Battered Wife’s Saga Renews Debate Over Self-Defense Killings

During their 6 1/2-year marriage, Jack Elson shopped for his wife’s clothes, decided which outfit she would wear each morning and determined the course of her day with a list of chores. He restricted her nail polish to pale pink and peach, forbade makeup, decided what she would cook for dinner, matched the change she received against the receipt.

In the beginning, the beatings were sporadic. He would slug her with closed fists because the pork chops were dry, punch her in the stomach while she was pregnant because the toast was burned, then apologize with flowers.

“If he told me he would kill me, I believed it. If he opened the door and said, ‘Go,’ I wouldn’t, for fear he’d stab me in the back on the way out,” Robin Elson said. “I was a robot.”

But on the evening of Dec. 17, 1988, she crept behind her husband’s brown reclining chair, stood her 4-foot, 9-inch, 70-pound frame against the wall and shot him to death with his 9-millimeter rifle.

Last month, a Long Beach jury decided the 28-year-old mother of three killed her husband in self-defense. The case was little noticed until it ended. Since then, it has sparked heated debate.

Domestic violence experts believe the verdict to be the first time in Los Angeles County, and possibly the state, that a woman has been acquitted of murder using a defense based on the “battered wife syndrome.”

The law requires there be “imminent danger” to justify killing in self-defense. What made Robin Elson’s case unusual is that she shot her husband three times in the back while he sat in his chair, possibly asleep.

The controversial verdict has been hailed by women’s rights advocates as long-overdue recognition of the battered woman’s mental state.

Her defenders say Robin Elson was trapped. She twice ran away and was found by her husband. But prosecutors have denounced the verdict as a throwback to jungle law.

Denis Petty, head deputy district attorney in Long Beach, put it this way: “She could have left the state, gone to a neighbor, called the police. He was asleep when the first shot was fired. He wasn’t posing any threat. And when we start allowing citizens to take matters into their own hands, we are back to the law of the jungle.”

But prosecutors do not dispute that Jack Elson was abusive. The following account is based on court testimony, neighbors’ recollections and interviews with Robin Elson.

The Elson family never fit in on the middle-class block of manicured homes on Pavo Street where Jack grew up and where some of the same residents still live today. A psychologist’s report said that when Jack got big enough, he once gave his mother a beating for burning a chicken. When he inherited the house years later and lived there with Robin, their two sons, and Robin’s daughter by a previous relationship, the neighbors said the violence were already routine.

They heard children in the house pleading, “Please, Daddy, don’t.”

As Jack’s violence escalated, the neighbors’ aversion turned to fear. But no one ever called the police.

“I tried not to irritate him. I was scared to death of that man,” said Nola De Martino, 74.

She was cleaning her motor home one day when she saw Jack order stepdaughter Renee, then 6, to do 100 push-ups on hot cement.

“She kept collapsing,” De Martino said. “He made her start over from 1 and do 100. She was saying, ‘Please, I can’t do this, please.’ ”

Ann Bennett, who lived three doors away, remembers a day in 1987 when Jack jammed a garden hose in the mouth of 18-month-old son, Camrin, and turned on the water full force. She walked into her house and shut the door.

Robin said that Elson never mentioned he had married four times before, that one of his wives was hiding from him and another had sought a restraining order when he beat her for slicing onions too big.

The beatings intensified while she was pregnant with their second son, and she left him. He found her at her mother’s house two weeks later and promised to kill them all if she left again.

Baby Brock arrived two months premature. When Robin Elson came home from the hospital, 9-year-old Renee was on the couch with ice packs, her eyes swollen almost shut, her upper lip touching her nose.

One day in the spring of 1988, Jack spent 2 1/2 hours beating Camrin, then 2. He held him upside down by the ankles and pounded his head against a black metal table over and over again. The boy was bleeding from the ear when his father put him to bed and announced, “He’ll never look at me like that again.”

Two months later, she and her children were placed in a shelter for battered women in East Los Angeles. Six months later, she opened the door and found Jack Elson standing there instead.

He promised to reform. But when they returned to Pavo Street, “He told me 50 times a day he would kill me and the kids if we ever left again,” Robin said.

Under the law, it is permissible to kill in self-defense when confronted by circumstances the “average reasonable person” would consider an “imminent danger.” But it is not unusual for a severely battered woman to believe her life is in constant danger and retaliate when her husband is least likely to strike back, the experts say.

Juries, however, typically have rejected the argument that a woman is in imminent danger if her abusive mate is at rest, partly because expert testimony about the battered wife syndrome has been excluded by some judges as irrelevant and restricted by others, the experts say.

Long Beach Superior Court Judge G. William Dunn allowed some of the most ample testimony about the battered wife syndrome ever admitted in a Los Angeles County court.

Saturday, Dec. 17, 1988, was set aside for buying a Christmas tree. But Jack Elson started drinking straight vodka at 7 a.m., according to testimony, and spent several hours kicking and choking his family instead.

He poked the garden hose down the throat of the family’s pet terrier, Maggie, then threw the dog on the roof. He decided two men were going to break into his house and rape the children. He ordered his wife to retrieve his rifle, inserted the clip and taught her how to use it.

While the children hid in a bedroom, he poked Robin’s chest with the rifle barrel. “It’s time to get rid of you, you illiterate slut.” he said.

Then he set the rifle by his reclining chair, placed the phone at his side and sat down to watch “The Little Rascals.”

She said she was convinced they were all going to die that night.

Then it was quiet. Gambling that he was asleep, she stood and leaned against the wall. The gun fired.

She fired twice more into his back. The fatal bullet pierced his aorta.

For the first time, a neighbor called the police.

Robin Elson and her children live now in a two-bedroom apartment in Long Beach. She has put on 25 pounds and is trying to quit smoking. The family is in extensive therapy. Renee’s grades are improving.

The house on Pavo Street is empty, seized by the state. A neighbor cut the lawn when it grew too high.

“He got what he deserved,” one of them said.

Nola De Martino looks at the house, finally quiet, from her kitchen window. “I cry about it and I pray about it. I even prayed for Jack that he wouldn’t go to hell,” she said. “But I don’t know how he couldn’t.”