http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=assael/071125These are exerpts of Dan Duchaine's memoirs.
Carlsbad, California
March 1997
While lying in bed on one of their Nubain getaways, Dan told Mary Lou, "You know what I hate about you? Your skin." It was too loose for competitive bodybuilding, he thought. What she needed was the translucent, shrink-wrapped look that judges liked. And as it happened, he had just the ticket: an industrial chemical named Dinitrophenol. DNP was employed in the early 1900s to ignite explosives. But German researchers found that it led to drastic weight loss when swallowed because it caused the body to burn calories. By turning the internal thermostat way up, DNP, which is similar in structure to TNT, can increase one's metabolism by as much as 50 percent.The key is knowing how much DNP to take. When he first got his hands on a sample of the yellow powder, Duchaine asked his friend John Romano to help him put it into gel capsules. After a while, Romano couldn't understand why he felt so hot. Finally, it occurred to him that he was absorbing the powder through his pores. His temperature had soared to 103 degrees. Mary Lou was a willing subject, perhaps too willing. One day she took more DNP than Duchaine had advised. Unable to reach Duchaine, she called his aide, Bruce Kneller, to ask what was happening to her. "How much are you taking?" he asked. When she told him, he was aghast. "If you keep that up, you're going to die."
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Tijuana, Mexico
October 16, 1998
Whether Dan Duchaine loved Mary Lou was irrelevant. On a visit to Scottsdale, Arizona, he walked into a jewelry store and walked out with a two-and-a-half carat diamond ring. At dinner that night, he slid it across the table and said, "I want to marry you. I want us to make a baby." Even through her Nubain haze, Mary Lou had difficulty saying yes. She had lost everything -- her husband, her friends, her life back East. For a time, all she had left was her bodybuilding dream and Duchaine ruined that as well. She had been knocked from the 1997 Nationals in Dallas in the first round, and with the 1998 show a month away, she looked like hell.
Duchaine's solution: "You need calf implants."So they set out for a clinic over the border in Mexico. Duchaine checked her in, got a hotel room, then came back just as she was being wheeled into surgery. "You'll be fine," he said. The operation was declared a success, but it hadn't gone well. Mary Lou realized as much when she awoke in the middle of the night with her feet incredibly numb. It felt, she would later remember, like a terrible case of frostbite. She dragged herself to the nurse's station, but the nurse didn't speak English and ordered her back to bed. The blood vessels in Mary Lou's legs had not been properly re-attached. Her lower body was essentially cut off from her circulatory system. She was rushed into the operating room so the implants, now leaking silicone, could be removed. Seeing her leg sliced open on either side as though it had zippers made Mary Lou grow faint and she screamed, "I want to go to an American hospital!" An ambulance raced her back across the border. By the time they pulled up to the emergency room of Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, Mary Lou's kidneys and liver were in a state of near-failure. While Shelley Harvey was in England, recovering from the brain damage caused by the motorcycle accident, the woman Dan Duchaine had selected to replace her,
a woman whom he had promised prize-winning legs, was about to have one of them sawed off.
