In July of 1994, when Kristy was six months old, Sally returned home from work one day to find a note from Michelle. She’d written to her mother that she and Rocky and Kristy had to try to be a “real family.” She said she owed it to her daughter to give her new young family a chance. She’d moved to Rocky’s tiny trailer and would be living there, she told her mother. Devastated, Sally told Paul. They couldn’t compel Michelle to return, of course. All they could do was try to be as supportive as possible, let Michelle know they’d be there for her.
Paul couldn’t abide them all living in that tiny trailer. “I could reach out my arms and touch both walls,” he said. So he bought a plot of land on the outskirts of Billings and began to build a new house for himself—the house where I would someday meet him. The house with the dented front door. He would rent his current house to Rocky and Michelle once he moved into the new one, and they could escape the dismal trailer.
Michelle had kept her word. She dropped Kristy at Young Families Early Head Start, a day care for high school kids who’d had children, and she returned to high school. To her family’s surprise, she got pregnant again and had Kyle, just a little over a year after Kristy’s birth. Not yet eighteen years old with two kids under two, but Michelle managed. Those were the days that Paul would sometimes see her pushing Kristy in the stroller, Kyle in the baby carrier, Michelle walking two miles in the harsh Billings winter to get to Young Families. She never asked for help. Eventually, Paul bought her a beat-up car so she could drive herself to school. She graduated on time.
Money was tight. When they’d first met, Rocky’d been working all over the western states on a seismic crew. The job sometimes required as many as twenty hours a day, seven days a week in locations far from Billings, and so Rocky quit because he didn’t want to be away from the family for long stretches. He’d work for a while, and then lose his job for one reason or another. He worked construction, or he was a roofer. Mainly jobs where the physical labor was demanding and pay never quite enough. Michelle told him she wanted to contribute; she had ideas about working as a maid at a motel behind their house, less than half a mile away. She’d be close enough that she could dash home if the kids needed her and she wouldn’t even need a car to get there. But he blew up, said he wasn’t going to have the mother of his children at a motel sleeping with all the guests. He got so angry about it that Michelle called Alyssa to come over, to be a presence in the house, in solidarity with Michelle. He was completely irrational and worked up, Alyssa said, pacing back and forth, outraged that Michelle would even entertain such a thought. It was the last time anyone can remember Michelle suggesting that she work outside the home.
Rocky’s was the kind of control that evolves slowly, beginning with little things—most of which aren’t illegal (though stalking, which Rocky eventually did to Michelle, often becomes part of the controlling behavior. Stalking is a crime in all fifty states, but can be charged as a felony in more than two-thirds only if it is not a first offense.1). Within the first couple of years, it became clear that it wasn’t just Michelle’s employment that he controlled, according to Sally and Alyssa. He wouldn’t let her wear makeup. He didn’t allow her to have friends over. He insisted they go camping nearly every weekend when the weather allowed. She never went out without him. Evan Stark, author of the book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, coined the phrase “coercive control” to describe the ways an abuser might dominate and control every aspect of a victim’s life without ever laying a hand on her. Stark’s research shows that in as many as 20% of relationships where domestic violence is present there might be no physical abuse at all. A 2016 New York Times article by Abby Ellin put it this way: “To a victim of coercive control, a threat might be misinterpreted as love, especially in the early stages of a relationship, or when one is feeling especially vulnerable.”2 Especially vulnerable like a teenage girl being seduced by a grown man. Especially vulnerable like a young mother with no means to support herself.
In 2012 Stark wrote a paper in which he argued for laws protecting victims from such behavior: “Most tactics used in coercive control have no legal standing, are rarely identified with abuse and are almost never targeted by intervention.” He cited, specifically, tactics such as monitoring or controlling the regular activities of life, particularly those traditionally associated with women—like parenting, homemaking, and sex. The control runs “the gamut,” Stark wrote, “from their access to money, food and transport to how they dress, clean, cook or perform sexually.”3 Our current body of jurisprudence in the United States misses entirely the real devastation to someone in such a situation, the loss of liberty that eventually and inevitably leads to a loss of self. Kit Gruelle, an activist in North Carolina, calls such victims “passive hostages” in their own homes. Stark insists we look beyond just physical injury as a sign of extreme domestic violence; in his view, women like Michelle are prisoners. It’s not at all unusual for people in such situations to talk about how their partners controlled how they looked, what they ate, what they wore, and who they communicated with. The abuser has, over the years, slowly cut off whatever escape routes—family, friends, community—may have once existed for them. And ultimately, coercive control is about stealing someone’s freedom entirely.
Stark was instrumental in shaping a coercive control law that passed in 2015 in the United Kingdom that makes such actions punishable by up to five years in prison.4 France, too, has a separate criminal statute for what it terms “psychological abuse.” But in the United States, we have no such law.
Alyssa remembers driving with Michelle one afternoon. It was after Kristy’s birth, but before Michelle was pregnant with Kyle. Alyssa thinks maybe Michelle was sixteen. Suddenly, from behind her, Rocky came flying up in his car, swerving around so he was on her driver’s side, and hurtling into oncoming traffic. He began screaming through his open window at Michelle.
“Why didn’t he die?” Alyssa asks now. “He did so many crazy things like that, daredevil things, but he never even got hurt.” He jumped from cliffs into a natural lake, scaled across skinny trees bridging twenty-foot gaps, got wasted on meth, and never even had so much as an infection or a broken bone. Like some outside force kept him out of harm’s way. Like he was stronger than anything that would dare threaten him. He was showing Michelle in every way he could that he would risk his own life before he would risk losing control over her.
Another crucial element of coercive control is isolation of a victim from her own family. It’s an isolation that often has nothing to do with geography. After Kristy’s first birthday, when Gordon gifted Rocky a video camera, members of Michelle’s family almost never appear on the DVDs. Rocky filmed the kids in the backyard playing around, or maybe on Christmas, opening their gifts at Sarah and Gordon’s. Or it’d be just the four of them camping. Occasionally, the tapes might show Mike’s daughter—the eldest cousin to Kristy and Kyle. But Michelle’s family? If one judged by the videos, one might think Michelle had come from nowhere, from no one. Sally rarely saw Michelle on holidays, though they lived just minutes from each other. Rocky would get mad when Sally visited, she told me, and he didn’t often let Kristy and Kyle sleep over at their grandma’s house. (They called her “Bugga.”) Once, when Sally stopped by, Michelle said, “Mom, you need to get a life and stop coming over here so much.”
Something made Sally uncomfortable after that. At the time, she was too taken aback by the comment to figure out just what it was that so unsettled her. She understood that Michelle had her own life, her own family to think about, but they’d always been close. Even in that tumultuous year of Michelle’s first pregnancy, it was Sally she had turned to. It never occurred to Sally at the time that it wasn’t really Michelle telling her to stop coming over so often—the words, yes, came from Michelle’s mouth. But the spirit of the thing? “That wasn’t Michelle speaking,” Sally said. Not the Michelle she’d raised, anyway. Sally knows what it means now: that victims often side with their abusers publicly, to family, to police, to prosecutors. Because long after the police leave, even after charges are filed and a sentence meted out, it is with the abuser that a victim must continually negotiate her life. And the life of her children. Victims who side with their abusers during police calls do so not out of instability, as many law enforcement officers assume, but out of a measured calculation toward their future safety. Sally eventually saw this up close with her own daughter, though she didn’t know at the time what she was really seeing.
When people talk of Michelle today, they refer to her unflappability, her calm in the face of stress, her absolute devotion to her children. But to her family she was also obstinate. And proud. She didn’t want to have to go back to her parents and admit they were right. She wanted to be the other, more rare statistic: the one who made it. She was determined that her children would not grow up in what she called a “broken home.” And this is one of those impossible equations that every parent tries to calculate in some measure: is it worse for the kids to have an imperfect parent—in Rocky’s case abusive, addicted to meth—than to have no parent at all? In the endless constellation of ways we feel we can mess up our kids, which are those that will inflict the least damage?
And Michelle loved Rocky, at least in the beginning. He made her laugh. He was full of life. He taught the kids how to put up a tent, how to fish, how to hang a hammock. He taught them how to shoot a BB gun at a target. He zoomed them through the air as babies and changed their diapers. He pushed them on the swing set in their backyard and bundled them up to go sledding in winter. He was controlling, abusive, addicted to meth; he was also shy, insecure, loving. For a long time, it seemed a balance she could live with.
Sally doesn’t know why Michelle didn’t confide in her over the years; she supposes it has something to do with Michelle’s pride—not wanting to admit she’d been wrong—and something to do with trying to save Sally’s feelings, to not make her feel guilty for divorcing Michelle’s dad. So rather than confide in Sally, Michelle occasionally talked to Sarah. She’d maybe mention Rocky’s continuing drug use or how separate their lives seemed—Rocky out there all night in the garage working on his car, smoking whatever he could get his hands on, turning into a meth head, and Michelle in the house with the kids. Even people who spent time with Michelle, like Paul, who had those Jerry Springer lunches with her, didn’t know what her life was really like because he was never there when Rocky was around. Melanie didn’t have long, deep talks with Michelle; she was mostly in the garage, doing drugs with Rocky. And so it was Sarah, but even with Sarah, Michelle was private. “She talked in later years about her family and why she thought she was the way she was,” Sarah says. “Through child development classes she had at school, she became very insightful about how people’s minds work and why they do the things they do and behavior patterns and so forth … I wound up with so much respect for how smart she was and gentle.”
And she was smart. Smart enough to know that getting away from Rocky wasn’t something she’d be able to do overnight. It would require meticulous planning and preparation. Leaving is never an event; it’s a process.
After everything happened, after Michelle was killed, Sally was horrified to learn not simply that Michelle had been struggling with Rocky for her very life, but that she’d not said a word to her own mother—not until just weeks before she’d died, and even then, there was so, so much she left out. So much Sally would learn later.
Sarah had, in ways both subtle and overt, tried a few things to get Michelle out of the house in the months before the murders. She once left Michelle a brochure on local domestic violence services, including the Gateway House—Billings’s local domestic violence shelter. She tried to talk to Michelle about it, but Michelle wouldn’t hear of it. She suggested Michelle take the kids to her sister’s place in Arizona for a while, but Michelle refused. She made these suggestions out of concern, and yet Sarah also worried she was overstepping her bounds, nosing into Michelle’s life uninvited. She often felt this way around Michelle, even about small things. One of the home videos shows her sitting with Kristy in Michelle’s backyard. Kyle is swinging on the swing set and Rocky is filming them all. Kyle isn’t yet two years old and his hair is shaggy and feral. Sarah asks if he’s had a trim and Rocky says no, he doesn’t think so.
“I could trim it just a little in the back,” she says. Her voice full of trepidation. It’s a summer day, the kids’ faces sticky with leftover snacks. “If she’d want me to. I wouldn’t want to butt in.”
She says it twice, three times. She could do it, but she doesn’t want to upset Michelle, doesn’t want to go where she’s unwanted. The moment is telling. Should Sarah, as the mother-in-law, take charge of something that is simultaneously benign and intimate?
“It grows back,” Rocky tells her. “It’s just hair.”
It is 2017, and I am sitting on the back porch of Gordon and Sarah Mosure’s house, at a table underneath a sunshade on a bright spring day in an outer suburb of Billings. Sarah has served us iced tea and crackers and cheese. It is Mother’s Day. The two of them do not have plans. Like Paul, Gordon has never spoken with anyone about the murders.
The couple’s two dogs sniff around us in search of fallen cheese. The backyard, at least by urban standards—which are my standards—is sprawling, with bright green grass that appears tended with great care. At the far end of the yard in a rectangular cutout is a garden with lavender and bleeding hearts. A boulder sits in the middle of the garden with a bronze plaque embedded into it.
Rocky’s father, like his son, is a small man, maybe five foot six or five foot seven, and so very quiet. When he speaks, I often have to lean in to hear him. He wears a baseball hat, Rainbow Run Fly Shop, a gray Eddie Bauer shirt, and a cloth belt with fish on it. The man belongs in the river, in waders with a fly fishing pole in hand. “I believed him, stupidly,” Gordon says to me. He’s recounting the time he took Rocky’s gun—an heirloom from Michelle’s grandfather—and thought that would be the end of it. It takes an enormous amount of imagination to believe—before the moment it happens—that a person you raise from a baby to an adult could ever be capable of murder. And after it happens, Gordon asks, “How do you ever get past that? Whenever you think about it, you can’t put an end to it because it’s ‘why, why, why?’ and of course you never know why.”
He tells me of one night when Michelle called in a panic. Rocky had threatened to kill them, she said. He was carrying her grandfather’s hunting rifle. Gordon rushed over to pick up Michelle and the kids. Rocky had already fled the house. After a while, Michelle convinced Gordon that she knew how to talk to Rocky and the four of them returned. “I took him in the other room,” Gordon said, “and asked, ‘Son? What are you doing? You can’t do this.’ ” Rocky said he knew, he knew. Of course he knew. Gordon emptied the gun, then collected whatever ammunition he could find in the garage and elsewhere, took it all home to his place. Crisis averted.
It was crazy, Gordon told me. “I got in his face. I told him, ‘You just don’t do things like that.’ [Rocky] said he’d never do anything to harm them. I believed him, stupidly.” I believed him, stupidly.
Gordon begins to cry, silently. Sarah reaches for him. Reminds him that it wasn’t his fault. I feel something utterly crushing inside him. Guilt, self-blame. “It’s just,” he starts, sucks his breath, “you think you should have been able to fix it, or protect the grandchildren, ’cause that’s what we men do, right? And I feel like, ‘Why wasn’t I smart enough to see what was going on? Figure it out? Anything?” He tells me Rocky was quiet and could also be very gentle. “You’d never imagine he’d do anything like that.” Gordon’s voice is a broken whisper. I think of Paul Monson; how much these men strain to keep such colossal pain inside them. How unfair it is that we live in a world in which they’re made to believe their tears are shameful.
As the years went by, Michelle grew up, grew out of Rocky, Sarah says. In their many camping videos, Michelle has a near constant expression of tolerance. She smirks, but rarely smiles. She rolls her eyes. She looks away from the camera, puts her head in the crook of her elbow, curled up sitting on a rock. She doesn’t perform for the camera like Rocky does, doesn’t ham it up. She doesn’t pretend to be happy if she isn’t. She makes no secret of her dislike of being filmed, or having her picture taken. Hours and hours of videos where she’s planted on a boulder watching the kids fish at the shoreline or dip their toes in the icy river, the crackling sounds of the forest—birds singing, water gurgling over stone, the snap of a tree branch—an infinite orchestra. It begins to sound like isolation itself, this music of nature, the sadness of a single hammering woodpecker.
Rocky is behind the camera lens. He pans across the rocks and birch trees till the lens settles on his young wife. Long brown hair, straight as a nail file, she carries their daughter, Kristy, down over the rocks. Kristy wears pink sweats and a too-big camouflage hoodie. 49ers knit cap. She seems unhappy. Quiet. Thoughtful for a child, like she’s working out a complicated problem. How to get over the rocks, maybe. Kyle’s not in the frame. He’s off somewhere. He’s the goofball, the giggler. Rocky’s voice from behind the camera says “Smile” to his wife. She looks into the lens. Half-smirk, half-smile. Then a video of Michelle perched on an enormous boulder with the kids sitting crisscrossed around her. Kristy leans on her mom. They look identical, genetics coded in their willowy limbs and toothy smiles. The camera jitters from here to there, from pine tree to the Canadian thistle underfoot, and then suddenly we’re in the camper where Michelle and Kristy sit across from each other at the linoleum table. Rolls of toilet paper sit on the windowsill behind Kristy. She’s got one arm across the table, lying on it, coughing. “Sick girl,” says Rocky. “You don’t look happy.” No one answers him. Bandit the pit bull is outside in their tent, lounging atop sleeping bags. Kyle sits on a log in a Mickey Mouse shirt. In the distance, the rush of the waterfalls, the spring birds. The quiet of their campsite is jarring after the scenes at home; heavy metal music pounding in the background eternally. When the kids are watching TV, when they’re playing in the yard, when they’re sitting at the table or on the couch, the music is ubiquitous, constant as a toothache.
The next view is behind a boulder. Waterfalls ribbon around a stack of rocks that surround Rocky. He calls Bandit. The dog stays. Calls him again. No luck. He reaches out, grabs the dog’s forepaws, and tries to pull him forward. But the dog ripples with muscle and rebellion and fear. Rocky tries again, then gives up. Bandit backs away cowering, unaware of his own power. “That’s right, Bandit,” Michelle says. “Too dangerous.” The video cuts off.
A top bunk in the tiny camper, body prone. “There’s Big Mama sleeping up in her bed,” Kristy says.
Michelle mumbles, “Big Mama.”
Kristy’s got the camera. Rocky searches for clean socks in their camper’s cabinet; Kyle asks if he can “camcorder.” Both kids use the word as a verb. The view jiggles as Kristy hands it to him without complaint. Kyle pans up his dad’s body. Jeans, maroon T-shirt, white baseball cap with black rim. “Big Daddy,” he says.
“What’s my name?” Big Daddy asks.
“Rocky Mosure.”
“Rocky what?” Big Daddy asks.
The kids aren’t sure.
“Rocky Edward Mosure.”
It’s Gordon Edward Mosure.
From Kyle’s vantage, his father looms like a streetlamp, so tall his head could have rested in a cloud.
“Why am I never Michelle?” Big Mama says to Rocky. “I’m Mama.” Why am I never Michelle?
In a video from the spring of 2001, Michelle’s behind the camera. A rare event. Kristy wears a blue-and-yellow sleeveless vest, Kyle a fishing vest. Rocky’s off a little ways in the distance, wading thigh deep in the river with the arabesque of a fly fishing line careening back and forth, and Bandit sniffs the sand nearby. Michelle moves the camera across the landscape. Lodgepole pine, juniper tree, fir tree. They fish into the creek. Morris Creek, maybe. Antelope Creek. No one quite knows anymore. Igneous rock formations piled behind Rocky. Michelle asks if the kids know what month it is.
“No,” Kyle says.
“No?”
They’re quiet for a long stretch. Then Kristy says, “April.”
“April. May,” Michelle says. “What day?”
But the kids don’t answer. They sit on the sand. Kyle fishes. Kristy watches the water. Bandit runs across the view, light brown fur with a large white splotch across his neck. The camera pans quickly across the landscape, across the family, and down, down, down to her own hand. Left hand, wedding band. She holds it there for a moment. Just long enough to understand it’s deliberate. Her fingers are thin and long, her wedding ring a small square-cut diamond on a diamond band. The wedding band itself matching diamonds. The camera holds, sees this, notes this, pans away. It moves back up and cuts out.
In the next frame, we see Rocky tiptoeing across a fallen tree that bridges across huge boulders and a series of waterfalls. He smirks for the camera, grins, holds up one knee and his arms like the Karate Kid. The children laugh. Daddy is crazy! Rocky makes it to the end, springs up to a rock, looks around, then makes his way back, holding out both arms for balance. When he gets to the other side, safely among the leafy spurge, Kyle says, “Daddy always lives!”
Michelle has a hunting rifle aimed at a target on a tree. She misses. Then it’s Rocky’s turn. Then Kristy has a turn in her green bathing suit. Then Kyle; the rifle is taller than the children. Alyssa and her boyfriend, Ivan Arne, are with them this time. Ivan’s hair runs all the way down his back in a scraggly blond ponytail. Rocky calls himself the family photographer.
“Alyssa, you can have my job,” Michelle says, meaning Alyssa can take over for those few times she’s expected to film. Ivan takes a hatchet to some firewood.
Rocky ties a fly onto a fishing pole, and then he and Ivan go the shoreline and throw in their lines. The river moves fast, ridges of white foam popping up over the rocks. “Hon,” Rocky tells her, “you don’t have a job.”