When they first dated in 1982, Jack Elson opened doors for his future wife, Robin, cooked romantic dinners and lit her cigarettes.
"I figured my knight in shining armor had finally come," said Robin Elson, who has an 11th-grade education and was selling Avon products when she met the 188-pound, 5-foot-8 auto mechanic.What he didn't tell her was that he had been married four times, that one previous wife was hiding from him and another got a restraining order against him when he beat her for slicing onions too big.
They married after a two-month courtship. He showed up 45 minutes late and drunk for the wedding.
Six months later, when Robin objected to Jack going on a Saturday fishing trip, he asked his friend to wait outside, went in the house and blackened both her eyes.
It was the opening of a brutal reign that left the two children he and Robin had together, sons Camrin, 4, and Brock 2, and a daughter from Robin's previous marriage, Renee, 11, living in terror.
Robin and the children were not only beaten, but Jack also left her lists of chores to be completed, limited her nail polish colors to pale pink and peach, forbade her to wear makeup, told her what food to buy and checked her change against grocery receipts.
Last December, Robin picked up a rifle as her husband lay in his recliner chair after a morning of drinking and beating his family and their pet dog. The 4-foot-9, 70-pound woman braced herself against a wall and fired three times, killing him.
A jury in Long Beach last month acquitted the 28-year-old woman of murder after hearing a wide range of testimony about a married life filled with terror and abuse.
He beat her because the pork chops she cooked were too dry. He slugged her in the stomach while she was pregnant because she burned the toast, then apologized with flowers.
Neighbors said they watched - horrified but too terrified of Jack to call police - as he ordered one pleading child to do 100 push-ups on hot cement and shoved a running garden hose down the throat of another.
"If he told me I was stupid, I believed it. If he told me he would kill me, I believed it. If he opened the door and said `Go,' I wouldn't, for fear he'd stab me in the back on my way out," Robin said in an interview published in Tuesday's Los Angeles Times. "I was a robot."
Prosecutors were appalled by the jury's vote, but defense attorneys hailed the decision, saying jurors are ready to accept the battered wife defense.
"Is this a signal that men who get frustrated by the actions of their wives can kill them? That whenever we get frustrated with someone we are entitled to exact the ultimate sentence - death?" asked Denis Petty, deputy district attorney.
The law requires an "imminent danger" to justify a killing in self-defense. Prosecutors insist that was not the case when Robin shot and killed her husband.
"She could have left the state, gone to a neighbor, called the police. He was asleep when the first shot was fired. He wasn't posing any threat. And when we start allowing citizens to take matters into their own hands, we are back to the law of the jungle," Petty said.
Robin tried twice to escape, and both times Jack found her.
After the second time he found her, he promised to reform. But when they returned home, he took away her check-cashing card and house key, quit his job and never left the house without one of the children. He often took the telephone with him.
"It's like the scientific experiment where they shocked dogs to the point that even when the gate was left open, the dogs never left," defense attorney Lynda Vitale said. "The dogs saw the open gate not as a means of escape, but an invitation to more punishment."
Neighbors said Jack and his little sister were raised in the house that he later inherited from his two alcoholic parents. While they were growing up, Jack and his sister were often thrown against the wall by their parents, or left alone at night while they went out for a night of drinking.
When Jack got big enough, he began beating his mother.
Robin and her family now live in a two-bedroom apartment in Long Beach. She has put on 25 pounds and is trying to stop smoking. The entire family is undergoing extensive therapy, the Times said.