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

her relationship with David, leaving her with only a shattered dream, which echoed the youthful loss of her father. Because of her overdependency, Clara’s love for David was filled with profound insecurity and abnormal possessiveness. Abnormally jealous lovers tend to be:
Always anxious when their partners are not present.
Worry constantly about what their partners are doing if they’re not in sight.
Give their partners the third degree all the time.
    This type of behavior by one partner can make the other partner feel smothered or even held hostage.
    * * * * *
    D AVID and Clara were initially attracted to each other’s similarities. Both were bright, ambitious dental students who seemed to have the same goals in life, but as with any intimate relationship, the fantasy of sameness gave way to reality. On an unconscious level Clara hoped “if you are identical to me, then you won’t leave me.” But the truth is that a partner simply cannot be one’s identical mirror image. For a narcissistic personality who has a pathological fear of being abandoned, this reality would be too much of a disappointment to tolerate. Clara Harris viewed marriage as the ultimate source of redemption, as a means of healing all of her psychological and emotional wounds. Instead her marriage destroyed her, and her husband.
    David Harris, after being caught by Clara at the hotel, was certainly not the most remorseful cheating husband in the world. He had the poor judgment to humiliate his wife further by pushing her to the floor and then walking his lover to her car, dismissing Clara’s feelings of intense pain and agony. He no longer cared about her outrageous and dramatic outbursts.
    For Clara, catching David with another woman was an emotional wound just too much to bear. Old feelings of being worthless and abandoned were awakened. The only response that made sense to her was to destroy the source of the pain. If Clara were better developed emotionally and had mastered the narcissistic stage of development, she would not have seen her husband as an extension of herself. Instead, David would have represented a separate and distinct person from whom she could separate. But when David left her and chose someone else, he confirmed her deepest fears, and once again, Clara felt worthless and unloved. Her response left her husband, the one that God reserved for her, dead.
    * * * * *
    D URING her trial in February 2003, Clara claimed she hit David with the car only once and that it had been an accident. The prosecution alleged that Clara had intentionally killed her cheating husband in a fit of jealousy and rage.
    It’s clear that Clara Harris did not really mean to kill her husband. She loved him more than life itself, and he knew that. Without David, life for Clara felt meaningless, empty, and perhaps most of all terribly lonely. She just wanted to stop the pain. The intensity of the sorrow he caused her was just too much to bear. He knew how vulnerable she was when it came to love, and he’d promised never to hurt her or to leave her. She believed him. How could he betray her this way? The rage and pain were so intense the only way to make them go away was to strike him down. He was strong. He would survive. He always did. She was the weak one. Because of her weakness, she could never kill him. The anger and anguish took over. All she could think about was eliminating the pain. Didn’t David know that the pain was killing her?
    Driving over his body gave Clara the illusion she could stop her husband from hurting and torturing her. She couldn’t reconcile her murderous, rageful feelings with a man she still loved and didn’t want to hurt. All she wanted was for things to be right, like they were in the beginning. And since she loved him, in her mind killing him was an accident, nothing more. There’s no doubt David and Clara loved each other when they first met. But unknown to David, a fiery personality such as Clara’s can be dangerous