Roscoe Evans, 28, sits in a room the size of a walk-in closet at Joliet Correctional Center where inmates meet their attorneys or relatives. Dressed in his blue prison-issue uniform, he has eyes as dark as a fawn`s and strong cheekbones. Once, he says, he was considered handsome, well dressed, intelligent. He is talking about those days in the past, when he was making good money as a waiter, when he was in love.
”I felt like I was going somewhere,” Evans says. ”And one of the things I loved about Patti so much was that she supported me. She made me feel like I didn`t have to be ashamed of coming from a family that was poor and wasn`t wealthy like hers. To her, I was Roscoe, and that was okay. I was going to have all the things I wanted. I was going to be happy. And I was. I was making $150 a night in tips, and we were drinking champagne. ”
Now, three years later, dozens of operations to repair the damage wrought by Evans` suicide attempt have left welts of scars on his throat and his abdomen. Liquid drain cleaner has all but destroyed his esophagus and stomach lining. He carries with him a stack of paper napkins because, often during conversation, he drools uncontrollably.
When he talks, his voice sounds as if he is underwater.
Three years ago, Evans unleashed a fury over the loss of his girlfriend that would change his life. With the pull of the trigger, he thought he would find freedom from pain. He thought he would reverse the course of his own tragedy. Instead, he wrought even more grief.
Now the doors of his future are locked. All over a girlfriend. All because she said, simply: Goodbye.
On Sunday, March 24, 1985, Evans sat with Patricia Armstrong, then his 22-year-old girlfriend, in a restaurant parking lot on Chicago`s South Side before going in to eat dinner.
”This is the last time we are going to see each other,” she had said.
”This time I mean it. It`s over.”
Evans did not believe her, in part because he didn`t want to, and, in part, because he had heard it before. In their two years of dating, there had been many breakups. Patti`s father, Charles Armstrong Sr., had forbidden her to see him. Evans was sure that her family`s pressure was the only source of her discontent.
”I think she felt that the family would disown her if she kept on seeing me,” Evans says. ”Every time we would get into a fight, I would call her on the job and beg her and say, `Don`t leave me. Give me another chance.` And she would. She would give me another chance.` But this time she didn`t.”
On the following day, Monday, at noon, Evans walked into the South Side offices of the weekly Chicago Metro-News and shot and killed Patti`s father, its publisher, and shot and wounded her brother, Charles Jr. Then he ran to the roof of the building and swallowed as much liquid drain cleaner as he could before he passed out.
”I just wanted him to suffer like I did,” Evans says now. ”I wanted somebody else to suffer.”
Evans is serving a 50-year sentence for first-degree murder and attempted murder. He will be eligible for parole in the year 2010.
Curiously, the source of his deepest suffering is not that he murdered or that he will spend probably one-third of his life in the horror that is prison or even that solid foods are now physical torture for him. It is this: ”I don`t care about the time. I don`t even complain about the time. I don`t mind doing the time. I deserve it. . . . The worst pain I have now is that Patti is out there suffering for what I`ve done.”
”He was so wrapped up in the girl,” says his mother, Ruby Evans. ”He just had to have her. They went back and forth so often and so many times he would come home and say: `I`m a failure.` I finally just told him to go on and find him someone else because it won`t work. But he loved her. He just loved his Patti.”
Much has been written about love addiction and obsessive behavior in relationships. Late last year came ”Fatal Attraction,” and the public was taken one step beyond to the jarring manifestation of rage upon rejection. In the film, Glenn Close portrays a woman seeking horrific revenge on her weekend lover and his family. The film was violent and bloody and loved and praised. Perhaps, as its producers love to suggest, the reason for its universal attraction is because it hit close to home for many viewers.
Its persistent late-night phone calls, the calculated ”chance”
meetings, the damage to cars have been the tools of desperation for many unrequited lovers.
”We`ve all had experiences in relationships that we knew were over, but we still were in love and refused to accept the truth,” says Chicago psychiatrist Richard A. Crane.
”Sometimes love doesn`t follow logic. That`s why they call it passion.” Spurned by the object of desire, it`s not uncommon to fantasize revenge. Furtively acting on it-even in the form of secretly punctured car tires-is not unheard of. But a few persons, for reasons that may be fixed at birth or at childhood, go on to violence.
”Someone obsessively in love or jealous who reacts aggressively is influenced by more than passion,” Crane says. ”They may have a biological disorder and suffer from paranoid schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness.
”Or their self-image may be devastated by lack of love in childhood. People badly hurt in childhood feel entitled to others` love to make up for their suffering,” Crane says.
Obsessive lovers become so intertwined with their new love that they lose all grasp of their own sense of self, according to Crane. They identify themselves so closely with the other person that rejection becomes a threat to their own survival.
”See, I just felt with her . . . safe,” Evans says. ”When I was away from Patti, I just felt like everything was bad and when I was with her, even when we would argue, everything was okay. . . . I told her I would do anything for her to stay. Anything.”
”Rejection triggers complete helplessness,” says Hyla Cass, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. ”In response to that helplessness, there is tremendous rage. The emotionally mature person has a measure of self-control. These people don`t.
”It all goes back to the mother-infant bond, where there is a real sense that if you lose the mother, you die. That`s transferred in an obsessive love relationship: `If I don`t have this person, I`m going to die.` It`s like an addiction. `If I don`t have my fix, I`m going to die.` There is this incredible desperation and it`s overwhelming,” Cass says.
In many cases, obsessive lovers become delusional. ”They can really believe that this person is in love with them and wants them but just won`t admit it,” Cass says. ”It`s not love, really; it`s projection. It`s similar to groupies who idolize rock stars: They don`t have any real interest in who the person is; they`re just interested in what their fantasy of the person is.”
According to 1986 FBI statistics, 1,400, or 30 percent, of all women slain in this country were killed by their husbands or boyfriends. The number of girlfriends who murder their boyfriends amounts to a tiny percentage, 1.3 percent of all murders in 1981 and 1.5 percent in 1986. But in reverse, the number of boyfriends who have killed their girlfriends has risen, in small increments, yet steadily, from 1.8 percent of all murders in 1981 to 2.6 percent in 1986.
To be sure, they are not overwhelmingly large numbers, but they do hint that the violent end in ”Fatal Attraction” is not an isolated Hollywood case.
”It`s not an uncommon phenomenon,” says psychologist Shelley Neiderbach, president of Crime Victims Counseling Services Inc. in New York.
”I would say we were seeing more of it. Domestic abuse, child abuse, all of this is now coming out of the closet because people are now more willing to talk about it.”
It is a tragedy that strikes the affluent and the poor. In September, 1982, 22-year-old actress Dominique Dunne, daughter of novelist Dominick Dunne, was strangled in Los Angeles by John Sweeney, her 27-year-old boyfriend of several months. Five weeks before her death, the couple had broken up after Sweeney attempted to choke her, according to her father. He was convicted of manslaughter and served two-and-a-half years.
In September, 1986, 14-year-old Jennifer Crompton of Bettendorf, Ia., was stabbed 63 times by Mark Smith, her 18-year-old boyfriend. It was just short of a month after Crompton told her parents she had ”cut the tie.”
Smith is serving a life sentence and is not eligible for parole.
Richard Herrin, a graduate of Yale University, bludgeoned his girlfriend, Bonnie Garland, a 20-year-old Yale student, with a hammer in the summer of 1977 after she had fallen asleep while watching TV with him at her parents`
home. Garland had just informed him that she wanted to date other people.
In June, 1987, Stan Beatty, a carpenter in Indianapolis, held girlfriend Kathy Hall hostage in her office overnight. He demanded $1 million to give to the poor in order to demonstrate to his girlfriend what a caring person he was. In the morning, he surrendered peacefully.
In 1983, Jarvis Brooks was the salutatorian of his class at John Marshall High School in Chicago. He was in the National Honor Society and had received awards for academic achievement and perfect attendance. But in September, 1986, the future that looked so bright was destroyed. He shot his high school sweetheart of three years and threw the gun on the roof of his alma mater. Brooks surrendered to police and is serving a 25-year prison term for murder. ”He was very bright, very articulate and well mannered,” remembers his attorney, Salvatore Marzullo. ”If you knew him, you wouldn`t think for a million years he would do something like this. He always said: `I loved her. I loved her.` All the way through. He cried like a baby on the stand saying that.”
Although their acts are brutal, these are people who had not been considered deranged or mad. But they are people on the brink, and then a lover pushes them over. As New York psychologist Neiderbach says: ”These things are happening to people you know, rather than the stranger who is coming to your door to do you in.”
In January, 1986, Kim, a pretty, 19-year-old high school graduate, was reported missing from her family`s home in an affluent Chicago suburb. Her disappearance had been discovered by a friend who found the front doors open in the bitter cold. It appeared that she had just finished taking a shower. There was a wet towel on the floor, her curling iron was left on, and the space heater in the bathroom still was humming. In the bedroom, a lamp had been knocked over. Upstairs, two telephone lines had been severed. Downstairs, the basement door and its frame lay splintered on the floor.
Two days later, Kim (because she and her family do not want to publicly recount her ordeal, they have asked for anonymity) called her distraught parents from the Stapleton International Airport in Denver and told them she was safe. Only a week before, Kim had broken off her relationship with her 20- year-old boyfriend, Tom, after living with him in his apartment for two years.
He had made repeated attempts to call and visit her at work. Once, he even hid in the bushes of her parents` home, hoping to talk to her. Then the pain of his rejection turned to rage. He abducted her at gunpoint and handcuffed her to the inside of his 1982 Mercury Lynx. He told her he wanted to drive to the Continental Divide, where they would die together.
Two days into the fateful journey, Tom saw the damage of his obsession and released her physically unharmed but emotionally battered. Four months later, moments before a federal court judge sentenced him for kidnaping, Tom`s attorney read a letter in court from Kim.
”I don`t want to see him go to jail,” she wrote. ”He is not a threat to society, and he is no threat to me. He would never do anything like that again. I`ve talked to him, and he said he would do anything to take it all back and wash the memories from my mind. I know that is not possible, but doesn`t it count for something? . . . I think he just cracked when I left him. . . . He just needs a second chance.”
The letter did not convince the judge. Tom was sentenced to five years in prison. ”I was shocked and disappointed,” says Jack P. Rimland, Tom`s lawyer. ”The letter had no effect on the judge whatsoever. Even the prosecutor said to me before sentencing, `Tell his parents he`ll be home for dinner tonight.` ”
At the time, writing the letter seemed the right thing to do, her father says. Even if Kim`s parents and friends did not approve, somehow she still felt some guilt for leaving him.
Last February, Tom was released from prison. He has a job now and is trying to start a new life. He has not tried to contact Kim, and Kim doesn`t ask about his whereabouts. She still is trying to forget that the man who loved her also wanted to deny her all her tomorrows.
”She`s looking over her shoulder now,” Kim`s father says. ”In retrospect, the first time I met Tom, he came into our house and shook my hand, smiled and was as pleasant as could be. But further on in their relationship, he did not want Kim to have any other male friends. She would say, `They are just my friends, and I`m not in love with them.` And Tom would say, `You don`t need any friends. You`ve got me.`
”Then came some violent days. Like getting Kim in the car and driving around town, careening around the corners and scaring . . . her.
. . . Whatever he wanted, he always got. And when he couldn`t have Kim, he wanted nobody else to have her either.”
Tom`s motive was to take away Kim`s autonomy, her father says.
”They can`t give themselves totally to someone who is going to have an independent will,” psychiatrist Crane says. ”After all, if you are going to have a will of your own, you might change your mind. You might leave.”
Certainly not all obsessive lovers reach the point of violence, but there is the potential for many to exhibit irrational behavior.
”The obsessed lover has a sense of self so impaired that there is a constant search for someone else to fill that gap,” according to Susan Weitzman, a clinical social worker in the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago Medical Center. ”Which, of course, no one else can do. ”Those that are predisposed to violence have such a huge amount of unresolved primitive rage at whoever let them down in the past that they transfer it to the person they are involved with in the present,” Weitzman says.
What is so ironic about the obsessive lover is that the beloved becomes the reason both for living and dying.
”I didn`t know how I was going to live without her,” Roscoe Evans says. ”She was the only real thing I`ve had in my life.”
