When they first met in 2000, my dad told my mom how he had gotten the money. The story begins 20 years ago.

Children's book author or confirmed pedophobe who found children “quite frequently not terribly likeable”?

“She considered herself in the vanguard of the punk scene, and she took a pair of scissors to the costumes, to punkify them,” Ms. Midler said. “Of course, Bob had a fit, and they didn’t speak for years.

Yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.