Murder By Inadvertence

It is difficult to comprehend the extent to which a lack of self-respect can be attained by women who feel desperate about ever finding someone with whom they can share their lives. Becoming so despondent and unhappy about their lack of a male companion that they are prepared to accept the presence of someone whose faults are clear to others, but not to themselves. A man whose aptitude is not to value and cherish the presence of a woman, but to dominate and to betray her trust.

That old adage that hope springs eternal is true enough. Just like children who, when they are abused or disappointed in the reaction of an adult, or the worst-case scenario, of witnessing the bulwark of their safety and security disappearing in the sundering of their family unit by a marriage in default, the child believing that they are responsible somehow, abused women seem all too often to believe they somehow earn the abuse heaped on them.

Donna Jones suffered from low self-esteem. The family she grew up in was not in ideal balance; her father belittled her mother and their children. He was a domineering man for whom outbursts of viral anger were not uncommon, although he was also a caring father. It might not have been surprising that she saw in the man she met who swept her off her feet, some of the same attributes of her father. No doubt feeling that the positive side of the man would far outweigh the negative.

She was concerned about her appearance; not pretty enough, that she weighed too much. She had a bubbly, outgoing personality, belying the unmerciful teasing she must have been the subject of as a child, wearing an eye patch. But she had a wide circle of friends and they cared deeply about her welfare. They had clear eyes of critical discrimination fully capable of identifying an abusive bully when they saw him in action.

Along with one of her brothers, they arranged a joint intervention where they all attempted to talk sense into her, to persuade her that the man she thought loved her and whom she felt reciprocal love toward did not have her best interests at heart. She listened, and then she informed them that she knew him better than they did; that she could see what they could not. Her closest childhood friends informed her they would refuse to attend her wedding.

She proceeded to marry him regardless. And then the true character of Mark Peter Hutt was slowly revealed. The young woman whom everyone knew as light-hearted and cheerful, optimistic and good-natured slowly turned inward. She told her mother she had slipped off a rock and broken her wrist. And when she was cooking pasta she burned herself with the boiling water. Everyone noticed the different Donna Jones and could hardly credit how she had changed.

Two years after they married his abuse of her came to a head. He threw boiling water on her again, and scalded her horribly over almost half her body. Her nose had been broken, her eyes blackened; a pair of old wrist fractures, fresh bruises, broken ribs, a cut on her head. He confined her to the basement of their house and simply left her there in an agony of pain as her clothing stuck to her infected wounds.

She was there, in the basement, suffering the unspeakable misery of abuse and desertion for fully eleven days, with no calls for medical attention. She lay on an old mattress in the cellar, slowly dying of infection, in excruciating agony. And while she was in that state she called and spoke to her co-workers to assure them in a quiet voice that she would soon return to work. She spoke to her brother and commiserated with him over an injury he had sustained, said she hoped he would feel better soon.

She spoke with her mother, and never once, speaking with anyone did she utter one word of the agony she was in, how she was suffering. Let alone to speak of how she had sustained such injuries. Her intention never was to name her husband as her abuser; she continued to protect him and shield him from blame for anything that happened to her. When she eventually died, her husband called 911.

He is now on trial for first-degree murder.

He explained her injuries, how she sustained them, and never once was he responsible. There were explanations for some of her injuries that might have involved him but they were always by accident, quite inadvertent, not by design. When it seemed unreasonable to believe his first explanation that his wife had stumbled into a firepit to sustain the burns she suffered, he finally admitted having caused the burns, but accidentally.

Admitting to a charge of criminal negligence causing death was rejected by the Crown. He insisted his wife had adamantly, vigorously, refused to have medical treatment. Although that part at least might have been true, that she might have wanted to continue to shield his malevolent treatment of her from any kind of public scrutiny.