The Murder of Jeffrey Dryden: The Grim Truth Surrounding Male Domestic Abuse

by Troy Veenstra

  “I am having trouble getting to sleep again, I remember 7 weeks ago when I was woke up by a detective knocking on the door. He gave me the worse news a mother can get. You were dead. I wanted to die right there myself. I miss you so much. Sometimes when Jason hugs me I want to think that it is you. I know that you are watching over me, but I want you here physically with me. It makes feel like you are with me when I write to you. I will love you forever. Mom.”

  ---Paula Dryden (Mother)

  CHAPTER 9:

  JULY 19 2010 12:00 AM

  His Last Moments…

  “It’s okay Jason,’ Jeff said as we talked that night, ‘I have accepted Jesus Christ as my savior,” Jason said in reference to a conversation he shared between his brother just before leaving for home the night of his murder. “For some time now, I have had this feeling that I won’t live to see 30… that she might go off at any time and kill me,” Jason added as he and Jeff talked about his future with Chiquita and where it would be going.

  “I should have gone with him that night, I should have known something was going to happen,” Jason said almost to himself, tears raining down the sides of his eyes as he tried to remain composed. “Dude, we can stop at any time, you don’t have to talk about the stuff you don’t want to,” I said, about ready to shut off the digital recorder. “No… I want people to know… I want his story to be told,” Jason said. “Besides,” Jason added, “that’s about it anyway, he went home shortly after and about three or four hours later I was told that he was dead… that she had killed… murdered my twin brother,” Jason added.

  At the end of the interview that day, I thanked Jason for being so open with me, and allowing me to tell Jeff’s story in my own words. Though I am his cousin, there is a bond between family, between brothers and sisters that I feel goes beyond blood. A bond that can only be known and felt by the heart, thus, for him to let me interview him, for him to share his thoughts and memories of such a personal and traumatic moment in his life, I felt truly honored by his trust

  As we turned away from the river that day and looked back towards the group of people, we called family, Jason added one final comment; a comment I felt should be shared and mentioned in this book as well.

  “I know he knew… he always knew that I loved him but I should have told him… Instead his last words to me were, ‘See you tomorrow at NASCAR…’ and mine were, ‘See you tomorrow,” sadly a tomorrow that was never to come.

  ***

  In an e-mail sent to me by Jason a few months later, Jason asked if he remembered to tell me about Jeff’s life insurance policy (Dryden, Jeff's Life Insurance, 2011). Which I informed him he did not.

  In the e-mail’s that followed that day, Jason informed me that it was his belief that Chiquita thought she was in for some money after Jeff passed away. “His company was having an open enrollment on Life Insurance,” Jason stated in the e-mail.

  “Jeff had called me up while I was at work and asked me for my social security number because he needed to turn in the form,” he stated. “He had told me that Chiquita told him to put her as the sole beneficiary to his life insurance, but at the last minute he just couldn’t bring himself to do it and decided for me to be on it instead.” Jason wrote.

  “I had told the police this… and was planning on testifying in open court about this when the Prosecution asked me about it, had the case gone to trial.” Jason added.

  Whether or not this had a bearing on Jeff’s death, only Chiquita can answer that, but in hindsight, it makes you wonder why a single male of 28 years old, with no children of his own, or a wife to worry about, would be so distraught over a life insurance policy… it just makes you wonder.

  CHAPTER 10: FEMALE DOMESTIC PERPETRATORS:

  “THE TRUTH BEHIND TRUTH”

  “(Blank) attempted to smother me with a pillow while I slept…”

  “I have been chased with a car and attacked with a chainsaw…,”

  “Our last argument left me with a broken leg, wrist, and ankle…,”

  “I was chased around the house with a knife… I felt as if my life was going to end that night…, (Cook, 1997)”

  When you hear the phrases above and think about the social acceptance of Domestic Abuse, what are the first images you get of the individuals saying the above phrases? Most people, not all, but most, envision a woman that has been physically assaulted, perhaps abused in front of her kids by an overpowering, domineering husband or boyfriend whom has no regard for the woman he is supposed to love, honor, and cherish.

  However, when you see this woman in your mind, what does she look like? Does she look like a biker chick from hell, bound in skintight leather, her arms stretched out in front of her, clinching her hands into fists, ready to strike back at her attacker or does she look helpless?

  Does the image that first snaps into your mind reflect that of a weak, perhaps frail or submissively shy woman? Does she have her arms stretched out and her hands clinched in fists like the biker or does she keep them down around her body, like a shy, perhaps timid and withdrawn woman?

  Again, most of us would choose the latter. Most of us see a poor defenseless woman too afraid to move, too afraid to do anything but take the beating her lover continues to inflict upon her, but what has placed this image in our minds? Why do we envision a defenseless woman instead of that biker chick from hell?

  In this current age of equality towards all regardless of age, color, creed, religion, sexual preference or gender, why do we instantly think of the woman as being the weaker abused sex? Keep these questions in mind as we explore this topic in more detail as it will come up again when we discuss and explore Domestic Abuse and its interpretation when applied with the prime cannon (rule) of the Feminist Theory, which states:

  “No aspect of the male/female relations can be considered as fact, without first accepting the male as all powerful and the female as completely powerless.”

  As you will read in the pages below, by having this principle as their basic construct, feminist will not accept anything that cast a poor light on their gender, unless, however, it is required to get the support and financial funding they need to continue their cause. For the most part, feminist and the organizations that they support will not and do not accept the fundamental truth of over 200 reports, surveys, and studies that show women are just as, if not more so, prone to use violence in a relationship as their alleged male equals. Nor will they accept the idea that, “the all-powerful,” man can be beaten and/or abused by the, “completely powerless,” female, and thus through political influence, continue to do everything in their authority to keep this idealism, this false truth, the societal norm for which we have all unknowingly come to accept as fact. Think I’m wrong? It may surprise you that the phrases stated at the beginning of this chapter. The phrases that invoked the image of a female being abused by her male lover were actually statements made by men who had been abused by their wives or live-in girlfriend, bet you didn’t see a dude as the first image that came to mind did you?

  Boys Don’t Hit Girls; Girls Hit Boys

  “When she got mad, she’d start hitting me. She’d slap at my face, and then keep slapping and try to scratch my face. I’d put up my arms, or just grab and hold her hands. I never hit her back; as a child I was taught that you never hit a woman, no matter what.” – Anonymous male married to an abusive woman of 10 years…

  As a child; a young boy, I can remember both my parents telling me not to hit girls, that hitting girls for any reason was wrong and that real men do not get into fights or hit girls. Thus, from the moment I was taught this, I knew there was a difference between girls and boys, the ideal; the basic construct of women as the weaker of the two, whether true or not, was entrenched in my mind. After reading the surveys and studies on male domestic abuse for this book, I began to wonder, “What, if anything, are girls taught when it comes to hitting boys?”

  Consequently, I posed this question to my sister recently, asking her when the
time comes and my 3 year-old niece goes to school, what will she be taught when it comes to hitting boys?

  “Em, will be taught, not to hit anyone unless they hit her first,” my sister said, “I don’t want her growing up being picked on and thinking she can’t fight back, but at the same time I don’t want her to think that it’s alright to hit first,” she added (Veenstra, 2011).

  Sadly, though I agree fully with my sister’s reply, I found that most girls my niece’s age might be taught the exact opposite. In a study on adolescent violence done by Peter Stringham of Boston University Medical, “30-50% of all adolescent girls hit or kick adolescent males, vs. 20-35% of adolescent males hitting females.”

  This apparently only gets worse as time goes on and adolescent females grow into young adults. In a youth survey done in 1995 of 1,725 participating young adults, researchers found that nearly, “48% of the female partners committed acts of violence against their male partners, of that 48%, 22.4% of the women perpetrated severe violence.” Most noteworthy from this study was the fact that, “women were the sole perpetrators in nearly 37% of the couple’s vs. 14% of the men that were sole perpetrators, (Morse, 1995).”

  Furthermore, a study that looked specifically at physical abuse against male college students found that, “40% of the males surveyed reported that they were recipients of physical aggression from their girlfriends. 29% reported that they received serious physical abuse at the hand of their girlfriend resulting in a visit to the hospital or other forms of medical treatment (C.J. Simonellie, 1998).” Thus, it seems, “In today’s society, as reflected in TV, Movies, and feminist doctrine, women are openly given permission to hit men. For example a woman slapping a man in the face, is rarely, if ever viewed as Domestic Violence (Gelles, 1997).”

  “From early 1950s TV through the 1990s, we had family sitcoms where the TV dads were often funny, but nevertheless had the respect of their kids and wives… centered in these forty years, the Feminist Movement turned from job equality issues to rampant male-bashing,” (Young, 2011). The proof of this is in the sitcoms we see today, shows such as Married with Children, Family Guy, The Simpson, Two and ½ men and so on all show men as unintelligent slobs, thinking of nothing more than sex, booze, sports and their next bowel movement. Thus by lower the standard of respect men once had as equals to something lower than that of a domesticated animal the media has allowed women to believe that hitting and/or abusing men is nothing to worry about as morally they are nothing more than pets that need to be prodded and trained to behave.

  The Primetime Social Experiment

  You may think that the above examples are just rare and perhaps isolated incidents, that though today’s movies and TV shows display women hitting men, or place men in an unfavorable, unintelligent light, that in real life if such a situation would occur, that society would step in and resolve the issue. However, the ABC show, “What Would You Do, Hosted by John Quinones,” (Quinones, 2008) proved otherwise when it posed an interesting social experiment in which it took two actors to act out a scene of a male and female couple having a physical altercation in a local park.

  When the situation involved the male as the abused and the woman as the violent abuser what the show captured was sadly not surprising considering the societal norms that the Feminist Movement and women’s abuse organization have placed on the mass media in using them to further the ideals of violence against men.

  In the course of a few hours, over 160 people, both men and women of various lifestyles, passed by this couple as they sat on a bench next to the park’s main walkway. Everyone that walked by could easily see and hear the obvious signs of the abusing woman choking, slapping, hitting, pulling hair and verbally abusing the scrawny white male doing nothing more than shaking their heads or laughing as they walked by. In fact, when interviewed later, one woman who smiled and brought her hands up towards her face and began to air box as she walked by was asked, “Why did you do that,” she stated with a smile, “Good for her…the guy probably DESERVED it.”

  Yet if the roles were reversed and the man was watching another man abuse a woman in the same way, we would instantly see a public outcry for any man daring to say on national TV that, “Good for him…the woman probably DESERVED it.” Does this not sound like a double standard? Does anyone deserve to be hit by someone that is supposed to love him or her?

  Sadly, this social experiment didn’t end there as later in that same clip, an off duty police officer was seen walking by the couple with his wife and instead of intervening, instead of helping the poor guy that was obviously being abused by the woman, instead of doing his job, he just walked by.

  When interviewed and asked about the situation, the same feeling as with the others were heard, “the woman posed no threat and the guy probably deserved it.” However, when asked if he had walked by a man doing the same thing to a woman he stated, “Of course in that situation I would have to do something.” Why would he intervene only for the woman and not the man, is not the crime of assault and abuse the same for everyone regardless of age, color, creed, religious beliefs, sexual preference or gender?

  Enter the Mediated Culture (Shadowboxing)

  So why is our society so acceptable to the acts of violence by women against men but not the reserve? There are several answers to this question, though there are only two main thoughts, two main answers that come to my mind. The first is the use of Social Conditioning, (which I touched on in a previous chapter) through repetitive comments, thoughts and ideas not originally our own design. Displayed upon us by (yes you guessed it) the media and other forms of authority, which dictates to us what is right and what is wrong, what is tolerable vs. the intolerable.

  As you sit there reading this, you may think that your actions are dictated not by what others think and/or do around you but by your own moral compass and for the most part I agree with that thought, however, not everything we do, not everything we’ve accepted as moral and justifiable are our original thoughts.

  Case in point, (and this may seem a little too simple of an example but the ideal concept is the same) when you were a toddler, your parents “conditioned,” you to dress in public and to go to the restroom to relief yourself instead of just going wherever you were standing. This conditioning continues to this day, though you can choose to run around naked in public, but by doing so, society, in of itself, will place its own social condition upon you.

  Taking this to the next step, for the most part, parents have conditioned their sons to never hit a girl. Society has created laws to that event, and the Feminist Movement has taken that conditioning a step further to condition society through repetition in every facet of the media to instill the ideal concept that man, being “all-powerful” cannot be abused by the “all-powerless” woman.

  However, as with all societies there will always be those few that stand out above the rest. Which speak from our own hearts and care not for what society deems as correct but for what we have found to be correct.

  It is with these people that the second answer to the question comes to mind, which is the lack of accessibility to the truth. Currently, if you were to go to the internet and try to look up information on male domestic abuse on any search engine, you would more than likely find pages upon pages of sites and information pertaining to men abusing women but nothing on women abusing men.

  This is because the facts behind female domestic violence against men by women are not voluntarily available to the public. Why is it not easily accessible? To answer this fully we need to go back to the feminist cannon stated above and apply it to the government’s inception of circular reasoning.

  The concept of circular reasoning is where one provides evidence for the validity of an assertion, which assumes the validity of the assertion. Confused? Good, that is the basic concept of the ideals behind Circular Reasoning. Examples of circular reasoning would be something like, “A is true because B is true and B is true because A is true,” or “there isn’t a problem with
the law, because if everyone obeyed the law there wouldn’t be a problem.”

  Thus, by applying the feminist prime cannon, which states, “No aspect of the male/female relations can be considered as fact without first accepting the male as all powerful and the female as completely powerless.” The government and the media have applied their own “circular reasoning,” by unofficially stating, “Females cannot abuse men as men are all powerful, and all powerful men cannot be abused by powerless women.” Consequently, any and all studies done which show men as being abused by women are false under the construct of this reasoning.

  Do you think this is nothing more than conjecture? If so, perhaps you can explain why the US Department of Justice, which administers grants to researches on domestic related violence, has refused funding research on female violence against men by demanding that all male victimization be ignored (Davis, 2010). Furthermore, perhaps you could also explain why House Resolution 590, (created by the 110th US congress of 2009) was enacted to raise awareness of domestic violence in the US, and of its devastating effects on families and communities but ignores male victimization, mentioning men as only offenders and never victims (1st session H.Res.590, 2009).

  The fact that the government has decided to ignore men as victims from the equation is strikingly odd when you take into account that the Violence Against Women Act conducted a survey (a survey supported and funded by the government no less) which found that there are 1.5 million female victims per year, and 835,000 male victims per year. To put this in terms that show a significant value, the report showed that nearly 40% of the VICTIMS in the Violence Against Women Act survey were men (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000).