Mortal Danger by Ann Rule Page B

break open his rolls and butterthem for him—because Sue always had. Finally, I told him to butter his own rolls.”
    But when it came to more important requests, Kate appeased John. “It was much easier not to make waves.”
    If she did, John would blame Kate for not being supportive enough of him, and that meant another skirmish that would always be her fault.
    One day, she would have to wonder if giving in to him might save her life—or at least prolong it—but at this point she had no idea what terror lay ahead.
    But that came later. For years, Kate hoped to marry John. Sometimes, she still did—if only to reconnect with the man she once knew. They had been together for almost a decade. Maybe it wasn’t too late. It was 1998, and Christmas was coming. John bought Kate an engagement ring and asked her to set a date to get married. She was hesitant. “I told him, ‘I will marry you if I can find the John that I fell in love with.’”
    “Okay,” John said quickly. “Then that’s who I’m going to be.”
    She hoped that he meant it. “When John was good, he was really good,” Kate remembered. “When he was bad, he was a little bit worse each time.”
    Over their ten years together, Kate left John several times—but never for long. If he couldn’t find her, or get through to her with his blandishments and apologies, he hounded her family, her friends, the people she worked with, calling them at all hours of the day and night, dropping in unexpectedly, demanding to know where she was. She worried about the way he disrupted the lives of people she loved.
    John wouldn’t let her go. He stalked her, phoning her constantly. If he couldn’t find Kate, he called or confronted everyone in her life, making her relatives feel as trapped as she herself did. “He bothered the people I lived with, bothered my family, my friends,” Kate sighed, remembering. “Bother, bother, bother. Call, call, call. He insinuated himself into the lives of everyone I cared about. It got to the point that everyone hated John—except John. He didn’t care about anyone else’s feelings, and he felt he was so much smarter than anyone else. It wasn’t the way to make friends….”
    Whenever he found Kate, he begged her to come home, telling her that he couldn’t live without her. Once, he even showed up at the airport in San Francisco to meet her flight, his smile beaming through the crowds of disembarking passengers. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t thrilled to see him. Once again, she was mortified at John’s behavior and found herself apologizing to all the people he called when he was desperate to find her.
    “I’d finally decide I had to go back,” Kate said. “I was committed to him—when I think of it, I realize I was probably more married than most women who were legally bound to their husbands. We’d been together almost all the time—we were practically joined at the hip, and he was totally lost by himself. People in Gold Beach assumed we were married, and it was easier to say nothing than to explain what was really unexplainable.”
    John’s jealous moods were exacerbated by his drinking, and Kate attended some AA meetings to see if that would help her deal with him. It didn’t. But her eyes were opening about the futility of trying.
    For years, she’d been living with domestic abuse, butshe hadn’t recognized it fully. She was classically in denial. Kate remembered only her promises to stay with John, and her conscience overrode the emotional battering, the bruises, the stalking, and his rages, which had grown steadily in frequency with every year they’d been together.
    “I always concluded that we should try one more time, and that we should have therapy to try to make our relationship work.” In the end, it still seemed easier for her to return to their little house in Gold Beach to try to work it out between them. She’d been captured in the cycle of violence that thousands of women come to