THE LAW HAS ALWAYS MADE ROOM FOR KILLERS. SOLDIERS KILL THE nation’s enemies, executioners kill its killers, police officers under fire may fire back. Even a murder is measured in degrees, depending on the mind of the criminal and the character of the crime. And sometime this spring, in a triumph of pity over punishment, the law may just find room for Rita Collins. “They all cried, didn’t they? But not me,” she starts out, to distinguish herself from her fellow inmates in a Florida prison, who also have stories to tell. “No one will help me. No one will write about me. I don’t have a dirty story. I wasn’t abused as a child. I was a respectable government employee, employed by the Navy in a high position in Washington.” Her husband John was a military recruiter, a solid man who had a way with words. “He said I was old, fat, crazy and had no friends that were real friends. He said I needed him and he would take care of me.” She says his care included threats with a knife, punches, a kick to the stomach that caused a hemorrhage. Navy doctors treated her for injuries to her neck and arm. “He’d slam me up against doors. He gave me black eyes, bruises. Winter and summer, I’d go to work like a Puritan, with long sleeves. Afterward he’d soothe me, and I’d think, He’s a good man. What did I do wrong?” The bravado dissolves, and she starts to cry. “I was envied by other wives. I felt ashamed because I didn’t appreciate him.” After each beating came apologies and offerings, gifts, a trip. “It’s like blackmail. You think it’s going to stop, but it doesn’t.” Collins never told anyone — not her friends in the church choir, not even a son by her first marriage. “I should have, but it was the humiliation of it all. I’m a professional woman. I didn’t want people to think I was crazy.” But some of them knew anyway; they had seen the bruises, the black eye behind the dark glasses. She tried to get out. She filed for divorce, got a restraining order, filed an assault-and-battery charge against him, forced him from the house they had bought with a large chunk of her money when they retired to Florida. But still, she says, he came, night after night, banging on windows and doors, trying to break the locks. It wasn’t her idea to buy a weapon. “The police did all they could, but they had no control. They felt sorry for me. They told me to get a gun.” She still doesn’t remember firing it. She says she remembers her husband’s face, the glassy eyes, a knife in his hands. “To this day, I don’t remember pulling the trigger.”
