A Rage to Kill (31 page)

E
loise Amelia “Amy” Packard*
was only sixteen when she met the man she would one day marry. The fine bone structure of her face and her ebony hair had come from her Indian heritage, and her perfect complexion from her Irish relatives. The tall redheaded young man from Oklahoma couldn’t take his eyes off her when they met for the first time in 1962.

Amy worked as a mother’s helper for a family in Olympia—the capital city of Washington State—and they loved her like their own. But she wanted to be with Eric Shaw* and they knew that it wouldn’t be long before they were going to be looking for someone else to help with their children. They advised Amy to wait until she was eighteen, and she did, although it was difficult. It appeared to be the culmination of a perfect romance when Amy and Eric Shaw were married in January 1964, in Olympia. Amy was then eighteen and Eric almost twenty-one.

The future seemed all charted out for the couple, but then the Vietnam War intervened and Eric was drafted. He was inducted into the Army on December 5, 1966. He went off to basic training, and Amy stayed behind. She was enormously pregnant with their first child, and frightened to travel to a strange Army town where she didn’t know anybody. Eric seemed to understand her need to stay in Olympia. Their little girl, Rose*, was born in 1967.

With her husband headed toward the Far East, Amy was having a very difficult time. For some reason, Eric had never signed the papers that would qualify her to receive dependent’s benefits, and she had barely enough to live on. She wrote to him again and again asking him to sign the papers but he never seemed to get around to it. In the meantime, she lived on their savings. Her friends were worried when they realized that Amy had actually lost weight because she had run out of food. In desperation, Amy finally wrote to Eric’s commanding officer to ask about her benefits.

It was possible that Eric never got Amy’s letters, and Amy hoped that was true; she didn’t like to think that it was out-of-sight–out-of-mind as far as she was concerned. She had agonized about writing to his C.O., but she was desperate. Then she worried that her husband might be angry when he found out she had gone over his head.

Eric was very much occupied at the time fighting a war. The Army suited him. By March 20, 1968, he had risen to Specialist 4th Class in Company B, 1st Battalion. He was an expert in light weapons, something he realized wouldn’t be of much use in the civilian world. But he knew he could use the G.I. Bill when he needed it to go to college. The world outside Vietnam seemed as distant as another planet.

Amy waited for him to come home and busied herself taking care of their little girl. And once she began to receive her dependent’s allotment check, her life became much easier.

Eric did come home, far sooner than they had hoped, but under tragic circumstances. The six-foot, one-inch, 170-pound soldier had seen duty all over the north part of Vietnam and he had almost begun to believe he was invincible. But one moonless night, as he was walking guard duty near the Cambodian border, a sniper with a Russian AK-47 fixed Eric in his gunsight. The blast hit him in the right shoulder, traversed his chest, and exited near his stomach. And it severed his spinal cord.

From that moment on, Eric Shaw was a paraplegic, his spinal cord severed at thoracic level three. He still had some strength in his arms and upper body, but his legs began to wither and they would never support him again. He was sent home to Madigan Army Hospital in Tacoma to heal and to begin rehab.

Eric was awarded a Bronze Star, an Army Commendation Medal, Vietnamese Service Medal, Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal, National Defense Service Medal and a Combat Infantryman’s Medal. And he would be eligible for extensive educational, housing, and living expense benefits. But, before he was thirty, he was profoundly disabled.

Amy and Eric were together again, even though he offered her a divorce. She shook her head in disbelief. She had loved him when she married him, and she still loved him. She told him she would stick with him. Eric had not lost his ability to engage the physical side of their relationship, and Amy became pregnant for the second time. This time they had a son.

With Eric’s benefits, both he and Amy enrolled in Bellevue Community College east of Seattle. It looked for a time as though they really
could
pick up the pieces of their lives and start over.

But things were never the same again. The first overpowering romantic love they had shared was gone. According to those who knew Eric well, he had always found men superior to females. Women were second-class citizens to him. And that included his wife. His confinement to a wheelchair seemed to make him even more adamant about male superiority.

Eric considered jealousy a weakness, and he often said that women were far more jealous than men ever were—always snooping and asking questions. He liked to come and go without explaining himself. The marriage began to crack around its edges, minute flaws that were scarcely noticeable but which weakened the structure nonetheless.

Eric Shaw was a bitter man, railing against the cruel fate that had taken away the power in his legs. He began to flout the law in small ways; it was his way of proving he was still a man, perhaps. He bought a new, hand-controlled car and had it fitted with a muffler that roared, the loud pipes audible for blocks. He was stopped by the local police, who gave him a warning ticket. But Eric confided to his friends that he didn’t worry about the police: “They have no facilities to take care of me,” he said. “So I can do whatever I want.”

As a mature woman, Amy was more beautiful than she had been at sixteen. She was caught up with her marriage, her two children, and her school work and she had neither the time nor the inclination to flirt with other men. But Eric didn’t believe her. Jealousy, the very emotion that he derided, became the central focus of his life. He had a favorite song—“Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town.” The lyrics seemed to fit his life: a Vietnam veteran chained to a wheelchair complaining that his legs were “bent and paralyzed” while he begged his wife not to go to town without him.

The “Ruby” of that song popular in the seventies had “wants and needs,” and her agonized husband sang of getting his gun and putting her “in the ground.”

The irony of it was that Amy still loved Eric. It was
he
who was destroying their marriage with accusations and bitter complaints. She didn’t have a boyfriend; she’d never had any man but him, but he had changed. She had long since forgiven him for leaving her alone without money for food, but it was hard to forgive him for taunting her with vicious remarks about her character. Eric seemed to believe that the whole world was against him, and at the same time, that the world owed him a living. He felt he no longer had to obey the rules that everyone else did.

Amy Shaw didn’t talk to her friends about her problems, but they could see the strain on her face. She occasionally visited the family where she had been the mother’s helper so long ago. Without her saying a word, they could see that she was troubled.

Eric didn’t want to work, even though there were many jobs he was still qualified for. The government would send him to college for years; he could have a profession. But he chose to sit home and weep in his beer. Nothing Amy did seemed to be right. And Eric began to call her “Ruby” instead of Amy.

Sometime after Easter of 1972, Amy Shaw told her friends that she was going to divorce Eric, but she wouldn’t say why. She didn’t want to be disloyal to him or say anything bad about him. She felt guilty enough that she couldn’t stay with him. That spring, she and the children moved out.

Although he had complained about her constantly and made fun of her when they were together, Eric would not let Amy go. In July, he called her relatives and threatened them. “You’d better find Amy and get her over to my house or you’ll be sorry—”

Frightened by his vehemence, they did as he asked. But they had no idea what he was going to do; they thought that he was just going to plead with Amy to come back to him. Amy’s family watched in horror as Eric wheeled over to a nightstand in the master bedroom and pulled out a .38 revolver.

He pointed it at Amy, and said he was tired of supporting her and paying for her car if she wasn’t going to live with him. “This gun is always loaded,” he said quietly, “and I have nothing to lose.”

Finally, they were able to persuade him to hand over the gun. Still, Eric Shaw’s hatred of Amy seemed to permeate everything he did. Over and over again, he threatened to shoot her. He told anyone who would listen that he would kill her before he’d ever let her have custody of the children. They suspected he didn’t really want the responsibility of the children, but he used them to get back at Amy.

Once, Eric told his friends that he was going to hire someone to kill a man he thought Amy was seeing.

Eric Shaw was far from being a pitiful, loveless man. He had already met another woman, Mariel*, who was also a paraplegic. She had lost the use of her legs when she was injured in an automobile accident. She was a lovely young woman who quickly fell in love with Eric, who when he wanted to be, could be completely charming.

*   *   *

Amy and Eric’s divorce was final in July 1973. Amy won custody of their two children, but Eric had visitation rights. Eric wasted no time in remarrying; he and Mariel married just days after his divorce was final. He claimed to be euphorically happy in this new marriage, and he and Mariel lived in a $50,000 house and had an income of almost $1,400 each month from veterans’ benefits and Social Security. Today, in Seattle, that would mean living in a $250,000 house and having close to $5,000 a month, tax-free.

But even while he lived with Mariel, Eric Shaw could not forget Amy. He let her know often that he would never forgive her for whatever sins he imagined she had committed. He was a man obsessed. He carried his .38 with him all the time and he made sure Amy knew it.

Amy Shaw was trying to make a new life for herself and the children. She enrolled in a library science course at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Washington, so that she could support them. The small girl and boy would continue to receive the Social Security allotted to the children of those disabled in the service of their country. But those benefits were only $260 a month, and not enough to keep a household going.

Amy had gone hungry before when Eric failed to list her as a dependent, but she would not allow her children to be deprived. She tried to get the court-ordered support that Eric was supposed to pay, but he withheld it. On one occasion, she went so far as to have him jailed for non-support and he spent a week in the King County Jail. This only enraged him.

Amy tried to honor the visitation rights Eric had with the children, but he devised new ways to torment her. She always sent the youngsters to visit wearing clean clothes and she sent extra clothes along. Eric began to keep that clothing, forcing her to buy them new outfits all the time. On her limited budget, she couldn’t afford that. She begged him to bring their things back, but he kept the clothes until they were outgrown.

In desperation, Amy asked her attorney to write to Eric and say that he would either have to bring the clothing back or provide clothing for them himself.

It was an age-old dilemma in divorce where children were concerned. The children still loved their father, and Amy didn’t want to deprive them of his company. On the other hand, she became afraid to have him come to pick them up. His hatred of her was almost palpable and she didn’t know what he might do when he saw her. Finally, she asked a friend to walk the children out to Eric’s car on visitation weekends.

It worked for a while, and then Eric backed his vehicle into Amy’s girlfriend one day. He claimed that his grip had slipped off the hand controls, but it was frightening. When he pulled his .38 from the holster and pointed it at the woman on the next visit, there was no way to explain that away. As much as she wanted to help Amy, her friend was now too afraid of Eric.

Things got worse; Amy was living a scary “Gaslight” existence, wondering what Eric would do next. Rather than forgetting about her and turning to his new wife, he seemed to grow more obsessed. He began a subtle war of nerves. When she unpacked the children’s bag, she would find that Eric had pulled up flowers and sent the dead vegetation home to her.

“Daddy said those were a present for you,” her seven-year-old daughter said, innocently.

Even worse, he frightened the children by telling them, “I wish your mother was dead; I wish she was never even alive.”

She tried to tell him that he was doing damage to their children, and he only smiled.

When she picked up the mail, she found pictures of herself—only Eric had cut off her head in all the photographs.

At some point, Amy Shaw faced an awful truth. She lived with the sure knowledge that Eric meant to kill her. She couldn’t have him arrested; she learned that the police couldn’t arrest a man for something he
intended
to do. And he had a legal permit to carry a gun.

In the end, even though she had friends, Amy was all alone with two small children, the oldest only seven. Her son was barely past toddler stage. Without realizing it, she had begun to expect less and less of life. Her world had grown incredibly small. She no longer dreamed of marrying again or of having a career. She could not remember a time when she could walk outside free of fear. All she wanted, hoped for, and prayed for now was the opportunity to take care of her children.