David McMahan bio
David James McMahan was born October 22, 1975, in Atlanta, Georgia, the oldest of three children. His mother, Eustace, came from a wealthy Savannah society family who frowned on her choice of Charles McMahan, a decidedly middle-class medical student at the University of Georgia, as a husband. As a result, Eustace was forever trying to win back her place in gilded society.
As David got older, he found himself siding increasingly with his father. By then, Charles was an established orthopedic surgeon at Piedmont Hospital, and he viewed Eustace's social questing as frivolous. He wanted to give his children "a realistic grounding" to focus their efforts on intellectual pursuits.
David attended Northwestern University near Chicago, where he majored in business. To supplement his already-generous allowance, he took a work-study job in the alumni relations office and earned a reputation as a fund-raising shark.
As a sophomore, David moved into a fraternity house and pursued a robust social life. One night he made a drunken bet with a housemate, vowing to seduce an attractive economics teaching assistant. Thus began David's romance with Wanda Forsythe, who hailed from Nebraska and admired David's urbane wit and society upbringing.
Wanda and David married as soon as he graduated in 1997. While she finished her Ph.D., David took a job specializing in global fund services at Northern Trust Bank, where he once again excelled at sales and negotiation.
On a business trip to Los Angeles in 2006, David was arrested for DUI with a blonde passenger who was also intoxicated and initially claimed David was her husband. The incident humiliated Wanda, who confided in friends that she was considering divorce.
After some marital counseling, David and Wanda held a re-commitment ceremony to celebrate their 10th anniversary. David took an upper management position that required less travel, and all seemed well in the McMahan household. In 2008, their only daughter, Annabelle, was born.
With Annabelle's birth, Wanda became a full-time mother. Even though her academic salary had contributed barely a quarter of their income, David told coworkers he felt pressured to curtail his spending. When Annabelle was five, Wanda returned to teaching, but the damage had been done. David channeled his resentment into a string of affairs with coworkers that were common knowledge around the office.
It was widely assumed the couple would divorce, but Wanda found another path. She applied for an assistant professorship at the University of Mississippi, only telling her husband about it when she was accepted. David agreed to the move for Annabelle's sake and found a position at First National Bank in Oxford, even though it was a professional step down for him.
Publicly, he took it good-naturedly, but this time David's resentment manifested itself in a superior attitude that sometimes offended neighbors and bank clients. Although his performance reviews have always noted how David excels at his job, his 2022 evaluation cited an incident when he berated a client for taking out "an idiotic loan."
Since 2021, David has served on the board of the Whitehall Homeowners Association as treasurer. The post has allowed him to distinguish himself among the neighbors, who say they admire his aims for the association even though they don't care for him personally.
