No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

Snyder introduces Patrick O’Hanlon, a husband and father under stress at work and financial stress at home, who was experiencing chronic insomnia and major depressive episodes complete with suicidal ideation. His wife and mother were concerned that O’Hanlon might harm himself, but no one anticipated that O’Hanlon would suffocate his sleeping daughter and bludgeon his wife to death.

Familicide—when someone kills their domestic partner and at least one child—is growing more and more common: “From the time of the 2008 economic crash, we began averaging […] around three a month. In other words, while nearly all other forms of homicide steadily declined over the past several decades in the United States, familicide appears to be on the rise” (160). Familicide perpetrators are predominantly white, middle- or upper-class men like Scott Peterson and Chris Watts. Most men who kill their families also kill themselves, which makes researching the causal factors nearly impossible.

O’Hanlon, however, did not kill himself. His father, who struggled with alcoholism, yelled at his family and sometimes threw things, but O’Hanlon remembers him as loving rather than abusive: “He downplayed the violence of his father and talked more often about his mother’s behavior. ‘My mother was no angel […] ‘If she had been less provocative, more respectful of his position as a husband …’” (162).

Snyder returns to Neil Websdale’s research, which led him to William Beadle: a man who killed his wife and four children with a hatchet after coming to the brink of financial ruin in 1782. Beadle felt that he was saving his family from hardship and social shame by killing them. In the subsequent cases of familicide that Websdale researched, economic hardship and its subsequent humiliation were also at the root of the decision to kill one’s family. Websdale classifies family killers in two ways: “livid coercive, or those with long histories of domestic violence, and civil reputable, in which perpetrators are respectable members of society—like William Beadle—with no obvious histories of violence and who kill out of a warped sense of altruism” (163). The latter group, Websdale says, are upstanding citizens, but there are often subtle clues that they are struggling to cope: “What we miss in the ‘he just snaps’ theory is the accumulation of emotional repression” (164). These men bear the primary financial responsibility for their families, are often religious, and may be socially isolated. They are often very secretive, with their wives having no idea of the pending financial ruin the family is facing.

David Adams cautions that we should not see these men as victims, but rather as narcissists who punish those who threaten their outsized egos. However, Websdale believes that it is important to consider why not only the victim but the abuser himself stays in an abusive relationship, saying that many abusive men are “terribly dependent on their female partners. They see them as a conduit to the world of feeling that they don’t inhabit, generally” (166).

Snyder argues that while toxic masculinity has always existed, it is more likely to cause violence today than ever, citing the work of Brené Brown on shame. Brown argues that shame is “‘organized by gender.’ For women, it’s about a competing set of expectations around family, work, relationships; for men it’s simply, ‘do not be perceived as…weak’” (168). Shame is a recurring theme in O’Hanlon’s record. After 9/11, O’Hanlon began experiencing insomnia and worsening depression. He took drugs to combat both and attended therapy. His daughter entered a rebellious phase shortly before O’Hanlon and his wife began building a new home and O’Hanlon retired from his job.

Snyder considers the biblical foundations of violence, discussing the stories of Abraham and Isaac and of Jesus as examples of filicide. O’Hanlon is religious and says that “it took three lives to save his: Jesus Christ, Dawn O’Hanlon, and April O’Hanlon […] In his interpretation, the murders seemed to be a way for God to get O’Hanlon’s attention, to straighten up, to restore his faith in the Lord, to serve” (170).

After O’Hanlon retired, he began having homicidal and suicidal thoughts. While retirement and financial stress may indeed heighten the risk of violence, Websdale cautions against focusing on any one variable or set of variables: “People think that if they can find enough variables they can do the odds ratio, put them into a formula, and spew out the cases where there’s very, very high risk, and I think that flies in the face of the complexity of the human condition” (171).

After killing his wife and daughter, O’Hanlon attempted suicide twice; he tells Snyder that there is a reason he survived, and that his path has been corrected in prison, where he leads a Bible study and helps inmates correspond with their families. He believes he will go to heaven and tells Snyder that he thinks of his family every day. While saying this, O’Hanlon “throws his head back violently, then sobs, his arms straight out in front of him, hands clenched […] He howls and howls, trying to hold it in, regain control, his body in an absolute visible war with itself” (174). Snyder believes O’Hanlon is trapped in the purgatory he created by killing his wife and daughter, “trying to extricate his pain through a thousand small gestures and kindnesses and prayers from that one colossal, horrifying moment” (174).

Snyder recounts a San Diego police training exercise in which a retired officer plays the part of “Ronnie”—a man who has barricaded himself into his home with his partner Melissa. Police call Ronnie to persuade him to come out and let Melissa go, but Ronnie repeatedly hangs up. The police make a timeline showing the progression of Ronnie’s anger and which topics elicit the most rage while other officers interview Ronnie’s friends and family, searching for information and feeding it to the officers on the phone. The police refer to these tidbits of information as “hooks” that calm Ronnie and “barbs” that set him off. The negotiations go on for hours. Unlike a typical hostage situation, in which the perpetrator uses the hostage(s) to secure his own freedom, the abuser in a domestic hostage situation is not interested in leaving. Rather, the abuser wants the hostage to pay some sort of penalty for challenging his control.

Police have their own internal problems when it comes to domestic abuse: a two to four times higher incidence of abuse and a tendency to downplay the violence of fellow officers, referring to the abuse as “domestic situations.” This language, Snyder says, is part of the problem:

[A]lthough I use the term ‘domestic violence’ in this book because it is the most commonly used reference for what I am investigating, a far more accurate term, and one that captures the particular psychological, emotional and physical dynamics, is ‘intimate partner terrorism’ (181).

Victims of abuse perpetrated by police officers also face unique difficulties, including fear of retaliation from the cops, and the advantage an officer has by virtue of his relationships with the courts.

Part of the reason officers protect other officers is out of loyalty, but part of it is because the penalties convicted officers face are severe. Police are also under a tremendous amount of on-the-job stress, but the presence of guns heightens the risk of fatalities—both in domestic abuse perpetrated by police, and at the domestic violence calls police respond to. Domestic violence situations with guns have historically ranked among the most dangerous for responding officers, although these days cops fear active shooter scenarios the most.

Although gun laws vary, there are loopholes in all states that allow abusers convicted of misdemeanors, including strangulation and stalking charges, to keep their weapons. According to April Zeoli, an expert on guns and domestic violence, gun restrictions only impact domestic homicide rates when people convicted of stalking can’t access guns: “Zeoli’s study found that intimate partner homicide decreased by 25% in cities where the restraining order laws were clear and enforced” (188). Guns eliminate the victim’s power to negotiate with her abuser, and make it easier for a motivated abuser to kill his victim. Snyder views the suggestion that women ought to arm themselves as an attempt to blame the women for not stopping whatever violence is perpetrated on them by adopting their own abusers’ methods.

Snyder recounts a domestic violence call she witnessed during a ride along in Montana. A woman had pulled a knife on a man, who called the police. Despite the woman saying the man had abused her physically for a long time and that she pulled the knife in self-defense, and despite the presence of a teenager who upheld the woman’s story, the officers arrested the woman. As the six male police officers gathered to interrogate the traumatized teenage witness, Snyder realized that “[T]hey were […] absolutely ill-equipped to act or think in any way that suggested they recognized the psychological complications at play, the implications of what they looked like from a child’s view. This was trauma happening in real time” (191). Afterwards, Snyder said, the officer she was riding along with admitted that the police could have handled the situation better.