by Dave Alfvin
Little by little, Larsen sapped away her independence and her will to resist his commands; ultimately, he was shaping Teri into his prototype of a perfect, subservient wife. By the time Teri realized what was happening, much of the damage had been done. Her life had digressed to a point where she could only anticipate whatever new terrors David decided to send her way, and do her best to appease him when he did.
Life continued in a roller-coaster fashion, full of emotional loops, corkscrews, and hairpin turns. At first, the manner in which David’s anger manifested itself was largely scattershot: a flare-up here, an outburst there, and so on. As the happiness that surrounded Amanda’s birth gradually wore off, life soon took a dive into the realm of irrationality.
Dark clouds settled over the couple during the second year of their marriage. David had become more controlling than ever, perhaps having sensed that he was in danger of losing his investment, Teri. He would track her whereabouts by asking her questions like, “Your receipt at the K-Mart says 3:05 p.m. Where were you between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m.?”
“I was at the park with Amanda; then we went to the store,” was her typical reply.
On one particular day, Teri managed to find a bit of humor in her normally bleak life. She had been cleaning out her refrigerator’s freezer compartment and threw out a sorry-looking, freezer-ravaged breakfast sausage.
Later that day, after returning from work, David slowly stalked around the living room, holding the sausage between two fingers and staring at Teri as if she had just discarded a priceless jewel. Teri looked back blankly, amused by his bizarre affection for this shriveled hunk of meat.
“What? Are you a raccoon…going through the garbage now?” she quipped.
Looking back at the incident so many years later, Teri could only laugh at how utterly ridiculous her life had become. “That didn’t sit too well with David,” she said. Not only did his wife dare to defy him, but she mocked him, too. As anyone may guess, David threw a fit. Whether the sausage was actually eaten in the end remains a mystery.
Teri left David for another long period of time near the end of the second year, and she sought refuge with her sister again. Amanda was six months old, and Teri had grown weary of the near-constant physical and mental abuse. She stayed with her sister for a few days and tried to regroup and piece her thoughts back together. During this time, she delivered David an ultimatum over the phone. Unless he finally took some initiative and moved forward with the counseling idea, she had no intention of returning.
Teri and David’s second daughter, Holly, was born in the beginning of year three of their fragile marriage. After Teri returned, David finally agreed to attend therapy sessions with a family counseling pastor at Elmbrook Church, a large, respected nondenominational church in metro Milwaukee. During the sessions, he admitted to having struck Teri, and the counselor strongly suggested that David receive anger management therapy at a nearby treatment facility.
Unfortunately, the name of the institution ended with the words “Women’s Center,” and that was all he needed to hear. He would never agree to therapy at “a place run by women.” David hated all women’s organizations, thinking of them collectively as “a bunch of lesbian bitches trying to convince (women) to get divorced.”
As one might expect, David’s attitude toward Teri only grew more and more hostile. Even when Holly and Amanda were nearby, he gave no second thought to using foul language— mostly directed at his wife—in their presence. As Teri summarized it later, “his language in front of the girls was about as bad as you can imagine.”
Even as the marriage continued in its death spiral, Teri had more control issues to deal with:
“Larsen worked at the airport from about 6:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., but he would suddenly just show up at home, like at noon, as if he was trying to catch something going on. One morning, I was going to do some work in the yard, and I got to the back door and it wouldn’t open…I couldn’t figure it out at first. Then I saw the back door had a new deadbolt on it, except the bolt was reversed so it wouldn’t open from the inside. I asked David about this and he said it wasn’t a big deal, because the key would be hanging on a string by the door. That was fine, except when he didn’t want me to leave the house…the key to the deadbolt was strangely missing. There was a time when we were fighting and I literally couldn’t get out of the house. I actually climbed out the bathroom window!”
Teri was now resolved to end the marriage, and it was only a matter of time. Her dignity, though bruised for now, would eventually energize her with the needed courage to leave Larsen.
One evening, David took out his anger on her right in front of their daughters, swearing in every direction of the house. Frightened, exhausted, and fed up with David’s volatile behavior, Teri had no desire to endure another tongue lashing or anything else he had to offer. She took the only available escape route and crept quietly into the basement. A large pile of empty cardboard boxes lay strewn about a dark corner of the room—a potential safe zone which could give her some time to recuperate. Teri lay down and quickly assembled the boxes around her, hiding herself from view.
Beneath her cardboard barricade, she could only wonder how her life had reached such a sorry state. It was pathetic. Teri knew she’d hit rock bottom, or at least she hoped she had. Still, the darkness of the basement, the relative protection of the cardboard boxes, and the merciful silence gave her a few sweet moments of relief. But soon, even her peace was shattered by footsteps on the basement stairs.
David descended slowly, step by step, calmly cradling the tiny Holly in his arms. Casually, as if he were walking through a garden, he approached the pile of boxes where his wife had taken refuge and uncovered her hiding spot. Teri’s heart raced. Paralyzed with fear, she could only watch, terrified, as David reached down and grabbed her hair in one hand while cuddling Holly with the other. With a forceful tug, he hauled Teri upright, ripping out a large patch of hair, roots and all. Parenthood had brought with it a new and sickening type of strategy for David—he would often hold one of the children while striking Teri as a form of insurance (or a hostage), thus ensuring that she wouldn’t immediately bolt from the house and take the children.
Teri stayed as far away from David as she could that night, hoping to avoid further conflict. She had been pushed beyond her limit and quickly formulated a new plan to leave the following day.
Teri left David a third time, and once again demanded that he attend both counseling and anger management therapy. The cycle of abuse and reconciliation was in full swing now, but Teri was rapidly running out of patience. She could only tolerate so much of her husband’s cruelty, and the previous incident had nearly broken her both physically and mentally. Whether he was actually trying to or not, David simply could not understand what kind of a person he was becoming or what he was doing. The landscape of his mind was twisted and cold, a forsaken place where the concepts of right and wrong intermingled seamlessly. Everything he said or did was absolute because in this world, David reigned supreme.
What David failed to realize was that, no matter how hard he hit or how loudly he yelled, the range of his dominion did not include Teri or the children. With one rash decision, he would soon seal his own fate forever. A new chain of events was in motion, one that would eventually leave him with nothing but his own delusions. And it all began with a fight over pasta.
Holly was still a newborn at the time, and Teri was feeding her in her high chair one day when David walked into the kitchen. As usual, he immediately noticed something out of place—a box of dry pasta, sitting out on the counter. Rather than simply moving it himself, he insisted that Teri stop what she was doing and put the box away immediately. It couldn’t possibly remain out in the open!
Teri assured David it was only pasta and, being dry, it wouldn’t spoil. “But he demanded that I stop feeding the baby that very moment and put the pasta away,” she said. “He just was being a total ass about it.” Faced with the choice of attending to
either a hungry Holly or a box of dry, unspoiled pasta, Teri instinctively focused on the task at hand. Anyway, she knew David was being ridiculous. But by failing to “secure the pasta” as requested, she had disobeyed an order, and that meant repercussions.
As she was walking into the other room with Holly in her arms, David shoved her roughly from behind. Teri almost tripped on a stair leading into the other room, stumbled, and whirled around, absolutely livid. “If I had fallen on top of the baby, I swear I would have killed you with my bare hands,” she growled, her voice steady and grave. “You could have killed Holly! What were you thinking?”
Prior to this incident, David had always been able to concoct some form of warped reason to justify his violence, and to him, his point of view was always the correct one. But he had no answers for Teri that night, no justification or reasoning or even the slightest hint of an apology. There were no apologies in David’s world—only self-serving explanations. He would find some way of shifting the blame onto Teri, his job, his life, or whatever forces he decided were “controlling his behavior” at the time. Everything in the world except him was at fault, and for David, this was as good a reason as any to act the way he did toward his wife and infant daughter.
For Teri, however, it was the last straw. She quietly took the kids and left David the next day, choosing to stay at a local women’s shelter for a couple of weeks. It was a secret place, a peaceful place, a place out of David’s reach, where she could live among friends without the fear of being intimidated on a daily basis. Having endured so much abuse and terror over the past three years, her relief at finally having a place of refuge was nothing short of tremendous.
The shelter staff was very supportive and gave Teri valuable information about her legal rights, as well as any further moral support she needed. At last, she felt protected in some small way. Teri did not tell David anything about where she was staying, but to her credit, she did not cut off communications with him. Unfortunately, when she did contact him, there wasn’t a shred of reconciliation in his demeanor. “You have no business being away,” he told her coldly. “Your place is to be here in your home.”
Though the causes of their separation were patently obvious, David still couldn’t conjure up a reason why Teri would want to live anywhere else. Somehow, in his twisted logic, David put Teri at fault for trying to destroy their marriage in a classic blame switch. To him, it was as simple as black and white: either she was home with him or she wasn’t. More so, Teri was a wife icon in David’s eyes, a contributor to his kingdom and a female investment as well—one he was very proud to own.
But in the long run, Teri had been nothing more than a playing piece on David’s game board, and only he had the right to roll the dice. And nothing, not even the threat of divorce, would make him change that rule.
“He never tried to sweet-talk me, apologize, or promise to make things better,” Teri said, regarding their negotiations. “It was always, ‘You get over here, where you belong.’ He was never nice about it. Never.”
“How can I love you if you’re going to be like this?” she finally asked, raising the question she had been asking herself for the past three years.
“You better love me,” David retorted in an ultimatum. “You better get that love back. Divorce is not an option!”
Unfortunately for David, Teri’s exit was, and always had been, an option. Within a few months, this option would grow to become a reality he needed to face, whether he liked it or not. David was finally paying the price for his hubris…the pride before the fall. As obsessed with control as he was, he had not anticipated Teri would ever stand up to him and challenge his leadership. This was paramount to a soldier disobeying an officer: a treasonable offense, another punishable offense.
After three-and-a-half years of this nightmarish marriage, Teri was finally forced to break the ugly ebb-and-flow cycle of violence. She gathered her daughters, left David for good, and filed for divorce in 2006.
In normal divorce scenarios, this would mean the end of their relationship, and the former couple might have gone their separate ways, expressing nothing more than regret or relief. This situation and its eventual outcome, on the other hand, were about as far from normal as they come. And though Teri might have escaped further harm at the moment, David still intended to follow through with his punishment, even if it took five years of waiting.
David’s Church Kingdom
When the leaders of the Norway Lutheran Church in Wind Lake first met David Larsen, they must have been delighted. A small religious organization such as this was always in need of new followers who had the potential to attract others, and David embodied this ideal almost perfectly. Younger members—people around forty years old with families and children—represented the next generation of churchgoers. Without new, younger members (especially with children), the church would eventually die when the last of its core members passed away or left the church.
That is why David was such a valuable commodity to Norway Lutheran—he and his family could play a major role in leading the congregation into the next millennium. David’s perceived persona among church people was that of the classic family man: outgoing and personable, a nice wife and kids, and a sense of humor to boot.
It also helped that David was fluent in “Christian speak,” so members of Norway Lutheran presumed him to be a spiritual man. As an adequately intelligent person, David seemed to have all the expected qualities of a good leader. The elders thought he would fit in perfectly as a key member of their church, a church that was carefully watching its age tick away. Not surprisingly, David wanted to get involved in as many activities as he could, as soon as possible. He was literally preaching to the choir. The church leaders were extremely impressed with his enthusiasm and expected great things from this new, proactive follower.
If only they had known the truth about what lay beneath David’s innocent exterior. They had no idea what a true wolf in sheep’s clothing he was. Unbeknownst to them, they had a beast in their midst.
In an interview with former Norway Lutheran Church member Pamela Gustafson, she described David Larsen’s personality as perceived by the members of their church, as he moved into position to become the next president of his church council.
Alfvin: David had high ambitions in the church—he wanted to be your church council president. Could you describe how David moved into that position?
Gustafson: I was on the church council at the time, and basically at our church, the person who says “yes” is the church council president. Nobody really wanted to be the president, and nobody really wants to be on the church council. The church was losing members and in trouble.
Alfvin: Was Larsen a board member before that?
Gustafson: Yes, and I believe he was the chair of the evangelism committee as well. But at some point, he and I decided that he’d be president and I’d be his vice president, just because it had to be done.
Alfvin: So there was no real process through which people gained experience and then moved into the president’s position?
Gustafson: No. Pretty much, whoever volunteered to do it, did it. There was very rarely an election.
Alfvin: What was the size of your congregation?
Gustafson: Probably less than one hundred and fifty members and shrinking. “Everybody in town” said they were going to Norway, but most didn’t attend. It appeared that the congregation was actually dying, that there weren’t many young people joining, even though at the same time that Wind Lake was growing quickly. We couldn’t meet our financial obligations; we were unable to pay our bills, so we couldn’t pay the benevolence fund on time, if at all.
Alfvin: So David moved into the evangelism program then volunteered to be president?
Gustafson: Yes.
Alfvin: Now there were some things that happened while he was president. He did start to show some of his anger and intolerance due to some things that were said at meetings…do you remember that?
; Gustafson: Well, the big thing that I remember is that the ELCA was doing a thing on homosexuality called “Reconciled in Christ,” and he was dead set against it. He didn’t want any part of it; he wrote letters to the bishop saying that Christians shouldn’t accept homosexuality. It did go on without him at the church, though. People talked about it, and we had discussion groups.
Alfvin: Were there any people who David would see as a threat to his presidency?
Gustafson: No. Definitely not. Nobody else wanted it.
Alfvin: As a council president, do you think he did a good job?
Gustafson: David did an “okay” job. He was always prepared and he always had an agenda. He was good friends with the senior pastor but disliked the junior pastor for reasons I don’t recall.
Alfvin: Overall, you’ve characterized him as a fairly normal person…maybe slightly high-strung but not this monster that we see in later days. It sounds like he seemed to be a slightly aggressive and ambitious person but not dangerous.
Gustafson: Yes, I’d say that’s accurate. David was confident, somewhat cocky and definitely opinionated, but he was also very social and amicable when he was in a group setting. None of us could have predicted his shockingly violent behavior in the years following. When the congregation learned of Larsen’s first police visit for beating up Teri, the congregation’s overall opinion of David plummeted like a rock.
*****
Pam Gustafson, in this interview, described her direct first contact with Teri and David Larsen when she met them through the church’s bowling team.
Alfvin: How did you meet Teri originally?
Gustafson: I met Teri the first night of bowling in a bowling league our church started. I may have seen her before that, but I didn’t remember meeting her before that. My ex-husband Ed and I were paired with Teri and David as their partners.
Alfvin: And how many years were you on the bowling league?
Gustafson: About four years.