Around the same time that Rocky killed Michelle and his children, a woman on the other side of the country named Dorothy Giunta-Cotter was on the run from her abusive husband, William. She’d fled to a shelter in Maine with her youngest daughter, Kristen, and had just had a temporary restraining order refused by a local judge. The judge claimed to have no jurisdiction to issue an order of protection, since Dorothy was a Massachusetts resident.
So Dorothy called the hotline of a domestic violence center in her hometown of Amesbury, Massachusetts. She’d never called the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center before, and no one there knew her history. But she spoke to an advocate named Kelly Dunne. Dunne normally didn’t work on Sundays, but this particular day she had, and something about Dorothy’s voice over the phone made her instinctively know she was dealing with an unusually volatile situation. Dunne found a place for Dorothy and Kristen in a shelter in Salem. She met them there later that day, and listened to Dorothy recount an almost unthinkably dire situation.
They spoke for four long hours. Dunne remembers the preternatural patience of Kristen, who sat outside the door of the room for all those hours while her mother detailed decades of such extreme abuse that Dunne still will not share some of the particulars (a promise she says she made that day to Dorothy and that she has kept). William had pushed Dorothy down the stairs, given her black eyes, kidnapped her and held her overnight in a warehouse, beaten her when she was pregnant, and threatened to kill her and drive her body so far out into the middle of nowhere that no one would ever find her. On the rare occasions when Dorothy had visited an emergency room, William would sometimes throw away her pain medication. He didn’t allow her to work and she had almost no life outside of the couple’s two daughters. Because he was a cable installer William had convinced her that he knew the locations of all the shelters in New England.
Dorothy also understood that under the law fathers had a right to see their children. Any custody agreement or visitation schedule would require a constant negotiation with William. So even if she could prove abuse—which she couldn’t, since she’d never called the police on him—William had rights in the eyes of the law. At least if she was in the same house, she reasoned, there was a chance she could protect her daughters. So she’d returned, again and again.
But this time, she swore to Dunne, she was finished. This time, he had crossed a line: William had abused Kristen, who was eleven, for the first time ever. He’d sat on her chest until she couldn’t breathe—and that was what spurred Dorothy to action. For many abuse victims, this is what eventually pushes them, when their child gets hurt. It’s one thing for an adult to abuse another adult, but a child? This is often the moment victims decide enough is enough.
Like many abusers, William was savvy enough to work the system. After this last escape to Maine, William had sent a letter to Kristen’s school saying his wife was mentally unstable and had taken their child without his consent; he told the school that if Dorothy tried to get Kristen’s records—which she would need to enroll Kristen anywhere else—that he should be contacted immediately. He noted in his letter that none of this was a result of any abuse in the Cotter home, a remark that struck the school as odd enough that they contacted the local police to come in and talk about the situation. At the same time, William Cotter went to the Amesbury Police Department and filed a missing person’s report with an officer named Rick Poulin. Poulin told me that Cotter was concerned his wife would use their credit cards. “He was very defensive for a missing person’s [report],” Poulin said. “Alarm bells went off in me.” Poulin was also the officer who spoke to school officials, and he even walked down the block to the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center and spoke to an advocate there. The case was strange, but so far as they could tell, no one had broken any laws. There was no record of abuse, no criminal history for anyone in the family, and no reason to have William on the law enforcement radar at all. Dorothy hadn’t yet called the hotline from Maine, and William appeared to be an upstanding citizen.
Dunne says William’s behavior is typical of abusers. They want to show victims they know how to play the system to their advantage. Dorothy was in Maine, and with that letter to the school, William, she said, “was trying to smoke her out.”
Dunne told Dorothy to stay in shelter, that she’d talk with their crisis center attorney and come up with a strategy after they filed for a restraining order—which they planned to do first thing the next morning. And then Dorothy told Dunne something that stunned her: I am done with shelter.
Dorothy had been in and out of shelters all over New England; she’d even gone as far as Pennsylvania. And every time she eventually returned, because she couldn’t hide forever. William would never just let her go. He’d never willingly agree to a divorce. Her kids needed to be enrolled in a school no matter where she was or what she was running from. Her own family lived in Massachusetts. How could she leave her mother and her sister? Her closest network of support? She’d someday have to have a job that could cover expenses for her daughters and herself.
Dorothy told Dunne she hadn’t done anything wrong, so why was she the one who always had to leave? She believed that William knew most shelter locations anyway, so there was no point hiding from him. She would not go. Not this time, and never again. Later, Dunne called this their “oh shit” moment. “We had no plan for a woman who refused shelter,” she told me. “Shelter was our plan.”
Dorothy and Kristen spent that Sunday night in the Salem shelter, and went to court the next day with Dunne and the center’s lawyer. The court granted her a restraining order—with one caveat: William told the judge he needed access to the garage or he wouldn’t be able to get his work tools. So the judge allowed William to pick up his tools from the house in the morning and return them in the evening. It was an unusual ruling, but William had no record as an abuser and, presumably, needed to be able to maintain employment while he and Dorothy sorted out their marital issues.
After court, William vacated the house. And Dorothy and Kristen moved back in.
Dorothy’s house was two stories built atop a ground-level garage. It sat beside a small parking lot for their neighbors, whose houses were so cloistered one could barely fit a hand between them. Dorothy’s rental house had white clapboard siding with green trim; a flight of rickety wooden stairs led to a narrow porch with two entry doors. The crisis center changed the locks, installed a security system, and gave cell phones to Dorothy and her daughters. They also gave her an emergency response necklace to wear. But one night while she was cooking, she accidentally hit the button and half a dozen police cars showed up. She was so embarrassed, she took the necklace and hung it in her bedroom.
Ten days after she had moved back in, Dorothy walked into the garage to get into her car. She was due for a job interview at Shaw’s supermarket. Suddenly, William—who had an active restraining order against him—grabbed her from behind and covered her mouth with his hand. “Stop screaming or I’ll shoot you,” he warned her. Kaitlyn, their elder daughter, heard the struggle and ran downstairs to find her mother being held hostage by her father. “Her mouth was bleeding … and she appeared terrified,” Kaitlyn later wrote in an affidavit. “I … stood with my mom and dad to make sure nothing was going to happen.” After two and a half hours, William left; the next day, Dorothy went to the police station and filed a report about William breaking the restraining order with a detective named Robert Wile. She and Wile spoke for a long time; it was the first he’d ever met her. She told Wile of her husband, “Every time I talk to him, he scares me.”
Dorothy was calm, rational, he said. She told him that in a shelter, she’d have to share a room with her two daughters, increasing the likelihood that if William did actually find them, he’d kill all three of them. In her own home, he remembers her telling him, there was a better chance “it would be just me.” Wile was struck silent. “She was basically telling me, ‘I’m preparing for my own death, and what are you doing?’ ” Wile told me. “And I was speechless.”
By the time Wile, who goes by Bobby, met Dorothy, he’d been in law enforcement for nearly two decades, working his way up to detective. He was often the first one called to the scene of some of the area’s most gruesome crimes—kids killed by their parents, wives killed by husbands. Amesbury, Massachusetts, didn’t tend to have random crimes, a drive-by shooting, say, or mugging-turned-accidental-homicide. Boston, just an hour away, had random crime, but Amesbury was one of those working-class Massachusetts towns with small central squares and red-bricked sidewalk charm, a New England colonial aesthetic. Still, it had the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of domestic violence in Essex County. And what murders they experienced tended to be where the perpetrator and the victim knew each other, which is to say that they were nearly always private violence. For Wile, the “domestics” were frustrating. Like practically everyone in law enforcement, he hadn’t gotten into police work to break up some dispute over butter between husbands and wives. His attitude was basically, “You gotta be kidding me. I’m getting called back to this house again?” And even though Dorothy’s case, her fatalist vision of her future, stood out to him in its severity, this interpretation of “domestics” was still the way he thought of them at the time.
Wile issued a warrant for Cotter’s arrest. On March 21, 2002, William, accompanied by his lawyer, turned himself in at the Newburyport District Court. Dunne said Cotter knew what he was doing. He knew the system, showing up at the end of the day on a Friday, all lawyered up. His previous record showed only a few traffic violations and bad checks. He had a steady job as a cable installer and coached a local youth sports team. The judge that day didn’t know of his decades of abuse against Dorothy, didn’t know the particulars of how he’d broken the restraining order, didn’t know he’d once stalked his wife, then kidnapped her. He didn’t know William had pushed her down the stairs when she was pregnant once, or how he’d strangled her with a phone cord. The prosecutor in court that day also didn’t have Dorothy’s affidavit, which chronicled her two decades of abuse. Maybe if Wile had known Cotter would be in court that afternoon, he could have made an appearance, given the judge more information. Maybe he could have called over to someone in the courthouse, warned them about Cotter, but Wile only had Dorothy’s affidavit from the day she’d gone in to see him. He knew she was scared of her husband, but he didn’t know the extent of the abuse. Dunne knew, but she and Wile had never communicated. Dunne had learned about her abuse only in the final weeks of Dorothy’s life, but never spoke to the police about her. At the time, Detective Wile didn’t even know any of the advocates at the local domestic violence agency, including Kelly Dunne or Suzanne Dubus, both of whom would become pivotal in Wile’s orbit in years to come. No one in the courthouse knew enough to have Cotter on their radar.
All of these critical gaps in the system often make the biggest difference between who lives and who dies—including the lack of communication between criminal and civil courts—and it still persists not only in this particular county in Massachusetts, but also in states and counties across the nation. The very fact that intimate partner violence is so often addressed in civil court, rather than criminal court, gives insight into how we as a society still view it. The country’s first “family court,” as it was called, began in Buffalo, New York. At the time, it seemed a great judicial innovation to have a place where families could work out issues related to divorce and child custody that didn’t require a visit to criminal court. In the ensuing decades, however, what this has meant is that domestic violence has been lumped in with other family matters, like custody and divorce, rather than being the criminal matter that it is. Imagine a man, a stranger, strangling another man with a phone cord, pushing another man down the stairs, punching another man so hard he breaks an orbital eye socket. Such assaults happen daily with domestic violence, but I have yet to speak with a prosecutor who sees these crimes treated as seriously as when they happen in the context of domestic violence. “It shocked me, the things someone would do to a family member that they wouldn’t do on the street, or in a bar fight,” a former prosecutor from Ohio named Anne Tamashasky told me. The day William Cotter showed up in court, he paid $500 and bailed out minutes after he’d turned himself in.
Five days later, William arrived at Dorothy’s house wearing a tactical vest and armed with pepper spray, handcuffs, ammunition belts, and a sawed-off shotgun. Kaitlyn was at a friend’s house; Kristen unwittingly opened the front door. As soon as she heard his voice, Dorothy barricaded herself in her bedroom. William pushed past Kristen and broke down the door to Dorothy’s bedroom, dragging her out in seconds. Kristen ran upstairs and called a neighbor, who called 911—an arrangement Dunne had worked out so Kristen didn’t have the psychological burden of calling the police on her father. The police arrived within minutes.
I freeze the scene in this crucial moment sometimes: Dorothy, still alive, held hostage by her abusive husband, and the police there—half the force, it seemed—guns drawn and ready. The family was known in the department now both because of Officer Poulin and because of Detective Wile and the day Dorothy went to see him. Wile understood by now that Cotter was dangerous, maybe more dangerous than most, and he shared it around the station to be on the lookout. And this is the moment: William is alive. Dorothy is alive. Dispatch is on the phone. The police are there.
Was this a scene she had ever imagined, sitting there with Detective Wile, telling him how she would die in her own house? She was thirty-two years old, not even halfway through her life. She had the glamorous look of an actress from the 1940s, a more ordinary Hedy Lamarr or Loretta Young.
Did Dorothy have time to remember that fateful day when she was fifteen years old and she met a boy who claimed to fall in love with her at first sight? Did she blame that young version of herself? Did she consider how her culture pushes little girls toward love, tells them love conquers all? Did she ever wonder why we don’t tell more stories of love’s defeat? I don’t believe love conquers all. So many things in this world seem more powerful than love. Duty. Rage. Fear. Violence.
I picture Kristen, eleven years old, hiding under her bed, blind to what was happening. The unbearable weight of knowing she’d let her father in. She’d thought it was going to be her friend at the door. I lost my own mother when I was around Kristen’s age. It was cancer, a civilized death, if there is such a thing. But I understand just a fraction of the raging desperation Kristen must have felt, the promise she was maybe making to any available invisible god in the blazing heat of the moment to protect her mother. And I understand this, too: that however terrible the singular moment of death is, however haunting those brittle final seconds, the loss will come to be defined by the buildup of years still to come. The scale of it, the cruel forever of it, a steel gate the size of the world itself shutting before you have time to blink.
The scene unfreezes. When the dispatcher called Kristen back to confirm the police arrival, William picked up the downstairs phone. He told the dispatcher to call off the police or “someone’s gonna get hurt real bad.” His voice was stern, but oddly flat, as if he still believed all of this was well within his purview, as if he thought this was just a colossal misunderstanding, his own private matter to manage. Officer David Noyes was the first to their door. He could hear Dorothy screaming, “He’s gonna kill me! He’s gonna kill me!” Noyes had his gun cocked, too, his Kevlar on. It was raining. They were all in their police-issued rain gear. The Kevlar and the equipment belt and the rain poncho made it difficult to maneuver. The dispatcher did not, of course, call the police off. Noyes kicked down the door at the same moment William shot Dorothy; Noyes said the muzzle flash was so sharp it blinded him for a moment, long enough for William to turn the gun on himself. The entire episode was captured by dispatch. Dorothy screaming in the background, a boom and instant cessation of her voice, then men’s voices barking orders. Above all the chaotic racket you can hear a single wail: “Noooooooooo!” screamed into the receiver by an eleven-year-old girl.
As news of Dorothy’s murder spread across the police station and then to neighbors, family, friends, media, domestic violence communities, and the courthouse and judge who’d seen William and allowed him out on bail, it was as if the entire town went into mourning. Those who hadn’t known her were just as shattered as those who had. Dorothy’s became the highest-profile murder Amesbury could recall. Kaitlyn and Kristen had lost both parents at once. Dorothy’s mother and her sister, her entire family, were all shattered. And for Dunne and Dubus it was a reckoning. “We fell into an institutional funk after Dorothy’s murder,” Dubus told me. The fact that they’d known Dorothy was in as dangerous a situation as anyone could be, short of camping on the front line of a war zone, did not in any way alleviate their feelings of anguish and guilt. In fact, it seemed to make them worse.
When I asked Dunne to explain why, she had no hesitation in her answer: because Dorothy’s death had seemed “instantly preventable.” If they couldn’t save the most obvious cases, the ones like Dorothy who predicted their own murders, the ones who absolutely knew they were in unmitigated danger, then what was the point of any of the work they did? Shelter was a part of this, too: Why was their only answer to take an innocent victim and essentially lock her away? Afterward, newspaper editorials skewered the local police and the judge who had released William Cotter on bail; some news commentators called for the judge’s resignation. Dubus, then the chief executive officer of the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center, called a meeting between the district attorney and members of the police department, including Detective Wile, in order to analyze why the standard response procedures had failed. Everyone appeared to have done his or her job correctly. The only real digression from protocol had come from Dorothy herself, when she refused to return to shelter. To Dunne, this meant their protocol was wrong.
In the midst of this reckoning, in 2003, Dunne flew to San Diego and attended a conference on domestic violence. The keynote speaker was Jacquelyn Campbell. Campbell spoke about the Danger Assessment. As Dunne listened, she was struck partly by the information Campbell was sharing, but also by how Campbell was offering a whole new way of quantifying the information to illustrate increased dangerousness. The single biggest indicator for domestic violence homicide is a prior incidence of physical domestic violence, Campbell said. It seems obvious. But often it’s the escalation that is missed. And her assessment showed where to rank dangerous behavior, like threats of suicide, or access to a gun. Dunne listened as Campbell talked about how half of women killed by their partners had sought help from the police or the criminal justice system at least once. These were opportunities to catalog risk markers. The risk of homicide unfolds on a timeline, Campbell said, spiking, for example, when a victim attempts to leave an abuser, or when the situation at home changes—a pregnancy, a new job, a move. The danger remains high for three months after a couple splits, dips slightly for the next nine, and drops significantly after a year.
There were other risk markers new to Dunne, too. Like how strangulation is a different category of violence than, say, a punch to the face. Or that abusers tended to fall into two categories when it comes to their pregnant partners: those whose abuse escalates, and those who lay off entirely for those nine months. Forced sex is a risk marker, as is controlling most of a partner’s daily activities. Dunne sat in the audience growing more and more agitated as Campbell went on. In her mind, an entirely different narrative was running that went something like this: “Dorothy had that. Dorothy had that one. Dorothy, again. Yup. Dorothy. Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy.”
For the first time, she learned about the Danger Assessment tool—what Campbell had thought would only ever be used in an emergency room. Dunne did a postmortem Danger Assessment on Dorothy and saw that she would have scored an eighteen, around the same as Michelle Monson Mosure. Dorothy had been in the highest possible category for domestic violence homicide, and none of them had even known it. This was why her death seemed so instantly preventable, Dunne realized. Because it was. It was protocol in the making. For the first time since Dorothy had been killed, Dunne began to feel a tiny bit of hope.
When Dunne returned from California, she and Dubus immediately began to think of how they might use Campbell’s work to predict which domestic-abuse cases were more likely to end in homicide. Dunne’s goal was twofold: one, identify and create action plans for high risk cases; and two, keep victims out of shelters as much as possible. They knew they needed to devise a program that would identify the potentially lethal cases, the Dorothys-in-waiting. And if these victims could be scored and categorized, then maybe the protections they’d build around them could operate on that same timeline of dangerousness that Campbell identified. Because if they could predict them, it stood to reason they could prevent them. They brought Campbell up to Massachusetts from her home in Baltimore to work with them on the design and implementation of what they had in mind. During the following year, Dunne and her staff met with police officers in Amesbury and Newburyport, district attorneys, probation and parole officers, batterer intervention counselors, and hospital representatives. They knew it was about information flow, breaking down communications barriers. If everyone in each of the various offices around town—the judge in the courthouse, the detective in the police department, the advocate in the crisis center, the social worker at school, the nurse in the emergency room, et cetera—had had all the information about William and Dorothy, instead of different offices having various different bits of information, there was a very good chance Dorothy may have lived. William might not have been allowed to bail out. He might have had to relinquish his guns. He might have been on a GPS bracelet. It was all these gaps that Dunne and Dubus needed to figure out how to fill. They went over what services they could try to incorporate into the safety plan for any given scenario. Could the office of probation help with getting judges more informed? Could police identify some of the risk factors on a call? Could the emergency room help identify potential domestic violence victims? Could police share reports with the crisis center advocates? Could batterer intervention groups share their information with the crisis center? At each stage, they talked through the practices, the legal issues, the privacy standards, and most of all how they could share information across bureaucratic lines. They scoured state statutes and privacy laws, learned what kind of information they could legally share with other offices and what they could not.
Sharing information meant departments that had been siloed were communicating. Perhaps the most significant cultural barrier existed between the police department and the crisis center. Every possible gendered stereotype that exists about these two entities had to be addressed on a personal level. Dunne’s office was primarily made up of women, the police department primarily men. Wile told me once that, prior to the formation of the High Risk Team, the local police officers viewed Dunne and the other crisis center advocates as the “Men Hate Us Club.” “We didn’t deal with them,” he said, because the common feeling among police officers was that the women who worked in places like crisis centers, well, “they don’t like us.” Dunne laughed at this characterization. “We were the feminazis, and they were the assholes who cared only about overtime,” she told me. But as they talked to one another, advocates to officers, they learned about the unique set of problems and barriers each faced. In talking to Wile, Dunne began to see how officers could get frustrated going to the same house again and again. And officers like Wile began to understand the intractable circumstances that keep victims in place. Dunne was able to explain how victims who appear hostile and show solidarity with their abusers when the police show up are often taking a safety measure, sending a message not to police but to their abusers. See my loyalty? Please don’t kill me when the cops leave.
In this new system, the crisis center would serve as the central point of communication. They formed a team, one representative from every possible organization that could be involved—from the emergency rooms to the judiciary to the prison to the police to the advocates and half a dozen others in between. They decided to meet monthly, discuss those cases deemed high risk, and within the tangled bounds of confidentiality agreements and HIPAA laws, share as much as they knew about each potential homicide. Offices working in isolation would no longer be the modus operandi. “It’s in the cracks that murders happen,” Dunne would later say.
In early 2005, the country’s first official Domestic Violence High Risk Team began accepting cases. Their mandate? Fill in the cracks.