Breaking Rank Read Free Page B

You weren’t just angry, were you? You were scared—to death.
    I’m curious, David. Where did you get your attitudes about women? About wives? Employees? Dates? Was it from your parents? Are you aware a therapist convinced a judge that your children shouldn’t be left in the care of their paternal grandparents? They’re afraid of your mother. They say she’s been violent with them. What do you make of that? Did Mom beat you when you were a kid? Not to get too psychological, but did she help turn you into a misogynist?
    How about your dad? Did he mistreat you? If so, I can relate. My old man beat me often. Usually it was with his belt but sometimes it was his fists or his foot or the back of his meaty construction worker’s hand. I remember the worst beating as if it happened this morning. It left me bloodied and cowed. Not until my forties did I come to realize that my father was a criminal, his “discipline” a felony.
    That’s my story, David. Not all of it, of course. (I haven’t told you how Mom would send my brothers and me out to the apricot tree to pick a switch when we’d been bad. It hurt like the devil, I can tell you that, againstour bare backs and bare legs. And she’d have this absolutely ferocious look on her face when she lit into us. But I choose to believe she did it to protect us from Dad. It was like they’d cut this deal between them: If she did it during the day he wouldn’t be required to do it that night.) Anyway, like I said, that’s my story. I wish you could tell me yours.
    I wish I knew whether, like so many of us, you were beaten as a boy. Was your dad, the Tacoma policeman, physically violent with your mom? With you? I know I’m dwelling on it here, but answers to these questions are of consequence, they really are.
    Research over the past three decades supports the conventional wisdom: Witness your parents fighting? Statistically, you’re likely to grow into a batterer yourself. Beaten as a child? Odds are you’ll beat your own kids. If you’re both a witness to and a victim of family abuse, your chances of becoming a partner beater and a child abuser, unless you have some remarkable coping skills or some other adult to turn to for support, are off the charts. And, God forbid you should grow up in a household where violence is the norm—spousal assault, child abuse, an everyday vocabulary of violence (“Eat those peas or I’ll kick your ass,” “Wipe that smirk off your face or I’ll slap it off”), and, yes, megadoses of TV and video game violence. If you come from that kind of home, the chances are slight that you’ll not settle differences with your fists or a hammer or a gun. (Either that, says the research, or you’ll turn out pathologically passive.)
    So, those questions about your upbringing are important, David. But the answers, no matter how heart-wrenching, don’t let us off the hook. Not for how we behave as grown-ups. They’ll never excuse what you did to Crystal, even before April 2003. Let’s talk about your behavior first. Then we can compare notes.
    The pushing, the threats to kill her, the choking (four episodes in the year before you murdered her), the angry display of your firearm—I hate to say it but that stuff’s not all that uncommon among male cops, or men in general. But you did some certifiably weird things, too. You sent her flowers with no card . . . so you could study her reaction. You timed her every trip from the house. You checked the odometer on her car. You accompanied her to the bathroom, and into her gynecological exams. You weighed her daily. You handled all the money, giving her a miserlyallowance then accounting for it like a cross between Scrooge and Attila the Hun. I wonder, David, if you also:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    Listened in on her phone conversations?
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