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anymore. “We were literally running down the street in our pajamas away from him to the police two blocks away. She thought he was going to shoot us.”

11
     
    I
     
    Living on her own with the two kids hadn’t turned out so bad for Mary Ellen Renard. After moving out of the construction shanty, she found a cozy little apartment for herself and embraced her new independence. And, at first, things went well.
    She found a good job. Friends. Although they’d had some trouble of their own, her daughters were alive.
    Life had gone on.
    Soon, though, bouts of loneliness and depression crept up on Mary Ellen and she began to crave companionship. For most of her adult life, she had been around people. She’d had a man—for lack of a better way to describe the abuser she lived with—in her life for almost two decades. But now, she was alone. And she didn’t want to be. So one night, Mary Ellen went to a church dance and met a man, a Catholic widower who met with her family’s approval. Despite a few nagging doubts, she married him. Yet, during the early days of her new marriage, she began to wonder if there was some sort of bull’s-eye on her back that attracted alcoholics and abusers. It was as if she had advertised for them. This new man turned out to be no different from her first husband.
    “I would have divorced him sooner than nine months,” she said later, “but I was scared to leave him alone with his two daughters. Shortly after I left him, he burned the house down.” Luckily, it was a few days after the man’s daughter turned eighteen and had moved out with her sister.
    II
     
    Soon after the second chapter of her married life ended, Mary Ellen found what seemed like the perfect apartment. It was a two-family house in Elmwood Park, New Jersey, just outside Hackensack and Paterson, an area close to where she had grown up. It was the first apartment she had rented since her second divorce that felt even remotely like a home. It was in a rural neighborhood.
    Nice people. Nice homes. Green grass. Picket fences.
    Start fresh, Mary Ellen told herself, moving boxes up the stairs. Learn from the past.
    After getting settled, Mary Ellen realized that it wasn’t necessarily the men in her past that had made her life a living hell—but the fact that she had chosen them. She resolved now to be more cautious. If she had picked two alcoholics and abusers, there was a reason. Now it was time to take an inventory and go back out into the world a smarter, more self-assured woman.

12
     
    I
     
    Two major Hollywood films set the romantic tone for the year 1987: Moonstruck and Fatal Attraction. One showed how a hardworking woman learns to love and trust again while the other explored the darker side of the one-night stand, which had become fairly popular by the mid-1980s. Fatal Attraction proved that although you thought you felt a magnetism toward someone you had just met, you didn’t really know the person. Heading out to a bar, hooking up with someone you shared a drink with, and then heading back home for a romp in the water bed could turn violent and even deadly.
    Mary Ellen was forty-four. She had just started a new job at MediPhysics Corporation that April. Elmwood Park was not a bastion of crime. For the most part, Mary Ellen had little to worry about—save for living alone as a single woman. She lived on the second floor, and her landlady lived below. She didn’t know the woman well. But Mary Ellen said the lady was a curmudgeon, an old hag who was paranoid about everything and everyone. “She was really eccentric,” recalled Mary Ellen. “She’d do strange things. When it was cold out, she’d remind me to leave the upstairs bathtub water running as a trickle,” which wasn’t so odd, “but she would leave me a note to do it every single night.”
    There was no reasoning with the woman. She had her rules and that was it. Keys were a fascination. The entryway (the main door) to the house, because it was a