Who You Know Can Be Deadly : Violence: Strangers may pose dangers, but chances are, if you are murdered, it will be by a relative, roommate, co-worker, neighbor or some other acquaintance.

About 20,000 times each year in the United States, murderers shoot, stab, strangle, mangle and perform other unthinkable acts.

The public’s perception is that most of these murders are random acts of violence, and in gang-plagued urban areas that perception is fueled by nightly news of drive-by shootings and other atrocities. No wonder the murder of Boston attorney Carol Stuart caught the attention of an entire nation.

Last October, Stuart’s husband, Charles, claimed their car was invaded by a black assailant after the couple left a childbirth class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Charles Stuart was seriously wounded. Carol Stuart died shortly after their son was delivered by Cesarean section; the premature baby lived only 17 days. Boston police launched a massive manhunt for the criminal; it was reported that Stuart identified a suspect in a police lineup.

Three months after the crime, Charles Stuart apparently jumped from a bridge to his death after he learned he had become the chief suspect in the case. If Charles Stuart indeed killed his wife, her death fits a pattern. In more than 60% of the murders committed in the United States, the killer was someone the victim knew.

The Stuart case fed the nation’s fears on two levels: fear of random violence and fear of racially motivated crime. Officials’ belief in Stuart’s story and the subsequent discovery that he was the likely killer has left Boston in the midst of what Mayor Raymond L. Flynn has called its worst racial crisis since the mid-1970s riots over court-ordered school desegregation.

In truth, if we are murdered, chances are it will be by a relative, roommate, co-worker, neighbor or some other acquaintance. Carol Stuart’s killing was sensational, but not unusual.

And it is one of many such cases to garner national headlines. Consider:

* In 1985 the body of Arleta teen-ager Michele Avila was found in a creek in Angeles National Forest. Shortly thereafter, her best friend, Karen Severson, moved into the family home to console the grieving mother. Severson was later arrested, along with another friend, for the crime. Their trial started Monday.

* In 1986, in Port Angeles, Wash., preacher Grady Young told authorities that burglars killed his wife of 38 years, but he was convicted of the crime in 1987.

* In 1975 Tommy Zeigler, a Winter Garden, Fla., furniture store owner told police that unknown assailants shot his wife Eunice, her parents, and a customer in his store. Zeigler was convicted in 1976.

* In 1970 Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald claimed a band of drug-crazed hippies invaded his Ft. Bragg, N.C., home and murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters. MacDonald was convicted of the crime in 1979.

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, “over half the murder victims in 1988 were related to (15%) or acquainted with (40%) their assailants.” Twelve percent were murdered by strangers, and “the relationships among victims and offenders were unknown in 33% of the murders.” (Police and social scientists assume there is a connection between victim and murderer in a large portion of homicides where the relationship is listed as unknown.)

Police officials in several jurisdictions list statistics that confirm the national trend. Of eight murders in Santa Monica last year, six were committed by people known to the victims, according to Police Detective Steve Rosenfeld. Detective Rick Swanston of the LAPD’s West Valley Division reports that 10 of last year’s 12 homicides were committed by people the victims knew. And at the Van Nuys Division, Detective Jim Vojtecky says that victims knew their murderers in 25 of the 26 homicide cases solved last year. (Citywide statistics were not available.)

As a result of the Stuart murder and the racial tensions it has exacerbated in Boston, social scientists, psychologists and legal experts say they hope Americans will start to explore the reality of violence instead of continuing to believe the mythology of random attacks.

“The problem is that people want to ignore reality” and prefer to think homicide occurs on dark seamy streets where evil strangers lurk, as it seemed at first in the Stuart case, said Venice attorney Paul Mones, who specializes in cases of children who murder their parents.

“It’s more likely,” Mones said, “that the person who assaults you in a parking lot is likely to be your boyfriend or girlfriend or someone hired by them than it is a stranger.

“The same is true in terms of a little girl who has been abducted, raped and killed. We think it’s some guy drooling in a beat-up car, as opposed to a well-dressed uncle, father or neighbor who knows the kid. But it’s more often the well-dressed father, the businessman, not the strangers” who do the deeds.

Added Mones: “Crime statistics show if you added together all the drug-related homicides, you still would not approach” the number of relatives and friends who kill each each other every year.

It’s much easier--and much more comfortable--experts say, to believe that a murderer is a stranger rather than someone we know. We are, said Mones, lulled into the belief that the family is a bastion of tranquillity and peace.

Boston police seemed to embrace Charles Stuart’s story of a nightmarish attack, although, according to Mones, “the circumstances of the homicide would lead an objective investigator” to look at the person who reported the crime as a suspect.

“Based on newspaper reports this guy took out an insurance policy on his wife right before she died. But still the police didn’t ask. They just accepted the fact that it’s a black man. A stranger. And the black community is up in arms, justifiably.”

Mones is one of many observers who say that physical violence has become so subtly woven into the fabric of family life, and into our culture, that most people are incapable of recognizing that violence when it is happening to them.

Donald Dutton, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and an expert on family violence agrees.

“People overestimate the danger of being attacked on the street and underestimate the danger of being attacked at home,” he said, adding that family violence experts estimate that anywhere from 30% to 75% of all marriages experience violence between the partners at one time or another.

Dutton and others say that media coverage of violent crime influences our perception of the likelihood of the event; drive-by shootings make for more sensational news coverage than do the more frequent episodes of family violence.

“Only 6.5% of wife assaults, for example, even get reported to the police, and a very low percentage of those ever make it to the courts or result in conviction,” Dutton said. “For that same reason we overestimate our danger of dying in a plane crash--crashes always make the news--and underestimate our danger of drowning. Drownings are more frequent but rarely get coverage.”

Kirk Williams is a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire and a research associate at the school’s Family Research Laboratory, which studies family violence. Based on studies he’s read, he thinks as many as 75% of homicides committed in this country are done by people who at least know each other, and about 25% are family-related.

To understand murder, he said, “We have to look at what’s going on inside the homes in this country. Historically, the home has been seen as a place of peace, solace, warmth and love.” But no more. “Once you look behind the closed doors, you see a very violent place.”

Home is a place where, in any given year, a number of physically aggressive acts are likely to take place, committed by one family member against another. It could be as mild as a push or a grab, Williams said. It could also be severe battery, sometimes repeated, he added.

A common finding in family violence research, Williams said, is that children who see violence at home tend to think it is acceptable, and grow up to establish violence-prone families of their own. “They think it’s OK for people who love each other to hit each other,” Williams said. And in many cases, when family members kill each other, its just because the small acts of violence have escalated into a larger one.

Solutions are hard to come by, said Williams. But if things don’t change, “the sanctity and privacy of the home may be in question,” with societal intervention mandated by government authority.

“We most often presume that that married lives are harmonious, that spouses care for each other and that things are good or the couple wouldn’t stay together,” said Julie Blackman, author of “Intimate Violence” (Columbia University Press) and a forensic psychologist and teacher at the Eugene Lang College of the New School for Social Research in New York. “For many that is incorrect. For some it couldn’t be more wrong.”

Certain people don’t recognize trouble because they’re living it.

“It’s hard to recognize the extent of your own suffering or to be insightful when you are in pain,” said Blackman, who added that women, especially, have a tendency not to recognize violence in the context of intimate relationships, even when they are suffering its effects.

That’s because “violence is not self-defining. When people hit each other, they provide the definition (of what’s violent and what isn’t) as they go along. They say, ‘I’m only doing this to you to teach you a lesson.’ ” The injured person does not think of it as a violent act.

“People who look at battered women,” for example, “think they must know that what’s been done to them is wrong,” she said. “But as a culture, we don’t know. We’re not singular in our response to violence. There’s no separate standard that informs us violence is bad.”

Said Williams: “We have . . . a lot of violent themes in our culture” evidenced even in children’s cartoons. By allowing it, we signal that violence is sometimes appropriate. “The good signal would be that it is never appropriate.”

Mones believes that police training could be modified to help officers better deal with the family violence they’re confronted with on a daily basis. And nonviolence training for parents would be helpful, too. “If we have driver education, we should also have parent education.”

“We still don’t have, on a state or national level, a coherent family violence policy,” Mones said. And that is tragic, he adds, because research proves that the whole, senseless cycle of violence is broken when people are taught there can be another way.

MURDER IN U.S. VICTIMS KILLED BY:

Family--15%

Friend / Acquaintance--36%

Boyfriend / Girlfriend--4%

Strangers--12%

Unknown Relationship--33%

Source: FBI Uniform Crime Report, 1988. Percentages rounded to nearest whole number.