'Perfect' Husband Takes a Terrifying Turn

July 19, 2006 — -- Cheri Kostrewa met Harald Ehrenfeld in the spring of 1986. She worked in a bakery, he in the frame shop next door. He was charming, while she was shy. Soon, Harald began to court Cheri, sending her flowers and cards. After dating for three years, he asked her to marry him.

"We got serious pretty quickly," Cheri tells "Primetime." "Within two months, he gave me an opal ring and by Christmas we were engaged. Our families were very happy. My family loved Harald. He's very charming, funny."

Cheri even thought sometimes that Harald was too good to be true.

"He was everything a boyfriend should be," she says. "You know, I thought I knew him very well. But sometimes ... just seemed sometimes too perfect."

Cheri's instincts turned out to be right.

After they married, Cheri and Harald started a business together, selling gifts and frames in the small town of Medina, Ohio. They worked side by side six days a week and were so happy together, they put off having children for nine years.

Their son, Karl, was born on Nov. 7, 1998, and Cheri thought this would be the beginning of another happy chapter in her life. But within days of Karl's birth, the even-tempered husband Cheri knew seemed to have disappeared.

"He wouldn't want to get out of bed in the morning," she says. "He wouldn't want to interact with us. ... I would ask him, what's wrong? Because he just didn't feel like himself. And he would say, I don't ... feel good."

Nevertheless, Cheri became pregnant again two years later. This time, though, the joy was replaced with worry. Harald, Cheri says, continued to grow remote and withdrawn. Cheri says it was painful to watch her sons try to interact with their father.

"That was very painful to me," she says. "Sometimes he would ... come home and he would just turn on the television, and he'd be watching the television, and laying on the couch and Karl would be trying to tell him something. And he wouldn't even look at him."

Cheri says she tried desperately to reach Harald and urged him to seek help. Instead, when Karl was 8 months old, Harald chose to go on a trip with his mother to visit family in Norway, including a woman Cheri thought was only a cousin and a friend from Harald's childhood.

When Harald returned from the trip, he began to act suspiciously.

"When he came back he started receiving letters here at work from Norway," she said. "I said to him, 'Oh, I hear you got a letter from Norway,' and he'd deny it. He said, 'No, I didn't,' and that started a whole series of events. You know he was seen on the phone all the time. He would talk quietly and in the backroom. And he was seen writing letters."

Cheri was devastated when she learned that her husband of 14 years was corresponding with a mysterious woman in Norway. But when she confronted Harald, he denied it.

"He'd tell me that I was crazy, that I was imagining things, that I was too suspicious," she says. "And then he would become angry. ... He'd say, 'I can't take this anymore, I just can't take this anymore,' and he'd just get up and walk away from me, and then he wouldn't speak to me, sometimes for days."