Dead Men Tell No Tales
I got married at nineteen to another nineteen year old. He liked claiming he had the perfect family.
I imagined my in laws would be the wonderful, loving family I longed for. I ended up realizing my family is more decent than average and there are no perfect people.
I'm not suggesting there are easy, simple answers. A desire for such tends to lead to easy, simple solutions that are gamable and the worst people seem to benefit the most from that.
This is a blog post by a homeless woman. I have not closely researched the case of the Menendez brothers. It would be problematic to interpret this as some kind of expert testimony on their behalf.
Redditors seemed to generally agree that everyone knew they were horribly abused, there was far more evidence than normal of their extreme mistreatment and there was substantial evidence they spent multiple years trying to get help.
Ideally, a case like that should have been addressed long before it got to a point where one brother says to the other "Let's kill our parents!" And the other goes "Sounds good! I'm in!" So redditors can wryly observe years later "If it goes that way, you're probably shitty parents."
I don't believe they should have been given a pat on the head and a walk. They probably needed years of rehabilitation after being abused to the point of deciding to kill their abusers.
But I think the reason they went to the big house is because whatever happened privately at home before the double murder, after the double murder, society has two dead bodies who will never hurt anyone ever again no matter what they were like while ALIVE and two known killers still breathing that we need to figure out what to do with to protect the public from two young men who at a minimum weren't raised right.
And because the parents were DEAD, the judge and jury had no opportunity to interact with the parents and observe them firsthand and draw conclusions about their character and whether or not it seems likely they really were abusive monsters and sexual deviants.
My suspicion is that in many cases, this reality isn't heaping additional experience of injustice on the real victims. My suspicion is that in many cases, it's rewarding people who were criminals and punishing people who fought back.
The footnotes of the linked post indicate I have come to believe my sister was the abusive spouse in her first marriage and murdered him and got away with it. One of my concerns is that if you promote this idea too hard and ride the coattails of the "believe women" meme, it becomes a defacto encouragement of bad women to play the victim card and kill their husbands and get a slap on the wrist.
I write in hopes of helping courts make more informed decisions, not in hopes of replacing existing biases with new ones where we tell ourselves we can feel good about our misandrist policies because misandry is a morally superior prejudice and misogyny is the work of the devil.
My sister left for college the year I turned eleven. My brother began molesting me as soon as she was gone.
Most likely, this was mostly situational. Simply having any witness tends to deter bad behavior.
But I viewed my sister as my protector and champion and the one person I could trust. The abuse stopped about three months before I turned fourteen and I went to see my sister and began trying to plot to leave home.
She left me alone with her boyfriend's best friend who was about 6.5 years older than me -- the same age difference between her and her boyfriend, so not anything most people would look askance at if I had been older -- and encouraged us to get involved, then in a secret family meeting without me, it was decided I was to never contact Alex again.
I was fourteen. The abuse stopped a few months earlier. I assumed my brother was the villain. I began rethinking that scenario last December, decades after the fact, through the lens of details I know now about how abusers operate that I didn't know then.
Like the Menendez brothers, I spent years as a teenager trying to get help. My sister said she would pay for therapy. Her best friend said she would drive me. Then I learned I couldn't get therapy as a minor without parental consent.
My sister double majored in journalism and psychology. Journalism to keep her journalism scholarship, psychology because that's what really interested her.
I'm sixty one years old. It's occuring to me AS I write this my sister probably was well aware I couldn't get therapy without parental consent when she offered to pay for it.
I was a minor. I didn't know that. We tend to draw conclusions and not revisit them. Once we draw a conclusion, we tend to stick with that idea.
She likely knew that. She was a psychology major. If she fooled me at fourteen, I probably wouldn't ever go "Hey, wait a minute...!"
I'm writing this post because I was molested and I felt strongly I would absolutely kill someone under the right circumstances in self defense or in defense of a loved one. I carefully arranged my life to try to avoid ever being in such a situation.
I was told my sister was the abuse victim in her marriage. I was painted a picture of her husband being a violent nutcase and I felt lucky he apparently committed suicide while I was in Germany.
I'm bigger and more athletic than my sister. My husband was career military. I had small children. I felt strongly if Julius showed up and started trouble while I was visiting with my kids, it would fall to me to defend the four of us.
I was told he had to sign away all rights to the house for her to qualify for a mortgage because of his atrocious credit and mountain of student loans.So he supports her career, she's making money like a man and she gets the house in the divorce free and clear.
That sounds like a situation that's enough to push a decent person off the deep end. "Bye, sucker! Fuck you!"
I worked very hard at not finding myself charged with murder because I felt strongly that I was likely to come across like a nutcase screaming at the judge and jury about being on the side of the devil and this was clearly self defense etc.
I felt that was a recipe for ending up in prison for a lot of years.
My sister is probably someone who committed premeditated murder in cold blood and convinced everyone she was completely innocent, his victim and ALSO it was suicide. They tested her hands for gun powder, so the circumstances were enough for the police to check if she could have, and then they exonerated her and declared it a suicide.
The person laying dead cannot speak for themselves. Career criminals are frequently emotional manipulators. You have them and their pheromones and their tears and bruises in front of you and a piece of paper and some photos telling you about the body of the dead guy.
I desperately wish we had better stuff in place for legal minors like I was seeking help. That's not really what this post is about.
It's about the fact that if someone kills someone, they probably in most cases weren't the victim and if it really was the victim pushed to their limit, then we still tend to assume they are the bad guy.
Killing someone isn't easy. I attempted suicide and survived. I never tried again though I was suicidal for decades because I didn't want more physical scars and more social stigma as a mental health case.
If you actually kill someone, you did something that's not that easy to do. The reason abused women typically do more time is they typically plan it and pick up an equalizer.
Aside from things like vehicular manslaughter, killing someone is not easy. It's not generally "OOPSIE!" and it's unlikely that without preparation of some kind, you kill someone in self defense first try.
If you didn't grow up hunting, haven't taken martial arts, haven't served in the military, it's kind of a long shot you can do this at all because "shit happens" and some asshole made himself a big problem you couldn't avoid.
Statistically, women attempt suicide a lot more than men and may have multiple attempts to their name. Men succeed more often.
Men are more likely to have combat training or hunting experience or work in the meat packing industry or similar. It's not just that they are bigger and stronger.
I worked at not finding myself charged with murder in part because I thought long and hard about it and if you know that "If X" then "I'm KILLING them" and you don't actively avoid X, it gets extremely hard to say whether or not you were looking for an excuse to kill someone.
I was molested as a child. If my children had been molested and I heroically killed their abuser, is that really me being a protective parent? Or is that me getting my kid assaulted because I am angry and want to kill someone who did a bad thing similar to what was done to me?
In the movie The Pledge, a retired cop uses a little girl as bait to try to catch a child molester and serial killer. The killer never shows because he died in a car accident.
The mom learns what happened and is furious. If you were molested and you don't protect your kids and then after the fact kill their abusers, are you really a hero or are you the monster who set them up because you have issues and don't want to get over it?
As far as I know, no one ever molested my kids. I'm no longer a seething ball of anger thinking about killing an asshole for doing that shit.
I'm probably not making any judge's job easier with this post. I'm not really trying to though.