Courtney dispatched his bride to pick out a new house. But her choices, she says, were never sufficiently grand. The pharmacist threw money around in the presence of his church friends. Yet he could also be fiercely parsimonious. He complained that his parents were squeezing him for money, though the new wife could see no evidence that this was so. Just a day or two into their marriage, Courtney informed her that she would have to find a job in Kansas City. He told her that she needed to think of ways they could save money. Courtney came up with one of his own: when the two dined at restaurants, he asked his wife not to order her own dish, but rather to eat off of his plate.

His moods careered from ebullience to aloofness. She began to be frightened by him. When they disagreed about something, Courtney's face would harden ''into that crazed look like he wanted to murder me.'' He yelled at one of his daughters in public and slapped her at home. The new wife had seen enough and left him after four or five days. Robert Courtney annulled the marriage a few months later.

Unchastened, Courtney two years later married a third, and much younger, wife, the former Laura Braugh. In 1994, the Courtneys added twins to their brood. Later, Courtney drew up plans for yet another residence, in excess of 5,000 square feet, to be built either elsewhere in Tremont Manor or in the equally coveted Riss Lake subdivision. The house, which never came to fruition, was designed to be child friendly, with the breakfast room and a breezeway angled to permit monitoring of the children at play in the backyard. Courtney was emphatic on these matters. But the architect could not help noticing that the husband did all the talking, while Laura Courtney, the stay-at-home mom, ''seemed to be mostly an observer.''

Though Courtney's dedication to his family as well as his church may well have been sincere, the economic expression of his attachments is impossible to ignore. He maintained extensive control over the household's financial affairs: Laura had signed a prenuptial agreement, and two of his daughters as well as his father were on his payroll. At Northland Cathedral, Courtney's fine tenor earned him a spot as soloist in the church choir. But it was his money that earned him particular distinction. As far back as 1990, his second ex-wife recalls him ''bragging about his donations all the time.'' In 1999, Courtney pledged $1 million to the church's building fund, to be paid over a three-year period. (The church has announced that it will give the $600,000 thus far received to Courtney's victims.) ''He was obviously a person to be respected -- he seemed to command that,'' says one of his former fellow church members, who also remembers Courtney as ''a different sort of fellow, kind of withdrawn. Even in church groups, when something pretty hilarious would be going on, I don't recall us sharing any belly laughs.''

To his church friends, Courtney was not an easy read. But pressures were apparently building, some of his own design. After both of them remarried, the pharmacist called his second former wife in the mid-90's. ''He sounded stressed,'' she says. A large family, a plush house and cars, frequent skiing trips to Colorado and massive church donations required the kind of salary few if any licensed pharmacists would ever earn. By his own confession to law-enforcement authorities, Robert Courtney's quest for ill-gotten gains began about the time he divorced his first wife in 1990 and paid her the $196,000. Around then, he began to buy prescription medications from a retired pharmaceutical rep through the so-called gray market -- legitimate drugs acquired outside the supply chain. For the next decade, Courtney purchased these items in cash at an under-the-table discount, marked them up and sold them. It amounted to a nice profit center -- and, perhaps, a criminal point of departure.

''The path to hell leads one step at a time,'' says Mike Ketchmark, the brash but persistent attorney who successfully litigated a $2.2 billion civil judgment against Courtney. ''I think he started from the gray market and realized you could make a whole bunch of money. Then he'd get orders in from people who were on their deathbed, and he'd slice a little bit. Then he realizes he can just continue to cut it, and no one's going to notice. It's a felony once you engage in the gray market; you're then breaking down the barrier of a person's inhibition. You don't go from being John-Boy to Charles Manson overnight.''

Two months before his arrest in August 2001, the pharmacist who in 1990 listed his gross income as $48,000 had amassed $18.7 million in total assets. During approximately the same time frame, Robert Courtney would, by law enforcement estimates, dilute 98,000 prescriptions for 4,200 patients.