Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong Read Free Book Online

be seen again dead or alive. Despite what Scott Peterson’s
    defense attorneys wanted us to believe, we need not live in fear of
    mysterious men in vans or homeless people or satanic cults. Young
    women, and especially young pregnant women, are most in danger
    from the men they love.
    More than a thousand women a year are murdered in America
    by an intimate partner. Many of those women, about seven in ten,
    bear the scars of years of male rage directed at them precisely because
    of their proximity and vulnerability. Others trust their partners
    implicitly and have no inkling of what lies ahead.
    In the last year for which statistics are available, eighteen hundred
    women in the United States were murdered by men, more than half of
    those by a current or former husband or boyfriend. Intimate partner
    homicide is a truly one-sided phenomenon, as less than 5 percent of
    male murder victims are killed by their wife or girlfriend.
    One of the most disturbing and perplexing aspects of the Peterson
    case was the fact that Laci was nearly eight months pregnant at the
    time she was murdered. It was unthinkable to most people that a
    man could kill not only his wife but also his unborn son. Yet young
    women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine—women in

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    their prime childbearing years—are most likely to be killed by their
    partner. In fact, pregnancy may place them at greater risk of being
    murdered.
    Recent studies from several states and cities across the country
    have found homicide to be the number one cause of death among
    pregnant women and that women continue to be at increased risk
    for being murdered for up to a year after giving birth.
    An analysis of five years of death records in Maryland revealed that
    a pregnant or recently pregnant woman is more likely to die from
    homicide than any other cause whatsoever. Homicide was discovered
    to be the single biggest cause of injury-related death among pregnant
    and postpartum women in New York City and Cook County, Illinois,
    and among women up to a year after giving birth in the state of
    Georgia. Researchers reviewing eight years of autopsy records of
    reproductive-age women in the District of Columbia found murder
    to be the second most common cause of death among pregnant
    women, just one death behind medical complications related to
    pregnancy.
    A 2005 study that attempted to look at the problem nationally
    found homicide to be the second leading cause of injury death in
    pregnant and postpartum women, behind motor vehicle accidents.
    But Isabelle Horon and Diana Cheng, authors of the Maryland
    study, believe that the national study seriously undercounted the
    number of pregnancy-associated homicides because it looked solely
    at voluntarily submitted death certificates for women who died
    during pregnancy or within a year of delivery.
    In their own 2001 study, the two researchers from Maryland’s
    state Department of Health found that only a small portion of
    pregnancy-associated deaths could be determined from death cer-tificates. The rate of homicide reported in the national study was
    suspiciously low compared to the earlier regional studies, six times
    lower than what the Maryland researchers found in their state by
    using medical examiner and other records in addition to death
    certificates.
    In any event, it is clear that the true number of pregnant or
    recently pregnant women who are murdered is higher than anyone
    has yet estimated, as pregnancy is not even looked for in all autopsies
    and may go undetected when women are killed in early stages of
    pregnancy. Nor are the numbers of ‘‘erased’’ women whose bodies

    Out of the Shadows
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    are never found to be autopsied or to be issued a death certificate
    included in any of these studies.
    Although murder is the most extreme form of a larger epidemic
    of domestic violence—an estimated two to four million American
    women are physically assaulted by their partner every year—the