'Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage, and the Mind of the Killer Spouse Read Online Free PDF

proceeded to run over David again, and again, and again, circling the car over different parts of his body, crushing his legs, ribs, and head. The private investigator, sitting nearby in a parked car, captured the grisly event on tape. When Clara was finally finished she got out of her car and, in a final burst of anger, leaned over her husband’s mangled, crushed body as he exhaled his last breath.
    “See what you made me do!” Clara screamed.
    It was the final act in a marriage Clara believed at the outset was the one she had wished for her entire life. Clara wanted the “perfect” husband, the “perfect” family, as well as the “perfect” successful career. For a while she fulfilled that dream, or so it seemed.
    Clara was a former beauty queen, accomplished dentist, and mother of two who worked side by side with her adored husband. Their hard work resulted in luxuries reserved for only the lucky few. Unfortunately her life scenario culminated far from the picture-perfect storybook image she had worked so hard to create, and her dream crashed to a halt.
    What would make such an intelligent and accomplished woman take such a fatal turn for the worse? What made Clara Harris do what most women would never do? After all, not many women who catch their husbands having affairs end up killing them. What was in Clara Harris’s history that would transform her understandable jealousy into a murderous pathology?
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    C LARA Harris was born in Colombia. She lost her father at the young age of six and was raised by her struggling single mother. Life was difficult at best, but in adulthood, after attaining great success, Clara exclusively credited her father for her career as a dentist even though she had but a vague memory of him. The fact that she attributed her success to her father revealed that she had a deep longing for him as well as a deep longing to have an important male figure in her life. Not having a father left Clara prone to feeling abandoned, which ultimately made her vulnerable to committing murder under the right circumstances.
    Without a male figure in her life she overly romanticized what it would be like to have one, and this engendered a narcissistic personality disorder that served as a defense against feeling worthless, abandoned, and unlovable. Clara’s major childhood loss sparked a hyperactive sensitivity and persistent fear of losing men, especially the man she ultimately chose to make her own. This preoccupation manifested itself through extreme jealousy and would create what Harris feared most: losing the person she so loved and cherished.
    Clara was a beauty queen, an achievement driven by her enormous need to be loved and valued. Winning a beauty pageant is the ultimate symbol of female success, one that signifies a woman’s desirability to men. For Clara, this enabled her to hide her deep-rooted feelings of being an outsider, feelings developed over years of living without a father, a deprivation that produced an overwhelming attachment hunger for a romantic relationship. Attachment hunger is a normal need to attach or bond to another and originates from our unconscious desire to re-create the peaceful, euphoric, and omnipotent feelings we experienced as infants when we were totally dependent on our mothers. If this attachment hunger becomes overwhelming, a person can acquire the power to distort reality, which can lead to obsessive behavior in relationships, as opposed to a more normal desire for intimacy.
    Clara’s statement “I found the one that God had reserved for me” underscores her highly romanticized view of love. Clara believed that her husband would make all of her dreams for happiness finally come true, that David was her “one” true love and would finally make her feel fulfilled and complete. Juxtaposed against this ideal state was a deep-seated, psychological preoccupation with the childhood loss of a loved one. Clara’s unconscious fear triggered the ill fate of