Strange Fits of Passion

by Anita Shreve

  Maybe they had a plan. Who's to say? I mean, what were they goin' to do when Jack hauled his boat? How was he goin' to see her every day? You ever think of that?

  At the trial I had to say, didn't I, that she said the bruises were from a car accident. I was under oath. I know some people from town, they don't understand that, but bein' under oath is serious business to me.

  I don't know how she got found. I do recall this fella up from New York City, he come down the co-op askin' questions. I mighta said, if he asked was there someone new in town, that there was this girl with a baby, but I wouldn'ta let on where she lived or anythin' like that. If Mary didn't want to get found, that was her business, wasn't it?

  I'm real curious now about Judge Geary's verdict in September. She'll probably get off, 'cause he's partial to women.

  Julia Strout

  Yes, I had to testify at the trial. I testified as to the condition Mary Amesbury was in when she first arrived in St. Hilaire. Then I had to say that she'd told me that the bruises were from a car accident. But I was quick to say, before the lawyer interrupted me, that I hadn't believed her.

  I could not have done what Mary Amesbury did. I don't believe so. I don't think I could have shot a man, but who is to say what a person might be driven to? I know that they say she killed this man, her husband, in cold blood. She could have asked Jack or Everett for help. She could have done any number of things, I suppose. But then who is to say that an act of passion, of hot blood if you will, has a finite limit of only a minute or two? Who's to say an act of passion couldn't last all the way through going out to the boat to get the gun and returning with it and shooting the man who was hurting you? Who you were sure would hurt you again. Who might eventually kill you. Who's to say an act of passion couldn't last for weeks or months if it came to that?

  So I can't tell you what will happen to Mary in September. They say she might get off, and I hope that's true.

  But when I think about this terrible business over to the point, what I feel most is ... distressed. I feel distressed for Mary and for Jack, and distressed about Rebecca, and most of all now, worried for Emily and this little baby I'm taking care of now. It's Emily and the baby I feel for.

  Listen. Do you hear that? That's the baby now. It always takes me by surprise. It's a strange sound in this house after all these years. But a welcome one. My husband and I, we didn't have any children ourselves, and I was always sorry about that.

  I just have the baby until Mary gets out.

  Would you like to see her? I saw his picture.... She looks like her father.

  The Article

  The Killing Over to the Point

  by Helen Scofield

  Sam Cotton seemed preoccupied. He looked uncomfortably hot in his best blue suit and in his shiny black wing tips, which were getting ruined in the sand. It was unseasonably warm on Flat Point Bar this September afternoon, and the talk in this small coastal town of St. Hilaire, Maine, 65 miles north of Bar Harbor, was that the temperature would hit 85 before the day was out.

  Cotton put a finger between his collar and his neck, then wiped his bald pate with a handkerchief. He was headed for the end of the bar, also known as "the point," so that he could get a better look at a green-and-white lobster boat that was bobbing in the channel. When he finished examining the boat, he made his way back to the other end of this small peninsula that juts into the Atlantic. There he stood next to his car below a modest white cottage that overlooks the point and the water. Apart from the odd wave to a fisherman heading for shore in his dinghy, Cotton said nothing and spoke to no one. The entire round trip, including the time he spent gazing at and thinking about the boat and the cottage, took about twenty minutes. He does this every day.

  Defense attorney Sam Cotton, 57, has been practicing criminal law in eastern Maine for almost 30 years. But his current case, at the Superior Court in Machias, may be the most complicated defense he's undertaken. It is certainly the most celebrated. The case is known around here as "that awful business up to Julia's cottage," or "that terrible story about the Amesbury woman," or "the killing over to the point." Sam Cotton must prove his client, a 26-year-old woman, innocent of murdering her husband last January in the small white cottage Cotton has spent so much time studying. And there isn't much time. Next week, at the conclusion of the second trial of a woman known both as Maureen English and as Mary Amesbury, Judge Joseph Geary is expected to deliver his verdict.

  As Cotton has told it, the bare facts of the case are these:

  Following two years of domestic violence at the hands of her troubled and alcoholic husband—including repeated rapes and physical assault, even while she was pregnant—Maureen English left her home in New York City last December 3 with her infant daughter, Caroline, and drove 500 miles to the small fishing village of St. Hilaire to seek refuge. There, under the alias Mary Amesbury, she rented the white cottage on Flat Point Bar and settled in to a life of quiet tasks, centered around caring for her six-month-old daughter and nursing herself back to both physical and emotional health.

  In the early morning of January 15, after six weeks in hiding, Mary Amesbury was surprised and frightened by her husband's sudden appearance in her bedroom. Harrold English, 31, a successful journalist with this magazine, had driven to Maine to confront his wife. He'd been tipped off to her whereabouts by a physician at a local health clinic Mary Amesbury had visited.

  Sometime during these early-morning hours, English assaulted his wife with a sharp instrument, raped her, and hit her so violently in the head she was knocked unconscious.

  Believing her life was in danger, Mary Amesbury waited until her husband had passed out from excessive drinking and then made her way to the end of the point. There she crossed a short expanse of water and located a gun she knew was kept on a green-and-white lobster boat moored in the channel. She returned to the cottage, and fearful that her husband would kill her when he came to, shot him twice—once in the shoulder and once in the chest.

  Cotton claims she acted in self-defense. So does Mary Amesbury. "I had to do it," she says. "I had no choice."

  Last June, a jury was unable to reach a verdict in Mary Amesbury's case, and the trial ended in a hung jury. There were seven votes for acquittal; five for a guilty verdict. Cotton immediately moved for dismissal, but D. W. Pickering, the prosecuting attorney, asked for a new trial date in September. In a surprise move in early July, Cotton announced that his client would waive her right to a trial by jury. Cotton has not commented on his strategy, but sources close to the defense attorney suggest that Judge Geary's reputation for leniency toward women may be the explanation.

  At both trials, Cotton likened his client to a modern-day Hester Prynne, the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic The Scarlet Letter. Both, said Cotton, were wronged women, romantic figures, living out quiet exiles in cottages by the sea and both fiercely protective of young daughters. Both women were outcast and doomed by love to carry the scarlet "A" on their breasts. In the case of Mary Amesbury, the "A" stood not for adultery, but for abuse.

  When Mary Amesbury tells her own story, however, she comes across as somewhat more complex than just a "wronged woman." And her story sometimes raises more questions than it satisfactorily answers.

  To prevent her husband from finding her, Maureen English assumed the name Mary Amesbury when she arrived in St. Hilaire on December 3. She refused at both trials to answer questions when addressed as Maureen English. The prosecuting attorney solved the problem, addressing her as "Mrs. English/Mary Amesbury." Cotton deftly avoided using either name when he addressed his client on the stand.

  For seven weeks this summer. I conducted a series of exclusive interviews with Mrs. English while she was awaiting her second trial. Despite the tension and fear she was obviously feeling, Mrs. English was often eloquent. She was also sometimes sad and occasionally angry, but she was always forthcoming, even at times appearing to contradict testimony she had given in court. One of these interviews was
conducted in person. The rest were carried on through the mail.

  Because there were no adequate facilities in Machias for long-term female prisoners, Mrs. English has been remanded to the custody of the Maine Correctional Center at South Windham. As she sat in the visitors' room, she looked older than her 26 years. Her skin was pale and lined about the eyes and on her forehead. Her red hair, one of her most striking features, had been cut short, and there was a thin streak of gray over her left eye. Her posture was tense and angular beneath the gray sweatshirt and pants of her prison garb. When she spoke, she had a nervous habit of twirling a strand of hair between her fingers. Those who knew Maureen English less than a year ago find the changes in her appearance startling.

  I had met Mrs. English only once prior to our prison interview—at a party at this magazine's office in Manhattan. Although she had once worked there, she had left before I joined the staff. At the party she wore a black velvet dress and looked radiant as she showed off her infant daughter, Caroline, to her former colleagues. She struck me that evening as a happy woman, well-off and well-married, and content to take a few years off to start a family. Harrold, her husband, was almost constantly at his wife's side and kept what appeared to be a loving and protective arm around her shoulder. The idea that he might be beating his wife in the privacy of their home was inconceivable.

  During the course of telling her story, Mrs. English spoke at length about her childhood and her upbringing. The illegitimate daughter of a soldier and a secretary whose immigrant Irish family hailed from Chicago's south side, she spent most of her youth in child care, while her mother worked to support them. Mother and daughter lived in a small white cottage in the suburban town of New Athens, 20 miles south of Chicago. Mrs. English appeared to have been close to her hardworking mother and to have respected her values: "My mother would often tell me that things happened to a person and that you should learn to accept those things," Mrs. English said, "but I also understood from an early age that neither my mother nor I would be happy unless I did what I was supposed to do. Unless I seized for myself a life she had been denied—a life with a husband and a stable family."

  A talented student, Mrs. English was accepted at the University of Chicago in 1962. She studied literature and eventually became an editor on the university paper. A svelte, redheaded beauty with pale skin and large hazel eyes, Mrs. English eventually made her way to New York City. In June 1967, she was hired as a reporter with this magazine. She met Harrold English on her first day of work.

  Colleagues recall Maureen English as a diligent worker who learned her trade quickly. Although she was well-liked, she was something of a loner. With the exception of Harrold English, she made no serious lasting friendships at the magazine. Still, she was promoted in near record time to the National desk.

  "She was fast," says a former editor who worked closely with her. "Give Maureen English an assignment, and she'd have a solid story back to you before the day was out."

  Despite the disparity in their backgrounds, Maureen and Harrold appear to have been attracted to each other at once. Harrold came from a wealthy Rhode Island textile family and was educated at Yale. A tall, well-built, dark-eyed young man whose good looks and journalistic successes made him attractive to his female colleagues, he had been a reporter for the The Boston Globe before moving to New York City. He distinguished himself as both a national and foreign reporter and was a 1966 Page One Award winner for his series on the race riots in Watts. "He did some great pieces for us," says Jeffrey Kaplan, editor in chief during most of English's tenure. "He was an excellent reporter and was very aggressive in the field. His writing style was clean and straightforward. He was an extremely intelligent man."

  The pair began dating almost at once, and were seen as a "perfect" couple, both up-and-coming journalists, both very much in love. According to Maureen, Harrold gave her presents, tutored her in her reporting, and significantly aided her career.

  "I loved him," she said. "Even on the day I left him, I loved him."

  Co-workers maintain that there was never the slightest hint of friction between the couple, who almost immediately began living together in Harrold's Upper West Side apartment. "These reports of friction between Maureen and Harrold are unbelievable," says Kaplan. "I have trouble believing it even now. You hear about stories like this once in a while, but it's always some poor woman with six kids, married to an alcoholic. Never, I mean never, do you hear about this kind of thing with people like Maureen and Harrold."

  Yet alcohol and abuse are exactly what Mrs. English asserts formed the fabric of her marriage. The violence began even before the couple were married, she said. It started one night when she refused to have sexual relations with Harrold and he became angry. He'd been drinking a lot, she said. Eventually that became a pattern: Excessive drinking would often trigger violent mood swings in her husband. He assaulted her in their kitchen that night, she said, and "raped" her.

  Later, Mrs. English said, Harrold repeatedly had sex with her against her will and then physically assaulted her—striking her in places where the bruises wouldn't show.

  "I think he believed if you couldn't see the bruises, it hadn't ever happened," said Mrs. English.

  She also said that her husband raped her and hit her even when she was pregnant. "I don't know what it was about the pregnancy that angered him so," she said. "Perhaps it was the fact that I was doing something that was beyond his control. He seemed to be happiest only when he was controlling me."

  Curiously, however, Mrs. English described herself as sometimes "complicitous," and hinted at'S&M sex games between herself and her husband that may have turned rougher than she anticipated. "I was part of it," she said, referring to "silk handcuffs" tied to a bed on their very first date. Sometime after a particularly brutal evening of sex that she subsequently began to think of as "rape," Mrs. English found herself wondering, "Was what had happened that night so very different from all that had gone before?"

  At other points in her account, she suggested that she was "a passive player" in the ongoing, furtively violent drama that was her marriage.

  In her interviews, Mrs. English came across as a passionate woman. Beneath the cool, contented, and hardworking exterior she presented to colleagues at work is a woman who uses words such as "ravenous," "lost," and "burning" to describe herself in relationship to her husband. "I was a toy top someone had spun and walked away from," she said, of their first date. She also described herself as being under the influence of "erotic fevers," as being "ensnared," and as having struck a "secret bargain" with her husband. For example, she described in detail a night of unconventional lovemaking but gave no hint that she thought the episode distasteful. To the contrary, she suggested she found it pleasurable. The implication in these revelations is that something in her own passionate nature may have contributed to the couple's unusual relationship.

  This ambiguity about the nature of the violence in the English household is crucial to any moral or legal judgment about the murder.

  One witness at the trial, Willis Beale, a lobster fisherman and something of an old salt, even at the tender age of 27, addresses this issue of the relativity of domestic violence from another angle. "I'm not saying she was lying, or anything like that, but we only ever had her say-so, didn't we?" says Beale, who seems to have made a point of befriending Mrs. English while she was in St. Hilaire—walking daily over to her cottage from the fish house where he mended his lobster pots on Flat Point Bar, to see if she was all right. "Most couples get into a little pushing and shoving at some point in their marriages. Nothing heavy. Just a little something. It takes two to tango, right? I'm just saying, how are we ever going to know?"

  The relative severity of the domestic feud between Harrold and Maureen English raises troubling ethical questions—particularly insofar as it casts a shadow of a doubt on her self-professed motive for the shooting—but there is an even more serious legal difficulty with Mrs. English's assertions of abuse and a
lcoholism in her marriage: No one has been able to produce a single shred of evidence to support them.

  Despite Mrs. English's testimony at her two trials, and her interviews with me, there has been no corroboration of scenes of violence between husband and wife. Although Mrs. English now says that her husband beat her up on at least three occasions and hit her repeatedly throughout their marriage, there is no evidence that she told anyone about this violence while it was happening.

  At the office party they attended together, none of those present had any hint of discord. While it is certainly possible that the scars of domestic violence might have been hidden, there were no visible marks on Mrs. English. She left the party early, telling former colleagues that she had to put her baby to bed. Now she asserts that her husband made her leave because he had seen her talking to another man and that when he arrived home from the party, he beat her severely. It was this beating, she said, that prompted her flight. "I prayed for my husband's death," she said.

  But if her situation was as bad as Mrs. English now asserts, why didn't she go to the police? Prosecuting attorney Pickering raised a similar issue at both trials: "If these allegations of violence are true, why didn't Mau/2 reen English leave her husband sooner, when the abuse began?"

  Upon arriving in St. Hilaire, Mrs. English told townspeople that her bruises were caused by a car accident. She also falsely claimed to be from Syracuse, facts that several St. Hilaire residents had to testify to at both trials. She declined to go to the police even after she ultimately told about the beatings.