UNSPEAKABLE: Matthew Badger (far right) has revealed that his grief over losing twins Grace and Sarah, 7, and 9-year-old Lily filled him with the horrendous urge to kill his ex-wife, Madonna Badger (top left), her boyfriend, Michael Borcina (bottom left) — and himself. (
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The father of the three little Connecticut girls who died in a Christmas Day fire last year was so crazed with grief that he threatened to kill himself and those he deemed responsible for the horror — including his ex-wife and her contractor boyfriend — in the wrenching days after the blaze.
Matthew Badger of Manhattan revealed the depth of his pain in stark new detail in an interview with New York magazine.
He recounted how he recently ran into the builder, Michael Borcina, downtown and the emotionally “struggling’’ man asked for a hug.
Badger refused.
The despondent, chain-smoking Badger — who has yet to return to his job as a commercial director since the fire — also said he’s fighting an uphill battle to get donations for the LilySarahGrace Fund, named after his tragic 9-year-old daughter, Lily, and 7-year-old twins, Grace and Sarah.
At a fund-raiser at a mansion in Norwalk last week attended by 200 people, Badger said, he received a paltry total of $1,200.
“I put my three daughters out there. And this is what they’re worth?’’ the dad said bitterly.
Badger, 47, said he’s spent the days since the tragedy trying to find meaning in his beautiful, spirited daughters’ deaths.
Two months ago, he and his current girlfriend went to India, where he met and cried with the Dalai Lama — and spread some of the girls’ ashes on a hill.
“Afterward, three white dogs came suddenly to sit with [the couple], beautiful, not mangy,’’ the mag says, quoting Badger, who wears a necklace with miniature Himalayan prayer flags.
Badger has also sprinkled some of his daughters’ ashes in the Columbia River in the Rockies — mingling them with those of his older brother, who had died of a heart attack 15 years earlier.
Badger recalled how he learned that all of his children — as well as the elderly parents of Badger’s ex-wife, famed Calvin Klein ad exec Madonna Badger, 48 — died in the Stamford blaze.
He had gotten two calls on his iPhone at around 7 that morning, but he figured he could call back later, thinking it was the girls wanting to talk about what Santa had brought them, the mag says. Shortly afterward, two policemen showed up at his door.
Hours earlier, Madonna and Borcina had been wrapping gifts in Madonna’s 116-year-old Victorian mansion.
Borcina was then in charge of clearing the ashes from that night’s fire from the fireplace. Authorities have said those ashes, put in bags in an outside mudroom, ignited the blaze.
Madonna now lives in Little Rock, Ark. She continues to challenge the official cause of the blaze and is suing Stamford officials for tearing down her house before an investigation could be conducted.
Her ex-husband also has sued Stamford — as well as Borcina.