When Women Abuse Their Spouses : Domestic violence: Michele Chapman is accused of killing her husband. Do sexual stereotypes affect how the law is applied?

The women felt sorry for her. The men pitied him.

To women living within earshot of Apartment 11, Thomas Chapman came across like a loser who made his wife a prisoner of his maladies--his drinking, his hernia operation, his bum back. “I heard him yelling a lot,” said the woman in Apartment 12, “but I didn’t hear her yell back.”

Once, Michele Chapman asked about a job at the answering service where the neighbor worked because, “I gotta get out of here.” Once, the women said, she had a black eye.

To men living within earshot of Apartment 11, Michele Chapman sounded like a Class-A harpy who publicly belittled a man they took to be a good fellow despite the booze.

Once, when Chapman was drunk, his wife made him sit in their battered Cadillac Eldorado all afternoon, said the man in Apartment 14. When at last he climbed out of the car, she shrieked: “You’re embarrassing me!” Once, she poured scalding water in his lap and once, said Chapman’s brother Phil, she stabbed him.

On June 9, something happened that turned the shabby moments of this boozy, embattled marriage into an episode that brings into question how even the best-intentioned domestic violence laws are applied in a culture that clings to stereotypes of how men and women behave.

In the small hours of that Sunday, Michele Chapman evidently felt she had reached her limits. She called 911.

In the bedroom below, Tracy Taylor heard her shouting into the phone. “Come get him and take him away before I kill him! I need to get away from him, I’m going to hurt him!”

A “415 family dispute” is about the most common call to come over a police radio. The two officers who answered this one, already snowed under with calls, did not check on Chapman, as policy says they should. They met Michele out in the driveway. She wanted to go to jail, she insisted.

Beth Faulkner, the neighbor in 12, was passing by, and told Michele she could stay with her. That was a good idea, the officer urged. Then they left on another call. Michele Chapman trudged upstairs, back to her apartment.

About an hour later, she called 911 again.

Tom Chapman, 52, was dead, apparently slugged or kicked or beaten in the head with a liquor bottle. The night stand, Phil Chapman said, looked like it had been spray-painted with blood.

“I believe the system failed him,” said Phil Chapman. “The police say ‘to protect and to serve,’ and it doesn’t say male or female, it says everybody.”

Every 15 seconds in the United States, a woman is battered by a man; 95% of domestic abuse victims are women. Laws and police training have only recently grappled with that reality, trying to build sensitivity toward victims.

But the irony at work that night in Tujunga was that the 5-foot-5 woman who stood ranting before two officers contradicted the statistics.

“We jump to our stereotypes,” said USC law professor Susan Estrich, “because it’s so often true. When it isn’t, we have to allow for that and not punish the unusual victim.”

Such cultural notions of manliness can skew judgments. Male abuse and rape victims, straight and gay, are even more hesitant than women to report such crimes, said Patricia Giggans, executive director of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women.

They routinely think, she said, “ ‘How could I tell anyone? Nobody would believe me, and everybody would think I’m a wimp. I should have been able to take care of myself. I’m less of a man.’ ”

The night before he was killed, Chapman was in the apartment with a blood-caked slash across the bridge of his nose, his brother said. Chapman insisted to his brother and to the paramedics of Rescue 74--the same ones who would pronounce him dead several hours later--that he had just fallen down.

Tom Chapman stood 5-foot-11 and as gaunt as a 2-by-4 after his hernia operation. Only once, and then to his daughter, had he ever hinted that he was afraid of his wife, Phil Chapman said.

“Had I called the police,” his brother said, “he’d have said ‘I fell,’ and there I would have been, saying, ‘No, you didn’t.’ I would have made a fool of myself.”

In 1985, Los Angeles police made 555 felony arrests for spouse abuse. In 1986--the year a law began mandating such arrests for domestic violence--4,871 arrests. One of those was Michele Chapman, arrested that August for assault with a deadly weapon and for spousal abuse. Charges were dropped.

Long ago, when Tom first told his brother that Michele had stabbed him, “I said, ‘How could you possibly sleep in the same room?’ I’d say, ‘sayonara.’ I think anybody would.”

As he cleaned out his brother’s things last week, Phil found two things that told it all: a pawn ticket for his brother’s cherished woodworking tools, and a letter Tom had written to Michele. He had stopped drinking, the letter said, couldn’t she stop spending, and they could get back together?

“If anybody was saying he was at fault, that he’s the beast--he wasn’t the beast,” said Phil. “He was sick and she was sick.”

On the morning Chapman died and his wife was arrested for his murder, both were still on probation for being drunk in public. Both had been ordered to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Tom eventually attended his, court records show, but Michele did not.

The couple were separated for a time. Tom moved into Phil’s apartment in South Pasadena. One day, Phil found a note: “Thanks, bro, for everything. I got myself an apartment.”

Phil “just knew” that meant Michele would rejoin him. They made their way to Apartment 11, to what another of the dead man’s brothers called “a tragic ending to a bad story.”

Gender stereotypes can cut both ways. Women, whether victims or suspects, are sometimes not taken seriously, some experts say.

“Policing (has) a very traditional bias against women,” said Kathy Spillar, national coordinator of the Fund for the Feminist Majority. “Look at (Deputy) Chief (Robert) Vernon: This is a man who believes women should be submissive to men, that violence (physical discipline) is appropriate for gaining compliance from children and other followers, and he said women are followers of men. . . . I know that has communicated itself. Police officers tell me it comes down very clearly.”

Remember that 911 call two years ago? she noted. A woman wanted help--her estranged husband was coming to kill her. Call us back when he gets there, the Sheriff’s Department dispatcher told her. He did get there, and he killed her and three of her friends.

The Chapman incident, even with its gender twist, is simply another case of police “not taking a woman caller as seriously as they should,” said Spillar.

On June 18, the same day that a retired Marine Corps general told Congress that women cannot kill in combat, Michele Chapman was arraigned for the murder of her husband. She pleaded not guilty, and is still being kept in jail without bail.

Without implying any failing by the two officers, Foothill Division Capt. Tim McBride said that since June 9, roll calls have likely reviewed “how to handle these calls, and to take the time to handle the calls right.”

Two officers in a squad car make judgment calls all night. Police are investigating whether this time, the officers made the wrong call.

“You have to remember,” said Cmdr. Chet Spencer of the Valley bureau. “It’s 2 o’clock in the morning, the officers get there, the lady’s drunk, she said she’ll stay with a neighbor, the other party’s sleeping, he’s drunk, according to reports--what do you do? Wake him up again? They make a decision.”

Spencer added: “They should have gone in and at least eyeballed him and made sure he was OK.”

Dr. Martin Reiser, the Police Department’s chief psychologist, cannot say whether the call might have been handled differently if Tom, not Michele, had called 911. “The officers probably wouldn’t know themselves.”

Police Department training emphasizes “doing away with the sexist kind of disparity” of gender roles. But given customs, statistics and the vast likelihood that the woman is the victim, not the abuser, “there’d probably be a little disparity in the general population--and even others, paramedics and other professionals--in evaluating a situation of a larger, stronger male who says he doesn’t need help.”

Once such unusual cases are out of the hands of the police, evolving domestic violence and rape laws can pose a quandary for the courts as well.

Estrich is concerned that such laws might not be gender-blind in application.

“If (Chapman) had killed his wife rather than vice versa,” she said, “would he be entitled to the special rules of evidence, special admission of special evidence battered women have sought and in many cases gotten? Some of the feminist legal theorists in this area would say no.”

Such concerns should not invalidate the social progress such laws represent, said Christine Littleton, who teaches on women and law at UCLA.

Those laws are “very recent, and yet people are already asking whether the laws might be written too much with women in mind.”

“That is a more subtle form of sexism. Centuries of laws were written from men’s perspective and nobody paid any attention. A very few are written from women’s perspective and people are already worrying if it’s gone too far the other way. I don’t think it’s a problem. We’re a long way from even equality, let alone some form of disadvantage to men.”

The thumping shook the walls of Apartment 11 so often that neighbors joked about it. Not long after paramedics came that June 9th evening, it started afresh. One of Beth Faulkner’s friends remarked: “There they go again,” and someone else kind of laughed and said, “Oh, she probably killed him.”

The police came and went. Taylor heard yelling and Chapman shouting back. Then the arguing ended, and the pounding began. Just as Taylor was about to tell them to knock it off, it stopped.

Rescue 74 came again. As they went in, Faulkner heard Michele say: “He’s choking on his own blood--do something!” Moments later, she heard: “ ‘Take him out. I don’t care what happens to him, get him out. I don’t want him around any more.’ ”

Tracy Tennant had seen the Chapmans’ comings and goings since she moved in. “Obviously, the only thing he could control in his life was her. . . . I think she snapped. And before she snapped, she tried to reach out.”

Taylor still thinks about the 911 call he heard as he lay in bed.

“She didn’t really sound malicious, just (angry), and I’ve heard my folks talk like that. When I was 4 years old I saw my mom break an ashtray over his head, and that’s about it. But I’ve never heard of a woman kill somebody before. If it’d been a guy on the phone, it probably would have been a whole lot different. They probably thought it was a hysterical female in a domestic dispute.”