Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong; Mark Powelson

Author:Marilee Strong; Mark Powelson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Murder, Health & Fitness, Social Science, True Crime, Violence in Society, Crimes against, General, United States, Pregnancy & Childbirth, Case studies, Psychology, Women's Studies, Uxoricide, Murderers, Pregnant women
ISBN: 9780470442524
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Published: 2009-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

Pregnant and Vulnerable

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mother’s neck and her father cleaning up blood on the floor with

towels. The judge excluded any testimony about the girl’s statements

as hearsay and a threat to White’s receiving a fair trial.

Michael White was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole

in seventeen years. That means he could be freed before his fiftieth

birthday.

Q

If the fact of an approaching pregnancy and the accompanying

responsibility and perceived loss of freedom are an impetus for some

men to kill, what exactly is the narcissistic dream for which they are

willing to execute their wife and unborn child? For eraser killers who

have been caught, we often don’t know, because they haven’t begun

to live out their ultimate fantasy. The best clue to this question may

be found in the case of the eraser killer who killed not an unborn

child but three young children and his wife, then proceeded to live

out what to him was an exotic dream existence.

A little more than a year before Scott Peterson committed

his pregnant wife to the murky depths of San Francisco Bay, a

twenty-seven-year-old Oregon man fashioned a similar fate for his

wife and three small children. Christian Longo, a once-devout Jeho-vah’s Witness, strangled each member of his family one by one. Then

he stuffed the bodies of his wife, MaryJane, thirty-four, and their

two-year-old daughter, Madison, inside suitcases and threw them

into Yaquina Bay off the coast of Newport, Oregon, near the pricey

condominium he was renting. In an apparent attempt to further

cover his tracks by not disposing of all his victims in the same place,

Longo tied rock-filled pillowcases to the ankles of his other two

children, Sadie, age three, and Zachery, four, and dumped them from

a bridge into an inlet a few miles up the coast.

Familicide, or family annihilation, is a crime almost exclusively

perpetrated by men. (There have been a few notorious cases of

women, such as Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, murdering all of

their children but not their spouse.) In case histories, men who kill

their entire families are invariably described by those who knew

them as loving husbands and devoted dads right up until the day of

slaughter.

Behind that well-honed fac¸ade, however, is usually a long history

of secrets and lies: mounting debts, clandestine affairs, and legal or

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