Breast cancer had already betrayed her body, and a fatal heart attack had stolen her husband, when a grieving Long Island marriage counselor got the shock of her life.
Three months after her investment-banker spouse of 28 years, Eric Williams, collapsed at the gym and died during a May 2009 business trip to Atlanta, Teresa Taylor Williams sat alone on a Sunday morning opening her mail.
“There was a letter from Social Security, and I figured it was concerning Eric,” Teresa, 53, recalled. “The first line of the letter was informing me of an applicant child applying for benefits by a Synthia Jones.”
The letter confirmed a suspicion, brewing for weeks and first signaled by the existence of a mysterious insurance policy: The man she had known and loved and trusted for decades was leading a double life.
“I ran out of the door with my cellphone, letter and car keys and just drove and screamed on the expressway,” she said. “I don’t know how long.”
Eric and Teresa met when the two were teachers at IS 192 in Hollis, Queens. He earned degrees at Princeton and Columbia universities before making the move to Wall Street, where he worked for companies like Paine Webber, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. They married in 1982 and built an idyllic life, residing in an exclusive enclave in Roslyn, LI, and raising three beautiful children, now all in college.
Teresa, a Ph.D. psychologist, even remembered meeting Synthia Jones, 28. But she thought she was Eric’s Atlanta business partner, not his mistress.
“It was so crushing,” Teresa said, her eyes brimming with tears. “I couldn’t believe that I had been so betrayed after 30 years with someone.”
Emotionally wrecked, she closed her Great Neck family counseling practice and initially refused treatment for the breast cancer, even hiding the disease from extended family and friends.
Then things got worse. Prudential claimed two of her policies with Eric had lapsed, and denied her $2.25 million in benefits.
“Your heart stops, because all of a sudden someone’s telling you that everything you’ve counted on, your comfort zone, stops,” she said.
She insists she and Eric always paid their premiums, nearly $1,000 a month on average, for years.
She hired a lawyer to investigate Eric’s finances and was soon dealt new blows: His estate was in debt $2 million, and records in Atlanta indicated some of his money had gone to items for a new baby — Eric’s 20-month-old love child with Synthia.
Teresa is now suing Prudential and its agent, longtime family confidant Albert Brodbeck, for breach of fiduciary duty, alleging they kept her in the dark about the other woman and shouldn’t have paid Jones’ policy while shunning hers.
The agent should have told Teresa the truth, or excused himself from her affairs, said her attorney, Derek Sells. The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court last week, seeks $2.25 million in damages.
Brodbeck and Prudential declined to comment.
Jones said she met Eric Williams four years ago in Barbados, where she was working and he was on a business trip. They planned to open a hair salon, Jones said. Romance wasn’t in the picture.
“We started out as business partners for a year and a half, two years, before we got together,” Jones said.
“One thing kind of led to the next, and when I moved to Atlanta, we had a child on the way,” Jones said. “I don’t go around looking for married men saying: ‘Hey, let me date you.’ I wasn’t raised that way. But sometimes, love takes over.”
Eric Williams, 55, spent every other weekend in Atlanta and helped her mom, Sheila Tate, buy a house, Jones said. She treasures their 20-month-old son, Makhi.
“He’s actually what keeps me grounded,” she said. “He looks just like Eric.”
Teresa, meanwhile, is haunted by the thought of what will happen to her children and ailing parents if she succumbs to cancer before she can resolve the family’s crumbling finances.
“I haven’t slept a straight five hours in a year and a half,” she said.
Additional reporting by Robin Nelson