine—the worst, finally, seemed behind them.

The kids came to her house in Houston and she flew up to see them for visitation as often as she could.

Murphy: What’s the temperature between you and Fred at that point?

Piper Rountree: It got better.

Murphy: Could you be civil with one another?

Piper Rountree: Yes. Yes.

Then came that Saturday. Piper was in Houston that evening when she got a call from her friend on her cell.

Piper Rountree: She said Fred was dead and I couldn’t understand what had happened.

And back on Hearthglow Lane, with Fred shot dead in the driveway, there was something detectives couldn’t understand yet either, and it had to do with Piper’s cell phone.

Six hours after the murder, as requested by investigators, phone service technicians were tracking that cell as it pinged off various towers.

Piper would tell people she’d been in Texas that weekend when Fred had been murdered but her cell phone seemed to be saying something else.

Det. Kelly: Piper’s cell phone was in Richmond that morning.

The cell phone didn’t necessarily mean Piper herself had been in Richmond,  but detectives quickly learned someone named Tina Rountree—her sister—had bought a roundtrip plane ticket from Houston to Virginia.

A passenger, a blonde woman, airline personnel recalled, who checked a .38 in her luggage.

10 days after the killing, police had gathered enough additional evidence to make an arrest in the case—not of Tina Rountree, but her sister Piper who would be charged with the first-degree murder of her former spouse, Fred Jablin.

Murphy: Piper, did you kill your ex-husband, Fred?

Piper Rountree: No.

A jury was about to be told otherwise.

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