by Dave Alfvin
“Just forget it,” she pleaded with him. “Just stop the car.”
David was well past the listening point by now, and continued inching his car toward the worker until it was almost touching her. Upon realizing that her signals had failed to dissuade this oncoming driver, the woman finally lost her patience and tapped the hood of the car with her short flagstick.
David went ballistic. He abruptly stopped the car, threw open the door, grabbed the worker’s resting stool, and—to her and Teri’s utter amazement—heaved it into the ditch, bellowing after her as he stormed back to the vehicle: “Don’t you ever, ever touch my car! Do you hear me? Don’t you ever touch my car!” Back in the car, Teri, now mortified by the fiasco that had just exploded around her and feeling about six inches tall, covered her face and prayed for a safe exit before police arrived. At long last, they were able to leave the scene. Teri was certain David would be arrested for his misbehavior, but as is the case in many such incidents, there were no repercussions. And while Teri wasn’t oblivious to the implications of David’s outbursts, she never could have dreamed that his rage might one day be directed at her.
The dating game itself was merely okay for David, but he was intent on getting married as soon as possible. Teri, however, held him off for a while. “My reproductive clock was ticking, you know?” she explains. “I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom with kids, and that’s what David wanted, too. We seemed to be moving in the same direction.”
Teri always has been a highly energetic person, effervescent and eager to please: the perfect wife for a regular guy. Unfortunately, her personality was also the perfect match for her regular guy’s grand marriage plan. In other words, Teri had been scoped out and targeted like a deer stalked by a hunter.
What David concealed from her, for obvious reasons, was his belief that a woman should have as little power and responsibility as possible, as evidenced by the progression of their marriage. David pegged Teri as an excellent marital candidate: someone who would knuckle down and unquestioningly obey all his commands, one way or another. In many ways, his ideal relationship was not one of “husband and wife” but rather one of “master and slave.”
Life can be a battlefield. When David was a child, older kids often picked on him because of his small size. Fast forward a decade or so, and we find that David joined the Marines in 1984. Not much is known about his two-year stint in the Corps, but there is little doubt that David formulated his adult value system during this time, along with a self-injected need to control everything in his universe. David brought the battlefield home. A strict regimen of military life just might have been the catalyst he was looking for. Military standards had replaced David’s God.
Teri’s Marriage: Year One
Teri’s disastrous honeymoon didn’t mark the end of her new marriage, but looking back, she certainly wishes it had. If she somehow gained the ability to reverse time, she no doubt would have traveled backward to finish the relationship for good.
After returning from Hawaii, life was “mostly good.” Indeed, the couple’s relationship had improved somewhat since the turbulence that marred the honeymoon. David was a little more lenient with Teri and didn’t need things to be exactly the way he wanted them to be. Furthermore, he was absolutely enamored by her attractiveness. She was the loveliest woman he ever had a relationship with, and he loved showing her off to his friends like she was some sort of valuable trophy or prize.
Teri, however, felt as if she’d endured half a lifetime during her early tribulation period. While living under David’s control in her first year of marriage, she was compelled to seek safety elsewhere no less than five times, including her final escape from his tyranny at home. Flight from David was always for the same reasons: undue physical, verbal, or mental abuse. In most cases, it was all three at the same time.
The dynamics of their relationship and David’s abuse followed a loose pattern of good times followed by horrible times. While Teri was pregnant, David generally refrained from mistreating her, but after childbirth, she was fair game—just another punching bag he could use to dump his anger.
One rough point early on in their marriage was the fact that David didn’t want Teri to keep her job. He detested the idea of his wife needing to work for a living. Working women were abnormalities in David’s eyes, as proved by his reactions toward the female construction worker and his blanket hostility toward any female who held a job. Ironically, his own direct supervisor at Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport was, in fact, a woman.
David’s protests notwithstanding, Teri continued working until sometime during the first year of their marriage. “David saw nothing wrong with taking my paychecks and depositing them in his account,” Teri explains. The couple had seemingly skirted the working wife issue, but many more problems were approaching.
Behind the scenes, David gradually took control of everything in Teri’s existence, establishing himself as the “family accountant” who oversaw all of their income and expenses. However, he viewed himself as the sole regulator of all family funds, and was highly secretive and ridiculously tight about anything concerning money. He refused to tell Teri how much they had made or lost, and withheld any and all information about the various real estate properties he held. Teri, being sensibly curious about the state of their finances, once asked him, “Can’t you just tell me about how much money you make?”
“Well, uh, it’s real complicated, and uh, there’s all kinds of factors involved…” David hesitantly answered, and explained that an estimate was impossible due to his numerous business expenses. “Apparently, he never filed an income tax return in his life,” Teri later joked.
Even before the two were married, David began draining Teri of her independence. He decided his wife needed a nice new set of wheels, so he traded in her old Camry and bought a newer car. However, he made sure that the car was registered in his name and—since Teri had a job at the time—took payments from her to pay for the car. But because David had purchased it before their marriage, it did not count as marital property and thus could not be claimed by Teri if (and when) they broke up. Yes, David was thinking ahead.
Teri received a weekly allowance from her husband—twenty to twenty-five dollars a week. She was required to produce receipts for all expenditures—no matter how small—at the end of each week. And they all had to balance to the penny. On the one hand, it was comforting that David was watching the family’s expenses, but on the other hand, his level of tight-fistedness bordered on the ridiculous. Teri resented his lack of trust and his juvenile treatment. In the same way that the sunrise burns away a morning fog, her post-nuptial naïveté was beginning to disintegrate in the light of her newfound knowledge. David may have been holding all the cards, but Teri understood her situation more clearly now, and she wasn’t at all happy with the way things were progressing.
David always had trouble controlling his near-inexhaustible supply of rage, but outbursts weren’t always proportional to the seriousness of the subject at hand. Instead, the vitally important issue was whether people listened to him or not. His frightening obsession with control and the newfound opportunity presented by his marriage interlaced perfectly with one another, and soon Teri was obligated to abide by David’s two most basic rules: listen and obey.
David craved unquestioning loyalty above all else, so when his orders weren’t obeyed immediately and to the letter, his already-unstable temper would flare to a flash point, often resulting in violent consequences. His period in the marines had given him the tools he believed he needed to make those around him follow his orders, and rather than leaving his military mindset in the military like most people, David went ahead and brought it home.
By twisting the rules of the Corps so they supported his own twisted philosophy of life, David built himself a foundation from which he could strike out at Teri and force her to submit to his will…and it was all based on the rules, David’s rules.
David found additi
onal support for his actions through his own religious beliefs, including a verse of the Bible taken out of context. He would often cite specific verses, in particular Ephesians 5:22, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.” However, as is normal for those who attempt to justify falsehood by such methods, David conveniently disregarded the message’s context and the preceding verse, which instructs spouses to “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Furthermore, the actual passage goes on to explain that “…husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.” (Ephesians 5:28)
Saint Paul preached marriage equality; David Larsen did not. For him, a husband and a wife wielding the same amount of authority was comparable to him being emasculated. The thought of submitting to a woman repulsed him; but as far as David was concerned, he had the Bible—the written and indisputable Word of God—on his side. Besides, being an established member of Norway Lutheran Church, he had all the religious support he needed. God had given him the authority to dominate his wife, and that’s all David needed to know.
Throughout the first six months of her marriage to David, Teri ended up making many changes to her home routine. The clothes had to be folded a certain way, expenses had to balance, and everything else had to be done just so. Whatever the situation, Teri would make the necessary accommodations, hoping to ease David’s tension.
“But after six months of this, I began to realize there would always be something I’m doing wrong,” she explains. “David could easily find things to call ‘wrong,’ just so he could yell at me about something. When I first made changes (to my lifestyle), I thought it would make him happy, but nothing I did really mattered much to him, (it was) just the next flaw he could find.”
Even though she made sure to voice her disapproval when he went too far, Teri repeatedly found herself experiencing a barrage of physical abuse from David…a small push, a jab, a supposedly playful smack that was, in reality, much too hard.
Teri’s life began to condense into a pattern: she would try to play the part of the good, stay-at-home wife, but she always ended up becoming a nervous victim in the end as she awaited her next shortcoming from her time-bomb husband. Teri was experiencing hardcore psychological abuse. Their marriage was only six months old, and she was already approaching the breaking point. Unfortunately, she hadn’t even begun to experience what David was like when his full rage was beamed toward her.
Wearied by constant verbal and physical torment, Teri knew she couldn’t put up with much more of David’s abuse. “I knew I was a damn good wife and mother,” she insists. “I maintained a nice neat house, and I was always there for my children. I wasn’t going to let him tell me how bad I was anymore.”
David’s first serious physical attack on Teri occurred sometime in the middle of the first year of their marriage. It all started as an argument over “something…it wasn’t important, whatever it was,” according to Teri. “It could have been about anything.” Whatever the argument had been about, it wasn’t long before things took a turn for the terrifying.
David let loose with a vicious assault: punching and kicking his wife, pulling her hair, and pushing her around the house. In a desperate attempt to escape, Teri dashed away through the living room and the door connecting their house to the garage. The large double door between the garage and the driveway was halfway down, and it was now dark outside. Teri had a window of opportunity to escape, but she just wasn’t fast enough. David grabbed her, pulled her back and resumed the attack. Teri recalls:
David yanked me back and viciously pushed me backward against the entry door. My head hit the wooden door with a loud thump. David pushed me into the door again and slammed my head against it. My nose was bleeding. I was yelling at him to stop; fortunately, one of my neighbors heard my screams and called the police. David yanked me back into the house. About ten minutes later, the police arrived, and David went to the front door. He was pushing me back so the police wouldn’t see me, but they did. David began screaming at the police, “I didn’t call you—I don’t need you here!” (One of the officers) took a suspicious look at me and asked, “Is your nose bleeding, ma’am?” When I said “yes,” that was all (the information) they needed to enter the house. David was his natural self, loud and belligerent. “I didn’t ask you to come here!” he shouted at the supervising officer. “Get the hell off my property!”
David was losing his mental faculties. In desperation, he told the police that I was crazy, psycho. They bought none of it and called for backup. After more police officers arrived, David resisted being handcuffed and fought off five officers who were struggling with him. During the scuffle, he kicked one officer in the groin. Eventually, the police were forced to use pepper spray to subdue him enough to slap handcuffs on his wrists. As they led David to the squad car, he was crying like a baby. I remember one of the officers telling me that “some of the biggest ‘tough guys’ act like the biggest ‘wusses’ when they’re arrested and thrown in jail.” I can’t say enough good things about the officers who responded to my calls.
The garage incident was all the convincing Teri needed to cut loose from her abusive husband and leave home. She called her mother on the phone to let her know what had happened and made plans to stay with her sister Patti until things calmed down. With this one explosive act of violence, she had been given a glimpse into David’s true persona: a dominating control freak at home…and also the inverse: a sniveling, pathetic bully when being taken away by the police.
David knew he had gone too far, and realized then there was no way to reclaim his innocence. He had been caught red-handed, and his sins were exposed to all. His neighbors would soon learn of the arrest, and so would his fellow church members. He would no longer possess the image he held for so long: a smart, respectable man, a friendly church council member, and a model citizen. He was now David Larsen: confirmed wife beater.
In David’s world, physical violence was a necessity—the proper thing to do whenever Teri either asserted herself or refused to obey his commands. His personal hell would be one in which no one ever listened to him.
But now he had crossed the line, and dreaded the potential punishments that might follow his actions. Next to money, his perceived image was the next priority, and it was now badly bruised. An outspoken homophobe, David also abhorred the thought of prison and what might happen to him if he ever ended up behind bars. He was not prepared to let those in authority or “the system” push him around like this. In Larsen’s eyes, police were meddling idiots, and no one could tell David Larsen how to live. But at the six-month mark of their marriage, Larsen’s wife had fled to seek shelter, and he now had a reputation as a spousal abuser. That was his reality, no matter how he wanted to vindicate his actions. Teri may have won a battle and gained a brief respite, but David had no plans of surrendering in the long run.
The only conditions under which Teri agreed to return to her husband were if David consented to counseling and anger management therapy. It was now obvious to all, except perhaps to David, that he had a severe problem controlling his anger. He agreed to go into therapy, and so Teri returned home, but David conveniently stonewalled the counseling visits. As the first year of their marriage drew to a close, the couple awaited their first child, and Larsen had yet to attend a single therapy session.
More Serious Attacks: Years Two & Three
The second year of Teri and David’s marriage began peacefully enough. With Teri pregnant, David relaxed his disciplinarian principles somewhat and did not attempt to assault her again; nevertheless, he continued to skirt the issue of his promised therapy sessions.
In fact, David had been working to make sure most of the problems he and Teri had agreed to address together were swept under the rug and forever abandoned. This temporary grace period continued until Amanda was born. Like any first-time mother, Teri was overjoyed at the arrival of her daughter. After all, she knew this was one of the most imp
ortant moments of her life, and nothing could diminish her boundless excitement.
But it wasn’t long before David’s ceasefire wore off. As the first days of motherhood turned into weeks and months, Teri found herself increasingly having to put up with a husband whose overbearing personality had begun to mutate into a comic parody. One morning at 5:00 a.m., she was awakened by the sound of David bellowing at her.
“You’re short twenty-five cents! Where did you spend that twenty-five cents?”
Evidently, her receipts for that week had come up a quarter short, and in the financial world of her husband, this was nothing less than fraud. Still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, Teri did her best to recall where and how she had spent the missing quarter. Somehow, even under such absurd circumstances, she remembered. “I put Amanda on a pony ride at K-Mart. They don’t give receipts for pony rides, David,” she said blankly.
David counterattacked. “Then you should have written it down on a piece of paper!” Guilty as charged! Teri was supposed to write down incidental purchases on a special sticky note she kept in the car, just one more ridiculous “statute” in the legalistic creed David crafted for Teri to obey.
While Teri’s life may seem to border on the absurd for those who hear her story, it must be pointed out that under normal circumstances, Teri would not have accepted this quality of life in one swallow—drastic behavior modification doesn’t happen instantaneously. David had spent a great deal of time keeping Teri busy, reconditioning her and changing all the things he felt were “wrong” about her attitude.