Be my 'Ouch' Valentine

By G. George Ostrom

Sad to say, but not every woman gets flowers, candy, or a lacy card for Valentines Day. According to the sheriff and police logs I read every day, some are more apt to get the opposite… like a bruised cheek or a knot on the head. Why am I writing like this in the week set aside for celebrating “love?” Because Valentine’s Day or not, I have to read the law enforcement logs and I don’t like to suffer all alone. That’s why.

“Some battered women have no other alternative than to kill their husband,” With that blunt statement a few years back, a New York State funded committee on domestic violence became the first official government entity to acknowledge something juries across the land have been saying for years. I’ve written about battered women syndrome before because I have seen too many of the victims and I report almost daily on local cases involving such abuse. The report by the New York committee not only gave details about why and how women get so degraded and desperate, but it also produced a long list of suggestions on how to start dealing with this growing problem.

We are all aware of Montana cases where women have done away with their abuser, some of them in the Flathead. It would be good if all states would do more to reduce the number of battered women, but until government legislatures decisively act, I except we’ll keep on reading about people, mostly male… “beating up on the ones they love.”

In the past I’ve done columns about the bizarre side of this human phenomenon. Remember the female back east who croaked her mean boy friend by climbing to the top of the davenport back and dropping a bowling ball on his head while he slept off a drunk on the floor, and that woman in Puerto Rico who hired hoods to “take several hours” in doing away with her husband, because she wanted him to “suffer a lot.” While this general subject is obviously not one to joke about very much, there are humorous aspects to most human activities, including “love gone wrong.” I write about those aspects because it is humor that makes it possible for people to better endure life’s harder times.

Meanwhile back on the beat, a 28-year-old gal named Mary Lou from Holly Springs, Mississippi, got sent up for 20 years on a manslaughter charges after stabbing her husband Charlie. The prosecuting attorney was asked why the law came down so hard on the poor widow and he said they just had to start gettin’ a little tougher on Mary Lou. A few months before she did in Charlie, she had done the same thing to her husband Dwight.

While some couples are unkind and mean to their mates, there is always some heart warming news from the other side. Powell County officers searched Laurie Waddington’s apartment and found her prison escapee husband, Joshua, hiding inside the refrigerator. The way I figure it, any man who has a wife he trusts enough to let her lock him up in an operating refrigerator, has a treasure worth far more that rare jewels and precious metals.

BE MY VALENTINE…EVERYONE!