No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

by Rachel Louise Snyder

all those relatives around for the holiday and life as they knew it over, yet they were all still somehow required to engage in the simple act of being a human: to eat, sleep, bathe, dress.

And the conveyor belt stopped, and the cashier came out from behind the register and wrapped her arms around Sarah and the four women hung there together in the fluorescence of the store, suspended in a kind of agony that had no words.

It was her office that dismissed Sally’s charges on the same docket as Michelle’s. Though the police were the ones who wrote the initial report, downplaying the severity of the situation and not giving her office much to use in order to charge Rocky in the first place.

Paul had wanted to raze the house after Rocky killed everyone, but Sally said the city of Billings wouldn’t allow it, and so he sold it for practically nothing to get it off his hands and out of his life.

book called Life After Trauma

Ivan says he and Alyssa fought and fought, and eventually they broke up. He says the murders made his relationship with Alyssa untenable somehow. She was the love of his life and Rocky’s actions destroyed his life, too, at least for a while. “They hated [Rocky],” Ivan said, of Alyssa’s family, “understandably. But he was my childhood friend. He wasn’t always that way.”

Sarah and Gordon retreated. She says for a year almost no one mentioned the murders at her job, even one of her coworkers that she’d thought was one of her closest friends. He told her much later how he never knew what to say, so he said nothing. Every day she’d come home to a silent house and a silent husband. They couldn’t talk about it. They couldn’t grieve. They couldn’t share their pain. They were just stuck there, like someone had frozen them where they stood.

It snapped something inside him. Something that maybe said he’d already lost so much, he couldn’t lose her, too, and so even though talking and opening up was more or less a tectonic shift for a man like him, he hauled himself to therapy, and he got on antidepressants, and the two of them also got counseling. It was something he thought maybe he should have done a long, long time ago.

And the therapy helped. He’d talk a little about it to her. Not much, but given his silent stoicism it was a lot for him, and Sarah recognized it and saw how hard he was trying and how much he was hurting.

The nurse told him he ought to read the research on accidents in medicine. It was amazing how many people were operated on inappropriately in the United States annually, tens of thousands at the time, she said. In particular, she told him to read the Atlantic articles on airline crashes and the literature on medical mistakes. Later, he did in fact read her recommendations, but on that day, when Websdale entered the surgical waiting room, he saw all these people on gurneys who had Xs over one eye or the other. “This was a simple remedy,” he said years later to a roomful of people at a video conference, “to prevent mistaken surgeries … And what we’ve found exploring errors in the fields of medicine, aviation, nuclear fuels is that we can correct problems fairly easily if we’re open to reviewing tragedies and accidents with a keen detailed analysis.”

Like this: he believes abusers are as stuck as victims. “Everyone asks why the victim doesn’t just leave,” he said to me. “But no one asks why an abuser stays.” Here’s another one, the paradox of domestic violence, he calls it: that the literature on intimate partner abuse and advocates all say abusers are about power and control, but to Websdale, abusers are simultaneously powerful and powerless. Both in control and out of control.

A way to take all this information, from all these different professions, and adapt it to domestic violence homicides. If systems were more efficient, people less siloed in their offices and tasks, maybe we could reduce the intimate partner homicide rate in the same way the NTSB had made aviation so much safer.

third book, Understanding Domestic Homicide.

domestic violence fatality review team.

The idea was to use the NTSB model and adapt it to domestic violence homicide cases, not to, as he says, “blame and shame” but to hold people and systems accountable to better standards, more efficient programs.

A combination of factors. “And that’s what we find in domestic homicide cases,” he says. There’s not any one single factor that can be pointed out and changed; instead, it is a series of small mistakes, missed opportunities, failed communications.

Team members build a timeline of a case, gather as much information as they can about the victim and the perpetrator and gradually try to look for moments where system players could have intervened and didn’t or could have intervened differently.

Montana’s own Domestic Violence Fatality Review Commission (MDVFRC). Their aim, she learned, would be to investigate domestic violence homicides with an eye toward reducing the number of victims annually in the state. She saw immediately the possibility to get some answers about what happened with Michelle; if she couldn’t save her daughter’s life, at least maybe she could help out another family in their same situation. Sally could point to the moment her own charges against Rocky were accidentally dropped because they’d been filed in the same docket as Michelle’s recanted testimony. But that seemed like a human error, not a systemic one. And no one could really say what the impact might have been had those initial assault charges stuck. Rocky had only ever been facing a criminal mischief charge to begin with.

Fatality review teams don’t go over every intimate partner homicide in their own various states, but they’ll review a select few where the information might offer a tweak to procedures or systems that might have kept a victim alive.

Teams like this have no regulatory or enforcement function, but rather through individual cases they try to determine if some systemic change could have made a difference. Maybe the judicial system might have played a larger role in locking up that abuser or keeping the victim safe? Might the police have done something different? Or the local church? There is, in fact, an infinite number of possibilities when it comes right down to it, so a team has to examine outcomes to some extent before they are even known.

Perhaps the most crucial element to a fatality review is something few team members discuss openly: that is, it forces them to ask how a system they’re involved in full of hardworking people with the best intentions failed enough that someone lost her life.

In domestic violence, the two main entities poised at the front lines are advocates and police. Two professions with entirely different cultures: the modern feminists and the traditional patriarchy. Indeed, in my near-decade of reporting and researching domestic violence all across America, the most successful cities and towns I encountered that had either lowered their domestic violence homicide rates or increased available services all had this in common: they’d broken down the cultural barriers between their police departments and their domestic violence crisis centers.

The subtext to this biography, what the assembled team members kept in the back of their minds, was whether or not something or someone in Ruth’s life could have intervened enough for her to be alive today. Did her friends know of the violence, and if so, when? Did she attend church? If so, did any of the church members know? Perhaps the minister? Did she ever show up with visible injuries?

What about her work history? Had she missed days? Had she been in other romantic relationships that had turned violent? If so, what had been the outcome of those? Was it ever possible to whittle down a murder to just one single moment that could have made it all turn out differently? The fact that the relationship got serious so quickly matters, too. Short courtships—let’s call it love at first sight—are a hallmark of private violence. Rocky and Michelle had this, too.

often the rage an abuser feels is highlighted in the particular details of a shooting or a crime scene. One common scenario: multiple bullets in a victim’s body, evidence that the perpetrator kept shooting long after what was necessary for death, perhaps even emptying an entire chamber into his or her victim. Such crime scenes point to a level of rage held by the offender. Often the one who will offer the most resistance is killed first in a family (as with Michelle Monson Mosure). Or a stepchild who is the source of tension between a couple will have an inordinate number of bullets. Sometimes police will find a single deadly bullet in one victim and a constellation of bullets in another. These aren’t simply gratuitous details, Websdale says. They’re clues to the mind-set of an offender, details about the particular psychology of a couple, and often they speak to interventions that could have been made, for example, by mental health professionals.

Even today, in this world of hyper-connectivity, where we can get a drone to deliver our toilet paper and a robot to vacuum our carpets, we still seem unable to create a database that speaks across state lines and across civil and criminal courts when it comes to violent people and their histories.

In a couple of cases, he had temporary restraining orders filed against him, and he’d wait until they expired and a partner wouldn’t show up to renew them, and he’d start coming around again. It was one of the ways in which he would abut the law but not break it.

“You want to get rid of homicide?” she’ll ask. “Get rid of guns.” She says this on and off for the two days we’re there.

restraining orders are generally a matter for civil courts; it’s only once those orders are broken that they become a criminal matter.

The systemic gaps, across courts, bureaucracies, state lines, are epic.

The variety of red flags are things everyone in domestic violence has seen before: the quick courtship, the isolation and control, the unemployment, the medications, the narcissism and lying and stalking.

The VA, where Timothy sought treatment, is the first place they identify. And then there was the court with his ex-wife. The police knew him, and he’d had that history of stalking and protection orders. He also had a home health aide who worked with him several times a week, who tried to warn her supervisor about his instability, and she was told to ignore it and just do her job. And then there was Ruth’s minister. “That’s five intervention points,” Matt Dale says. “The VA, mental health, law enforcement, the judiciary, and the clergy.”

By lunchtime on the second day, the team asks everyone to call out recommendations. The retired nurse says, “Guns, guns, guns. Get rid of the guns.” Some of the police officers on the team laugh. “This is Montana,” someone else says. “So what?!” she says. She is charming in that way of a grandmother—the knitting and all—but fierce in her opposition. She knows it’s a battle she’ll never win in this state, but that doesn’t deter her from fighting it.

Recommendations come from all sides of the room, five, ten, fifteen. The goal is to put all ideas on the table, and then they’ll whittle down the most realistic ones—those that will cost little or nothing to implement or those where the legislature might not have a big battle on their hands. One of the most significant is the gap between Timothy’s history of restraining orders and what local police who dealt with him knew. This becomes one of their primary recommendations: that they have access to a history of such orders in other states. Dale says they also ought to take a page out of the DUI statutes. DUIs now remain on a person’s record in Montana. That’s a simple fix, keeping the history of temporary restraining orders in the system, even after they’ve expired.

And there are other recommendations, too, all of them seemingly small tweaks, and some that have come from other fatality reviews: invite clergy to trainings so they know how to deal with domestic violence. (“More women talk to their pastors than police or domestic violence advocates,” Websdale told me once.) Talk to the VA about ways in which their medical treatments and prescriptions can be accessible to other doctors electronically. Close the technology gap in the courts. By the end, more than twenty recommendations are listed, but Dale and the team whittle them down, and ultimately only a handful will go on to be included in their report, and though the reports cover at least four reviews done by the team, the recommendations aren’t linked to any case specifically for privacy. So that by the time the team issues their report for the period in which I sat in on the review, I recognize only two or three as likely ...

Montana eventually implemented something called the Hope Card. It is the size of a driver’s license and laminated and contains identifying information about the offender, including a picture, the active dates of the protection order, and any other pertinent information. Victims can get multiple Hope Cards and pass them out to coworkers, teachers and administrators at a child’s school or anyone else who might need to be made aware of the order of protection. Two other states, Idaho and Indiana, have implemented the Hope Card, and more than a dozen other states have looked into Montana’s program.

Michelle Monson Mosure and her children were the first case Montana’s fatality review team took on. Today, as a result of Michelle’s fatality review, Rocky wouldn’t have been allowed to bail out first thing in the morning. Meaning, he would have been held longer. It gives domestic violence advocates more time to connect with a client, to go over safety plans, a Danger Assessment and timeline, to offer up services like shelter or other emergency plans, to give a context for what victims and their families might not know they’re seeing or experiencing.

an automatic no-contact order with anyone arrested in conjunction with a partner or family assault; today, Rocky would have been barred from contacting her from jail. They also recommended a systematic method of warning victims when abusers are due to be released—either having served their time or after bailing out. So Michelle would have been warned far in advance of his release. They also recommended that any victim who rescinds his or her testimony, recants as Michelle did, be provided with domestic violence information, including area services. Hopefully they’ll be more aggressive in their evidence-based prosecution in years to come.

As in cinema, this objectification—woman as an erotic form for the filmmaker or viewer—underscored the power dynamic in their relationship. He does what she does not want him to do. He continues to do it despite her objections. Finally, she concedes to his power and he, as he expected all along, wins.

how ceding power to another person does not happen in a vacuum. It’s a slow erosion over time. Step by step, moment by moment, whittling away until a person no longer feels like a person.

Silicosis is a type of pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease caused by breathing in tiny bits of silica, a common mineral found in sand, quartz, and many other types of rock.

Why did so many of the men he knew beat each other up?

After a few years in Detroit, a group of women came to him and said they, too, wanted to organize. Some of them were the wives of men he’d organized in the past. The way he saw it, he’d help anyone who wanted to be helped. If you were ready to fight systemic prejudice or unfair labor conditions, if you were a justice warrior, he didn’t care who you were. The more bodies, the bigger the impact. The bigger the impact, the bigger the chances of change. But the men he worked with, it turned out, weren’t as egalitarian in their gender views. They were vehemently opposed to women organizing. It was 1975; women’s liberation was still in its infancy. As more women began to attend Sinclair’s community organizing events, some of the men Sinclair had already helped organize would complain about the women, and say women can’t be organized.

Sinclair and the men held a series of meetings, each one seeming to escalate in emotional intensity and patriarchal entrenchment until one night, after the third meeting, one of the men who’d been pivotal in Sinclair’s organizing of men went home and beat his own wife so badly that several women—“tough as nails women” Sinclair called them—came to him the next day and asked him to call it all off. This guy was serious. A lot of their husbands didn’t want them organizing. It had to stop. At the time, Sinclair said his attitude wasn’t that the husbands should refrain from beating their wives because it was morally reprehensible, but rather because it split up the community.

After those six months, they declared a truce. The men came to him and wanted to start up the organizing again. Sinclair said all right and then asked if they were ready now to bring in women. The men were aghast. Hadn’t they been through this already? they asked him. And he told them, “Well, I’m not going to work for someone who wants to divide the community in half by gender.”

Claude Steiner. Steiner was a giant in the field of gender theory, the father of the so-called “radical psychiatry” movement in Berkeley in the 1970s; he wrote about men and women’s “internalized oppression” and advocated for social-justice-based therapies; he helped popularize the idea of emotional literacy. Radical psychiatry criticized standard modes of clinical treatment that often ignored the social context in which patients were living—a world in which war, poverty, racism, and inequality were endemic. Radical psychiatry called for systemic upheaval to the social and political order. It was an antiauthoritarian movement born of a counter culture outspoken in its criticisms of standard medical interventions, like drugs, involuntary hospitalization, or electrotherapy. It aspired to a treatment model that purported that mental illness could often be addressed through social theory and personal change, rather than the medical industry.

He began to understand violence as the result of a belief system men all seemed to share, which told them they were the authority in their lives, that they were to be respected, obeyed. Top of the human hierarchy. It was a belief system that not only distanced them from people around them, but also limited their range, kept them boxed in by their own narrow ideas of what men could be and how men could behave.

But why? Why did men believe this? Sinclair understands, of course, the arguments about human evolution, how we must kill to survive (to eat, he means). He’s willing to believe that maybe at some point, far back in human history, men had some kind of predisposition toward violence in order to feed their families. But no longer, not today, and not for many hundreds of years. Beyond this history, he rejects the notion that violence is inherent to the male species, that men are somehow born to fight. For starters, we no longer need such violence to survive; instead, what we need now is to “intimate,” as he puts it. And in this, men have no belief system, because men are taught violence, but they are not taught intimacy. “Violence is a skill that we all had to learn just to stay with the pack growing up,” he said. “The trouble is, it doesn’t work for intimacy. That’s a whole different set of skills.”

you’re likely to see some version of the question why didn’t she leave? What you almost surely won’t see is why was he violent? Or better yet, why couldn’t he stop his violence? Men, Sinclair believes, get one type of training and women get another.

“men learn to be men by defining themselves as superior to each other and to women, and much of the violence in our communities is due to men’s ongoing enforcement of this learned belief in their superiority, be it spousal abuse, gang turf wars, street assaults, armed robbery, and all the other crimes that men in the jails had been charged with. Men … had learned that it was normal to use force and violence in all of the forms above to enforce their social obligation to be superior.”