Here’s an article about a divorce and child custody case in which the mother apparently attempted to hire a hit man to kill her husband (KPTV, 11/18/10).
Oregon native Kip Anderson was involved in a custody battle with his ex-wife Connie over their three children, two of whom are teenagers; the other is five years old.
Kip Anderson said the dispute with his wife boiled down to the custody battle involving their children…
Kip Anderson said his ex-wife didn”t want him to see their three children.
“That was her biggest problem, she wanted me out of the picture,’ he said. “… Why? The only thing I tried to do was stay in contact with my kids.’
Kip Anderson said the past year has been a struggle with constant custody battles over their three children.
“I didn’t want her to go away. I wanted to be civil about the kids,’ he said.
She apparently did want him to “go away” – for good. So she contacted a friend about how to have Anderson killed. At some point an undercover police officer got involved, posing as the hit man.
Kip Anderson says officers told him they offered Connie Anderson many chances to back out of the plot.
“She led the charge, she never backed down, she was committed to having me dead,’ he said.
Connie Lynn Anderson was arrested and has been indicted by a grand jury on charges of attempted aggravated murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation of murder.
There’s some evidence that, when one spouse is responsible for the murder of the other, men are more likely to do the job themselves while women are more likely to hire someone else to do it. Thankfully, no one was harmed in this case, but the tendency I mentioned looks like it was at work.
And contrary to much bloviating in certain quarters, spousal murder is rare in the United States. The most recent statistics I’ve seen indicate that about 1,300 women and 400 men were killed by their spouse or intimate partner in the previous year. Of course those figures don’t include cases of murder for hire, which law enforcement agencies record as “multiple offender” cases. So the number of male victims of wives or girlfriends is likely higher, but how much so remains a matter for speculation.
What’s most remarkable is the lengths some people go to to deny another parent access to their children. The most outrageous behavior – false allegations of crime, child abduction, PAS and even murder – stems from child custody cases. How parents justify that in their own minds is something I’ll never understand.
What I do understand is that children can bring out the best behavior in adults… and the worst. And all the mediators, sound advice and self-help gurus, all the family courts in the world, staffed by the wisest judges will never adequately deal with some people and some cases.
Read what Kip Anderson says about learning that his ex wanted him dead – not theortically or in a momentary fit of anger, but actually dead, the result of careful planning. This is not a man who, in some part of his mind knew Connie was dangerous, knew she had it in her to hire his murder. This is a man who was utterly surprised when he learned the truth.
In short, in some deep fundamental way, the woman to whom he was married and who bore his children somehow had become a stranger to him. To her, he had become not a once-loved partner, not a decent father, but an “other” who was fair game for murder.
What strange and complex animals we humans can be.