When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  To boost the crown’s position that Homolka wasn’t to blame (the murders themselves were the only events not recorded on video), Ray Houlahan had her thread complaints of her own mistreatment through an account of horrifying cruelty to her victims. Not only did they drag Kristen French off the street to make her their sex slave for three days and then slaughter her and dump her in a ditch, but Paul hit Karla on the arm, and she got a bruise! The documentation of bruises was a fool’s arithmetic. How many punches does it take to rape your sister? Nine? Fifty? One thousand and two?

  The crown didn’t see how Homolka’s testimony belittled the courage of the young women she killed, which had become so agonizingly evident in the videos, as French and Mahaffy struggled, fought, refused to perform certain acts. Nor did the crown see how their argument that any woman would have done what Homolka did demeaned the character of an entire sex.

  How had we as a society—our attorneys, our cops, our psychiatrists, our politicians—come to this point, that we could find no other way to discuss or position a female offender?

  A crucial development in the modern vocabulary of female violence came about in 1977, as a result of the Lansing, Michigan, case of Francine Hughes, a horribly battered woman profiled by Faith McNulty in her book The Burning Bed and portrayed by Farrah Fawcett in a TV movie of the same name. Hughes was arrested for setting fire to her ex-husband, James “Mickey” Hughes, after a day in which the police had been called yet again and had left Francine on her own yet again to cope with the increasingly lethal brutality he was raining upon her. Prosecutors saw it as an open-and-shut case. First-degree murder. No plea bargain. There was no understanding of how a woman might snap after years of unrelenting attack, which she had repeatedly tried to escape, only to be dragged back, unable in her poverty to go far enough away to evade an obsessed man, beyond rescue from the entire community, who watched from behind their curtains and refused to acknowledge the grave danger she was in.

  From the prosecutor’s point of view, all that mattered was that Francine had had time to think about where Mickey kept his gasoline, had found it, sprinkled it around his bed, and, after putting their four children in the car, had set a match to the fuel and fled. It was clearly premeditated murder. The fact that she’d driven straight to the police, in unconsolable upset and terror, was not seen as evidence that her crime was impulsive and reactive. The fact that the entire police force knew Mickey to be a “vicious bastard,” as one put it, wasn’t considered relevant. Struggling with the legal options, Francine Hughes’s defense attorney could see only one way to go: He had to argue “temporary insanity.” There was no other criminal category available to exonerate his client.

  Advocates from around the country came to Michigan to protest on the courthouse steps that Francine Hughes deserved to be acquitted because of her “right to self-defense.” They argued that the concept of “justifiable homicide” had to be broadened to include women who saw no other way to prevent themselves from being beaten. Francine did not have to be considered insane for rational people to agree that she had been trapped, and that she finally took the only action that guaranteed her future safety. What they were saying touched a chord in America’s long tradition of vigilante justice: When the law is an ass, take it into your hands and, by your actions, change the law. Judy Sturm of Nebraska, whose murder case predated Francine Hughes’s by three years, tried to push this point. At the age of twenty-six, Sturm shot her sleeping husband with her own hunting rifle after a brief marriage in which he persisted in being a sadistic menace. Said Sturm: “I just said to myself, it’s not going to happen. I’m not going to be beaten. My kids aren’t going to be beaten.” She shot him dead, she went to trial, and she presented herself as sane. Her jury recommended probation. Years later, Sturm told an interviewer: “If the man were alive today, I’d probably kill him again.”

  Francine Hughes’s attorney wasn’t prepared to employ that argument. His passionate commitment to his client overrode the broader issues that her situation raised. He wanted to fit her into the law as it stood so that she could go free. After a mesmerizing eight-day trial, in which Hughes revealed immense reserves of fortitude, compassion, fair-mindedness, and integrity, she was acquitted of first-degree murder on a plea of temporary insanity.

  The long-term result of the Burning Bed case, in the context of the vocabulary of motive, has been terribly problematic. We took the legal framework of temporary insanity, which was never meant to explain Hughes but rather to give the jury a way to acquit her, and turned it into a full-blown female propensity. And because, at this critical juncture, we opted to press the view that battered women were psychologically deranged, not situationally trapped, we ventured down a road toward the battered woman syndrome, a specifically female form of helplessness that is increasingly applicable to women in circumstances far removed from those of Francine Hughes.

  The cornerstone of the battered woman syndrome is the concept of learned helplessness, which stems from experiments by animal behaviorists in which it has been found that if one repeatedly and arbitrarily shocks dogs, they become so demoralized that they lose the will to escape from their cages. Learned helplessness was first applied to battered women by Lenore Walker, who said, “Only men kill in anger.” Women had to have some other reason, something more selfless, perhaps, or innocent, or fundamentally well-intentioned. Women also had to have a reason that would qualify as insanity in a court of law.

  Walker has testified throughout the American court system that women, like dogs, are rendered helpless and passive by the randomness of their husbands’ assaults, a condition reinforced by feminine conditioning to be submissive. This is why they don’t leave their husbands, even if they have opportunities to do so: “Repeated batterings, like electrical shocks, diminish … motivation to respond.”

  By the time Homolka took the stand in 1995, the standard of what degree of brutality a woman must sustain before she succumbs to this “syndrome” had eroded to a point of insulting implausibility.

  “When Tammy first died I felt numb,” Karla testified. “Then, when Leslie was in the house I felt number. With Kristen I felt even number.” If she was hoping to describe the condition of “psychic numbing,” as it is called in her battered women books, she was, nevertheless, too preoccupied with deflecting responsibility from herself to keep it consistent. Asked why she could be heard confidently instructing Kristen to fellate Paul on one of their videotapes, she replied, “I didn’t want her to be beaten.” Sensitive to punches, but numb to abduction. Murdered, okay. But not beaten. She was borrowing from the battered woman syndrome and getting it almost, but not quite, straight.

  If learned helplessness is a valid explanation of what happens to abused individuals (who ought to include children, male spouses, and elderly parents, by the way), it has never been clear why this is a homicide defense. Walker and other battered women syndrome experts don’t address the contradiction in the formula as it applies to a violent response: If the woman/dog is too listless and disoriented to escape, she will also be too apathetic to attack. A woman cannot simultaneously be stupefied and lethal. According to the scholars who originally identified learned helplessness, domestic violence is not an appropriate example of the condition. From their point of view, the classic case is of elderly patients in a nursing home who are completely deprived of control over their lives, to the point of being unable to water their own plants or go to the bathroom alone. They lose all power of self-determination and, ultimately, become so despondent and demoralized that they pass away. As the law professor Gerald Caplan has written, “[This] reasoning doesn’t explain how women who are that helpless manage to stab their husbands repeatedly in the chest.”

  Karla Homolka, for one, engaged actively and spiritedly in her full-time job, arranged an extravagant wedding for herself, traveled, socialized regularly, raised a Rottweiler dog, moved into and furnished a house, all the while too helpless in one realm only: to make the moral choice not to dru
g, rape, and kill. Her self-exonerating testimony grew so distressing and offensive over the course of the summer that Paul Bernardo’s defense attorney, John Rosen, looked like a folk hero when he jumped up on July 5, 1995, to cross-examine her. He was the first person to put truly probing questions to Homolka since she’d left her marital home, and the effect was strangely exhilarating.

  When Homolka testified about her sister’s rape, “I didn’t believe that her life or physical safety would be in jeopardy,” Rosen asked, “Do you still not understand, Ms. Homolka, that her integrity as a woman was in jeopardy? That your boyfriend was planning to rape her in your parents’ home?”

  Of course she did, she said, abandoning all pretense of blankness and becoming combative and pedantic, but what could she do? She loved Paul. “A lot of women go through this,” she instructed Rosen coldly. “It is not that unusual to be abused and still be in love with the man.”

  Rosen said, “Ms. Homolka, let’s just get this straight. You were in Saint Catharines, you had your parents, you had your sisters … you had your friends. You had your co-workers. You had a doctor you could confide in. And the person who’s supposedly abusing you is in Scarborough, an hour and a half away!”

  Homolka glared at him. “You don’t have to be physically isolated to be emotionally isolated,” she retorted, as if he were a dunce.

  Rosen produced a letter she had written in 1991, lecturing a friend to get a restraining order against a violent lover, telling the friend that the situation was “ridiculous.” He flung her own words in her face.

  The law professor Charles Ewing recently studied one hundred battered women who killed their mates and compared them to one hundred battered women who left them. The difference, he found, was that the women who killed were more situationally trapped. It had nothing to do with their psyches. It had to do with the fact that, every time they tried to get away from their husbands, the man came after them with a closed fist or a shotgun. As the social psychologist Julie Blackman told Time magazine, “They don’t have personality disorders. They’re just beat up worse.”

  An analogy might be drawn to the fate that befalls men in war. In the First and Second World Wars, men in combat shit their pants with fear. They vomited and cried like babies, because, as one wrote, “Loud and violent death is screaming down from the sky and pounding the earth around you, smashing and pulping everything in the search for you.” Men went into the world wars without hope of getting out—they died, went mad, or the war got won. In large part, the atrocities of war are committed as a response to the fear men feel. Terror and humiliation are the combustible fuels of rage. They are striking out blindly against their own predicament. Passivity, if it comes, sinks in later, after the violence is spent. Common wisdom as to when a soldier would fall victim to “shell shock” was two hundred days of uninterrupted horror on the front lines. “Inevitably,” wrote one military historian, “all will break down if in combat long enough.” And broken down, they’ll cease to fight.

  “I don’t expect anybody to understand,” Judy Sturm told a journalist in 1995, about how she had reacted to marital terror, “because you can’t imagine, no more than I can imagine being in Vietnam or Saudi Arabia and what the veterans went through.” Sturm’s daughter had served as an army corporal in the Gulf War, and her comparison is apt. Based on the experience of soldiers and Francine Hughes and Judy Sturm, Lenore Walker’s formula is simply too pat. Learned helplessness is not the percursor to violence. It describes, if anything, the shattered spirit in the aftermath, when a woman has fought and failed, and falls, once and for all, to despair.

  Judy Sturm cofounded the Nebraska Domestic Violence Sexual Assault Coalition in 1976 and went to work helping other women get out of abusive marriages. “I don’t want to seem like I’m endorsing open season on men,” she said. “There’s less reason to kill them today—there are shelters and support. I didn’t have any of that.” Sturm was once at the forefront of arguing that women were perfectly capable of defending themselves against male violence, but advocates of psychological derangement ran roughshod over her position. The battered woman syndrome has entered the vocabulary of motive. Cut adrift from the circumstances that gave rise to Sturm’s and Hughes’s violence, the syndrome is now an entity unto itself, free-floating through criminology research and courtrooms, providing the answer for why a woman, any woman, would commit an act of violence.

  One day at the Bernardo trial, the crown brought in an expert witness to state that up to “eighty percent” of women in prison were there because men had abused them. This is a widely held sentiment among feminist criminologists and battered women’s advocates. Lenore Walker is more conservative, insofar as she asserts that one half of women in prison committed their offenses—check forgery to pay bills, theft for food denied to them by their husbands—to avoid further battering. Statistically, this picture of women as humble creatures sneaking timidly off to snatch a loaf of bread for their children before the next beating is a bit off target. A survey of California’s female prisoners in 1993 found that only 3.1 percent had become criminal “to escape abuse.” Another 5.4 percent broke the law “to protect self or children.” A sample of 1,880 adult female offenders across the United States found that less than half reported being physically assaulted by a mate in their lifetimes. Fourteen percent had been assaulted one to two times, another 40 percent three to ten times. What that violence had to do with their crimes—heroin dealing, armed robbery, infanticide, prostitution, embezzlement, the whole gamut—wasn’t determined. Of 90 percent of the women incarcerated in Florida during August 1985, one quarter stated that they’d been assaulted in violent relationships at some point, with the question of degree and mutuality again unclear. No correlation was made to their crimes.

  Like men, most women who commit crimes have no stake in correcting our impression of their innocence, and possess, at any rate, no explanatory language for their actions beyond the vocabulary of motive. It’s up to us to disentangle the variables, to see which women are truly violent in self-defense, which ones are genuinely insane, which ones turned criminal because they were, indeed, coerced. Our ability to interpret what is really going on is confounded, however, by the advent, in feminist scholarship, of “standpoint epistemology.” This research framework holds that history must be told from the standpoint of the woman/victim. Her explanation for what she does is the true one, because, being oppressed, she possesses “a more complete view of social reality” than her oppressors, which is to say, men. We cannot impose an explanation upon her, and we must listen to her account with respect for “the centrality of consciousness raising.” It is a principle similar to the one that’s at work in therapy circles, where a woman’s recovered memory of ritual abuse, for example, is held by the therapist to be more important than the actual evidence.

  Standpoint epistemology is laudable in certain types of research, but it tends to collide with the criminal mind in a manner akin to Bambi meeting Godzilla. A seasoned armed robber who is asked by earnest interviewers whether she’s ever been abused will call to mind a time when she was. Why shouldn’t she? She’s being invited to air a grievance. The assault may have been a defining moment in her life or an incidental experience, for she has moved through a rough and hostile world. In either event, it is not the de facto cause of her crime. Overlooking factors like personality, temperament, moral judgment, drug addiction, poverty, and cultural milieu as if their importance were fleeting, the researcher prompts the criminal to spin the simplest possible tale of her woe. Inmate Veronica Compton, in a guest editorial in Prison Life magazine, echoed the typical view that “violence on the part of women is usually in response to abuse.” Compton didn’t mention to her readers that she was serving time for strangling an innocent cocktail waitress in Los Angeles in 1978. To illustrate the point that women are treated more harshly than men in prison, she complained that she’d done most of her time “either in maximum security or the hole”; but she skipped the fact tha
t she escaped from prison early in her sentence and was a high-security risk.

  In her six-city study, Coramae Richey Mann found that 80 percent of her sample of women who’d killed claimed they were “not responsible,” whether their victims were men, other women, or children. In cases of self-defense, the provocation often turned out to be verbal—a taunt or an insult, not a lethal physical attack. In some cases, the provocation was sexual rivalry. One woman who claimed self-defense, for instance, was a twenty-eight-year-old Latina humiliated by the love affair between her younger sister and her husband. When her sister gave birth to his baby, she went to her sister’s apartment intent on killing them both. The sisters fought, the eldest whipped out a handgun and fired three shots, killing her betraying sibling. Then she grabbed her infant niece, stormed over to her husband’s workplace, announced what she’d done, and threatened to kill him, too. Her husband was able to wrench free the gun. “With no prior record, she received 10 years’ probation.” And landed in the data as an abused woman who’d killed in self-defense.

  Once again, the point here is not to suggest that women never act in self-defense—of course they do. The point is that criminologists contemplate no other factors. Whereas they once described violent women as lesbian man-eaters and perverts, we have simply sailed to the other extreme, from whore to madonna. The old fabric of misogyny blends seamlessly with new threads of feminist essentialism to preserve the myth that women are more susceptible than men to being helpless, crazy, and biddable. The effect, in the case of Karla Homolka, was startlingly clear in the courtroom. Encouraged to attribute every move, every want, every look on her fiercely intelligent face to the machinations of Paul Bernardo, Homolka renounced her claim to be an adult. She infantilized herself, relinquishing spirit, will, passion, pride, resourcefulness, and rage. Her wheat-blond hair fell across her wan face like a curtain as she sat on the stand for three weeks, and she divested herself of a soul.