Because He Loves Her

Women really appreciate being desired, loved and cherished.  It is all, in fact, most women really want out of life.  A companion with whom they can share life, whose interests converge with their own, and for whom they are prepared to offer love and companionship in exchange for the same proffered.  Women rarely bargain for abuse when they agree to a life-partnership with a man expressing love for them.

But that is the questionable offering that many women realize they have been offered.  They simply did not recognize it for what it represented, behind a more palatable facade of empathetic caring and fond regard.  So when the relationship stagnates into a contest of wills and ill will becomes the fare of the day, everything - love and trust - disintegrates and it really is time to part.

But then, controlling men are not readily appeased by an appeal to fairness and justice.  Explaining that interpersonal affairs simply haven't worked out to an agreeable intimacy and it is time to part, seems to infuriate these men.  They evolve from merely verbally and physically abusive to violently threatening.  And once the first episodes of brutality occur, it seems to become a habit, and much easier for the man to commit them.

And all because he loves her.  Because Robert James Johnston of Ottawa so very much loved and continues to love his one-time partner, he viciously attacked her meaning to kill her because he could not bear life without her.  He would not kill himself, just her.  "This is what you wanted.  I just can't be without you.  I can't let you go", he repeated as he smashed her face repeatedly into a bathroom faucet, the hardwood floor.

"If you are not going to be with me, you are not going to live.  I have to do this because I'm not going to jail.  I have to kill you", he explained as he tried to snap her neck.  Over a forty-minute period of concentrated attacks, the woman pleaded with him to check on their daughter, all of nineteen months, and by herself in another room of the Kanata house they shared.

Her co-workers, concerned at her absence from work, contacted police.  When three police officers entered by knocking down the door, Johnston informed them his partner's injuries resulted from an accident.  The police thought they were looking at a corpse.  She had a severe gash across her forehead, exposing her skull, while the blows had shattered or fractured multiple bones in her face.

Five days in hospital followed.  Permanent brain damage is the result.  But Johnston informed the interviewing detective that his partner was the "love of his life".  "She's my one and only.  I'm in love.  True love.  I've made her my life."