David had been an abused child and adolescent. When he was twenty-one and a senior in college, he and his father argued violently one night about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. David’s father, who was mentally and physically brutal to both his wife and son, threatened to kill David for what he called un-American ideas. David’s mother took her husband’s side in the argument; she always did. Fran said David’s mother was “pathologically adapted to her terrifying situation. Like so many women so afflicted, she would frequently assist in the violence against David as a means of identifying with her oppressor.”
When the argument was over, David’s parents went to bed. David hid. Hours later, he “emerged in a state of terror” and killed them both. Arrested, tried, and convicted, David was sentenced to life.
Fourteen years later, he met Fran. When she visited, David rarely smiled, never laughed. His was a “seemingly emotionless demeanor. He needed to be that way to survive.” But Fran, rather than being discouraged by his lack of expression, tried to draw David out. She wanted to help him because she recognized his pain; it was a reflection of hers.
“Maybe it was the years of abuse that I had. A terrible life can either destroy you or make you a terrible person.” What did it do to Fran?
When she was very little, her mother left her father and married another man. Fran’s new “grandfather,” her stepfather’s father, sexually abused her when she was four. Throughout her childhood, she was beaten. “People thought that’s how you raised kids: You beat the hell out of them.” When she was twelve, her mother, who had a history of psychiatric problems, committed suicide. Later, Fran went to live with her natural father, who “had sexual problems. He never tried to have intercourse with me but tried to do everything else. He didn’t know the dividing line.”
Sexually abused, battered, and beaten, Fran carried her burden alone through life until she met David many years later. “All the short circuits I had in life led me to the real thing,” she says of their love. They met in 1983 and married in June 1984. For the next three years, Fran worked to get David released, convinced that he had murdered because of the abuse he’d suffered. He should “have been charged with the lesser offense of voluntary manslaughter and certainly not given a life sentence.” Fran “played detective,” talked to David’s relatives to find out more about “the craziness of his parents,” went on radio and television arguing on his behalf, persuaded The Houston Post to print an editorial, and appealed again and again to the state parole board. All of Fran’s passion and sacrifice paid off; David was paroled on January 19, 1987.
Today, they are happily married and very productive. David is even able to show happiness. “Now, he’s very expressive; he laughs. I say, ‘David, you’re laughing. That’s wonderful.”’ Despite the fact that Fran’s sister and brother won’t speak to her because of her relationship, and although she’s had some problems with work because of their marriage, Fran is still firmly committed to David. He assists a social worker at a Houston hospital and is finishing a master’s degree in psychology. She is working toward a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing. They live with three poodles and four cats and are trying to adopt a child.
Fran’s fantasy of rescuing David has come true. “I had saved David’s life, so to speak, and given him opportunity in life.” Fran refers to David as “my loving husband,” and although they argue occasionally, the disagreements never escalate, never become violent. Is Fran afraid that David, having killed once, could kill again? “You would think I’d be a liar if I never did [think about it], and for the first year, yes, I did. But now, I don’t know why, but no, I’m not afraid… If I was ever afraid of David, I wouldn’t be with him… The great, overriding feeling I have had about him is his suffering.”
LOVE KILLS
“If you stay around long enough, you discover what we have learned again… Love also kills,” wrote columnist Pete Hamill. Love killed JoAnn Breton on December 14, 1987.
Twenty-one years earlier, in 1966, Bobby Breton came home from a date knowing he was in big trouble. His father’s drunken body was lying on the floor directly in front of the door so he’d have to shove it against the old man to get into the house. Bobby was scared because if the old man was that drunk, he might wake up and beat him to within an inch of his life.
That’s what happened; the door opened and Bobby’s father woke up. What are you doing? screamed the older man. He whipped his belt out of its loops and went after Bobby. Bobby’s grandmother screamed also: Leave him alone! Leave him alone! But Breton, Sr., was beyond hearing. He hated his son, hated his life, hated his mother—just hated. And Bobby was going to pay. He pushed his mother out of the way and ran toward Bobby. Bobby was crying, What did I ever do to you? He picked up a knife from the counter and rushed toward his father as his father came at him. I hate you, I hate you, Bobby screamed over and over as he drove the knife into his father’s body.
His father fell to the floor, his drunkenness, his age, his rage, no match for his son. Robert J. Breton, nineteen, had committed patricide.
“His father was mean to Robert all the time… He was ready to hit [him] all the time,” Eva Breton testified during her grandson’s trial. Her son was abusive and spent all his money on liquor, but Robert was a quiet, obedient boy who helped support the family, she said. It was an open-and-shut case of self-defense, said Judge Leo Gaffney. He gave Breton a one-to-two-year suspended sentence and placed him on parole for two years. The young man never went to jail for killing his father.
For the next two decades, nothing more was heard from Robert J. Breton in his hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut. He worked, married, raised a family. In 1971, Robert and his wife, JoAnn, had a son whom they named Robert, Jr. A third generation of Robert Bretons.
Fifteen years went by. By 1986, Robert and JoAnn were living apart and a divorce was imminent. JoAnn, a clerical worker, filed for a restraining order barring Robert from the house, saying he had broken furniture, put a hole in a wall, fired a shot into the ceiling.
When the divorce became final, during the second week of December 1987, the Bretons’ son, a high school junior, told a neighbor that his father had threatened to kill his mother and had pulled a knife on her.
It was two weeks before Christmas and Robert Breton was furious that JoAnn had locked him out of his own house. So what if he knocked her around once in a while? So what if he gambled, had a girlfriend, drank? So what if they would be divorced in a matter of days? It was still his house.
Breton walked up to the front door and banged on it; JoAnn had changed the lock. When she didn’t answer, he broke the glass and turned the knob from inside. Then he ran up the familiar steps into the bedroom they used to share. She was in bed. He punched her in the face a few times, yelling, Why did you do this to me? I hate you, I hate you.
He ran down to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. By the time he got back upstairs, she was out of bed, trying to dial the phone. He plunged the knife into her body. She stopped moving, stopped crying out.
He heard a noise on the stairs. Breton ran out of the bedroom and saw his sixteen-year-old son running toward him. He stabbed his son in the neck and the boy pitched backward, falling down the stairs, blood spurting out of his severed artery.
This time there was no leniency in the courtroom for Robert J. Breton. On April 11, 1989, twenty-two years after he was given a suspended sentence for killing his father, he was sentenced to death for the murder of his wife and son. He is on death row at Somers State Correctional Institution waiting to die in Connecticut’s electric chair.
“This was a vicious, brutal murder,” said John Griffin, Waterbury’s chief inspector of detectives.
Did it have to happen? Why did JoAnn marry Robert Breton knowing that he had committed patricide? Didn’t she understand that her life, and the life of any children they would have, would always be at risk living with a man who was capable of stabbing to death his own father? Why didn’t JoAnn realize the danger of marrying a man wh
o had killed? Or did she?
According to Detective Griffin, JoAnn knew Robert had killed his father and chose to ignore it. “It was common knowledge around here that he had done that.” He described JoAnn as “a nice girl. Anyone we talked to who had known her said she was a nice girl.”
Like many women who love men who kill, JoAnn suffered a traumatic loss when she was very young. She was six when her parents divorced, and she never saw her father again. JoAnn was raised by her mother and stepfather.
JoAnn’s marriage to Robert Breton was a rocky one. Said her mother, “It was an on-and-off marriage—we tried to help her as much as we could. He was breaking everything in the house. Who knows if he hit her. But you know what love can do. She loved him. (Emphasis added.)
“She always told me: ‘I’m not scared that he’s going to hit me.’ But she had no peace. He was always calling her, always going over to her house. She wanted the divorce; there were too many arguments and he was gambling in the end. She cried to us… He had a girlfriend for a while; he didn’t bother her then.”
Since Robert never went to prison for killing his father, it was easy for JoAnn to deny his violent nature so she could love and marry him. We will never know what was in JoAnn’s mind and heart on the day she married Robert. She is gone and buried and her reasons for loving a murderer are gone with her.
JoAnn Breton represents an unvoiced fear. Is this what eventually happens to women who love murderers—when their men are released from prison, when their phantom lovers become real? JoAnn, who once thought herself passionately in love with a killer, who was able to overlook and rationalize his crime, is herself a murder victim.
Beaten, stabbed, robbed of her life by her husband, her untold story dead with her, JoAnn Breton may serve as a warning to other women who live with fantasies of love.
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