Witnesses say she was terrified of him. Sure is a hell of a man, isn't he? 6'4" tall, and he kept her frightened for years. she knew he was going to kill her. Her mother knew he was going to kill her. She applied for protective orders, not once, not twice, but three times and was refused every single time. Not that protective orders do all that much good in the face of the kind of sickness that causes a man to stab his wife because she is getting a divorce, but still. They do weed out the crazy husbands from the ones who are just a mite peeved to be getting dumped.
"He is sick in the head ... I don’t know what to do," Fran Newman, Heather’s mother, said in August, according to Lorraine Gerbino, a lifelong friend. "I’m scared for my daughter. Pray for her....And now she is. A statistic, I mean. Two little girls left without parents, because, after stabbing her, he grabbed the kids, drove 80 miles to a motel and killed himself.
"... She knew he was going to kill her — and so did Heather," Gerbino said Friday, breaking down in tears. "Heather said to friends he was going to kill her, and he did."
Few people in Middlesex County took the threats seriously, Newman told friends.
"I guess my daughter would have to be killed for someone to say, ‘Oh, I guess she was right,’" she said in one e-mail to Gerbino.
In another, she wrote, "The laws in Middlesex County are not great for domestic violence. I don’t want my daughter to be a statistic."
I suppose we should be happy that he didn't kill his children as well, like Chris Coleman, Christopher Vaughn and Neil Entwistle.
Why are there not being any studies done on these men to find out just WHY they do these things? Is it nature or nurture or both? How can these killings be prevented? Obviously the court system is utterly powerless. It's easy to point out the characteristics of the narcissist and tell women to stay away, but when they insist on coming on like Prince Charming, it's hard to make headway with the Voice of Doom. We could ban fairy tales, but I've always been against banning books of any sort.
Dearly Beloved, what are we to do?
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