Hatfields & McCoys: Let's play the feud!

As an avid student of human nature, I’m eager to watch the History channel’s “Hatfield’s & McCoys.” I’m ignorant of the historic feud’s origins but I understand it involves a stray pig.

Nothing stirs my interest like rationally disposed human beings helplessly giving in to bents of insane passion.

This is true in cases of both love and hatred. 

I’m still following all the news about the messy love triangle between former Highmark insurance titan Ken Melani, his golf cart honey Melissa Myler and her fifth-wheel husband. 

Just two months ago, Melani was earning $4.5 million a year as the CEO of a $14 billion industry giant. He was often feted by local philanthropies and society pages for his keen intellect and social dash. He was a true mover and shaker.

That was before he fell under the spell of the comely half-his-age Myler, who moved and shook in ways that cause older married men like Melani to drive their once-stable lives straight off cliffs.

You can read more about it here and, you betcha, count on me to keep you informed any time any of the trio does anything to make the news.

Then there’s the sad, tragic reverse when people let irrational hatred drive them to the very depths of human experience.

It’s impossible to catalogue all the news stories I’ve written about men who are now serving life sentences that stemmed from conflicts over things as mundane as the disputed location of a hedge.

I can’t recall the details and wouldn’t post them here for fear for my life, but the most gripping Hatfield & McCoy story I’ve ever covered involved two middle-aged western Pennsylvania men who’d led otherwise spotless lives right up until they become neighbors.

One was a college English professor, the other a skilled carpenter.

The story would be better if I could say both men were well-regarded within the community as quality individuals. That was not the case.

The professor was. The carpenter was not. In fact, I spoke to maybe a dozen witnesses from the subsequent trial and everyone said the carpenter was an absolute jerk no one would miss if he dropped dead.

The professor was a man of manners and good humor, at least he was until the carpenter moved next door and began poisoning both their lives.

In fact, the first dispute was over the location of a fence the carpenter built. The professor said it strayed across the border onto the property of his tidy suburban home.

By two feet.

Those two feet led to an escalation of antagonisms the led to attempted murder.

Six months after the construction of the fence, the professor had had enough. He couldn’t sleep. The carpenter kept odd hours and played loud music with the speakers pointed at the professor’s bedroom. The carpenter’s dog was pooping in his yard.

Individually, these may seem like petty irritants. Cumulatively, they consumed the professor. So much so that one day he purchased a gun and approached the carpenter on his back porch and emptied the clip in his antagonist’s head.

Imagine a hatred so all-consuming that you’d willingly sacrifice your freedom to eliminate it. He understood the law. Knew he’d go to prison. Yet he chose the peace incarceration would bring knowing because it meant the end to the source of his soul-searing hatred.

Then imagine the object of that hatred surviving six bullets to the head.

I don’t recall the calibre of the weapon, but it is irrelevant. Experts and police were stunned that this evil neighbor could survive intact. I interviewed him at his kitchen table. Without knowing the history of their feud, he would have seemed like a perfectly normal guy.

He showed me his wounded noggin. It looked like someone had slugged him multiple times with a ball peen hammer.

And everyone in town felt terrible about the whole thing.

Not for the victim.

For the history professor.

Jurors told me they felt bereaved they couldn’t imprison the victim and free the assailant.

It reminded me of what one old attorney once told me. “There are three kinds of homicide: justifiable, unnecessary and praiseworthy.”

I’ve had some wonderful neighbors and some that have caused me to think of how that old English professor reacted with his mortal enemy -- or maybe he thinks of him as his immortal enemy. I may revisit this topic again soon because I’m convinced a bad neighbor can make your life worse than a bad spouse.

The bad neighbor has more permanence.

A friend of mine told me the last time he golfed he was beset upon by tiny, annoying flies. They didn’t bite, they didn’t sting, but they were a constant irritant that ruined his round..

“They were just always there in your face,” he said. “You couldn’t escape them and you couldn’t kill them.”

You mean, I asked, like neighbors?

Exactly.

Melani/Myler -- an insurance industry love story

We’re enjoying a splendid spring scandal here in Western Pennsylvania too delicious to keep to ourselves.

It involves Dr. Ken Melani, the married 58-year-old now-former CEO of Highmark insurance and Melissa Myler, a 28-year-old also-married lovely whose chief credential at securing employment with an insurance conglomerate appears to have been an ability to navigate a golf cart.

As he until 24-hours ago was earning $4.5 million a year to preside over a $14.6 billion industry titan that makes life-and-death snap judgements based on indifferent data and patient charts, let me make a couple of snap judgements on Melani and Myler.

He’s an arrogant prick and she’s a shallow tramp.

I must first confess my bias against the insurance industry and anyone adept at helping it increase its already obscene profits. The health care industry suffers from many colossal failings and greed is at the heart of most of them.

Still, I’m fairly confident about my diagnosis of Melani. He looks and is acting like someone who felt his millions should insulate him from conventional behavior.

And, really, who could blame him? Up until last week when he was arrested for assaulting his mistress’s husband on their porch, it was all working out pretty swell. Highmark canned him Sunday, a move that led one newspaper to say he’d suffered “a spectacular fall from grace.”

I’m still researching to see if his wife, still steadfast it seems, is actually named Grace.

Up until last week he’d been shacking up with the comely Myler in a luxury riverfront apartment. Reports on what she did at Highmark -- besides Melani, of course -- are sketchy.

Melani had her hired in October as a “business analyst 1,” a position Highmark says requires at least a few years of experience. She must have been a quick study because previous to this she was the part-time operations manager for a Pittsburgh-area golf tournament.

Police reports said three weeks after he hired her for a job that pays between $38,000 and $58,000 the two began their affair. I guess in these days three weeks qualifies as playing hard to get.

From those humble beginnings she in January spearheaded a $15 million promotional sponsorship with the PGA Tour. The deal was hefty enough that Highmark’s board of directors was supposed to approve it before it went through.

They did not.

Melani did.

It’s something to think about next time your Highmark premium is due or your school district raises taxes citing ever-escalating insurance obligations.

It all began to unravel when she learned that Melani, suddenly suspicious of motives, hired a private investigator to dig into her background, expecting to find, I guess, something more salacious than unreplaced fairway divots.

The investigation hurt her feelings and drove her back to her husband, causing Melani to go berserk and confront the pair. A fight ensued, police were summoned and the doctor, from the back of the cruiser, tried to gain sympathy by examining the soul of arresting officer David Brankley.

“He asked me in an emotional voice if I’d ever had a relationship that was everything to me,” Brankley wrote, adding he “declined to answer.”

Oh, how I wish Brankley had responded in song with a tuneful soliloquy about a heartache he’d dare not revealed since that prom night long ago!

It’ll be interesting to see what’s next for the now disgraced Melani, freshly unshackled from that $4.5 million annual salary.

I once wrote a story about an old doctor so country he accepted live chickens from farmer patients in lieu of traditional payment. The only thing that kept it from being one of my favorites was I couldn’t get him to say he gave fresh eggs for change.

A down home practice like that would do wonders for Melani or anyone in the health care field whose soul’s been corrupted by money.

And that brings me back to my harsh assessments of Melani and Myler. The romantic in me hopes there was a true emotional connection there, but the brain in me says she never would have spent a minute with him if he wasn’t loaded and he never would have had a chance with her if he was a twice-her-age business analyst 1.

So in the end this sordid tale is all about money.

Which makes it for the health insurance industry the perfect love story.

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