reporter: service in the military, as so many americans have come to know, can form a person. as it did james white. i was a marine for life. it never leaves you. reporter: once a marine, always a marine, they say. and james white loved everything about the corps. i miss the marine corps very much. reporter: though not so much his next job as a mississippi deputy sheriff. what was it you didn t like about it? i don t like seeing human suffering on a day-to-day basis. reporter: so, after a failed marriage and with his young daughter in tow, he moved back to the place he started out, northern california. that little girl, katelynn white, is all grown up now. we re more best friends than father and daughter. we fight like siblings, and we re just we we re more focused on having fun and not really caring about what other people think.
reporter: what tim, the starving artist could offer, beyond love and loyalty, was a whole lot of nothing. todd, on the other hand. we went to orlando with them to disney world. reporter: and he was picking up the bill for this stuff? yeah. most of the time, yeah. don had no way of knowing that tim was, for a time, still in rachel s life. sort of. reporter: you didn t lose touch completely. no, we really kept in touch, reporter: why would they do that? maybe because her marriage, her marriage, rachel led tim to believe, wasn t all apple pie and ice cream. because she wanted to share with me what was going on. reporter: what did she tell you? she shared with me that todd took her credit cards and maxed them all out and bought a plane and just put her in debt for, like, $45,000. reporter: whoa. i was, like, whoa. i m all, aren t you freaking out? and she said, yeah, but we he ll take care of it. reporter: which when he thought about it sounded less li
we make debts we must pay. rachel hatfield turned her life as if on a dime, left her past behind and embraced an existence that was everything it wasn t with old boyfriend tim. when she married todd winkler, the ex-fighter pilot turned corporate executive, she also married into a very different lifestyle. there were private airplanes and boats and motorcycles. a big house in a development east of sacramento called an air park. cessnas in garages, piper cubs on the curb. tim cherrington versus todd winkler? no contest, said her dad, don hatfield. the guy s an air force academy graduate. he s successful in business. he s a family man. he s, you know, from the midwest. he s got to be great. reporter: good, solid upper-middle class guy? up yeah, no. reporter: and he s got a plane and he s got planes and boats and you know, all over the place.
trash talk about the husband whose mere existence was an impediment to their happiness. but, wrapped up in their fog of love, they began talking about running away from it all together. and then, it was just about a year into their affair, uh-oh, she was pregnant, with todd s baby. so did rachel and james end it then? why, no. they did not. what did it do to your relationship? brought us closer. she said to me, who in their right mind would want to take on a woman with two toddlers and an infant? i said, i would, without hesitation. she started crying and so did i. reporter: how did she feel about carrying todd s baby? she said that the life in her was a gift from god, and no matter who the father was, she s going to love that baby no matter what. because half that baby was her. reporter: sure, of course.
at the entrance to james s isolated mountain property. we just got done shooting. and i just hear this car roll up. i was like, wow, that sounds like rachel. and i see these two men walking up the driveway. and i was like, oh, my god. what are they doing here? and i ran out. i m like, dad, todd s here. and so is don. he goes, all right. let s get this over with. and i grabbed the nine or i didn t grab the nine, i grabbed the m4. reporter: katelynn is talking about the guns she had at the ready, a 9 millimeter pistol and an m-4 rifle. and james? he had a pistol holstered in the small of his back as he walked out to greet todd and don. i had a 9-millimeter on me, and i know how to use it extremely well. reporter: here is james s memory of a confrontation so tense it sounds almost surreal. as the two men approached the house, he said, they hid behind todd and rachel s children.