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Relationship secrets exposed
What happens when the man you're loving is living a dangerous double life?
By Susan Bourette
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The correspondence began innocently enough. 45-year-old Cathy Taylor was settling in for another quiet evening at home on the outskirts of Seattle. She'd recently separated from her husband, and, that night especially, she was feeling anxious to connect with new people. "I couldn't sleep," she remembers. As the evening wore on, she steeled her nerves, booted up her computer and logged on to a chat room under the guise of Sleepless777.
It wasn't long before a cordial instant message popped up onto her screen. "Good evening, luv," Tinwhistle wrote, proceeding to dispense a series of brash and witty one-liners. The man behind the moniker identified himself as Patrick Burke, an Irish millionaire originally from Belfast, now living in Winnipeg. He'd made his fortune in the event-planning business, he said, organizing such high-profile events as the Pan Am Games and the Canadian Figure Skating Championships.
Burke seemed lonely. Taylor recalls more than one year later, as she sits nursing a cocktail in the smoky lounge of Seattle's Kit Carson restaurant. He said he was going through a nasty divorce. To top it off, it was his birthday and he was all alone. "I thought it was sort of sad," she says.
Soon, Burke was sending Taylor digital images of himself and his daughter, as well as a shot of his palatial home in Winnipeg. He told her he was anxious to relocate to Seattle, where he hoped to become the city's next impresario. More than two months and some 100 e-mails later, they agreed to meet in person at a local family restaurant -- the very one Taylor sits in now.
"The first thing that went through my mind when I saw him was, 'You fibber,'" Taylor says, shaking her head and laughing. He wasn't quite as tall and slim -- nor nearly so dashing -- as the man in the picture had been. "The only reason I knew it was him was that he looked right at me and said, 'Hello Catherine.'"
Despite his portly appearance -- five feet eight inches and tipping the scale at 350 pounds -- Taylor was charmed. Burke spoke in a thick Irish brogue, and was full of stories of his impoverished youth in Ireland. His mother had died when he was nine years old and he'd been raised by his abusive, alcoholic father. At the age of 12, he left home and lived for some time in a Belfast pub. Eventually, he had won a scholarship to the prestigious Trinity College, where he met a small cadre of political radicals who recruited him into the IRA. He was trained as a spy.
"I was fascinated by his intelligence, his background and his humour," Taylor says. "I was totally at ease with him. He was just like a big teddy bear. We chatted for hours that night."
Photo courtesy of Le Château
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