Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

the events after the killing. He’d seen Doris Mae and Larry a few days later and warned Larry, “George is going to kick your ass,” after he saw Larry caressing Doris.
    Larry had only grinned and commented cryptically, “I have already whipped his ass and sent him down the road.”
    Once the illicit duo had returned to Illinois, their affair was short-lived. Larry had been arrested for parole violation and went back to prison at Menard, and Doris and her children had settled in nearby Chester.
    Both Larry and Doris were extradited to Oregon to face the charges for a long-hidden crime. On September 5, 1974, Larry Light pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree murder (after dismissal of first-degree charges) and was sentenced to ten years in the Oregon State Penitentiary.
    One week later, Doris Mae’s first-degree murder charge was dismissed and she was charged only with being an accessory after the fact.
    She pleaded guilty to the latter charges on November 5, 1974, and received a five-year suspended sentence. Consideration was given to the fact that she had five young children to care for.
     
    All her life, Doris Mae Light ran from one unhappy situation to another in search of freedom to live a happy life, only to find herself more and more enmeshed. Suddenly she was free of both the men who had trapped her: the brothers who first coveted her and then bound her into a special kind of slavery.
    Perhaps Doris Mae’s compassionate sentence was a fitting end to one of the strangest murder stories in Oregon history. Where the years since have taken her, God only knows.
    If she is still alive, she would be sixty-six years old.

The
Chemist’s Wife

There are many obsessions that trigger human decisions; of them all, none may be as deadly as pathological jealousy. It can drive some to commit acts so despicable that they are incomprehensible to a rational individual, beginning with treating a woman as a possession. A woman in this kind of relationship is caught in a cage—as surely as if she were actually hemmed in by iron bars. Not only is she in danger, but so is anyone who might try to free her.
    My mail and e-mail are full of desperate pleas for advice from women trying to move out of unhappy liaisons where they feel trapped or, worse, live in fear. What they once believed was true love was really their partners’ need to control them. When they try to leave, they are threatened, demeaned, and even physically attacked.
    How I have wished that I had answers and solutions for them, but the law has few remedies for women who are afraid, short of restraining orders to bar stalkers from approaching them—and those are really only pieces of paper with little clout. Even when the woman, her family, and her friends know in their hearts that tragedy lies ahead, police cannot arrest someone for what he might do. That would take away his rights.
    Some women run away, hoping to disappear in a town or city far away, but that means leaving their families behind. Most don’t have the financial resources to do that. If there are children involved, moving would mean the loss of grandparents, schools they are used to, a familiar life they trusted. And in custody disputes, it is often illegal to take children away from their fathers and refuse visitation.
    The small percentage of wives or lovers who have been backed to the wall in terror and fight back, killing the men who have stalked them, don’t walk away untouched. Even if they are not charged with murder and sent to prison, they inevitably suffer profound emotional damage, and they live the rest of their lives full of guilt and regret.
    In the end, this seems to be an insoluble problem, one that might be avoided only if women could see beyond the romantic façade of a suitor who promises her the world while he is steadily separating her from her family and her friends.
    The lover who insists that he loves a woman so much that he wants to be with her all the time—and tells his love object that she should want to be with him constantly—is almost always a burgeoning stalker.

When Emily Borden * encountered Terry Ruckelhaus* for the first time, she was just fifteen years old, albeit a mature-looking fifteen. She could pass easily for twenty. The attraction between the teenager and the twenty-six-year-old chemist was immediately apparent to anyone who observed that first meeting.
    They met in Hawaii, where Terry worked for Emily’s parents. Despite the eleven-year