the story of her life. pamela had a spirit that was infectious. carol neve was pam s best friend. she was always happy. she had a personality that just sucked you in and kept you ere. reporter: carol met pam 22 ago.years we were neighbors, and we did become best friends to the tune of every day we talked. every single day. reporter: that was long before jim came into the picture, of course. good morning, baby desiree! first christmas! pam was a single mom. she and carol babysat for each others kids, walked their babies together, went shopping, shared recipes, and hung out during the holidays. pamela was very much family to me. pam was the most caring, loving, giving person you would ever meet. life was about other people. tina holland is another friend.
kind of left us as a family. we didn t really see much of him at that point. it kind of angered me seeing the person he was turning into. the year was 2006. desiree says that, as jim became harder to get along with, it served to push away pam s attempts to be more involved with the company while her husband was ill. i could hear them bickering about the business on a daily basis. specifically? nothing in specific, but just little things here and there that needed to be changed. their disagreements grew daily and festered to the point where the couple separated. jim started spending more and more time at the ranch home in moor park. and while the fayed marriage was crumbling, federal prosecutors were taking a look at the booming online gold trading business. they were looking for evidence of fraud, of tax evasion, and of the transferring of money without the proper government license. pam s friend carol did not want to see pam caught in a federal mess. i called her to warn h
very quickly, the fayeds started making a lot of money. they moved their home business into this building in camarillo outside l.a. and hired employees. they bought a new home, a second home in nearby moor park which they called happy camp ranch, complete with horses for pam and janette. they were nouveau riche perhaps but they were determined not to flaunt it much. even their older daughter desiree who started working for them as a teenager did not realize how much her parents were raking in. when you hear figures of tens of millions of dollars coming in, that s news to you. it is, yeah. did they live that way? we had an average house, a two-story home. we didn t live in a mansion. we had extra money to do what we wanted, but it wasn t enough to
he was someone who was invincible. then one day jim discovered that he wasn t. his health started to slip. he developed rheumatoid arthritis and started taking a lot of pills to dull the pain from that. and perhaps a different side of jim fayed began to emerge. there became a point where jim was addicted to pain medications, and it wasn t the same jim that pam knew. by this point, jim wanted total control of her and the company and her job was to stay home and be a wife. as controlling as jim was, he couldn t control the arthritis in his joints. it forced him to give up going to the office. was he in the hospital or bedridden? he was bedridden, yes. for how long? for a couple of years. really? so he barely got out of bed for a couple of years. yes. i felt as he got bedridden he wasn t as social with us anymore. he stayed in his bedroom. he basically i feel like he kind of left us as a family. we didn t really see much of him at that point. it kind of angered me seei
i just liked being around him. reporter: funny but not nearly as social and outgoing as pam. jim was a gentle soul, a very quiet kind of soul, very private back then. she saw jim as someone who could provide for the family, had a good, honest job doing electrical work. reporter: when they learned pam was pregnant, they decided to make it official. jim and pam were married in vegas in 1999. now they were the parents of two girls, young desiree and even younger janette. with more mouths to feed, the couple began to experience some rough patches financially. jim often worked as an electrical contractor for the government, a job that would take him on the road for weeks at a time. then there were times when the work would run out and he would have to scramble to find more. it was a struggle. they argued. pam felt abandoned a lot. reporter: at one point pam went on public assistance. it was something she d promised herself would never happen, but now pam had to go down that path.