Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives Read Online Free PDF Page B

described as eraser killers , because
    that term describes simply and succinctly both their motive and
    their methods. Their victims are not ‘‘missing women’’ or ‘‘vanished
    wives.’’ They are women who have been erased, just as repressive
    political regimes have used the method of ‘‘forced disappearances’’
    to dispose of their enemies and strike terror into all those who
    oppose them. The impact of so many women being ‘‘erased’’ or
    ‘‘disappeared’’ from our very midst, from communities or homes we
    have assumed in some fundamental sense to be ‘‘safe,’’ is overwhelm-ing and undermines so many fundamentals on which our sense of
    trust and security is based. These eraser killers exploit the funda-mental safeguards of our legal system—principles enshrined in our
    constitution to protect honest citizens from unreasonable searches
    of their property and from being forced or coerced into making a
    false confession—as if those honored protections were simply escape
    hatches built to provide safe haven for someone capable of pulling
    off an expert murder.
    By following a series of threads, beginning with Laci Peterson and
    then going back and forth in time to hundreds of other instances
    of mysteriously disappeared women, I discovered that most of the
    cases fit a distinct pattern or profile of a startlingly prevalent type
    of murder, yet one that had never been identified because we have
    tended to look at each case in a vacuum.
    Most were not missing persons cases in any strict sense of the
    word, but elaborately planned and premeditated domestic homicides
    disguised to appear to be mysterious vanishings. Invariably, the
    person responsible for the woman’s disappearance was her current
    or former husband or boyfriend. Although some recent killers even
    cited Scott Peterson as their inspiration, he was hardly the first to
    come up with such an idea. Looking back in time, I traced the same
    pattern back a century to the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser’s
    literary classic, An American Tragedy .
    Although the essential facts of these cases bear a striking similarity,
    the outcomes vary widely. Many ‘‘disappeared’’ women are never
    found, and no one is ever held to account for what happened to them.
    A few victims—the ‘‘lucky’’ ones, in a manner of speaking—are

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    eventually discovered, often by pure chance or an act of nature. Their
    families get a chance to bury their loved ones, or what is left of them,
    and sometimes their killers are brought to justice. A small number
    of presumed killers are tried and convicted in the absence of a body;
    others are acquitted with or without a body because there is not
    enough evidence to convince a judge or jury beyond a reasonable
    doubt that a murder occurred, much less that the woman’s intimate
    partner was the one responsible.
    The victims of these killers are women of all races and social
    classes, from all parts of the country (and around the world as well).
    Whereas some have been the subject of intensive media coverage,
    others are all but unknown beyond their closest loved ones.
    All the women listed here are dead or presumed to be dead.
    All were murdered or are believed by authorities to have been
    murdered by a husband or boyfriend, falling victim precisely because
    of their physical and emotional vulnerability to their killer. All ‘‘went
    missing’’ under mysterious circumstances, but none of these women
    was ever truly lost. They didn’t wander off, run away from home,
    suffer amnesia and forget where they belonged. They were deliberately
    ‘‘disappeared’’ by someone who had good reason to try to make sure
    they would never be found, someone who wanted to erase them from
    the face of the earth.
    Q
    • Hattie ‘‘Fern’’ Bergeler, fifty-seven, was found floating in the
    bay near her Florida home in August 2002 with a bedsheet wrapped
    around her head and cinderblocks