'Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage, and the Mind of the Killer Spouse (21 page)

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A
CCORDING
to Dr. Phyllis Sharp, associate professor at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, some women retaliate when they are hurt and victimized. Because they are often smaller in size than their abusers, they sometimes need to plan their escape in order to get out of a dangerous relationship. The legal system may penalize the abused woman for her careful planning, which can make her seem calculating and deceitful. But often such women have been abused for a very long time. The crimes against them may be no different from rape. “Under violent circumstances, you do whatever you need to, to survive,” Dr. Sharp says. This phenomenon is also called battered women’s syndrome, and murder under these conditions is sometimes used as a form of self-defense in reaction to severe mistreatment experienced throughout an abusive relationship. Could something unreasonable under normal circumstances be completely comprehensible considering the violent environment in which a battered individual lives? In other words, did Susan Wright really believe, at the moment of the crime, it was either kill or be killed?

Dr. Lenore Walker, who originally defined battered women’s syndrome, says such women are unable to leave their abusers even when it seems to the outside world that they should. Over time, these women experience what is called a learned state of helplessness. They become dispirited and hopeless about their ability to leave or change their situation. Furthermore, Dr. Walker states that the battered woman exhibits “bizarre” behavior as a result of her victimization. So, a homicide committed by a victimized spouse can also be seen as a “normal” response to an “abnormal” and/or dangerous situation. Those who oppose this idea say it is just another way to blame the deceased victim for his own murder.

It is plausible that Susan Wright went into a wild and irrational frenzy during the moment of the crime. However, her husband was tied up, which makes it difficult to imagine that she felt any danger or was afraid of him during that moment—at least it is hard to understand from a rational perspective. Susan was clearly enraged with her husband. After all, it takes a lot of energy to stab someone almost two hundred times, clean up the mess, and then bury the body in the backyard. The question remains, however: Was the murder of Jeffrey Wright revenge or self-defense? Maybe, in Susan Wright’s case, it was a little of both.

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U
NLIKE
Susan Wright, who claimed she had been violently abused,
NANCY SEAMAN
didn’t appear to be a woman with an ax to grind—but she did, driving one into her husband’s skull.

Nancy was a gray-haired, fifty-two-year-old teacher who, at a whiff above five feet tall and weighing a scant one hundred pounds, was barely taller than her fourth-grade students.

On May 9, 2004, Nancy bolted from a Mother’s Day dinner, following yet another argument with her husband Robert, fifty-seven, and drove to a Home Depot, where she bought a twenty-two-ounce hatchet. Upon her return to their Tudor home in an exclusive subdivision in suburban Detroit, she allegedly walked up behind Robert in the bathroom and struck him in the head with the axlike hatchet. The next day Nancy arrived at school, taught her students, and then made a pit stop on the way home to pick up bleach, rubber gloves, a tarp, and other materials. After cleaning up, she wrapped Robert in the tarp and secured it tightly with duct tape, then placed his body in the back of his Ford Explorer, which was parked in their driveway.

Robert, a local businessman, was reported missing two days later by his brother. Shortly thereafter, police arrived at the Seaman home and questioned Nancy, who claimed her husband had left the house and never returned. When police discovered Robert’s body inside his SUV, they found he had more than a dozen ax-like wounds to the head, had been stabbed twenty-one times, and his throat was cut. They also found the hatchet, soaked in bleach, under the car seat.

Nancy was arrested and charged with what prosecutors claimed was a methodically planned “cold-blooded murder.” They pointed to video taken at the Home Depot that captured her buying an ax-like hatchet the night her husband died as well as stealing another one, which she returned two days later using the receipt from the actual purchase, ostensibly to erase the purchase from her credit card.

For her part, Nancy claimed, through her attorney, that she was a woman who had suffered years of abuse at the hands of her husband, who attacked her that Sunday after learning that she secretly put a down payment on a condominium and had been taking items from their home. The couple had been sleeping apart and were planning to divorce, she said, and she was preparing to move on with her life. But her husband’s angry reaction startled her, and when he took out a knife and cut her hand, she ran to the garage, where she picked up the hatchet and swung at her husband, killing him.

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T
HE
killing of Robert Seaman was the end of a marriage that spanned more than thirty years, a marriage that mirrored the lives of any successful family. Robert was the vice president of an engineering firm with a complementary six-figure salary while Nancy was a stay-at-home mom, taking care of their two boys and their $400,000 home in a gated community. But after the children were grown she decided to follow a lifelong dream, and in 1997 she became a teacher in the local public school system.

While many thought the Seamans had a strong relationship, in reality they would often argue loudly. Nancy alleged her husband had been unfaithful, since he spent more time with another woman than he did with his own wife and two sons. She even filed a protection order against the woman, claiming she was trying to destroy her marriage. “It appears she wants my life,” said Nancy in her complaint. The stress of her marriage was even causing what Nancy described as “severe loosening of my upper teeth due to grinding.” But the core of her defense, she claimed, was the years of abuse she had endured at the hands of her husband, who she said had a vicious temper and habitually kicked and hit her.

Nancy testified that Robert had attacked her nearly a hundred times during their marriage. When he lost his six-figure job in the 1990s, the violence became even more frequent, since Nancy had become the breadwinner and provider of health benefits, a circumstance that she said gnawed at her husband. The beatings became so regular, she said, that she learned to cover her face with her hands or arms. When asked why she never reported any of the beatings to police or filed charges against her husband, Nancy offered vague excuses. When asked why she even stayed in the marriage, Nancy said it was due to her strict Catholic upbringing and, after all was said and done, she still loved Robert dearly.

Her attorney brought in experts to testify about battered women’s syndrome, to explain why she remained with her husband all those years, and why there were so many wounds on Robert’s body. Nancy, said her attorney, just kept swinging the hatchet to save her own life.

Robert’s death divided the family. Son Greg defended his mother, testifying that his father angered easily and was abusive. He also drank heavily, his physical deterioration the result of losing his cushy job several years earlier. But older brother Jeff told a different story, one in which his father was a loving man who was married to a woman prone to injuring herself as a result of clumsiness. Nancy’s brother-in-law testified that Robert knew his wife purchased a condo and told her just prior to his death that it would be part of any divorce settlement. That, he testified, was the last straw. Nancy, he said, promptly purchased the hatchet, returned home, and killed her husband.

The jury didn’t believe Nancy’s testimony, finding it contrived. They also found her to be someone who was easily angered and combative. In the end, they found her guilty of murdering her husband. She was sentenced to life in prison.

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L
OVE
seems to be the unlikely partner of hate, yet when we are strongly connected by love to another person, he or she can stir up a lot of other intense emotions, including stress and displeasure. Both love and hate can become obsessive. Together, these emotions activate the primitive neural system in the brain. Our minds are often occupied by the people who we love and hate because those people often either enhance our reproductive capabilities or threaten our ability to survive. A person who falls “in hate” may spend as much time thinking and brooding about the hated individual as does a person who falls in love. Accompanying hatred, however, is a tremendous amount of aggression and hostility. Hate can blind us and therefore make us think and behave in ways beyond reason. Hate is the most powerful and enduring form of primal hostility.

One thing that separates human beings from other animals is that we often, without knowing it and/or having a valid reason for it, cause each other emotional suffering. We do this by cheating, lying, humiliating, disappointing, betraying, or abandoning one another. And it’s fascinating that we often inflict these painful wounds not on our enemies but on the people with whom we feel most close and intimate. It’s odd that so much human suffering takes place not on the battlefields of war, but in the private battlefields of our homes, and that it can lead to the destruction of our dreams and hopes for the future. In some cases such intense suffering can lead to an unyielding desire to retaliate and get even. In still other cases it can turn heinously violent. That’s what happened in the case of Nancy Seaman and her husband Bob. They were unhappily married for thirty-one years.

Growing up, Nancy Seaman could have been anything she wanted to be. She graduated as valedictorian of her high school class. But all she ever really wanted in life was to be a successful wife and mother. She would often dream of her wedding day and the white picket fence she wanted to live behind. When she met Robert Seaman, she found him to be quite dashing and charming. And when she married him she believed she had met and married the man of her childhood dreams. But the dreams quickly turned into nightmares, leaving young Nancy confused and disenchanted.

The marriage, she said, went sour only two weeks after the ceremony. Nancy was unprepared for Robert’s transformation from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

According to Nancy, she continued trying to make their marriage look the way she thought a marriage should look. She tried to be quiet at times, even submissive. She also did her best to be seductive and supportive. In the end, however, it seemed that whatever she did wasn’t good enough. The years flew by and the marriage only got worse. Nancy often felt devalued by her husband’s continual criticism, and whatever self-esteem she had quickly eroded. She admitted to being temperamentally erratic, yet she always felt that was in response to Robert’s provocation. Then there were the affairs, the critiquing of her career aspirations, and his spending less and less time at home. It was as if he despised her. Nancy Seaman’s marriage was her own private hell, a hell that often left her isolated and feeling alone. The only person she felt she could rely on was her younger son, Greg.

Robert’s dismissive and abusive behavior over the years left Nancy feeling injured and violated, and the marriage was ruining her view of herself and her life. She found her injuries unforgivable and felt that she had no control over her life. Robert had taken everything away from her and she didn’t know if she would ever really be able to recover from her intense sense of betrayal. Robert had destroyed her ideas about fairness, justice, predictability, and goodness. It is not uncommon for unforgivable injuries, brought on by a “misbehaving” spouse, to cause a combination of pain, rage, and humiliation. Robert had not only robbed Nancy of her future, but he had destroyed her past and her present as well. From her perspective, her life was a mess and it was all his fault. Robert was supposed to love her and protect her from pain. Instead he just caused her more pain and heartache.

The issues in Bob and Nancy’s marriage only grew worse with time. For example, Nancy began to wonder who would want her now that she was middle aged, and, according to Nancy, Robert delighted in pointing this out to her quite often. Furthermore, she claimed that Robert began to ask her to play the role of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl before he would have sex with her. This only perpetuated Nancy’s theory that the request was linked to the woman he was now spending more of his time with—and that woman had a thirteen-year-old daughter. As time wore on, Nancy felt increasingly defenseless and unable to find her own purpose in life. She felt her husband deserved to be punished for robbing her of her life. It was time that she balanced the scales that had been tipped against her for more than thirty years. In Nancy’s eyes, Robert’s days were numbered; he just didn’t know it yet.

Of course, there are two sides to any story, and it has been argued that Robert wasn’t thrilled with his wife’s behavior either. According to him, Nancy was unpredictable, irritable, and appeared to have an untreated mood disorder. Yet she refused to get any help and seemed to prefer blaming everybody else for her failures in life. She would scream in front of their friends, accusing him of having affairs that Robert said never happened.

Either way, Nancy Seaman was a woman who had suppressed much rage. Now, it had stewed into a bitter and undeniable resentment, which ultimately turned into a perceived need for revenge. There was no denying the pain and hurt any longer. Nancy had an irrepressible cruel wish to harm her husband in the way he had harmed her over the years. It was an eye-for-an-eye mentality. Her desire to seek revenge was overwhelming. Think
War of the Roses,
only worse.

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M
OTHER
’
S
Day is supposed to be a special day on which the family celebrates their love and appreciation for the woman/mother of the house, yet in keeping with the theme of Nancy Seaman’s life, Mother’s Day was no different from any other. There was no appreciation. She and her husband had agreed to move in different directions. That was all too clear now. There were no flowers, no gifts, just more disappointment and misery.