From Marilee Strong:
Quick. A woman goes missing. Your best friend, your sister, your neighbor.
She is not someone who has ever dropped out of sight before. Perhaps she's a mother with young children. She didn't seem to take anything with her. Her car is at home, so are all her belongings. She's someone who holds down a job, someone responsible in every aspect of her life. She's not into drugs or anything that makes her lifestyle dangerous. She hasn't contacted anyone to explain her absence--no phone call, no email, nothing. Her husband is acting, well, strange, but you can't quite name what bothers you about his behavior.
Someone--not the husband--calls the police. He tells them that his wife told him she was going for a long walk and he points down the street. Family members, friends, and neighbors begin to search for her. He does not. You notice a strange look on the husband's face. It's not worry, not fear, not anxiety, just a cold blank stare, almost a look of indifference.
The police say they'd like to "look around" the house she has shared with her husband for years to look for any clue that might tell them where she has gone. "No, actually, you can't come in," he says, stunning everyone else. "You'll have to get a warrant."
You begin to realize what it was about his speech and behavior that seemed so odd. Just moments ago--hours into the search--he was already talking about his wife in the past tense! You didn't say anything at the time, but now you feel a growing sense of dread.
Inspired by the Laci Peterson murder of a few years ago, Marilee Strong has written a new book on this subject, Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives.
Marilee Strong explains the type of killer we've seen too much of in recent years:
In my book I present an original criminal and psychological profile of what I have come to call “eraser killers.” I have given them this name because “erasing” their victim best describes both the motive and modus operandi of these crimes. The eraser killer does not kill for money or to be with another woman. Those might be ancillary benefits his crime affords him, but they are not what truly drives him. Instead, he kills to eliminate the woman, and sometimes children, in his life because he views them as in the way, as an impediment to what he believes he deserves. He is not about to support a wife he no longer cares to be with, or raise a child he does not want. In the mind of the eraser killer, murder is a quicker, easier, less painful, and more emotionally satisfying solution.
Divorce would leave him with too much baggage, too many restraints. His goal is to expunge this intolerable burden from the record of his life, and once he kills he seems compelled to rid himself of every earthly trace of her existence, often giving away his victim’s most intimate possessions even as he claims to be searching for her and praying for her return. He is so incredibly selfish, so consummately narcissistic, that he feels entitled to this most brutal form of annulment, the ultimate do-over. Because he is psychopathically callous, devoid of empathy or any genuine human connection to those he once professed to love, getting rid of an inconvenient wife and child is of no more emotional consequence than throwing out an old sweater. And because he is also highly Machiavellian, he believes that he can pull off the perfect murder and move blithely on to a newer, better life, one more in line with the grandiose nature of his fantasies. He does not fear punishment because he is thoroughly convinced that he will never be held accountable. He thinks that he is smarter than everyone around him because he has spent his whole life lying to others, living behind a mask of secrets, sometimes living a completely double life.
Yet in the existing scientific literature, there is virtually nothing on domestic homicides involving the kind of elaborate staging and deception employed by these killers. There has been literally more research on lesbian serial killers (of which I think there has been exactly one in history) than on a crime so prevalent I find new cases that appear to fit this profile every week.
Marilee Strong also has an interesting blog. Here in an excerpt from a typical post she takes on the question Do healthy women "accidentally" drown in their own bathtubs?:
There are two important things to know about this "drowning in the bathtub" business. First of all, it is very difficult for an autopsy to clearly determine drowning as a cause of death. The leading forensic medical textbooks make this quite clear. "Investigation of a body recovered from water can be challenging," writes Dr. Werner Spitz in the widely-used textbook he authored on death investigation. "Autopsy findings alone may be misleading and can cause the inexperienced pathologist to render a diagnosis of drowning when inappropriate."
As Dr. Baden told Greta van Susteren, speaking about the Savio case, "Healthy adults don't drown in bathtubs accidentally."
