He was rearing two children; she was a few years out of high school.

But something clicked when Paul Berkley and Monique Wheeler met nearly six years ago. They crossed paths at a Circle K in Ventura County, Calif. He was a regular; she had walked down from her home to pay her partner a visit.

The Berkleys' five-year relationship ended tragically early Sunday. Paul Berkley, a Navy reservist home from the Middle East for Christmas, was killed in a North Raleigh park in a scheme that police say was devised by his wife, her teenage lover and her lover's friend.

Monique, one of five children in a prominent Tampa, Fla., family, moved to California in 1999 to live with a woman she met on the Internet. The move upset her parents, said her former partner, who has had surgeries to change her sex and is now a man named Markus Montgomery.

Her father, a CPA, and her mother also owned Goody Goody, a well-known Tampa hamburger joint that the couple sold in September for $1.25 million, according to newspapers in the Tampa area.

From the girls school

Monique excelled at a Catholic girls school, Academy of the Holy Names. She was a National Merit semifinalist and starred as Lady Macbeth in a production of "Macbeth" at an all-boys Catholic school in Tampa. She planned to attend the University of Florida and become a psychiatrist, she told a local newspaper at the time.

She found Montgomery in a chatroom for gays and lesbians. The two courted in cyberspace about eight months before Monique moved to Ventura, just up the coast from Los Angeles, to be with Montgomery.

Monique settled into a domestic life. "I just wanted her to cook and clean," Montgomery said. "That's all she did. She stayed at home, and that was pretty much that."

Without a car, the couple stayed in a lot. They watched TV and played games with a small group of friends, Montgomery said.

On Sept. 5, 1999, at a church in Santa Paula, Calif., the couple united in a religious ceremony that, while not state-recognized, allowed the church to acknowledge them as a married couple, Montgomery said. Wheeler's mother didn't approve, Montgomery said.

Within six months, their relationship unraveled. Montgomery blames Paul Berkley.

Soon after Wheeler and Berkley met, he invited her and Montgomery over to his house, Montgomery said. They watched TV and hung out for a while.

"He supposedly at that point had come into some money," Montgomery said. "He said it right in front of us when we were at his house. That enticed Monique."

A week later, on Montgomery's birthday, Wheeler left for Berkley.

The breakup devastated Montgomery, who said it followed several failed relationships. Depressed, Montgomery said he began his transformation from woman to man exactly six months after Wheeler left.

Tender heart, wild side

Paul Berkley, like Monique, hadn't had much luck with previous romances.

His first marriage ended in divorce after 14 years, court records say. His second marriage lasted about a year before divorce papers were signed.

Berkley, who grew up in Southern California, enlisted in the Navy in his teens and served four years until 1982. He and his first bride then moved to Santa Paula, where they raised their children, Zeke, now 18, and Becky, now 16.

The children's grandmother, Letha Weaverling, described Berkley on Wednesday as a tender-hearted man whose childhood was scarred by his parents' divorce.

Behind his role of father and husband, friends said, Paul Berkley had a wild side. Friends paying tribute to the fallen reservist after his death this week described him as the life of a party, who would "do anything, even without a dare," according to a blog kept by a childhood friend, John Robles.

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