FORMER WINCHESTER DRUG DEALER DESCRIBES TRAFFICKING PILLS PURCHASED ON INTERNET

The 35-year-old woman with reddish blonde hair falling just below her
shoulders sat on her sofa in her Lexington home, smiling as she recounted a
recent trip to Dale Hollow Lake on the Kentucky-Tennessee border.

For two days, she and her family hiked, camped and swam. She flipped
pancakes in the air and watched rainbow trout swim in the lake. "I'm so
happy," she exclaimed with a smile that widened as she spoke.

Just remembering details of a weekend getaway is something Wendy Gividen
Berryman may never again take for granted. Berryman recalls little of an
excursion to Natural Bridge State Park in 2002 when she was hooked on
painkillers and anxiety medication - a period when taking 10 pills a day
was not unusual. She cannot recollect hiking the trail to the bridge or
posing atop the stone archway for photographs. The trip is a blur in her
consciousness, just as is much of the past three years of her life.

In interviews lasting more than three hours, Berryman openly recounted
years of drug abuse and trafficking in Winchester. (She claims to have once
been the pill franchise in Winchester.) Her world of Lortabs and Xanax
collapsed around her last fall with her arrest for trafficking and her
husband's arrest for murder. Involved in a collision on the Mountain
Parkway which resulted in the death of an 80-year-old man, her husband,
Thomas C. Berryman, 37, is alleged to have been under the influence of
drugs at the time.

Wendy Berryman, free on probation after pleading guilty to trafficking
hydrocodone, insists she is now drug-free. So when she recalls her recent
trip to Dale Hollow, it is almost as if she is traveling with her family
for the first time in years. She savors every detail. The demons she has
fought for years are shed. She is happy.

'Drugs Were Always A Part Of My Life.'

Berryman spent most of her childhood in Louisville. The oldest of four
children, she related that she was sexually abused as a child. Her mother
and stepfather smoked marijuana in the house. Two of her siblings also have
a history of substance abuse, according to Berryman. Her brother went to
prison for an armed robbery that Berryman says was gang related.

"Drugs were always a part of my life," she recalled. She says she smoked
marijuana and experimented with cocaine while still a teenager. "Everybody
was smoking pot. People say it's not a gateway drug (a rug that leads to
using stronger drugs). It's a lie. It's a lie," she said emphatically.

At age 15, she gave birth to a daughter. At age 18, she moved with a
boyfriend to Winchester, wanting to raise her daughter in a small town -
one that seemed safer and offered fewer temptations than Louisville. What
she didn't realize at the time was that in Winchester she would meet people
who would lead her down a path of drug addiction and trafficking that she
had never imagined living in Louisville.

Berryman's first marriage ended in divorce after nine years. Her second
marriage bolstered her already social use of marijuana. Her second husband
was an "avid marijuana smoker," according to Berryman.

"When he got out of bed in the morning, he grabbed a joint - every morning.
.. If he didn't have it, he was awful. You couldn't live with him."
Berryman claimed he would often become violent when he wasn't smoking pot.

Then, in 2000, a car crash would become the catalyst to near-destruction.

'I Got Greedy.'

One August morning in 2000, Berryman and her then-husband were involved in
a wreck on Interstate 64. Their car was rear-ended and both suffered severe
back injuries. Both were prescribed Lortabs for their pain, and her husband
soon became addicted. However, Berryman found another use for her
painkillers. She sold them.

She still recalls the first time she trafficked her pills for $6 each to a
friend of her husband. It was the first of hundreds of illegal transactions
she would make over a four-year period ending last fall. During that time,
Berryman estimates she made a quarter of a million dollars trafficking
drugs in Clark County.

"I got greedy," she said. "You pay $30 for a prescription and sell (the
pills) for $8 apiece. A 10 milligram Lortab was $10 apiece. That's what got
me at first."

After five years, Berryman left her increasingly abusive second husband but
continued selling drugs to pay expenses. "I was slinging pills like crazy,"
she said. She met her third husband one month later, who, like her former
husband, was addicted to pills.

"I don't care how many (Lortabs) you eat, as long as you pay the bills,"
Berryman recalls telling her husband at the start of their relationship. It
was a statement she now says she will forever regret.

Berryman says the couple began looking for new ways to buy pills and
discovered a clinic in Ohio where a doctor would write prescriptions for
Lortabs and Xanax with few questions asked. She also was prescribed
painkillers by a Lexington physician at the same time.

Berryman's powerful addiction at that point was money, not drugs. But all
of that changed, she says, as her husband became increasingly addicted to
painkillers. As he took more pills to stay high, so would she.

"I got hooked," she said. "I was taking four or five a day. I got up in the
morning and my body ached until I got one."

But taking four or five pills a day was just the start of a downward spiral
in Berryman's life. Before long, her drug habit was up to six pills a day,
then seven and then more as her body became immune to the high she had been
experiencing. Finally, last year she regularly swallowed 10 pills a day.

Easy Access

As her drug usage increased, so did her trafficking, and Berryman soon
found an easy way to buy all the drugs she wanted. All she needed was a
computer. She discovered Web sites that would sell her Lortabs or Xanax
with relatively little effort or risk. Some required her medical records,
others merely asked a few questions about her medical problems and shipped
her any medication she wanted. Some online pharmacies would even call her
or send e-mail reminding her that it was time for a refill.

Berryman said, "There were Web sites out there you'd just type in what's
wrong with you and that's it. You could put in fake things wrong with you.
I'd put in tubal pregnancies, back injury, sexual abuse. They'd load me up.
They didn't care. One day I'd order one color (Lortabs). The next day,
before I had even gotten them, I'd order more."

Her apartment on Cook Avenue became a beehive of drug activity. Before
long, she was receiving regular shipments from online pharmacies. Some
days, two, three, even four packages of drugs would arrive by UPS. As the
drug shipments came in, so did the money, sometimes as much as $5,000 in a
week. No sooner would a drug shipment arrive than Berryman would receive
telephone calls from some of her regular customers.

"Most of them that morning would call and say, 'Did you do any good?'
'Yeah.' 'Well, I'm coming over.' We never said too much on the phone. You
had to be careful in case the police were listening in. I'd have one person
coming five times a day and wipe me out, take everything I had. If they
bought enough, I'd give them a deal, and they'd go out and sell them," she
explained.

She added, "We didn't flaunt the money. We went out. We took trips. We
didn't buy fancy cars. We bought things for the kids."

She also found creative ways to make even more money by helping other
people in Winchester buy pills online using her computer.

"I'd get drugs for other people in Winchester for a fee. They paid me up
front. I got $100 for every one I did. I probably did 400-500 people," she
said. Later, after she was arrested, Berryman said she arranged to have the
hard drive to her computer destroyed. "If (the police had) gotten my hard
drive, there would have been a lot of people in Winchester going to jail,"
she said.

As her drug addiction increased, Berryman began spending more of the
profits from her dealing to sustain her habit. She and her husband would
often take 30 or more pills a day between them. Often she spent days passed
out, sometimes burning her clothes from a lit cigarette she was smoking.

"It was awful. I'd lay awake, crying, begging (someone) to please go get me
a pill. I stole from my own daughter. That's bad when you steal from your
own kid. You'll do anything," she explained.

Berryman says she had always been careful about whom she sold drugs to. "I
was smart. I knew who the rats were," referring to police informants. But
her drug use caused her to become careless. At one point she thought she
and her husband might be caught. "We were so messed up on Xanax we didn't
know who we sold to," she said. "I remember going to sleep one night. We
went to sleep with $20 in our pockets and woke up with $800."

With the exception of one instance when she was caught shoplifting,
Berryman never was arrested until November 2004. After her husband was
arrested following the fatal crash, Berryman says someone she had sold
drugs to, working as an informant for the Clark County Sheriff's
Department, "ratted" on her.

Even as the sheriff's department was knocking on her door to take her to
jail, Berryman says she reached into her purse, pulled out a handful of
Lortabs and Xanax, popped them in her mouth to conceal any evidence of her
trafficking, and spent two days in the Clark County Detention Center high
on drugs.

Money Isn't Worth A Life

Faced with the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence for trafficking,
Berryman said she decided it was time to turn her life around. She spent
one week in jail.

"That's all it took," she said."The thought of going to prison terrified
me. Leaving my child behind, that's the only thing in my life that's meant
anything to me."

After pleading guilty last month to one count of trafficking a controlled
substance, she could have been sentenced to as much as five years in
prison. Instead, Circuit Judge Julia Hylton Adams agreed to give Berryman
another chance. She sentenced Berryman to one year in prison, then set
aside her sentence and gave her two years' probation. Berryman knows her
freedom depends on her staying straight. One positive drug test, one brush
with the law, and Berryman could have her probation revoked.

Looking back on years of drug addiction and trafficking, Berryman says she
feels true remorse for the path her life has taken. She wants to speak to
young people about the consequences of drug use.

"You might think everything's all right and you're having fun when you're
locked up in your house and that nobody sees you. You're having a blast.
.. But there's always consequences," she said.

Berryman says the consequences for her include losing her husband, who has
been incarcerated in the Clark County Detention Center since the crash on
Nov. 2 that killed William Deaton of Jackson. Regardless of the outcome of
her husband's trial, scheduled for October, Berryman says their marriage is
over.

She said she feels responsible for the crash, even though she wasn't in the
car at the time. As the interview was wrapping up, a seemingly contrite
Berryman apologized to Deaton's family for her role in the tragedy.

"If I could take it back, I would. I'd give every bit of money back. All
that money was not worth it." She continued, "I wish that was me (who was
killed). I would really like to take that man's place. I am forever marked
for that. ... All I can say is 'I'm sorry and I wish I could fix it, but I
can't."

Drug Free And Loving It

Berryman has moved from Winchester and now lives in Lexington. She says she
hasn't taken any prescription pills in eight months. "I'm so proud of
myself. I could pat myself on the back every day when I get up and don't
have one."

That isn't to say there aren't moments when she craves one. "This will be a
fight for the rest of my life," she said. Berryman said there are moments
when she breaks down and cries, wanting a pill. "I'll never be able to get
over them. I crave them. I see these pink and blue and green pills just
dancing in my head," she said.

However, Berryman says she is moving on with the help of her family. "I'm
living, and I'm remembering things. I remember every moment. It's
wonderful," she exclaimed.