“He’s going to kill me.” She stated it flatly, without emotion, the resignation in her voice somehow more unnerving than fear would have been. “He’s going to kill me and there isn’t anything you can do about it.” She was a plain, sad-looking woman, and at 45 she seemed old to me, just 25 and only two years on the job. She looked at us with a defeated expression on her face, glancing nervously into the house from time to time to assure herself that her eleven-year-old son was not listening, her other son, nineteen, already away at college.
We were standing on the front porch of her modest suburban home, my sergeant and I, filling her in on the last-minute details of the domestic violence investigation we had completed involving her and her husband. We had just returned from serving a protective order on her estranged husband, who she had finally agreed to have arrested for domestic violence after years of emotional and physical abuse. The order was a “stay away,” and had been accompanied by a mandatory gun removal, the man’s modest gun collection now safely contained in the trunk of my patrol car.
My sergeant, a veteran of perhaps 18 years in police work, attempted to placate her, assuring her that the vast majority of these incidents were resolved without further violence once police became involved. I listened attentively, nodding as if I had the experience to even agree. She looked at us both, and in a tired voice, said “you’ll see. You don’t know him, but you’ll see.” Still, flush with the confidence of youth and inexperience, I believed somehow that the order of protection we had just served would serve its purpose, and, with our help and that of our victim assistance counselor, this woman’s life would soon take a turn for the better.
In the movies, when an abused woman flees a violent husband, it is often portrayed as some sort of clandestine adventure as she escapes with her children and begins her new life. But real life is not so romantic. Like most women trapped by an abuser, our victim on that day had almost no access to money. She had no credit, and only a part-time job as a hairdresser to pay the bills. Her suburban prison had been carefully built by her husband, a violent man who I would later learn was a true narcissist. We left her that day with reassurances that she was safe, with the admonition to call 911 immediately should her husband show himself at her door.
It was only a few days later, on my night off when he returned. Armed with a cheap 12 gauge shotgun he had purchased at a nearby gun store, he stood outside her kitchen window on the cool fall night, watching in silence as his wife did the dishes. He then placed the shotgun barrel on the glass and fired a single round of buckshot into her face through the window. Her eleven-year-old son, only steps away into the bathroom brushing his teeth, found his mother, and called 911. She died there, on her kitchen floor, a few minutes later as officers tried in vain to administer aid.
He was arrested a few hours later, after a brief standoff at his parent’s home in a neighborhood a few miles away. He had already retained an attorney, an expensive and highly respected criminal defense lawyer intimately familiar with the justice system. With the help of a convincing psychiatrist and his lawyer’s expert ministrations, a deal was eventually worked out, and he was sentenced to 8-25 years in prison for Manslaughter.
There is a rather cruel joke sometimes heard in police circles, “in New York, if you kill your wife on your wedding night, you’ll be out of jail by your twentieth wedding anniversary.” The joke, if one could even call it that, is regrettably rooted in reality. Fifteen years after he shot and killed his wife in front of their eleven-year-old son, the man was paroled back to the community. His parents, who had remained steadfastly by his side throughout his arrests, deeded their spacious suburban home to him in their will. He still lives there today, unencumbered by debt or financial worry.
The courts, acting on behalf of his surviving children, did terminate his rights to visitation despite his protestations. I find it difficult to be too congratulatory here of our justice system, even a broken watch is right twice a day. To the best of my knowledge his sons never spoke to him again, though I doubt that this troubled him at all.
What is it in the male psyche that goes wrong, that takes something as powerful and beautiful as the love one can have for a spouse and turns its warmth into venomous hate? Is it an evolutionary tic, a flaw in the system that causes these men to snap when control is wrested from them? “If I can’t have you, no one can” was a phrase I heard countless times over my police career, though only from the mouths of men. I eventually stopped trying to reason with them, and would instead spend extra time speaking to their victims, warning them of the very real danger that they could be killed after leaving.
I have written about domestic violence here before, and most likely will again. It is a featured performer in the story of most police careers, my own included. To be clear, men are often the victims of domestic violence, and I witnessed many of these tragic scenes over the years. But the statistics do not lie. In America, an estimated one-third of the women murdered each year are killed by an intimate partner. Following the O.J. Simpson trial, vast changes were made in many police departments around the United States regarding the prosecution of domestic violence cases. Despite these measures, the court system has remained out of step, failing to aggressively prosecute and jail violent offenders.
Somewhere in America, right now, a woman is telling somebody, a friend, a co-worker, a police officer, that her intimate partner is going to kill her. And she is right. Will we listen?
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