Baileys had a rocky relationship

“I couldn’t even count the number of times you and Diane separated,” District Attorney Mike O’Pake said during his cross-examination of Robert Bailey.

On the witness stand, through questioning by public defender Kent Watkins, Bailey recounted a time line, sketchy in places, of the couple’s relationship.

In late 1994 or 1995, the two met in Richmond, Virginia. Diane was six months pregnant with her first daughter, Ashton. The two “lived together off and on.” Diane moved to Sumter, South Carolina. Robert Bailey remained in Richmond.

Robert Bailey’s 9-year-old son was killed by a drunken driver. He looked up Diane in Sumter. They got back together and moved to Williamstown, New Jersey, where Robert’s mother and stepfather lived. According to his testimony, “Diane and my stepfather were seeing each other.”

“But I couldn’t resist Diane, I forgave her, and we got back together,” he testified. But the relationship soured when he discovered she was seeing someone else. The next contact between the Baileys came in the form of a legal document seeking child support. Robert asked for a paternity test; the child (now Kali Hile) was his.

The Baileys had no contact for five years, and Robert Bailey filed a motion to have the child support dropped. His contact information was on documents received by Diane Bailey, and she contacted him. They got back together.

“It was beautiful,” Bailey testified about the reunion. He said that she visited him in New Jersey, and they made love in a hotel room. But the following day, he was confronted by Diane and her current boyfriend. They split up.

Thirteen years passed. In July 2015 Robert Bailey got a telephone call, and talked to both Diane and his daughter, Kali.

“We talked about getting back together, that Kali wanted a family,” Bailey testified. “She (Diane) was in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband; I packed up and moved to North Carolina.”

Once there, Bailey found out that Diane was not living with her husband, she was living in a women’s rehabilitation center. He was only permitted to stay there with her for three days of a week and spent the other four days “on the street.”

“I met Kali for the first time, and it was like heaven, but trying and emotional,” Bailey testified. “I found out (Diane) was into crack cocaine and was going back to her husband.

“It was wintertime and I was sleeping in the woods,” he added. “I made arrangements to go back to Jersey (Williamstown).”

But soon Diane followed him to New Jersey.

“She (Diane) came up to live with me,” Bailey said, adding that was in October 2015. “But three weeks later we were thrown out from New Jersey and moved to Tamaqua.”

Diane had family in Tamaqua and made the move. Bailey’s mother was in the hospital and he moved to Tamaqua two weeks later.

“It was beautiful, it was perfect, no complaints,” he said.

In January 2016, the couple heard from Kali, who was living in North Carolina and having issues with her husband. The two decided to drive there and get Kali. But they got a flat tire in Virginia. A police officer who stopped to check the disabled vehicle ran their names and found there was a warrant for Diane’s arrest in Virginia. In July 2016, Bailey traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to see Diane, and they got married, according to his testimony. She returned to Tamaqua in February 2017.

In March 2017, Diane had triple bypass surgery on her heart. Kali, who was in Virginia, came to help during her recuperation. On Nov. 23, 2017, “we had Thanksgiving as a family,” Bailey testified. “But I was not sociable, ate upstairs — I didn’t like Kali’s boyfriend — and that night we started doing meth.”

Bailey testified that meth use had been “a regular occurrence” for about three months, between Kali, her boyfriend and Diane, and that he joined in with the drug use that Thanksgiving evening.

“I felt left out,” he testified. “I wanted to be a part of what they were a part of.”

“The loving thing was being replaced by drugs,” he added. “(Diane) started going downhill.”