Patsy, Jane, and Robert on vacation just prior to Robert's departure.   (Photo: Jane Maharam)

Jane was devoted to Robert, whom she describes as handsome and broad-shouldered, with curly red hair. Robert spent his leisure time golfing and swimming, she recalls, and collected expensive glass owls from around the world. Over the years, Robert began leaving more and more often on business. But the marriage remained solid and loving. Or so Jane thought—until one day in 1979, when she happened to open an attaché case Robert had left in the living room.

Inside, Jane found pictures of a woman in alluring positions. She confronted Robert in the kitchen, and while Patsy, then a teenager, listened from the hallway outside, Robert unleashed a long, rambling confession. “He said that it was a prostitute,” Jane recalls. “He said that for most of his married life, he had been with prostitutes. He had bought them jewelry. Cars. Clothes. He would travel with them. It was horrifying. I’d thought I was living the greatest love story in the world.”

Robert promised that he would stop, and Jane forgave him. “I was still very much in love and wanted to go on with the marriage,” she explains. For a time, things returned to normal. Jane had doubts about his fidelity—she began accompanying him more often on business trips—but repressed her suspicions. “I wanted to believe him,” she says. “He hung the moon, and I was a fool.”

A year later, she discovered blisters in her genital area, which a doctor would later diagnose as herpes. Robert had passed it on to her, she says, from a prostitute. “I remember standing in the shower, taking luxe soap and rubbing and rubbing the blisters, as if they’d go away—how stupid was that?” Jane says, growing emotional over the memory. “Here I was, this well-brought-up girl, and now I had the mark of Zorro. It was unbelievably humiliating.”

But Jane was still not prepared to face life alone, and she persuaded herself to forgive him. A year later, after Robert had left for work one morning, the phone rang. Jane picked it up, and an unfamiliar woman’s voice said, “Do you know where your husband is?”

Jane’s heart started racing—it must be a prostitute, she thought. Robert had once dropped the name of one of his women, and Jane dialed a few motels near Robert’s office, asking if any had her as a guest. One did. Jane woke Patsy. (Lewis had been away for several years at medical school.) The two women drove to the motel and knocked on the door to Robert’s room. He opened it—and behind him, she recalls, sat a woman buttoning her blouse near a table set with two glasses and a bottle of champagne.

“He sat there and said, ‘I’ve hidden all the money, and your mother’s never going to get any of it.’ ”

Robert tried to make it up to her, and the couple went on several trips together, leading Jane to think the marriage could be saved. Which is where things stood when she returned to the house that afternoon in June 1983 and found him gone.

Robert moved at first to the Washington, D.C., area, and had left a phone number. Patsy left several messages; none were returned. Robert, however, agreed to meet Lewis at a D.C. airport, where the son tried to persuade the father to share the fortune with Jane. “He sat there and said, ‘I’ve hidden all the money, and your mother’s never going to get any of it,’ ” recalls Lewis Maharam, who is now the medical director for the New York City Marathon. “He was rocking back and forth with this hysterical laugh. I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, in this bizarre, sick tone, ‘Because I want to.’ ” It was the last extensive conversation any of them would have with Robert.

After the divorce became final in 1983, Jane—stunned, disoriented, broke—turned to the courts to get some of her money back. She also lodged a separate lawsuit against Robert—for giving her herpes. In 1986, a New York appellate court granted her the right to sue her ex-husband for a sexually transmitted disease, a landmark ruling that made news in tabloids as far away as London. (In 1997, Jane won a jury award of about $600,000, which she collected because Robert had been forced to put up the money in bond.)

In the late eighties, Patsy moved to Manhattan to pursue her musical career in earnest, and soon after, Jane followed. Jane became not only Patsy’s roommate but her full-time manager too. Patsy got drawn deeper into the case in part to help her mother and in part because she had a financial stake in the outcome, too.

Robert’s lawyers, meanwhile, stalled a trial, Jane and Patsy say, by filing dozens of motions and continually postponing depositions. As the years passed, the women began to worry that Robert would spend all the money before the courts reached a decision. So Jane and Patsy hired detectives to track Robert’s expenditures. When the trial finally took place in 1996—thirteen years after Robert left—the evidence collected by Jane helped persuade a New York State Supreme Court justice to rule in her favor. Two years later, when Robert was ordered to pay her a huge judgment—ultimately tallied at more than $4 million—the women thought they had finally won.

They hadn’t, of course. A couple of weeks later, at a meeting in court to tie up loose ends, Robert’s lawyer turned up without her client. The lawyer (now deceased) dropped a bomb: Robert had left the country. As Jane recalls it, Robert’s lawyer told the judge, “He’s fallen off the face of the earth.”

The money—the promise of millions—was like a mirage on the horizon, drawing mother and daughter deeper and deeper into the desert. They couldn’t believe it was so easy for Robert to ignore a court order. Surely all they had to do was locate him in another state or country, and they could extradite him to New York, where he’d be on the hook. Right?

The court that had awarded Jane the money held Robert in contempt for nonpayment—a good start. To find him, the court granted Jane the right to subpoena his credit-card receipts from American Express, which she used to track him to Canada.