On the afternoon of Feb. 27, 1990, sunlight glinted off the Park City snow. It was a nice day, Michael Massimino noted, as he pushed a train of grocery carts across the parking lot.
Massimino, manager of the Albertson's grocery store on Park Avenue, returned inside to the busy checkstands. It was 5:20 p.m., a peak business time for the store, whose aisles teem daily with skiers looking to fill condo cupboards and mothers stopping off for milk on the way home from work."I can take those," shopper Nadalee Noble assured Massimino as he threaded his fingers through the plastic handles of her grocery bags. But Massimino overruled her, escorting her past the pharmacy to the store's north exit. Nadalee, a 43-year-old woman with brown eyes and short, mussed hair, seemed preoccupied.
A tall man approached them from around the corner of the store, from behind the wooden pallets stacked with rock salt. The man wearing a dirty beige jacket and a small cowboy hat, grabbed Nadalee from behind, roughly squeezing the nape of her neck. "You're coming with me now," he told her.
"No, get away from me," she cried, frantically scrunching her shoulders under his grasp, then pleading with Massimino to call the police. Massimino stared into the deliberate, controlled face of Nadalee's attacker.
The man pulled a .45-caliber handgun from under his jacket, pointed it at Nadalee's stomach and pulled the trigger, but it didn't go off. Nadalee spun away from her attacker's grasp.
To Massimino, it seemed as if only seconds had passed since they had stepped out of the store. He watched Nadalee, now free, stumble, cowering near the store wall. And he watched the man cock the pistol, his elbow bent, and aim at the woman's forehead, 3 feet away.
Two blasts rang out and Nadalee fell to the ground. Massimino ran to get help.
Nadalee Noble died of two bullet wounds to the head, the same day she moved out of the women's shelter in Salt Lake City, 90 minutes after divorce papers were served on her husband.
On June 15, an eight-member jury found Donald Allen Noble, 53, guilty of second-degree murder.
***
When the couple up the street starts yelling on a summer evening, the neighbors shut the windows and retreat inside. It's not polite to listen.
When a bullet slices the air, we fear that the next one will find our heart. Murder scares us primarily because of its randomness.
But when an angry lover or a husband, present or former, is charged with the crime, we are relieved. We look around at our loved ones and assure ourselves, "That could never happen to me."
The law enforcement term of "domestic violence" is itself a jarring oxymoron. Home is supposed to be a harbor, a refuge, a safe place. But when intimacy explodes into violence, the very foundation of that refuge is betrayed.
Why does any man kill the woman he loves? Why does any woman allow continued abuse? When in the course of a once-promising marriage did love and hate and violence become entwined?
In the Nobles' severed marriage, the leading characters are both victims: Nadalee, trapped by her own fear and refusal to leave a stultifying domestic situation; and Don, trapped by his fear of losing his wife and his need to control. Both avoided reality by choosing a twisted sort of way, to romanticize a humiliating existence.
The Nobles disagreed about money. About who should clean the house. About broken vacuums. About who should keep the fire stoked. About how much time they spent together. About how often to have sex. About a man's role and a woman's role. About the fissures in their relationship.
About control. About love.
The same kinds of everyday things that men and women everywhere fight about. Two genders. Two sets of eyes. Two stories.
***
Nadalee Puzey was born in 1946 and grew up in Murray. The oldest of eight children in an LDS home, she was named for her father, Nad. As a child she was especially close to her grandfather, who took her fishing and taught her to drive when she was 13.
Nadalee taught her younger sister, Holly, about teenage life, about Fabian and Frankie Avalon. Whenever Holly Kay sees Avalon on TV, she remembers the time her older sister took her to see the teen idol at the Terrace. "I remember going to see him with our beehive hairdos. And we thought we were movie stars."
In 1964, during her senior year, Nadalee Puzey dropped out of Murray High School. At 18, she married a man her sister described as "a long, skinny guitar player." She really fell for him, Kay said.
But the marriage fell apart quickly. Her husband abused her and starved her, according to her family. After Nadalee became pregnant, her family helped her escape and hid her.
Divorced, Nadalee moved home, had the family's first grandchild, Amy, and worked as a secretary and then in a bakery. She was, her family recalls, a mild and gentle young woman.
***
Don Noble was adopted at birth in 1937 and grew up in Sugarhouse. He had two older sisters but was the only child still living at home. "They wanted a kid and they got me," he says of his parents. "I had everything I wanted as a kid."
He started working young. One fall he simply stayed on at his warehouse job and didn't go back to high school. "The job was so good I stayed. Money was a big thing in the '50s," he says. "I was an early grown-up kid."
His parents weren't religious. "I'm kind of a non-practicing atheist, you might say." Out of a sense of responsibility to them, he stayed out of the kind of juvenile delinquency that troubled most of his friends.
He and his dad hunted, fished and rode horses together, buying property in Kamas to pasture them. He joined the Utah National Guard, but lived at home until he was 29, helping out as his father got weaker with
emphysema.
He joined a car club and drove a light blue 1950 Mercury convertible, "you know, like the kind Sylvester Stallone drove in `Cobra.' "
And he was a flashy dresser who dated "hundreds" of girls. He went with one for four years, and was once engaged to another.
***
Nadalee was 20 when she met Don Noble at a church dance. Don, 29, went to the singles dance at the old Terrace ballroom in order to meet nice women. He met two other girls that night, but a week later he dated Nadalee.
"She was everything that I ever wanted. She was really a beautiful woman. She had long legs and long hair."
Nadalee was "crisp and clean, marriage material," he says, "and she liked me and that was an important thing."
"They met and he followed her home," is how Nadalee's mother, Daralene Puzey Burt, tells it. "We interviewed the parents and they were quite nice."
"It was a Halloween party," says Nadalee's oldest daughter, Amy Cowley. "She'd dressed up as a witch. He'd asked her to dance.
"Fact is, she said she didn't even know his last name when they got married. She had to ask. She told me that."
Don and Nadalee married Dec. 2, 1966 - just over a month after they met - at her family's home.
The young couple found an apartment on Highland Drive. From the early days of the marriage, her family says, Don used a strong hand to tone down his young wife's style.
"It was almost like a brainwashing thing," Kay says. "When he married her she had red hair and wore makeup. She was a real pretty girl. It was like she became a polygamist." Don says Nadalee wore gaudy makeup, and he told her she was prettier when she applied it with a lighter hand.
Nadalee took on the role of housewife while Don went to night school and worked, earning his high school diploma in 1969. At the University of Utah, he majored in geology, taking classes from the summer of 1969 through the winter of 1974. He carried a 2.81 grade point average but dropped out just short of graduation. As a working father with three children, he didn't have enough money to attend a nine-week geology camp in southern Utah required for his degree.
In 1974, the Nobles moved to six acres of his family's property in rural Summit County and camped out in a trailer for the summer. "It wasn't to get away from something, it was to get to something," Don says.
Noble built his family a large stone house, which he continued to change and expand over the years. The house had big rooms and a two-story flower box, planted with fig trees, ivy and geraniums, to please his wife.
The Noble family grew to include five children. After the move, Noble was self-employed, working mostly in construction and other odd jobs, first at a sawmill, then as an electrician and a carpenter.
While the family never had much money, Nadalee's oldest daughter, Amy, remembers homespun summer days. Her mother had an easy laugh and enjoyed the beauty of the country. She read her children the Jungle Book, the Little House and the Hobbit books. Afternoons, she'd serve them pound cake and Kool-Aid.
"We'd go up to the barn. We called it 'Tea Time,'" Cowley says. "She taught us all to sew. We made mud beads. We made paper-mache mushrooms. We attempted a paper-mache tepee and got stuff in our hair."
Don describes himself as a "worry-wart" of a father but also the kind of man who gazed at the stars through a telescope with his children. The way he tells it, the children were the driving force in his life. "I remember the big family talk he gave me on 'Don't smoke,' and I never have," daughter Trina says.
Over the years, the Nobles and their next-door neighbors, the Curtises, took vacations and went horseback riding together. "When Don was sinto it, he really could be fun. We had a lot of good times together," Bev Curtis says. "He built my fireplace wall. Anything you needed, you could just call."
Curtis remembers once when she had an allergy attack while haying with her husband. Don came by to relieve her.
The Nobles were active in the local Lions Club--Don served as vice president--abd for several years, Don and Nadalee acted in the melodrama for Kamas' July 24th celebration.
"He usually played the villain," says Randy Taylor, who directed the local show for 25 years.
"Not only did he like it, he did a good job," said Taylor. "Don was quite ingenious. Anything we needed in the way of scenery and things like that, Don could handle."
Taylor said Don Noble was bright, if somewhat withdrawn socially. "When he would talk to you, he could talk to you about geological formations and things of that nature. He was well-informed about historical things."
"He had more books than anybody," says daughter Trina. "He could tell you anything about the sky, the dirt, the trees. But he couldn't tell you a thing about living in America.
"Maybe he was born 50 years too late."
***
For years, the Noble family scrimped, living a pioneer existence in their stone house. Don worked mostly as a firewood merchant to provide for his family. Nadalee washed their clothes in a wringer washer. For a septic tank, Don rigged up 40 feet of plastic pipe and connected it to a demolisheed automobile.
The family drew water from a shallow well that Don dug--just two loads of wash would drain the water source after the Kamas Fish Hatchery moved in next door and altered the water table. The toilet didn't always function properly. Nadalee made her own soap, cheese and canned food. When the well went dry, the family of seven hauled water from the creek. Some winters, the house would be so cold that shampoo as well as house plants would freeze.
Fifteen years ago, Nadalee, defended her life to her family, as noted in her diary:
March 20, 1975: "I called Mother and very nicely told her to mind her own business. Her and Daddy are always worried that I'm unhappy here and that Don should take better care of me. They're always talling me about moving to town, staying with them and making Don fix things better. They don't believe I'm happy."
The Nobles shopped at rummage sales and second-hand stores, scrounging household items from the dump, which locals nicknamed the "Kamas K mart."
Holly Kay says poverty forced her sister to be so resourceful that she even rolled her own tampons. Both sets of in-laws provided the family with food and clothing.
Bev Curtis, Nadalee's next-door neighbor, says her friend could make light of her burdens. "She'd tell all these sad stories and by the time she was done telling them, you'd be laughing. It didn't take a lot to make her happy."
Nadalee tatted and knitted and wrote in her journals and sewed and painted and made ceramics. She sold her crafts and milk from her cow in order to scrape together some money, and for 50 cents a column inch, wrote the "Meet Your Neighbor" and the "Summit Cooks" columns for the Summit County Bee.
She taught homemaking lessons at the LDS Kamas 2nd Ward. One of the youngest members of the Rhoades Valley Camp of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, Nadalee served as captain and wrote a 357-page book of oral histories, "Pearls of the Past."
In 1983, Nadalee finished adult education requirements and graduated from South Summit High School along with Amy, who then joined the Army. Trina, the second daughter, ran away from home at 16, favoring a foster home over the hardships of her own family life, despite being her father's favorite child.
Trina, who changed her identity in order to make a "clean break," refers to her father and mother by their first names. she says she never got along with Nadalee. "She was kind of a little different. She didn't like me. She was always jealous of the extra attention Don gave to me rather than to Amy."
"I found out," Don says, "the minute I sided with Trina, Trina got in more trouble."
Nadalee didn't tell Don where Trina was after she ran away. "Imagine not knowing for five years where your daughter was," Trina says. "And having someone in the same house know, and not tell you. That's mental cruelty."
According to Nadalee's writings, the marriage started to falter when Amy and Trina became teenagers. They began to want things, such as the luxury of daily showers and new clothes. Their father thought they should be happy with what they had. "But I felt their pain and helplessness," Nadalee wrote in an essay she kept in her desk drawer. "I felt a loss of respect for myself for not being able to provide for my children."
The chasm in the marriage deepened. Nadalee wrote that Don stopped working and bathing after the girls moved away, his spirit broken. "My resentment about what had happened to us I turned entirely on Don. He blamed the girls' leaving entirely on me. Though we lived in the same house, our marriage had slowly slipped away until we were no longer even friends."
Don says he loved his wife and feared she was fantasizing about having an affair with a younger man. "I kept thinking what I could do different to make her like me better." Don says Nadalee picked fights fights with both daughters, and that's what drove them away.
As years passed, Don withdrew. He didn't have life insurance or fire insurance on the house. He didn't always get his cars registered. "He's a very intelligent person, in general, he has a major reality lapse," Trina says. "He didn't think all those things that we call reality were necessary."
"They started to ignore each other," is how daughter Amy summarizes the later years of her mother's marriage.
***
Tomorrow on B1--Nadalee Noble chronicles her deteriorating marriage.