About 'home made' widows

Chiefly because of the greatly increased use of drugs, especially METH, there is a corresponding surge in domestic violence. That affect on local law enforcement was brought home this week by Flathead County and Kalispell budgets increasing the number of law officers to be hired soon. The damage to society is increasing the problem of abused and neglected children but also mistreatment of wives and girlfriends with the prospect of violence by females against their chosen house mates.

Relative to these matters is a view of that situation I covered in June of 1987, thirty years ago:

“Some battered women have no other alternative than to kill their husband.” With that blunt statement issued June 9, a New York State funded committee on domestic violence may have been the first official government entity to acknowledge something juries across the land have been saying for years. I’ve written about the battered women syndrome before because I have seen the victims and I report almost daily on local cases involving such abuse. The report by the New York committee not only details 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 eliminated their abuser, some of them in the Flathead. I hope all states soon do more to reduce the number of battered women. Until governments decisively act, I expect we’ll read of a many more “burning bed” type incidents.

In the past I’ve done columns about the bizarre side of this human phenomenon. Remember the female back east who croaked her mean boyfriend by climbing on a chair and dropping a bowling ball on his head while he slept on the floor after beating her up. An extreme case was 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, 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.

As an example, a 28-year-old gal named Mary Lou from Holly Springs, Mississippi, just got sent up for 20 years on a manslaughter charge after stabbing her husband, Charlie. The prosecuting attorney was asked why the law came down so hard on the new widow and he said they just about 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 untrusting to their mates, there is always a little heart-warming news from the other side. Only this week, 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 the old Kelvinator, has a treasure worth far more than rare jewels and precious metals.

G. George Ostrom is an award-winning columnist. He lives in Kalispell.