Woman Is Crushed When Husband’s Decades-Long Deception Is Exposed

Early one January morning in 2015, a knock on the door brought Bobby and Cheryl Love’s lives crashing down. “It was like I was in a movie — a Lifetime movie,” Cheryl described, and rightfully so: What happened when she opened the door sounds like something from a bad noir film.

She didn’t notice how many cops there were until they were streaming past her and into the house. A stunned Cheryl watched as they — the letters “FBI” gleaming on their jackets — rushed right over to Bobby. “You’ve had a long run,” they told him.

“You don’t know who this man is,” the cops told Cheryl. But she did know him! Nothing Cheryl was seeing made any sense. He was Bobby Love, father to their four children, her husband of 40 years…now wearing a pair of handcuffs. 

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This had to be a mistake, Cheryl decided. But as Bobby was ushered out the door, he told Cheryl something that made her blood run cold. “This goes way back, Cheryl. Back before I met you. Way back to North Carolina.”

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North Carolina in 1964 was much different than New York City in 2015, and it’s where Bobby’s story began. But before he was Bobby Love, husband to Cheryl Love, he went by a different name entirely: Walter Miller.

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Walter Miller was just one of eight siblings, so he spent a lot of time walking the streets of his North Carolina town and getting into mischief. According to Bobby (AKA Walter,) nothing bad happened until he went to that Sam Cooke concert.

Thinking it was funny, Walter yelled a profanity at the stage…and was arrested for disorderly conduct. “Things went downhill pretty quick after that,” Bobby later explained. He stole purses from cars and checks from mailboxes, but the worst was yet to come.

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After he was caught stealing from his school, Walter was sent to juvie. “I hated everything about that place,” he remembered. “I still have scars.” Every night, he laid in his bed and listened to his favorite sound.

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The sound of the nearby freight train whistling by. “I always wanted to know where that train was going,” he recalled. After weeks of wondering, Walter decided that enough was enough. “I ran out the back door—toward the sound of that whistle.”

“That was the first place I ever escaped from,” Bobby said. He followed the train tracks to Washington D.C., where he lived with his brother. He returned to school, determined for a fresh start. “It seemed like everything would be alright,” Bobby said.

Of course, old habits die hard, and Walter was soon back with the wrong crowd…and committing increasingly dangerous crimes. He was robbing banks and living large, but according to Bobby, “The fun didn’t last for long…one of those banks had a silent alarm.”

Walter found himself surrounded by cops, and all his attempts to dodge them were futile. He woke up in a hospital with a bullet hole in his backside and handcuffs around his wrists. Walter was sentenced to thirty years in a maximum-security prison.

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Walter’s instincts to escape Central Prison eventually faded. “I sorta got used to it,” he said. He became the perfect inmate, and years later he was sent to a minimum security prison. “I was relaxed…I had no plans to escape.”

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That is, until he was falsely accused of talking back to the guards. “They started putting me on the road,” Bobby recalled. Working on “the road” meant doing back-breaking labor on the side of the highway. Still…it gave him plenty of time to think.

“That’s when I started planning and plotting,” he said. His instincts to escape returned. Each insult from a guard only solidified his decision, and one night everything fell into place. He just knew: “That was going to be my last night in prison.” 

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The next day, when the bus stopped en route to “the road,” he sprung to action. “I swung open the back door — and I was gone,” Bobby described. He hopped on a Greyhound, where the person sitting next to him asked him a fateful question.

They asked him his name. “I thought for a moment, and said: ‘Bobby Love.’ And that was the death of Water Miller.” He rode the Greyhound to New York City, where Bobby Love’s new life awaited.

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“All I had was $100 in small bills, a single pair of clothes, and a brand new name,” Bobby described, “[But] I was glad to be free.” He found a social security number, a birth certificate, a driver’s license…and a job at Baptist Medical Center.

Baptist Medical Center wasn’t only the place that got Bobby off the streets, but it’s the place he met a woman who would change his life forever. “Cheryl was innocent. The opposite of me. And that’s why I was attracted to her,” Bobby said.

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Still, Bobby never told Cheryl about Walter Miller. “[He] died a long time ago, on that Greyhound bus out of Raleigh,” Bobby said. Life without Walter was happier. Bobby and Cheryl got married, had four kids, and made a home for themselves. 

New York Daily News/Michael Graae

“Bobby Love didn’t have a criminal record. Bobby Love was a family man. Bobby Love was a deacon at his church,” Bobby explained. Bobby Love was a good man with a good life…and he thought that Cheryl felt the same way.

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“All these years I loved my husband…but something was missing.” Cheryl saw the gaps that Bobby tried to conceal from her: His closed-off nature, the feeling that he was always looking over his shoulder for some invisible threat.

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Bobby assured her that nothing was wrong, so she turned to her most trusted advisor. “I begged God to change my husband’s heart,” Cheryl said. “I’d reached the end of my rope.” Little did she know, Bobby’s marathon was also nearing its end. 

A few weeks later, the cops knocked on the Loves’ door. “My world came crashing down,” Cheryl described. “Bobby had deceived me for all those years. There was no truth in our house.” Any wife would have walked away.

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But that just wasn’t Cheryl. “I was so angry. But I never hated him,” she said. “When I first visited him in prison…he broke down crying,” Cheryl described. This time, Bobby had no plans of escaping…but Cheryl had plans of her own.

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“I married you for better or for worse,” she told him. With that, Cheryl put her plan to action. She wrote letters to the governor and even to Obama, telling them Bobby’s story of redemption. She feared it would fall on deaf ears…

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“I didn’t know a thing about Walter Miller. But I told them all about Bobby Love,” Cheryl said, and it’s her hard work that got Bobby out of prison a year later. The day he was freed, Cheryl asked him a pivotal question.

New York Daily News/Michael Graae

 “I asked, ‘Are we the Loves? Or are we the Millers?’ And he said: ‘We Love. We Love.’” According to Cheryl, Bobby Love no longer looks over his shoulder in fear…and neither does she. Still, the ordeal will never be behind them entirely…

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Neither Love feels the need to escape anymore, but Cheryl will never forget what happened. “I got my own story to tell,” she said. “I might not have escaped from prison, and started a whole new life…but I forgave the man who did.”

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