A Legacy of Violence : The Courts Say They Are Killers but They Say They Were Abused and Had No Other Way Out

FRONTERA —  Susan Bustamante was a credit officer in a bank, Glenda Virgil a veterinarian’s assistant, Brenda Clubine a nurse. They never knew each other--or that they had so much in common--until they killed their husbands.

They met in the California Institution for Women at Frontera, where they continue to meet, along with 34 others, in a support group for battered women.

Every Wednesday evening at 6, they amble into a prison classroom, chatting about their children and friends, pulling chairs into a closed circle. They conduct business as if they were members of a local women’s club, some wearing wedding rings, politely asking for walk-a-thon volunteers, newsletter contributors, a head count for next month’s roast beef banquet.

Sometimes, though, they talk about what brought them there. “How many of you were abused?” someone asks.

Every woman raises her hand.

“How many of you killed your abuser?”

The hands stay raised.

These women want Gov. Pete Wilson to do what governors in Maryland, Ohio and Washington already have done: free those who were battered and who killed their abuser. Last month 34 women from the Frontera prison sent a petition to Wilson requesting clemency.

“All of their cases will be reviewed,” says Wilson’s press secretary, Bill Livingstone. “I can’t tell you how long it will take. There is no timetable.”

The stories battered women tell of years of beatings, rape and torture make homicide seem justifiable, many believe. But others are troubled by the legal and ethical questions raised when killers go free.

Across the nation, a debate is raging over a novel but problematic legal defense based on the battered-woman syndrome, a condition some liken to an illness that keeps women trapped in abusive relationships. Because the legal system consistently fails to protect these women before they kill, they resort to murder, they say, as their last hope at self-defense.

But inequities inherent in self-defense laws as they apply to battered women “leave us with a basic and terrible problem,” says Holly Maguigan, a New York University legal expert on battered women who kill. Juries, judges and defense attorneys “don’t see these cases as self-defense.”

The battered-woman inmates at the Frontera prison range in age from 26 to 76. All killed to protect themselves from being killed, they say. During group meetings, they talk incessantly about lost love and failed relationships, seemingly unable to comprehend how their belief in ideal love could have kept them locked in an abusive relationship.

“I loved that man with all my heart. I have so much love for him, even to this day. A song could play. . . .,” Glenda Virgil says, sucking in her breath. Around the room, the others do the same, rubbing teary eyes, passing Kleenex, stifling sniffles. Virgil continues:

“I’m sorry he’s gone. He was rainbows and dreams. The first couple of years, there was such happiness. You want that back so much, you want to believe so much, you take anything. That’s what love’s supposed to be about, right?

“You don’t tell people about the rest ‘cause you know they’ll ask, ‘Why don’t you just get out of it?’ You’re embarrassed because you don’t have an answer. ‘I love him’ just doesn’t work for most people. I understand that now.”

Before they got to prison, they accepted violence as a normal part of marriage, the women say. “I believed I deserved everything I got,” Rosemary Dyer, 38, tells the group.

“We all did,” another says.

The rest nod in agreement. For a long minute, the room is eerily quiet. Toby Yniguez, a reserved, graying grandmother, breaks the silence.

“This is what I had to come to prison for: for the power to refuse to let a man put his hands on me ever again,” she says with defiance. “Because I’m not gonna take it.”

The room erupts in polite applause.

Wife beating has long been an accepted condition of marriage, says New York University’s Maguigan. “Until the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, cops rarely made arrests for wife beating because it was assumed that men had the right to control their wives,” Maguigan says. “It goes back to the basic notions of male ownership of women.”

Because the government was understood to have little role in family matters, the legal system only in the last two decades has begun recognizing family violence as a pervasive problem. The turning point came in 1977, when psychologist Lenore Walker introduced the battered-woman syndrome in a Montana case.

Subsequent television dramas suggested to the public that the problem was being solved. “The Burning Bed” showed the courts freeing Francine Hughes after she set her husband afire because he had so badly abused her. Vivid scenes from “The Tracy Thurman Story,” of police officers standing by while Thurman’s husband beat her into paralysis, made clear why many states now require police officers to arrest batterers immediately.

And Charlotte Fedders’ 1987 book “Shattered Dreams,” recounting years of abuse from her husband, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman John M. Fedders, showed wealthy women also suffer abuse.

But for every neatly resolved case, there are hundreds of others with more complicated and ambiguous endings.

Susan Bustamante, for instance, was convicted in 1987 of helping her brother kill her husband for a $50,000 insurance payoff. Pure greed, the jury said. And her in-laws concurred.

Bustamante, now 35 and sentenced to life without parole in the Frontera prison, tells a different story. She recounts years of beatings, stabbings, chokings, humiliation and anguish, in between intense good times and the birth of two children.

“I grew up in a typical Mexican household where the dad sat back and the woman fetched. I was raised to do what a man says. You served your man because you wanted to, not because you had to. With my husband, he beat me whether I wanted to serve him or not,” she recalls.

The battered women at Frontera share similar stories. They talk about being reared in fundamentalist Christian homes and tell horror stories of alcoholic and drug-addicted husbands, of families where child abuse and wife beatings seemed normal to them.

Physical or sexual abuse started when they were children. “Marriage was the only way out,” Virgil says. She married at 16.

So did Brenda Aris. At the time, Aris was pregnant and refused to consider an abortion. “I was raised Christian,” she says. “You don’t go killing babies. I would never kill a baby.” Her parents, she says, persuaded her to marry a man seven years older so her child would grow up with a father.

During 10 years of marriage, she left her husband but never tried to divorce him “because I thought he would change. There’s always that hope. It wasn’t just 10 years of beatings. There was always those six months of the family you always wanted.” Her voice trails off. “To go on living, you block out what he did.”

Aris had bruised ribs, a broken jaw and blackened and bloodied eyes too numerous to count, she says. Her husband chased her brandishing guns, knives, even a mirror.

“Yeah, I saw ‘The Burning Bed,’ ” Aris says. “My family called me up afterward and said, ‘Brenda! That’s you!’ And I said, ‘No, it’s not.’ I was in heavy denial.”

Her husband threatened to kill her during an argument in 1987, she says, then passed out drunk on the bed. Aris shot him.

Prosecutors worry that granting women like Aris clemency will encourage them to kill rather than end bad relationships. But it’s not that simple, Aris says.

“People who don’t understand always say that. They always look at you real accusing and say, ‘Why did you go back?’ That’s why this group is so important,” she says of the other battered women at Frontera. “Because nobody asks, ‘Why did you go back?’ They (group members) just understand.”

The women at Frontera believe they never had a fair chance to defend themselves. They complain about low-budget lawyers or public defenders who had no idea how to mount an effective defense. They complain about judges who refused to consider their histories of beatings. They complain about juries misunderstanding their illness.

Their complaints reflect inequities in the law, says Mario Conte, who has successfully argued many self-defense cases for battered women who kill. Most of these women have no money to hire competent attorneys, he adds.

“Most trial attorneys have no knowledge of how to argue these cases. They don’t put enough effort into educating themselves on how to use the right defense or how to approach the intensive investigation it requires,” he says.

The law on self-defense assumes a fight between two men of the same size and strength, where the killer uses only as much force as the victim. If a woman shoots a man while he has his hands around her neck, she can be--and has been--convicted of murder. Instead of looking at the imminent danger she faces, juries and judges blame the woman for staying in the relationship, says NYU’s Maguigan.

Glenda Virgil, for instance, killed her boyfriend during a 1986 argument on a San Diego rifle range where they lived as caretakers. She says the boyfriend, 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds, had been taking amphetamines and threatened to kill her, chasing her around the range for hours at night with a gun. When Virgil, 5-foot-5 and 135 pounds, wrestled the gun free, she shot him. Police found her bruised and scratched, her false teeth missing, according to court documents.

The San Diego district attorney who prosecuted the case never established what happened that night.

“We proved that she was lying,” says prosecutor Michael Przytulski. The bruises came from a car accident a week earlier, he argued at the trial. She could have removed the teeth herself, he said, and the fresh scratches on her back “could have been self-inflicted. We could never prove where they came from. It was inconclusive no matter what.”

What happened the night of the murder? “I don’t know,” Przytulski says. Virgil killed him over another woman, Przytulski believes. “There were other things, too,” he says. “She wanted to leave him, and he didn’t want her to.”

There was no mention during the trial of battered-woman syndrome, even though Virgil says she has medical records, photographs and psychiatric reports describing her boyfriend as violent and suicidal. The jury convicted her of second-degree murder. She is serving 15 years to life.

It is common for lawyers to exclude evidence of previous batterings to avoid establishing a motive. And it is also common for judges to refuse to hear testimony about battering to avoid putting the victim on trial. But without understanding a history of abuse, Maguigan says, the jury can’t understand why the woman feared for her life.

California judges allow testimony on a case-by-case basis, prompting women’s advocates here and in several other states to lobby legislatures to make it easier for battered women to show they were acting in self-defense when they killed abusive partners.

Changing the law is unsettling to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lillian Stevens, who sentenced Brenda Clubine--the leader of the Frontera battered women’s group--to 15 years to life for killing her husband.

“Frankly, I feel changing the law would be authorizing preventive murder,” she says. “The only thing that really matters is: Was there an immediate danger? There can’t be an old grievance.”

During 11 years of marriage, Clubine says, she was kicked unconscious by her husband, a police officer more than a foot taller and twice as heavy as she. She says she had medical reports showing she had vomited blood, had possible skull fractures, had broken teeth and ribs; she also had police reports proving officers had been to her house constantly, she says.

She even had a judge’s order protecting her from her husband and had pressed charges to have him arrested for felony battery. Six weeks later, on the night in 1979 that she killed him, the warrant was still pending, she says.

Clubine says she hit her husband over the head with a wine bottle during an argument in a Glendale Holiday Inn. Judge Stevens says Clubine drugged him into lethargy with cold capsules and then clubbed him to death.

At the trial, Stevens heard testimony about the beatings but never gave jury instructions on self-defense.

“It seemed to me (the beatings) were some time ago,” Stevens says. And, she adds, “there was evidence that a lot of it was mutual.”

In Clubine’s cell--a room about the size of a walk-in closet that she shares with another inmate, a toilet and a sink--photographs of stepchildren from her current marriage lean against the bed.

Susan Bustamante also has remarried. Bustamante’s husband, Terry Bradley, moved to Ontario and is raising her two daughters from her previous marriage.

“A while ago he called to ask me for my Social Security number so he could make me a beneficiary on his insurance,” Bustamante says. “I started laughing--I’m in here because I supposedly killed my husband for the insurance, and now he wants to make me the beneficiary? When I asked him about it, he said he wasn’t really worried.”

The women at the Frontera prison say they regret what they did, but not what it taught them.

“At least I survived,” Clubine says. She reflects for a moment. “This is an awfully high price to pay for survival, though.”

ON MONDAY *In some states battered women accused of killing their husbands cannot use a history of abuse as a defense. So, governors have started commuting their sentences--and getting into political hot water.