Mary didn’t have quite the right background to sell newspaper ads. But in October 1988 she applied to become an account executive at the Times Standard, a daily in the northern California city of Eureka, and informed ad manager Judi Pollace that she simply had to have the job, even if she didn’t have all the qualifications. Pollace, who hadn’t had great credentials when she went back to work after raising her four children, admired Mary’s pluck and decided to take a chance on her. “There was just an intensity about Mary that I responded to,” she recalls.
“Are you Jean Smith?” one of the men asked*. When she said yes, the men asked her to accompany them outside to discuss “a possible problem.” In the lobby FBI special agent Stanley Walker explained that they had confirmed her true identity using fingerprints. She admitted who she was, and was handcuffed and placed under arrest by Walker and Eureka police officers.
The National Woman Abuse Prevention Project estimates that between three and four million women are beaten by their husbands or partners every year. In a 1989 monograph the National Center on Women and Family Law estimated that in 24 to 30 percent of all marriages the women will at some point be battered. “But it is not necessary for abuse to be only physical,” says Leslie Landis, executive director of Life Span, a Des Plaines organization that helps victims of family abuse. “An abuser can use intimidation too, or what I’d call psychological terrorism, to get what he wants. If you perceive that, it’s easy to understand why Jean felt she had to leave with her daughter. If this type of material can be raised in a homicide case, it should be raised in a case like Jean’s too.” But as Jean’s case shows, the law is not clear about when or to what degree domestic violence is an extenuating circumstance in a criminal case.
Before father and daughter returned to Chicago, Abby wrote her mother a letter. It read:
or Heather
In the spring of 1989 Jean’s self-esteem was rock-bottom, according to Forrest. “She also thought Rich could kick her out of the shelter. She was sure he could keep her from getting a job.” The separation from her daughter had exacted its toll on Jean, and she felt increasing remorse for the time lost with her other children, Matt, then 18, and her twins, Sarah and Louise, then 16. All her children were living with Rich, a car mechanic, and his new wife in a northwest suburb.
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His first wife says she had married Rich the previous November because she was 17 and pregnant. The marriage “went downhill immediately. He lost interest right away.” Shortly after Rich and his wife separated, in the summer of ’69, he and Jean started living together in a Glenview apartment. According to Gladys Dickelman, a longtime friend of Jean’s family, the relationship disturbed Jean’s parents because Rich “wasn’t culturally of the same ilk. He had a motorcycle image and a low-class way of living.” Jean split up with Rich briefly, but they reunited when Jean discovered that she was pregnant.
