This post is co-written by author and magazine journalist Sheila Weller and attorney, author and television commentator Wendy Murphy.
WELLER: Blog posts are a good way for investigative journalists to share with the public shocking and important stories that we couldn't tell in the traditional media for legal reasons, even though those media may have committed intense dedication and serious resources to the effort. Part of the legal impediment is public officials who don't see what's in front of their eyes and call a person of interest a "person of interest" so articles can be published without publications being sued for libel by protected criminal suspects. I've used HuffPost to tell otherwise untell-able stories a couple of times in the past. The current Massachusetts Senate race runoff has given me -- and Wendy Murphy -- an occasion to do it again.
I personally strongly support Martha Coakley for U.S. Senate. (Wendy may have a different stance.) Still, with even tough prosecutors, cases slip through the cracks -- and we should call them when we see them. I wish Coakley had been bolder a few years ago when Wendy and I were co-investigating what was one of the most egregious cases of unprosecuted domestic violence and wife murder I 'd encountered in my decades of writing in this field.
A wife had "disappeared" out of the blue, under the most suspicious circumstances, unfathomably leaving her adored young son behind. The local cops completely botched the case, refusing entreaties from the missing woman's highly concerned and extremely reputable employers to investigate. By the time first Wendy and then I entered the case, the trail of evidence on the husband was over a decade in the making. Wendy and I, interviewing family members, found that the man had come into the woman's life (she was, by the way, a highly educated woman from a close, upper-middle class family) while she was married. Within a couple of weeks of knowing this new man, she left her husband and ran off with him. Then, in an extreme scenario of a pathologically controlling man (and a woman who, it appeared to me, was both a victim and, sorry to say, also a participant in her victimization -- until it was too late), he proceeded to cut the woman off from her family members, one by one. He made harassing and threatening phone calls to them (including her mother), repeatedly and in the middle of the night, and wrote them angry and abusive letters. Her relatives called the police. We had copies of the chilling letters, and we interviewed the family members. I also talked to a woman who accompanied the mother to court to get a restraining order against her daughter's new husband, and a police official who issued the initial protective order.
MURPHY: The woman's family felt terrorized enough to ask a judge to order him to stop all contact, and the judge was right to issue the order; but, in hindsight, the husband was probably thrilled. The court order gave him permission -- indeed, a lawful command -- that he could then use to convince his wife that she had no option but to choose him over them.
Contact between the victim and her family ended -- and little information about the victim was known until someone heard that she'd had a baby, and shared the news with her mother and siblings. By the time they learned about the babty, he was five years old. This development inspired the family to try again to make contact and maybe rescue the victim from her situation.
A private investigator approached the victim outside her workplace and showed her photos of her family. She started to cry when she saw recent pictures of her beloved nieces. We later learned that she phoned her husband right after this encounter and some kind of fight ensued. It was around this time that the victim was described by her co-workers as ashen in color -- frighteningly thin -- and constantly terrified, especially when her office phone would ring and her husband was on the other end. Sometimes she would come to work with injuries -- and bald spots on her head where hair had been ripped out. She limped for a time, too, when her back was broken. She wore long sleeves and turtlenecks even on the hottest days of summer to make sure her injuries weren't visible to others. Most times she had no money and ate bread for lunch that she kept in her desk drawer. She was the primary provider for her family -- and her salary paid the mortgage, But her abusive husband, who was almost always unemployed, reportedly took all the money when payday came.
Her employer knew what was going on. Human Resources offered her shelter and domestic violence services. They even offered her a large amount of cash so she could relocate with her son, but she rejected all offers of help. Then one day she didn't show up for work. She was one of the most responsible and dedicated employees, and she'd never failed in her responsibilities. Not showing up -- without so much as a phone call -- was odd. Her boss
called the cops. He also called her husband. Their conversation provided lots of evidence against the husband, not only because he refused to put his wife on the phone but also because he lied and said things that made no sense. He then forged her signature on a document the boss received by mail a few days later, stating that the woman had resigned from her company. The obvious forgery should have put cops on his tail instantly. Instead they called the guy and asked him about his wife. He told the cops she was OK and that she'd left the family and moved to another state. The cops accepted his claim and did nothing more.
The case went nowhere for years -- during which time the husband suffered a foreclosure on the family's home and the house was sold to an architect who gutted it -- destroying any forensic evidence that might have been left behind.
Nobody screamed and yelled about this woman's disappearance -- not because they didn't care, but because she had been so alienated from friends and family, they didn't know she was missing. It wasn't until many years later that the family learned she'd "disappeared". They immediately called police to get some answers. That's when I got involved.
By the time I started helping the family, the prosecutor's office was also on board. Martha Coakley was the District Attorney at the time. She did little to condemn the cops for their failure, though she did assign one of the most experienced prosecutors to handle the case, and he wanted to solve it.
WELLER: I wanted to write about the case.
Wendy and I sat with the woman's coworker at a Starbucks. He was shaking at the remembered events, even years later. This man and his boss had kept detailed diaries of the missing woman's increasingly disturbing appearance and demeanor, unquestionably that of escalating abuse, and of her phone calls with her husband, who'd demanded where she'd been when she took a five-minute bathroom break. The documentation was extraordinary in its specificity, and in the harrowing story it told.
Wendy and I visited the woman's next-door neighbor. She detailed bizarre and angry behavior by the husband and volunteered that she had smelled a strong, suspicious odor -- "like burning flesh" -- coming from a fire in a rented dumpster next door, around the time the woman disappeared.
Wendy was tracking down the possible location of the rented dumpster (all these years later), and when she and I visited the police (who still had MISSING posters of the woman on their station wall, years later), they were interested in what she might turn up, while at the same time defensive about the little they had done.
MURPHY: When I started working with Sheila, we knew right away that a magazine story might help. Maybe a witness someplace saw something. Maybe the little boy was a witness. The husband refused to let cops speak to the child -- which is enough reason to suspect that the kid probably saw what happened.
Most prosecutors would have insisted that the child be subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury -- but Coakley wouldn't do it. In her defense, she said she was worried the kid might not tell what he knew -- either because he was traumatized or frightened. But, considering the age of the case and the lack of a dead body, it was worth trying. There was little left to lose.
While the D.A. was dragging her feet, I filed a grandparents' rights case in family court in the hope the child might benefit from having a relationship with his dead mother's family. We had to fight all the way to an appellate court to win a ruling that gave the child's grandmother a right to visitations with the boy -- but by then the husband had moved the child to the other side of the country, where he got the boy's school to prevent the boy from having contact with any person other than him.
Had Coakley been a bit more aggressive, things might have turned out differently. She did try to get child protective services involved on behalf of the little boy, but they declined, finding no evidence of neglect. (Go figure.) But Coakley didn't treat the man with the serious aggressiveness this case deserved. She wouldn't even call him a "person of interest," which would have helped allow a powerful magazine piece to be written, exposing all the evidence and possibly eliciting new information from the public. So what if he'd filed a lawsuit? Coakley would have prevailed, because the mountain of evidence pointing at the husband was more than enough to defeat a libel claim. All we were missing was the body -- and law books are filled with cases of successful murder prosecutions where the victim's body was never uncovered.
I worked with Martha Coakley for years. She was my boss, actually, and she was pretty tough. I've never been able to figure out why she couldn't find her toughness in this case.
WELLER: I interviewed many others who knew the missing woman and her husband -- a preschool teacher who spoke of the father's controlling behavior, his isolation of the child, and his threats to her (the teacher). Other neighbors noticed this same menacing behavior. Finally, I called the man's mother to ask about what her son had said to her before and after the his wife's disappearance. The chilling conversation I had with this woman -- full of all kinds of brazen semi-admissions, inconsistencies, and peculiar fury for her long-ago-defeated in-laws -- would have been easy fodder for even a rookie prosecutor, had this been said on a witness stand. Hanging up, I realized this woman didn't care that people knew her missing daughter-in-law hadn't "disappeared" -- that her son knew all too well what had happened to her.
One early morning, I waited for the man in the parking lot of his apartment complex, approached him, and handed him a letter, asking for an interview. He took it, read it, then fixed on me a long, cocky, hostile half-smile. Here's what I read in that look: Yes, I gamed the system; both of us know it, and there's nothing you can do about it.
MURPHY: This case haunts me. A woman is clearly dead; her little boy may have been a witness, and a killer walks free. I like Martha Coakley. She came to my wedding, and I've watched her grow into a sophisticated public official as District Attorney and, now, Attorney General. While I'm a fiercely independent nonpartisan, she's the kind of Democrat some conservatives like because she's more 'law and order' than most of her liberal colleagues. But her opponent in the U.S. Senate race, Scott Brown, has a long record of working hard for victims, and I can't help but feel that if this case had landed on Scott Brown's desk,.more would have been done, such as making the victim's son testify no matter what his abusive father tried to do to stop him. Martha Coakley won important convictions in many child ause cases, but Scott Brown has filed bills in Massachusetts to ramp up the punishments of child predators while Coakley fought against mandatory sentencing for sex offenders. Does this mean one of them will be a better Senator than the other? I don't know. But I'm certain we need more people in state and federal government who care about imposing tough punishments on perpetrators of violence against women and children
WELLER: I want Coakley to win. But this case -- like the obscene failure of justice for the families of the victims of serial killer and convicted murderer Rodney Alcala, who is currently being standing trial, for the fourth time, in Southern California, for murders of now five young women (there are more victims) -- is an example of our government's failure to sometimes do something simple: Be curious, aggressive, and effective in victim crimes. What a shame for one grieving family, for all grieving families -- and for the justice system.