OFFICER'S PRIVILEGE: THE COL. GEORGE MARECEK STORY

"On the Beach"

Col. Marecek & wife Viparet

As court papers would later describe the scene, it was just about lunch time on June 4, less than half a day after his petite young wife, Viparet, had vanished in the brief but violent storm, when Col. Marecek burst into the general store at Fort Fisher, and collapsed to his knees on the floor. By all accounts, all of his icy military composure, that bearing forged over three decades of bloodshed, had completely evaporated, as he screamed, "I found her, I found her."

He claimed that he had spent hours searching for her, and that at last, he had found her nude body, washed up on a secluded spit of land near the end of the dirt road that led out to Davis Beach. Though there was no sign that she had been sexually assaulted, she had been bludgeoned, brutally, apparently with a blunt object. She was still alive when whoever had killed her left her face down in the tide. She drowned, the coroner would later declare.

There was, even from the beginning, no doubt that Viparet Marecek had been murdered.

But it would take nearly seven years before prosecutors would finally be able to convince a jury that they had found the man who had murdered her. It was, a jury concluded, the same man who had collapsed screaming on the floor of the general store that day, Colonel George Marecek, a man who had a life time's worth of experience with death and dying.

The death of Viparet Marecek and the prosecution of her husband remains to this day, a controversial case. Even now, the Colonel, who was released on parole from prison after serving less than five years for the slaying, still has his supporters. Among them are some who believe that Marecek was framed for the killing, and that he was ultimately targeted for personal destruction because in the years leading up to his arrest, he had begun devoting himself, actively, to politics in the then-recently free Czech republic.

But there are others, among them Tommy Hicks, who spent the better part of a decade prosecuting Marecek, who insist that Marecek is a cold-blooded killer, and that his actions were less than ignoble, they were prosaic. The way Hicks sees it, Marecek murdered his wife in part, so he could collect a $300,000 insurance policy he had taken out on her, in part because he wanted to be free to marry Hana Marecekova, his cousin and lover, a Czech woman with whom he frequently visited and often corresponded, but most importantly, because, after a life time of adventure, "he was getting bored."