Strange Fits of Passion (30 page)

A talented student, Mrs. English was accepted at the University of Chicago in 1962. She studied literature and eventually became an editor on the university paper. A svelte, redheaded beauty with pale skin and large hazel eyes, Mrs. English eventually made her way to New York City. In June 1967, she was hired as a reporter with this magazine. She met Harrold English on her first day of work.

Colleagues recall Maureen English as a diligent worker who learned her trade quickly. Although she was well-liked, she was something of a loner. With the exception of Harrold English, she made no serious lasting friendships at the magazine. Still, she was promoted in near record time to the National desk.

"She was fast," says a former editor who worked closely with her. "Give Maureen English an assignment, and she'd have a solid story back to you before the day was out."

Despite the disparity in their backgrounds, Maureen and Harrold appear to have been attracted to each other at once. Harrold came from a wealthy Rhode Island textile family and was educated at Yale. A tall, well-built, dark-eyed young man whose good looks and journalistic successes made him attractive to his female colleagues, he had been a reporter for the
The Boston Globe
before moving to New York City. He distinguished himself as both a national and foreign reporter and was a 1966 Page One Award winner for his series on the race riots in Watts. "He did some great pieces for us," says Jeffrey Kaplan, editor in chief during most of English's tenure. "He was an excellent reporter and was very aggressive in the field. His writing style was clean and straightforward. He was an extremely intelligent man."

The pair began dating almost at once, and were seen as a "perfect" couple, both up-and-coming journalists, both very much in love. According to Maureen, Harrold gave her presents, tutored her in her reporting, and significantly aided her career.

"I loved him," she said. "Even on the day I left him, I loved him."

Co-workers maintain that there was never the slightest hint of friction between the couple, who almost immediately began living together in Harrold's Upper West Side apartment. "These reports of friction between Maureen and Harrold are unbelievable," says Kaplan. "I have trouble believing it even now. You hear about stories like this once in a while, but it's always some poor woman with six kids, married to an alcoholic. Never, I mean never, do you hear about this kind of thing with people like Maureen and Harrold."

Yet alcohol and abuse are exactly what Mrs. English asserts formed the fabric of her marriage. The violence began even before the couple were married, she said. It started one night when she refused to have sexual relations with Harrold and he became angry. He'd been drinking a lot, she said. Eventually that became a pattern: Excessive drinking would often trigger violent mood swings in her husband. He assaulted her in their kitchen that night, she said, and "raped" her.

Later, Mrs. English said, Harrold repeatedly had sex with her against her will and then physically assaulted her—striking her in places where the bruises wouldn't show.

"I think he believed if you couldn't see the bruises, it hadn't ever happened," said Mrs. English.

She also said that her husband raped her and hit her even when she was pregnant. "I don't know what it was about the pregnancy that angered him so," she said. "Perhaps it was the fact that I was doing something that was beyond his control. He seemed to be happiest only when he was controlling me."

Curiously, however, Mrs. English described herself as sometimes "complicitous," and hinted at'S&M sex games between herself and her husband that may have turned rougher than she anticipated. "I was part of it," she said, referring to "silk handcuffs" tied to a bed on their very first date. Sometime after a particularly brutal evening of sex that she subsequently began to think of as "rape," Mrs. English found herself wondering, "Was what had happened that night so very different from all that had gone before?"

At other points in her account, she suggested that she was "a passive player" in the ongoing, furtively violent drama that was her marriage.

In her interviews, Mrs. English came across as a passionate woman. Beneath the cool, contented, and hardworking exterior she presented to colleagues at work is a woman who uses words such as "ravenous," "lost," and "burning" to describe herself in relationship to her husband. "I was a toy top someone had spun and walked away from," she said, of their first date. She also described herself as being under the influence of "erotic fevers," as being "ensnared," and as having struck a "secret bargain" with her husband. For example, she described in detail a night of unconventional lovemaking but gave no hint that she thought the episode distasteful. To the contrary, she suggested she found it pleasurable. The implication in these revelations is that something in her own passionate nature may have contributed to the couple's unusual relationship.

This ambiguity about the nature of the violence in the English household is crucial to any moral or legal judgment about the murder.

One witness at the trial, Willis Beale, a lobster fisherman and something of an old salt, even at the tender age of 27, addresses this issue of the relativity of domestic violence from another angle. "I'm not saying she was lying, or anything like that, but we only ever had her say-so, didn't we?" says Beale, who seems to have made a point of befriending Mrs. English while she was in St. Hilaire—walking daily over to her cottage from the fish house where he mended his lobster pots on Flat Point Bar, to see if she was all right. "Most couples get into a little pushing and shoving at some point in their marriages. Nothing heavy. Just a little something. It takes two to tango, right? I'm just saying, how are we ever going to know?"

The relative severity of the domestic feud between Harrold and Maureen English raises troubling ethical questions—particularly insofar as it casts a shadow of a doubt on her self-professed motive for the shooting—but there is an even more serious legal difficulty with Mrs. English's assertions of abuse and alcoholism in her marriage: No one has been able to produce a single shred of evidence to support them.

Despite Mrs. English's testimony at her two trials, and her interviews with me, there has been no corroboration of scenes of violence between husband and wife. Although Mrs. English now says that her husband beat her up on at least three occasions and hit her repeatedly throughout their marriage, there is no evidence that she told anyone about this violence while it was happening.

At the office party they attended together, none of those present had any hint of discord. While it is certainly possible that the scars of domestic violence might have been hidden, there were no visible marks on Mrs. English. She left the party early, telling former colleagues that she had to put her baby to bed. Now she asserts that her husband made her leave because he had seen her talking to another man and that when he arrived home from the party, he beat her severely. It was this beating, she said, that prompted her flight. "I prayed for my husband's death," she said.

But if her situation was as bad as Mrs. English now asserts, why didn't she go to the police? Prosecuting attorney Pickering raised a similar issue at both trials: "If these allegations of violence are true, why didn't Mau/2 reen English leave her husband sooner, when the abuse began?"

Upon arriving in St. Hilaire, Mrs. English told townspeople that her bruises were caused by a car accident. She also falsely claimed to be from Syracuse, facts that several St. Hilaire residents had to testify to at both trials. She declined to go to the police even after she ultimately told about the beatings.

Mrs. English's charges that her husband was drinking heavily during their marriage have also been called into question. Editor Kaplan dismisses the claim: "Harrold was no alcoholic," says Kaplan. "He drank like the rest of us drank. A martini at lunch, maybe two if the occasion called for it. But that was it."

Whatever actually happened between Harrold English and his wife, there
is
evidence that friction began to develop not long after the wedding. According to Mrs. English, the traveling demanded by her job incited Harrold's jealousy. Like most national reporters, Mrs. English often had to travel around the country with male reporters and photographers. While she always had her own room, she acknowledged that there was usually an easy camaraderie among the crew and that her colleagues would often visit her in her hotel room. Her husband, she said, found this familiarity intolerable and once beat her badly upon her return from a business trip. She was then forced to lie to her editors, telling them that she suffered from motion sickness and could no longer travel in airplanes or automobiles. Her editors released her from reporting duties and relegated her instead to rewriting other people's stories, a move that effectively derailed a promising career.

Mrs. English said that she was driven to seek the help of a psychiatrist, and that at one point she considered suicide. It's also possible that her pregnancy aggravated her despair. She quit her job at the magazine unusually early in the pregnancy and seldom left her apartment after that. On one occasion, she ran away to her mother's.

Alcohol, too, may have exacerbated her downward spiral. Both she and her husband, she said, were drinking excessively during this period. "We drank like we were drowning," Mrs. English explained. They drank in bars and then drank at home. Curiously, Mrs. English continued to drink in Maine. By her own admission, there was always beer in her refrigerator at the cottage on Flat Point Bar, and she often offered Willis Beale a drink when he came to visit.

Even after she reached St. Hilaire, Mrs. English's emotional health appears to have been unstable. At one point, she said, she began to have hallucinations, to hear her husband in the cottage long before he actually found her. She also apparently passed out from fright at a community event—a festive holiday bonfire on the town common on Christmas Eve.

Undoubtedly Mrs. English was under great stress during her stay in St. Hilaire. She had taken her baby from the apartment in New York City and driven 500 miles to a strange town. When she arrived, the temperature was 20 degrees below zero. Both her own and her baby's health were fragile. She was living on funds she'd taken from Harrold's wallet on the night she left him. She'd been unemployed for nearly a year and had no clear prospects for employment in Maine. She was lying about her name, lying about her background, and telling varying stories to those she met. She was trying to begin a new life—that of "Mary Amesbury."

Everett Shedd's general store has always been the hub of the small fishing village of St. Hilaire, but these days it is bustling. Each day, after "the doin's over to Machias," residents of the town gather in the small store filled with groceries, sundries, fishing gear, and cold beer to talk over the case. They speculate as to who came out on top that day in court, and comment about how "Mary Amesbury" looked on the stand.

On the surface, St. Hilaire is a classic New England coastal village—charming, picturesque, and sleepy. There's the typical white steeple, the common, the old colonial houses, the tidal rhythms of the harbor. But underneath, life in St. Hilaire is not always as simple as it seems. According to Shedd. who has one glass eye, a thick Down East accent and doubles as the town's only officer of the law, St. Hilaire has seen better days.

"The town was big in shipbuilding 150 years ago, but now it's economically depressed," he says. "Most of the houses are abandoned. The kids, when they get out of high school, they lose heart and leave town."

The fishing for lobster, clams, and mussels makes up the heart of the economy of this and other towns like it along the coast. Further inland, a few residents have been able to eke out meager livelihoods on scrubby blueberry farms, but an aura of hard times permeates the area. The houses, while charming, do not look prosperous; small pink and aqua mobile homes, many of them rusty with age, mar the landscape. It is a town, says Shedd, where women frequently become depressed during the winter months, where insularity has led, on occasion, to inbreeding (according to Shedd, one local woman has three breasts; others have what appears to be a ubiquitous familial trait—gapped front teeth), where men sometimes drown off their lobster boats, where unemployment and alcoholism are pervasive. It is a town of lapsed ventures and failed hopes.

"You read the tourist brochures," says Shedd. "The shortest paragraphs are about St. Hilaire. There's nothing here."

Into this bleak and frigid coastal town came Mrs. English on the night of December 3. She spent one night at the Gateway Motel just to the north of town and then rented a cottage on Flat Point Bar from Julia Strout, a prominent local widow. Mrs. English then, according to her own testimony, settled down to a tranquil, Hester Prynne-like existence. Like Hawthorne's heroine, she even took up needlework. "I loved the cottage and my life there," she said. "I read. I knit. I took care of the baby, I took walks. It was a simple life, a good life."

Indeed, this tranquil domesticity might have helped her more at her trials were it not for one critical detail that some observers have found at odds with her assertions of a simple life.

Barely a month after she arrived at St. Hilaire, Mrs. English took a lover—a local fisherman with a wife and two children of his own. He was Jack Strout, 43 (a cousin of Julia Strout's husband), and he was there on the morning Mrs. English shot Harrold English.

"By Christmas Eve, I could see there was already something between Jack Strout and Mary," says Beale. "And I can tell you this: It wasn't Jack who started it. He was always, before he met Mary, very loyal to his wife. I always liked Mary, but I have to say, in retrospect, she was a pretty fast worker."

Strout is a tall, lanky lobsterman with light-brown, curly hair. His daughter, Emily, 15, is still at home, and his son, John, 19, is a sophomore at Northeastern University. Strout attended the University of Maine and hoped to become a college professor. But after his sophomore year, his father broke both of his arms in a fishing accident, and young Jack returned home to take over his father's lobster boat. Strout refused to be interviewed for this article, but he appears to have been well-respected in St. Hilaire. For years he has kept his green-and-white lobster boat moored off Flat Point Bar.