Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

would beat his teenage “wife.” He knocked her to the floor and kicked her, screaming, “God dammit, Emily, I’m going to kill you!”
    He seemed to take sadistic pleasure in her terror and confusion. “What’s the matter?” he taunted. “You’re scared, aren’t you? You’re damned right you’re scared.”
    And then he would go into a terrifying monologue about what a “mean S.O.B.” he really was. Emily saw that he took great delight in reminding her of that.
    Terry began to watch Emily’s every movement. If she went to buy groceries, she had a time limit. If she didn’t return within five minutes of her limit, he locked the doors on her and made her beg to be let in. Only when he felt that he had subjected her to enough humiliation would he let her in. Then Terry would make her sit across from him while he carefully checked the supermarket’s receipt against what she had brought home.
    Terry had no reason whatsoever to suspect Emily of going against his wishes or cheating on him with another man. In spite of the jealous rages and beatings, she still loved him with the kind of unwavering devotion a young woman feels for her first love. She kept hoping that they could somehow find their way back to the way they had been when they were first together. She tried to obey his rules—rules she didn’t understand and that changed so rapidly that she could never keep up with them.
    Terry succeeded in completely isolating Emily. She was far away from her own family, alone—except for Terry—in a strange city. She tried to believe that he would change, that she could live up to his expectations so the beatings and psychological torture would stop.
    But her life only grew worse. One night, Terry threw her all the way across the room, and a huge gash opened on her knee when she landed on something sharp. Another time, he slapped her so hard with his open hand that her lip split, and then he grabbed her by the hair and methodically slapped her until her head bounced like a rag doll’s.
    As suddenly as he’d started, he stopped. He looked shocked as he gazed at her with obvious distress.
    “I just realized I was beating the shit out of you,” he said, begging for her forgiveness.
    Emily took a job in Fort Worth—because Terry asked her to. They needed more money to pay their bills, he said. But then he resented the time she was away from him, and he was jealous of the men he believed she talked to at her job.
    It became routine for her to show up at work with scars and bruises on her face. Her fellow employees and boss worried about her, but she brushed aside their questions. She was ashamed and she was frightened.
    Terry had sayings he enjoyed repeating. “A good woman needs a beating every day,” he said. He explained to her that he knew she still loved him, so it was all right for him to beat her.
    Although Emily was no longer allowed to see her girlfriends, Terry had several male friends. Their opinion of women matched his. When he complained that he didn’t trust Emily, one of his friends said, “Just put her on a chain.”
    “Well, she knows I love her,” Terry said. He really believed that a woman would submit to anything as long as she was sure of her man’s devotion.
    In his own obsessive way, Terry thought he loved Emily. Had he not been filled with such emptiness and inadequacy, had his need for a complete love slave not been so all-encompassing, he might have been able to accept her love and to trust it. Initially, he had the total devotion he said he wanted—but he was destroying any love Emily had for him with his jealousy, his physical punishment, and the terrible emotional flogging he constantly administered to her.
    Emily was seventeen years old, but she felt as if she were a hundred.
     
    Like a butterfly trapped in a cigar box, Emily beat her wings hopelessly against her prison. One night, she rode her bicycle around the block a few times, only to come home and find Terry in one of his rages. Where had she been? Who was she sneaking off to meet?
    Before she could open her mouth to answer, he was on her—hitting and kicking her in full view of a neighbor. When the neighbor started in their direction to stop him, Terry was even angrier at Emily, blaming her for “embarrassing me in public.”
    Then a time came when she was no longer allowed to talk to her friends on the phone. He was mad when he got a busy signal when he tried to call her. Foolishly, he ordered her to leave