“He tried to fork me to death,” the trembling woman said as we stood in her Commerce City living room. I was the public defender appointed to represent her husband in this wife beating case. My wife, Julie, was helping me with this interview.
We were puzzled as to what “fork me to death” meant until this woman rolled up her sleeve and showed us a series of tine marks — four black and blue dots — where her husband had repeatedly jabbed her with a fork. Then she took Julie into her bedroom, took off her clothes and showed that her whole body was covered with these marks. The husband had jabbed her dozens of times, hard enough to leave the marks but not hard enough to break her skin.
The Ray Rice beating of his then-fiancee Janay Palmer brings back this long-ago case. Both the sheer viciousness of these kinds of family assaults but also the too frequent willingness or desire of the victim to give the spouse another chance. That’s exactly what happened in the “fork” case and most of the other domestic assault cases I handled. The wife would decide not to prosecute or refuse to testify, the case would be dismissed, and who knew what would eventually happen to her.
I’m sure that most public defenders detest these cases as I did. In my opinion, wife beaters are not only almost always incurable but also are capable of a viciousness that you don’t see in ordinary assault cases — whether the extended sadism of dozens of jabs with a fork or the explosive punch from a 220-pound football player.
Sometimes victims struck back. Typically, it would involve the husband coming home drunk, beating his wife and then taking a nap. The wife would then get a gun and shoot him. Those were called “Commerce City divorces” and, due to the enlightened Adams County judiciary, never resulted in prison time.
Two particular cases come to mind. The first involved a very frightening client who I was representing in a bar fight. A short, stocky but extremely powerful man, he came home drunk one night, beat up his wife and then walked to the kitchen to get another beer. She grabbed a rifle, fired a shot and emasculated him. No charges were filed against her.
The second involved a woman whose husband would, among other brutalities, make her cross the fingers of her two hands and would then squeeze them, causing tremendous pain. As a result, her knuckles were hugely swollen with arthritis. She looked like an old prizefighter from his punches to her face.
Finally she bought a pistol and, when he came crashing through the door in a rage one night, she shot him down. She was charged with murder but the judge acquitted her after less than a day of testimony. Later, when I was in private practice, we made a claim against the husband’s accidental death policy. The case eventually went to the Colorado Court of Appeals (Yeager vs. Travelers Insurance Company, 515 Pd 117) which agreed with our argument that the death was an accident from the point of view of the husband. The satisfaction in knowing she had received some compensation for her suffering didn’t, however, atone for the disgust I felt for men like the husband who tortured his wife with a fork.
What’s common knowledge among those who have to handle these cases is the level of viciousness involved. If the women in these two cases hadn’t fought back, their husbands would have eventually killed them.
The Ray Rice case seems no different. How could the NFL, the Baltimore Ravens and the prosecutors have either missed or ignored the sheer viciousness involved here? Even setting aside the explosive question of who knew about the video and when, didn’t anyone realize that when a professional athlete who weighs 220 pounds drags an unconscious woman out of an elevator, something really terrible must have happened?
Doesn’t that require that you dig and dig until you get all the facts?
In addition, are we too focused on what happens after the assault — how cases on campuses or in the military, for example, should be investigated and prosecuted — and not enough on prevention? At the Colorado International Trade Office years ago, the women trade specialists who led trade missions to other countries asked for training found a martial arts trainer to help them be safer. Very recently, my daughter-in-law, who is a martial arts expert, put on a training course for her daughter and her classmates. People who commit these assaults often have a sixth sense as to who is weak or vulnerable; thinking that their perceived victim could defend herself would be a deterrent in many cases.
Who knows where this Ray Rice case is headed? With regard to these kinds of cases, however, I look back in pride at the women who survived — and the others who went through “Commerce City divorces” — but what I feel most strongly is a sense of dread for the others. Whatever happened to the woman whose husband tried to “fork her to death?” What happened to the others? What’s going to happen to Janay Palmer?
Morgan Smith (Morgan-smith@comcast.net) was the public defender of Adams County from 1967 to 1970. He subsequently served in the Colorado House of Representatives and under Governors Lamm and Romer.
