Barbara Sabich and Carolyn Polhemus’s hostile relationship

Barbara Sabich and Carolyn Polhemus’s hostile relationship is presented not as a direct rivalry between two women who openly confront one another, but as a conflict mediated by Rusty Sabich’s affair and Barbara’s interpretation of it. In his account to Dan Lipranzer, Carolyn becomes the rival around whom Barbara’s resentment, ambivalence about her marriage, and eventual plan to kill her take shape. The relationship’s decisive consequence is therefore double: Carolyn is killed, and Barbara’s attempt to make Rusty understand the act leaves their marriage bound to a secret he cannot acknowledge.

A Rivalry Reconstructed Through Rusty

The relationship emerges while Rusty lays out two identical beer glasses beside the larger set in his kitchen. The glass associated with Carolyn’s bar bears Rusty’s fingerprints, and the matching glasses help him explain how Barbara could have left a misleading object at the crime scene. As he washes the evidence powder from one glass and packs the set with Lipranzer’s help, he reconstructs the wife’s state of mind. This domestic scene makes the rivalry inseparable from objects: the staged glass links Carolyn’s death to Rusty, while the intact set reveals how easily an ordinary household object could be made to look incriminating.

Rusty describes Barbara as believing that she should have been the focus of her husband’s desire. In this account, Rusty’s affair gives Carolyn the attention Barbara wanted for herself, while Barbara regards Carolyn as a manipulative rival who treats Rusty as a diversion. That is Barbara’s perceived version of the relationship as Rusty reconstructs it, not an independent account of Carolyn’s intentions. The distinction matters: Carolyn’s place in this conflict is shaped by the marriage and by the husband’s divided loyalties, while Barbara’s hostility is described through her sense of displacement.

Resentment and Ambivalence

Barbara’s feelings toward Rusty and Carolyn are not presented as a settled decision to leave the marriage. Rusty’s reconstruction depicts her moving between days when she is certain she will leave and days when she wants to stay. Either possibility, he says, seems to require action. Her resentment is tied to the affair, but her wish for Carolyn’s death also persists when Barbara imagines repairing the marriage. If she leaves, she fears Rusty will return to Carolyn; if she stays, she hopes that removing the rival might allow the couple to rebuild their life together.

This contradiction gives Barbara’s hostility its particular force. Carolyn is both the person Barbara wants gone and the obstacle whose removal she imagines might restore the marriage. In Rusty’s account, the fantasy is attractive in both anger and self-pity: it promises revenge when Barbara imagines leaving, and a possible route back to the marriage when she imagines staying. The rival’s death is thus not simply an end to the affair in Barbara’s thinking. It is made to serve two incompatible outcomes, separation and reconciliation.

From Hostility to a Deliberate Plan

Rusty presents the idea of killing Carolyn as something that takes hold over time. Barbara’s supposed plan includes not only Carolyn’s death but also Rusty’s recognition that Barbara caused it. In his interpretation, that knowledge would make the act a form of vengeance if she were leaving, and a demonstration of commitment if she hoped to save the marriage. The relationship’s antagonism therefore becomes a design for controlling what Rusty will understand about both women and about his own loss.

Rusty describes several steps by which Barbara tried to direct suspicion toward him. She first logged into a computer at the university, which he believes supplied an alibi, then visited Carolyn after arranging to drop by. He says Barbara left a glass bearing Rusty’s fingerprints, used a small item called a Whatchamacallit, and brought cord. She also introduced a male-fluid specimen into the scene and left doors and windows unlocked. The account portrays the crime as an attempt to make the affair and the physical evidence point back toward Rusty, rather than as a confrontation between Barbara and Carolyn over the affair itself.

The Plan Reverses

Barbara’s plan, as Rusty recounts it, depended on controlling what investigators would find. Instead, he points to traces she had not anticipated: carpet fibers from her home on her skirt, hairs collected at the scene, detailed analysis of the specimen, the traced call from the Sabich home, and the third fingerprint on the glass. Carolyn’s tubal ligation also made the specimen significant in a way Barbara had apparently not expected. Rusty further says that Tommy Molto was shadowing the investigation and noticed evidence Barbara had not meant to leave behind.

The resulting danger to Rusty changes the emotional balance of the rivalry. As the case closes in on him, Barbara sees him suffer in ways she had not intended, according to Rusty’s reconstruction. Her hostility gives way to shame and pity; she cares for him during the ordeal and stands ready to tell the truth, although disclosure proves unnecessary. This reversal does not undo the murder or restore Carolyn to a merely temporary rival. Instead, the consequences Barbara intended for Rusty become a burden she must witness at close range.

A Marriage Divided by the Secret

Rusty says that he and Barbara are now better together and have rediscovered passion and feeling, but he also calls the crime a barrier between them. Their improved relationship does not erase what Barbara did or her guilt about it. She cannot bear her own guilt or the memory of what she had become, while Rusty cannot tell her what he knows. The affair that first defined Carolyn as Barbara’s rival thus leaves behind a marriage that may have recovered intimacy but cannot recover candor.

The relationship’s final irony lies in Barbara’s effort to make the killing mean something to Rusty. She wanted him to know the act was hers, whether as punishment or devotion; the truth eventually gives him that knowledge, but not the understanding or reconciliation she may have hoped for. Carolyn’s role in the marriage ends with her death, yet the rivalry persists as an unspoken presence between the surviving spouses. The crime meant to end the competition instead becomes the secret that keeps it alive.