Battered Wife Can’t Count on the System to Keep Her Safe

We are sitting in Department 51 of Orange County Superior Court, waiting for a sheaf of papers on which an impossible burden rests.

The plaintiff, Linda Williamson, is beside me. Her eyes are wide, rinsed with tears. She is muttering, over and over: “He is going to do something. I know he is. I know he is.” The words have a life of their own. They are not necessarily directed at me.

Judy Haskell, the legal advocate for Human Options, which operates a shelter for battered women, is seated on my left. She has been explaining to me about how the system works, too often not as well as it should.

We are here to obtain a temporary restraining order against Linda’s husband. Judy has led far too many women through the same steps that have led Linda here.

What is happening in Orange County is happening virtually every place else. The statistics alarm.

The latest federal Justice Department study says violent crime against women is remarkably different from that against men. It is six times as likely to be committed by their intimates, men who have professed their love.

Back in the courtroom, Commissioner Betty Farrell is looking over Linda’s order. She signs it without a question, without even looking up. Should James Patrick Williamson try to contact or harass Linda, her 18-year-old daughter, her parents, her two sisters, or her brother and sister-in-law, he will be in violation of the law.

The restraining order, to be finalized later this month, is a document that Linda Williamson is glad to have. It is not, however, one in which she places great trust.

James Williamson viciously attacked Linda last month. He did not seem to care who saw him try.

Williamson was waiting for Linda when she came back from work at a collection agency on the afternoon of Feb. 4. Linda was staying in an Anaheim motel suite then. She saw him, across the street, waving, moments after a co-worker dropped her off.

She hurried her pace and locked the door quickly once she was inside. The phone was already ringing; it was her husband calling from a pay phone, suggesting that they kiss and make up.

The last time Linda says James Williamson beat her was two days earlier. The motel management had called police. Linda didn’t press charges; she just told her husband to go away, and he eventually did.

Now Linda was telling him that she wouldn’t see him, but she avoided suggesting that their 6-month-old marriage was dead. She didn’t want to make her husband mad, not even over the phone.

Linda was thinking about taking a shower, to relax.

What happened next, according to police and eyewitness accounts, was this:

James Williamson shattered the suite’s front window. Linda ran to the motel office, screaming, pleading for help. The office door did not lock. The motel managers--husband and wife--stared.

Linda’s husband pulled her out from behind the front counter, by her hair, then dragged her to the driveway just outside. There he threw her to the ground and banged her head against the concrete, four or five times, all the while choking her, cutting off her breath.

Linda lost consciousness. It was a stranger, hearing Linda’s screams from inside a nearby market, who stopped the attack, perhaps even saving Linda’s life. Then his friend, and several other witnesses, tracked James Williamson down. He had run until he was short of breath, then tried to steal two cars as their drivers idled in traffic.

The witnesses held Williamson until the police arrived. He was booked, charged and tried within two days, part of a new expedited processing system designed to help unburden the courts.

James Williamson, representing himself, pleaded guilty. The charges: two misdemeanor counts of assault. He was sentenced to 60 days in the Orange County Jail, with a credit of three days. His probation is three years. Today he is free after serving 31 days.

Linda Williamson literally shakes at that thought. She fears for her life and for those that she loves. She needs a place to hide.

The law, for Linda Williamson, has not worked very well. Still, those in the system cite cases that are much worse. The ante is always being upped, it seems, when you are talking about crime.

And most spousal-abuse cases are routinely logged away as misdemeanor crime, petty stuff, unless the injury meets what cops jokingly call the 40-stitch rule. In other words, the wounds need plenty of sewing up.

Shock becomes more relative with time.

There is enough blame here to spread around. Where you start depends on your point of view. Too many criminals, not enough people enforcing the law, not enough room in the jails, not enough time, not enough people who give a damn.

Pick one, or more, or all of the above.

Time is what Detective Mike Lopez, homicide, Anaheim P.D., stresses when I ask him about crime report 91-06066, the understated police accounting of what James Patrick Williamson did to his wife.

Williamson served more than three years in state prison--for assault with a deadly weapon and statutory rape--only Lopez says he did not have enough time to really check that out. So the case reached the judge’s hands with no prior convictions attached, effectively as a first offense. Misdemeanor, as such, was a pretty easy call.

Had he known about Williamson’s record, Lopez says he would have had “a little more firepower for the D.A.”

“He came in at 5:49 p.m.,” Lopez says, checking the file. “I didn’t get it until Tuesday morning. Wednesday morning, I’ve got to have it ready for court. So I have one day. I have other cases. He pleaded guilty. He knows the system.”

The Williamson case appears to have fallen through a crack, one of many, Lopez says, that turn out this way.

“I would say it’s a usual case, even with a record like his,” the detective says. “It’s sad to say, if you don’t spend enough time investigating, they turn out like this. To you and to Linda, who are experiencing this for the first time, it’s out of the norm. To me, and to the district attorneys and to the judges, guess what? It’s another case, sad to say.”

Before Williamson’s case went to court, Linda told Lopez that her husband had been in prison, even supplying him with a prison number that she obtained from his photo ID. Later, Linda gave the same number to me.

Lopez told Linda that a computer search found a James Patrick Williamson, with her husband’s date of birth, with a rap sheet dating back to his teens. He said the fingerprints did not match those of the man who had beaten her up.

When I talked to Lopez, however, he told me there were 10 listings for James Patrick Williamson, two of them with that same date of birth. One of these, he says, has the wrong fingerprints and the other a notation of a manual rap sheet.

This, the detective says, means that he would have had to request a written list of the offenses from Sacramento. This takes time. Lopez let it go.

I found out the information from a phone call to the state Bureau of Prisons. Lopez says that phone calls used to be good enough for them, too, except now that doesn’t hold up in court. And had he asked for an extension on the court date, Lopez says, Williamson probably would have been out on bail.

“So he would have been out much earlier,” he says. “This way, it gives Linda time to put a distance between herself and Williamson. Hopefully, that is what she is doing. He really did a number on her.”

When I suggest that Williamson could return to finish her off, Lopez says that he agrees.

“That’s why they assign these cases to homicide,” he says.

The numbing brutality of the legal system is something that Linda Williamson cannot deal with just yet. She is still having a hard time believing that the man she loved--and a part of her, she admits, loves him still--could hurt her the way that he did.

“Not in a million years, did I think I would be in this situation,” Linda tells me, after court, on another day. “Not in a million years did I think he would try to kill me. I never thought he would be capable of that.”

And to look at this woman--self-assured, poised, beautiful--is to defy all sorts of unconscious stereotypes about how a battered woman should appear. For too long, Linda says, even she would not admit to herself that something was seriously wrong.

She believed her husband’s lies and rationalized the unpleasant truths. She welcomed him back after fights. She wanted to help him. She wanted to be loved.

“He used to be so easygoing,” Linda says, tears clouding her eyes. “He wanted to cater to me. He absolutely adored me. He wanted to be with me all the time.”

Even when she says he started to hit her, threaten her, call her names and do things to make her hurt, Linda says, she did not tell her family or friends. She feared that they would not like the man whom she loved.

She was thinking about down the road, she says. She was counting on her marriage lasting the rest of her life.

As Linda and I keep talking, her stories of abuse begin to trickle, then to pour out.

By the time that she recounts the details of last month’s attack, her emotions explode. When she describes her husband’s thumb pressing at her throat, cutting off her breath, she literally gasps for air. Then comes the sobs.

“I’m getting over the anger,” Linda says, after she’s calmed down. She is smoking a cigarette. Soon, she lights up again.

“Now, it’s the betrayal,” she says. “I’m doing a lot of meditation, but sometimes it gets overwhelming. . . . Obviously, I was supposed to live. I can start a new life. God protected me. I know that. I don’t want to lose this, sink into a depression and not be able to protect my daughter and myself.”

And Linda says that the reason she is talking to me is because she feels that it is something she must do.

“I guess it’s pretty scary. . . . I know he is a very sick individual. But I know I have a responsibility to warn other people. . . . And I know I have to look out for myself, get back on my feet. Right now, I just don’t know how.”