Stephen Moore was a world-class speed skater in his time. But according to this article, Moore was savagely beaten to death and stuffed into the trunk of his mother’s car (Star-Ledger, 8/26/10). The car was then driven around for a couple of days before being torched. As of now, Moore’s ex-wife Kathleen Dorsett and her father Thomas Dorsett, are charged with his murder. An employee of Thomas Dorsett, Anthony Morris, is charged with setting fire to the car.
Of course these are nothing but allegations at this point. No one has been convicted of anything. Still, the case appears to have followed a distressingly familiar pattern. Moore and Dorsett had been married since 2007 and had a daughter who is 20 months old. Dorsett had custody, but Moore was seeking to expand his visitation rights. The legal case grew bitter and the next thing anyone knew, Stephen Moore had disappeared, only to turn up dead, his body partly burned, on August 18th.
This article tells us that Moore was truly a gentle, friendly guy (Orange County Register, 8/28/10).
“Stephen never had a mean bone in his body,” said Donn Calvano, who was Moore’s skating coach after he moved to New Jersey about seven years ago. “His life revolved around his daughter and his mother who needed his help. Skating was his passion…”
Missy Queen, his former roommate and skating buddy for more than 20 years, says Moore was the best roommate she has ever had.
“Stephen was loved by many, many people here in Orange County,” said Queen, sobbing. “He did not deserve to die like this.”
Apparently Dorsett had acted normally prior to the birth of their child. But then, according to Cam Graham, a longtime friend of Moore, everything changed. Moore complained to him that, after the birth of their daughter, Dorsett completely withdrew from him.
“Stephen told me that she just didn’t want him around any more,” Graham said. “There was no intimacy, no communication…nothing.”
In short, it looks like another case in which maternal gatekeeping takes its most extreme form. In the Mazoltuv Borukhova case, a mother hired someone to once and for all remove their daughter’s father from her life. Here it looks like Kathleen’s father did the job with her acquiescence, and then got his employee to cover up the crime. That’s certainly the theory prosecutors are pursuing and any different scenario looks unlikely at this point, but, as I said, we don’t yet know for certain.
Time and the judicial process will tell. But part of that process will involve Anthony Morris who finds himself charged with serious criminal wrongdoing in a murder case in which the victim is a man against whom Morris had no animus whatsoever. In short, Morris never had a dog in the Moore-Dorsett fight and that means he’ll be powerfully motivated to tell prosecutors everything he knows in exchange for leniency.
We’ll see how it all shakes out. If, as appears likely now, the murder went down as prosecutors think, will those who pretend that domestic violence, even including murder, is only done by men to women finally admit the truth? The truth is that, in the U.S. about 1,200 women are killed each year by an intimate partner and about 400 men are.
But what’s also true is that women are far more inclined than men to hire the job done or, if no money changes hands, get a friend or relative to do it. Those cases are coded by police as “multiple offender” killings and therefore aren’t reflected in the figures on homicide by an intimate partner. How many women kill their husbands/partners, or have the job done by someone else? We don’t know. That looks like what happened to Stephen Moore, but whatever we eventually learn to be the case, it’s high time the domestic violence industry admits the truth.