Diary Shows Woman’s Fear of Ex-Husband

Barbara Steele carefully documented how terrified she was of her ex-husband.

“Our dog never gets let outside, I never get to take my contacts out of my eyes, and I sleep in my clothes,” she wrote in a diary she kept of Allen Steele’s erratic and increasingly menacing behavior.

Her last entry was April 18. Two days later, her former husband shot her to death, then killed himself.

The diary was found among legal memos on Barbara Steele’s office computer. Her family released it in the hopes that it would help other women.

“We’re hoping . . . because of Barb’s death, a judge or the authorities will look at our laws and try to protect women and their children from people like this,” said Kathleen McGowan, a colleague at Foley & Lardner, the Milwaukee law firm where Barbara Steele worked as a typist.

Exactly why she kept the log isn’t clear. Barbara sent pages to her children’s lawyer to expose her former husband’s behavior. But whether she wanted to stop Steele’s unsupervised visits with their three children or was compiling evidence in case anything happened to her, her family didn’t know.

Her lawyer, Roger Rustad, declined to comment on the diary, citing lawyer-client confidentiality. The children’s lawyer, Judith Budny, did not immediately return a call.

Allen had court-ordered, unsupervised visits with Alexandra, 8, Cassandra, 6, and 20-month-old David. But Barbara often gave in to his demands to see the children outside of his scheduled visits to avoid confrontations.

“I don’t want to keep the children away from their dad; I just want them to be ‘mentally’ safe and happy,” she wrote in a letter to the children’s attorney in October.

Allen never hit his ex-wife, said Barbara’s best friend, Leslie Meka, but his behavior became increasingly hostile. “She was more worried about him doing something to his kids,” Meka said.

In the diary’s first entry, dated March 1, 1995, Barbara said her former husband was “doing everything in his power to cause heartache and trouble.”

“Allen has been telling the children terrible lies about me, screaming at me in front of the children and making me bring the police into our lives almost every day,” she wrote.

A diary entry dated March 2, 1995, reveals Barbara’s concerns about her ex-husband’s influence on the children: “Allen never sees his family, has no friends, and now, I fear, has no job. If Allen is telling the girls these types of things, it is no wonder that Alexandra comes into bed by me every night, and Cassandra always gives me hugs and kisses and tells me to ‘never let go.’ ”

On March 10, 1995, Steele disappeared with the children. Police found them four days later, 200 miles north. “The sheriffs found a lot of guns, one gun was hidden under the girls in the front seat,” Barbara wrote.

Allen paid a $261 fine for carrying a concealed weapon and temporarily lost unsupervised visitation rights. Barbara obtained a restraining order against him in early 1995 and eight months later a divorce.

Barbara wrote about how her daughters had grown afraid of Allen and how David cried whenever his father was near.

A thousand people attended Barbara’s funeral. The youngest, David, still cries for his mother.

“He’s looking for Momma to come home,” said Barbara’s sister, Joyce Mares. “He’s still looking.”