She Was Texting About a Concert Outfit and Four Minutes Later She was Dead

What the Rachel Long case reveals about intimate partner homicide, staged suicides, and the most dangerous thing a woman can do.

Disclaimer: Kyle Long has been charged with the murder of his wife, but these charges are allegations. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

The last thing Rachel Long texted her friend was about what she was wearing to the concert.

32-year-old Rachel Long

It was a Thursday afternoon in late October, and thirty-two-year-old Rachel was excited about her life in a way her friends had noticed and talked about. She had a business she had built from the ground up in downtown London, Ohio, two daughters she loved fiercely, and plans for that Friday: a rock concert with friends. She’d be jamming to the kind of heavy music she had turned her coworkers onto, the kind that produced that particular laugh of hers, the one everyone who knew her could pick out across a room.

She never made it.

At 4:11 p.m. on October 23, 2025, a 911 dispatcher in Madison County received a call from Rachel’s husband, Kyle Foster Long. His wife had stabbed herself, he said. Seventeen times. In the face and neck. He had been in another room, he said, watching television.

“My wife just stabbed herself. There’s no pulse. There’s blood all over the place.”

It took four months, an autopsy, digital forensics, search warrant returns from Amazon, Apple iCloud, and email providers, a 360-degree crime scene scan, and interviews with Rachel’s friends and family before investigators were ready to move. On March 4, 2026, Kyle Long was arrested during a traffic stop after the Madison County coroner changed the manner of death ruling to homicide. He has been charged with murder.

Kyle Long, the estranged husband charged with Rachel’s murder

This case is worth examining closely, not because it is exceptional, but because it is not; a woman building toward a new life, a husband who allegedly could not accept that, a staged scene that redirected attention but could not survive scrutiny. The forensics dismantled the cover story. So did the digital evidence.

So did something simpler still: the voice of a woman who was, by every available account, not desperate. She was hopeful. She was breaking free.

Who Was Rachel Long?

Rachel M. Brown Long was born on December 22, 1992, in Columbus, Ohio, the daughter of Susan Brown and the late William Brown. She graduated from London High School in 2011, married, raised two daughters, and built something of her own: Pawfect Pups Grooming and Boarding, a pet care business operating out of 99 West Second Street in downtown London. She was an avid reader. She loved rock concerts. She rescued dogs and had two of her own, Autumn and Clifford. She is survived by her mother, her sister Robyn, and her daughters Ruby and Scarlet.

Her friend and coworker, Madison Myers, described how Rachel had introduced her to heavy rock music, the kind that played through speakers at the candlelight vigil held the night of Kyle’s arrest. “She introduced us to heavy rock that we are very much into now,” Myers said. “And I will keep jamming out because I love it now because of her.” Friends said one of Rachel’s most unforgettable traits was her laugh. “One of her signature things was her laugh. And it was amazing,” Myers said. “Anybody who knew her knows what I’m talking about, and we will miss that a lot.”

Her coworker and friend Mackenzie Perez described her as someone who “worked hard, loved her babies fiercely and built a life she was proud of” and who “showed up for people even when life was heavy.” Customer Melissa Cooper told ABC6 that Rachel “liked helping people,” a bright light now missing from the community.

Rachel’s best friend, Brittany Mattox, was unequivocal after Kyle Long’s arrest. “She was never a sad or suicidal person. She was not depressed. It just didn’t make any sense. It just didn’t add up for any of us.”

Rachel and her best friend, Brittany Mattox

Mattox also described where Rachel was headed:

“We knew that she was excited to leave. She was making new relationships and friendships and looking forward to a new adventure as a solo single mom.” — Brittany Mattox, Rachel’s best friend.

Read that language carefully. Rachel wasn’t just leaving a marriage; she was making new relationships and friendships. The plural matters. So does the word “making” rather than “maintaining.” This is not the description of someone whose divorce would simply reconfigure an existing social world. It is the description of someone rebuilding one, re-emerging into her own life on her own terms.

On the day she died, Rachel Long was texting her friend about what to wear to a rock concert the following evening. A woman who is planning to die does not discuss tomorrow’s concert outfit.

Rachel had also lost her father before she lost her life. She was building her future, carrying that grief, too.

Who Was Kyle Long?

The public record on Kyle Foster Long is thin in the ways that matter and revealing in the ways that are easy to overlook.

He is 35 years old. He and Rachel married in 2015, shortly after she graduated from high school, and had been together for ten years. They owned a home on State Route 187 in London, Ohio, reportedly valued at close to half a million dollars. Their daughters, Ruby and Scarlet, were getting off the school bus when their father called 911 to report their mother’s death.

Kyle has two younger sisters, Desaree and Mackenzie. His parents are Angela and Darren Long. That is the full extent of what the public record offers about his family background.

His employment history is more telling. According to available records, Kyle worked at Mail Boxes Etc., a franchise retail and shipping store, from January 2016 through December 2019: a counter job, a front-of-store position. In 2018, he registered a business called Healthy Vending, apparently to operate healthy-option vending machines. The company’s last filing was in 2022, the typical indicator of a business dissolved or quietly abandoned.

The most recent listing in his employment record, dated October 26, 2024, less than a year before Rachel’s death, shows him registered as the owner of a company called Insight Global. This requires careful handling. Insight Global is a large Atlanta-based staffing firm with more than 70 locations that does not operate through individual franchise owners. What the record almost certainly reflects is a separately registered LLC given a professional-sounding borrowed name. This practice allows someone to present as running a business without the underlying substance of one. His attorney, Sam Shamansky, told reporters that investigators seized Kyle’s electronics, including his work computer, suggesting he presented a professional identity to the outside world. Whether that presentation matched his actual income is a question the public record cannot answer.

What the record suggests is a pattern: four years at a shipping counter, a vending business that went dormant, a company registered in a borrowed name. Attempts that didn’t grow into anything, presented as a professional life.

Meanwhile, Rachel owned and operated a real brick-and-mortar business with employees, a downtown address, and a name people in London, Ohio, associated with her personally. After her death, the obituary noted that Pawfect Pups would continue operating with the help of Ashley Long and Mackenzie Perez. It was a functioning enterprise with staff, loyal customers, and community roots she had grown herself. She was the economic anchor of that marriage. She was the one with the professional identity and the public presence.

When she said she wanted to leave, she wasn’t just ending a marriage. She was taking herself away from a man whose own professional record suggests he had very little of his own to stand on.

The night of Kyle’s arrest, a candlelight vigil was held at a park gazebo in London. Several dozen people came. Some wore Rachel’s favorite colors, purple and black. The music she had loved played through speakers. Kyle’s sister, Desaree Long, addressed the crowd: “Rachel, we love you. We miss you. And we will not stop speaking your name.” His other sister, Mackenzie Perez, who works at Pawfect Pups, spoke about Rachel’s strength and devotion to her children. No statement of support for Kyle has emerged from within his own family.

In the extensive media coverage of this case, not a single neighbor, friend, colleague, or community member has come forward to speak on Kyle Long’s behalf. That silence, in a small town where Rachel’s kindness drew dozens of people to a park on a cold March night, tells its own story.

An Incredulous Tale

When deputies arrived on October 23rd, Kyle Long told them that Rachel had come home from work and gone to their bedroom. He had been in another room, watching television. He heard what he thought was laughing, then screaming. When he checked on his wife, he said he saw her stabbing herself in the face and neck.

That account contradicts what he told the 911 dispatcher. On the call, Kyle placed himself in the bedroom when the incident occurred. To deputies arriving minutes later, he was somewhere else entirely, watching TV in another room. These are two different locations given in the space of a single afternoon, before any second interview, before any significant pressure from investigators. The conflicting stories did not start in a second interview. They started the day Rachel died.

The claim itself fails on forensic grounds, regardless of where Kyle was.

Self-inflicted stab wounds appear in a small fraction of genuine suicides, primarily on the wrists or forearms. They are almost universally accompanied by hesitation wounds: shallow, tentative cuts that reflect the profound psychological difficulty of inflicting pain on oneself. The body resists. Even people in serious suicidal crisis typically cannot override instinctive self-protective mechanisms on the first attempt, or the third, or the tenth.

Rachel Long had no hesitation wounds. She had at least seventeen sharp-force injuries, distributed across her face, neck, and both hands. The wounds on her hands were defensive injuries, consistent with someone trying to grab a blade, to protect her face and throat. A wound on her right arm directly contradicted Kyle’s statement that she had held the knife only in her right hand. The autopsy, conducted by the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office, was unambiguous on this point.

The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation conducted a 360-degree scan of the residence and found evidence consistent with a struggle between two people. Investigators determined that Kyle could not have seen his wife from the vantage point he described in either version of his account; the sightlines did not allow it. He described witnessing something, the physical layout of the home, which made it impossible to witness from where he claimed to be.

The Staging: Stuck With What You’ve Done

When someone stages a homicide, they are not always working from a well-thought-out plan. Some intimate partner killings are premeditated, with the method and cover story chosen deliberately. But when lethal violence erupts from a confrontation, the perpetrator is left with a body, a crime scene, and a ticking clock. Now they have to explain it.

In the Long case, the cover story that emerged was suicide. A woman stabbing herself in the face and neck, repeatedly, while her husband watched television nearby.

It is easy, in retrospect, to see this as an absurd claim. Consider what the alternatives were:

A home invasion/burglary? Two adults were home in the middle of the afternoon on a residential state route. Cars parked in the driveway; nothing reported missing. There was no forced entry, no fleeing suspect, no witnesses to an intruder. A home invasion requires other actors, and other actors leave evidence.

An accident? Seventeen stab wounds to the face and neck are not an accident by any means.

A missing person? The school bus was coming. Ruby and Scarlet were arriving in twenty minutes. Moving a body, cleaning a scene, and constructing a disappearance in twenty minutes was not possible, not with the blood volume the affidavit describes, not on a Thursday afternoon in a house on a state route in a small Ohio town.

Suicide was the least-bad option available. It was the only narrative in which the body stays where it is, the husband himself calls 911, and Kyle Long remains a surviving (and sympathetic) spouse rather than a man trying to explain where his wife went. The problem is that it required investigators to believe that a woman excitedly planning a concert outfit had instead decided to drive a large knife into her own face seventeen times, in front of no one, while her husband watched TV nearby and her beloved children were on their way home from school.

Forensic science exists precisely because these stories do not survive scrutiny.

The 911 Call

911 calls have become significant forensic evidence in domestic homicide cases, not because they are confessions, but because they are unrehearsed. In the immediate aftermath of violence, a perpetrator constructing a cover story is doing so in real time, before legal counsel, before considering what the physical evidence will eventually show or what the digital trail will reveal.

The breathing and vocal presentation. Investigators noted that Kyle Long’s voice was not shaky. His breathing was described as consistent with physical exertion rather than acute shock. This is not proof of anything; people express trauma differently, and the absence of conventional distress markers is not evidence of guilt. It is a data point that sits alongside everything else in this case.

The failure to render aid. Throughout a call stretching several minutes, Kyle Long does not attempt CPR. The dispatcher prompts him repeatedly. He mentions the school bus. He asks about calling his father. Shock and dissociation can produce this kind of disconnection. Taken alone, it explains nothing. Taken alongside the physical evidence, the digital timeline, and the two contradictory locations he gave on the same afternoon, it contributes to a behavioral picture consistent with someone who already knew the outcome.

The daughters’ bus. Kyle points out that Ruby and Scarlet will be getting off the school bus in roughly twenty minutes. He says it more than once. If this was, as investigators allege, a violent act that erupted from a confrontation, the children’s imminent arrival was a deadline Kyle had not planned for. The urgency with which he returns to the subject may reflect the collision between a cover story still being assembled and a timeline he could not control.

The location problem. On the 911 call, Kyle placed himself in the bedroom when Rachel’s death occurred. When deputies arrived minutes later, he said he had been in another room watching television. He gave two different accounts of where he was before anyone had asked him a second time. The 360-degree crime scene scan later confirmed that, from the positions he described, he could not have seen what he claimed to have witnessed. He had already described seeing something he could not have seen, from a location he later changed.

The Timeline: What Four Minutes Contains

Digital forensics of Kyle Long’s phone revealed a 911 call placed from his device before the call that connected to dispatch. That first call was ended without connecting. Four minutes passed. Then the second call was made. Kyle Long did not disclose this to investigators.

Rachel’s last text message to Madison Myers was sent before that first, unconnected call. She was texting about a concert outfit. Then something happened. Then Kyle tried to call 911 and stopped. Then four minutes passed.

Four minutes is not remarkable in the abstract. In the context of a woman dying on a bathroom floor from multiple stab wounds, it is a window in which something was decided, or done, or waited out. Investigators have raised the possibility that Rachel was not yet dead when the first call was attempted, and that those four minutes represented a waiting period. What happened in those four minutes is not yet publicly established. What is established is that Kyle Long chose not to account for them when he spoke to investigators.

Who Was Desperate Here?

The conventional frame for intimate partner homicide often positions the victim as the one in crisis: unstable, depressed, someone who provoked the outcome by arguing or “threatening” to leave. Perpetrators lean into this framing. Communities can arrive there on their own.

Everything we know about Rachel Long’s state of mind in the days leading up to her death completely inverts this.

Rachel Long was not in crisis. She was in transition, and she was excited about it. She was building a social world, forming new connections, picturing herself as a solo single mom with a fresh start. She was texting her friend about what to wear to a rock concert. She had a whole evening to look forward to, a whole life taking shape.

It was not Rachel who was desperate. It was her husband.

Rachel had built the business, a real one with employees, a storefront, loyal customers, and a name that meant something in the community. Kyle’s professional trajectory, by the time of her death, appears to have been a series of attempts that did not grow into anything: a counter job that ended, a vending business that went dormant, a company registered in a borrowed name. Rachel was the economic anchor. She was the one with the identity and the community presence. And she was leaving.

The psychology is easy to misframe. The temptation is to describe this as a loving husband who could not bear to lose the woman he adored. That framing is not supported by the evidence, and it is not consistent with what I see in evaluating men who have killed intimate partners without a prior documented history of violence.

What I see, across those cases, is a recognizable character pattern. These men tend to be self-centered and emotionally immature, with a possessiveness rooted in entitlement rather than love. Many carry a particular resentment toward the wives on whom they depend, especially when, as appears to be the case here, the wife has built something visible and successful while the husband has not. Her success is simultaneously a resource he relies on and a daily indignity he cannot fully absorb. He needs what he also resents.

What these men stand to lose when a wife decides to leave is not a love story. It is a function. She has been the stabilizer, the identity anchor, the person whose presence allowed him to avoid reckoning with his own failures. When she starts making new friends, envisioning a new chapter, texting about what to wear to a concert, she is not just ending the marriage. She is demonstrating, in real time, that she will be fine without him, for a man whose self-image has been quietly propped up by hers, that can be the most intolerable thing of all.

When Rachel said she wanted to separate, she wasn’t just ending a marriage. She was taking herself away from a man who, in all likelihood, had spent years finding ways to make his own failures her responsibility. The confrontation, when it came, was not a man who had loved too deeply. It was a man whose fiction about himself had run out of room.

A Barely Visible Population

The domestic violence research literature is clear on one point: the period surrounding separation is the most dangerous time for victims of intimate partner violence. A 2023 concept analysis published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing by Spearman and colleagues puts precise numbers on this: approximately 44 percent of women killed by intimate partners in Campbell’s landmark 12-city femicide study had separated or were in the process of separating at the time of their deaths. The first three months and the first year following separation are the most lethal. The risk declines over time, but the period of peak danger is not after leaving. It is the moment of leaving.

Forensic criminologist Jane Monckton Smith’s 2020 analysis of 372 intimate partner femicide cases, published in Violence Against Women, maps this danger onto a specific timeline. The homicide follows not from a loss of control, but from a calculated or explosive attempt to reassert it. The violence that follows Rachel Long’s stated decision to leave fits Monckton Smith’s model with uncomfortable precision.

Jane Monckton Smith studied domestic violence perpetrators. The Long case raises a harder question: what about women who never enter the domestic violence system at all? Is there a danger that is much harder to see?

Criminologist Neil Websdale, in his research on familicide, described a perpetrator type he called the “civil reputable” perpetrator: men who, from the outside, appear to be devoted husbands and fathers. There is no paper trail, no police calls, no shelter history.

That label describes how these men present externally, not what they actually are. The apparent devotion, on closer examination, tends to reflect dependency and self-interest more than genuine care. These are not great husbands who snapped. They are men whose relational style was never visible as abusive because it expressed itself through emotional immaturity, possessiveness, and a quiet expectation that their needs would be met, rather than through the overt control tactics that generate police reports.

The concept of catathymic violence, developed by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham in 1937, describes how the internal architecture of an emotionally charged conflict builds slowly, organized around a perceived threat to the self, until it releases in a sudden, explosive act. The perpetrator may have seemed entirely normal to everyone around them. But the crisis had been building, often from the moment separation was first raised, driven not by grief over losing a love but by the collapse of a structure that had allowed him to avoid confronting his own inadequacy.

Wilson and Daly’s research on male sexual proprietariness adds a complementary frame: jealousy and possessiveness, not prior abuse history, are dominant motives in a substantial proportion of intimate partner killings. A man can be intensely proprietary, unable to tolerate his partner’s autonomy or her re-emergence into a social world of her own, without ever having been a batterer.

After these killings, friends and family sometimes describe the man as someone who was “so devoted” or who “couldn’t function without her.” What they are describing, in hindsight, was not love.

A man who cannot function without his wife is not cherishing her. He is using her as a crutch, and very likely resenting her for it. Brittany Mattox’s description of Rachel as “making new relationships and friendships” is the language of someone re-emerging, which suggests there was something in that marriage that had kept her from fully inhabiting her own social world. That may not have looked like textbook abuse from the outside. It rarely does in these cases.

Between twenty and forty percent of men who kill their intimate partners have no prior documented history of physical violence against the victim. That statistic is almost always misread as suggesting these men were decent partners until the moment they killed. They were not.

“No prior physical violence” is not the same as “no prior abuse,” and it is certainly not the same as “no prior harm.” Most had abusive dynamics — control, isolation, psychological coercion — that weren’t captured in any official record. What distinguished them is not goodness but method: the damage they inflicted was emotional and psychological, expressed through immaturity, possessiveness, dependency, and the quiet erosion of a partner’s autonomy and self-worth. Physical violence was not the primary weapon. It was the final one.

We do not have good population-level data on this group, precisely because they do not appear in the datasets that feed most intimate partner homicide research. They do not accumulate police reports. They do not show up in shelter samples. They may not be identified by anyone, including themselves, as abusive in any recognizable way until the moment they kill.

That gap in the literature is one of the more important unsolved problems in the field.

What Brittany Mattox Couldn’t Have Known (And What You Should)

Brittany Mattox knew her friend. She knew Rachel was excited. She knew the suicide claim was wrong the moment she heard it. She talked about Rachel’s death to anyone who would listen.

How could she have known that the moment Rachel decided to leave was also, statistically, the most dangerous moment of the marriage? Most people do not know that. Most people assume the danger in a troubled marriage is ongoing, a slow-burning threat that announces itself through visible abuse. The research tells a different story.

The risk of lethal violence from an intimate partner peaks during separation and in the period immediately following a partner’s decision to leave. This finding is among the most consistent and well-replicated in the field of intimate partner homicide research, and it remains largely unknown outside of domestic violence advocacy and forensic circles.

For anyone reading this who is close to a woman who is leaving a relationship, or considering it, several things are worth knowing. The absence of prior physical violence does not mean there is no risk. A husband who has never hit his wife can still be dangerous when she decides to leave, particularly if he is emotionally dependent on her, has few independent sources of identity or stability, and has responded to her increasing independence with resentment or subtle efforts to limit her social world. The new friends she is making and the new chapter she is envisioning are not just signs of her recovery. In a relationship with this particular dynamic, they can be triggers.

Rachel Long had people around her who loved her and were excited for her. That mattered. It did not save her. But the next Rachel might have a friend who knows what the research actually says about when the danger peaks, and that knowledge might make a difference.

The Long Wait

Five days after Rachel Long died, her family and friends gathered at the Cypress Church of London to bury her. Kyle Long, who had called 911 to report her death, was a free man. He would remain free for four more months.

Those four months mattered. The Madison County Sheriff’s Office and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation were building a case, methodically, gathering forensic evidence, warrant returns from digital providers, and autopsy results from the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office. Investigators interviewed Rachel’s friends. They listened to the 911 call. They mapped the crime scene. They noted what the phone records showed and, critically, what Kyle had not disclosed about those records. They interviewed him a second time and documented the places where his new account diverged from his original one.

The community in London watched all of this. Rachel’s friends did not believe the suicide story on day one, and they said so publicly. Her business stayed open, run by women who had worked alongside her and loved her. Her daughters were adjusting to a world without their mother.

Kyle Long retained Sam Shamansky, a prominent Columbus defense attorney. His electronics were seized early in the investigation; Shamansky told reporters that Kyle had been fully aware throughout that he was under scrutiny. He cooperated, Shamansky said, and made himself available.

The charges, when they came, were the result of that alignment Sheriff Swaney described: forensic, digital, and testimonial evidence pointing in one direction, assembled carefully enough to present to a grand jury. Four months is not a long time to build a murder case. The Madison County Sheriff’s Office and the prosecutors deserve credit for taking the time to do it right.

As of this writing, Kyle Long is being held on a $1.5 million bond. His attorney maintains he did not cause Rachel’s death. No alternative explanation for her injuries has been offered publicly. No other person has been named or suggested as responsible. Sam Shamansky told ABC6: “He has continuously maintained he did not cause her death, and he maintains that today. It’s a horrible, tragic event, for which he bears no responsibility, only sorrow.” What the defense has not offered is any account of who killed Rachel Long or how seventeen sharp-force injuries consistent with a violent struggle came to be on her body.

What Comes Next

Prosecutors plan to present the case to a grand jury. If an indictment is returned, the case moves to the Madison County Court of Common Pleas for trial.

The Madison County Sheriff’s Office and the Madison County Prosecutor’s Office have asked anyone with information related to Rachel Long’s death to come forward. Tips can be submitted directly to Sergeant Rodger Heflin at heflin@madisonsheriff.org.

Rachel and Kyle’s daughters, Ruby and Scarlet, were getting off their school bus on the afternoon of October 23rd. They are now without both parents: one dead, one in custody. Kyle Long’s own sisters are running the business Rachel built. His family stood at a candlelight vigil and vowed to keep speaking her name.

She Was Going to the Concert

The show Rachel was planning for that Friday went on without her. Two little girls named Ruby and Scarlet are also having to go on without their mother, cared for, one hopes, by the aunts who stood at a candlelight vigil and promised publicly to keep speaking her name. Kyle Long’s own sisters made that promise. That detail has stayed with me since I first read it.

Rachel Long wanted a new chapter. She had earned one. She built a business from nothing, turned her coworkers on to music she loved, raised two daughters she called her babies, and, at 32, was learning what it felt like to imagine her own future on her own terms. Her father had already died; she carried that. She was still building toward something.

Forensically, this case is about defensive wounds, sightlines, a four-minute gap in a phone record, and a man who gave two different locations for where he was standing on the same afternoon. Psychologically, it is about a man who needed his wife the way a person can need something they also resent, who experienced her joy at leaving as a threat he could not absorb. Those are not separate stories. They are the same story told in different languages.

The forensic evidence will do its work in a courtroom. The harder and longer work belongs to those who want to understand how this happens before it happens, who want to recognize the man who has never raised a hand but is quietly building toward something catastrophic, who want to be the kind of friend who knows that the most dangerous moment can look, from the outside, like the beginning of freedom.

Rachel Long was not the desperate one. She was the free one.

Almost.

* * *

If you or someone you know may be at risk:

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 (call or text) or thehotline.org. Available 24/7, confidential, with safety planning support for women at any stage of a relationship, including those who have never experienced physical violence.

Tips regarding Rachel Long’s death can be submitted to Sergeant Rodger Heflin, Madison County Sheriff’s Office: heflin@madisonsheriff.org.

Selected References

Boxall, H., Doherty, L., Lawler, S., Franks, C., & Bricknell, S. (2022). The “Pathways to intimate partner homicide” project: Key stages and events in male-perpetrated intimate partner homicide in Australia. Sydney: Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS). [Source for “fixated threat” perpetrator pathway]

Campbell, J.C. (1986). Nursing assessment for risk of homicide with battered women. Advances in Nursing Science, 8(4), 36-51.

Campbell, J.C., Webster, D., Koziol-McLain, J., Block, C., Campbell, D., Curry, M.A., ... & Wilt, S.A. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: Results from a multisite case control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089-1097.

Monckton Smith, J. (2020). Intimate partner femicide: Using Foucauldian analysis to track an eight-stage progression to homicide. Violence Against Women, 26(11), 1267-1285.

Revitch, E., & Schlesinger, L.B. (1981). Psychopathology of Homicide. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Schlesinger, L.B. (1996). The catathymic crisis, 1912-present: A review and clinical study. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 1(4), 307-316.

Spearman, K.J., Hardesty, J.L., & Campbell, J.C. (2023). Post-separation abuse: A concept analysis. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 79(4), 1225-1246. [Source for separation lethality statistics]

Websdale, N. (2010). Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers. Oxford University Press.

Wertham, F. (1937). The catathymic crisis: A clinical entity. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 37, 974-977.

Wilson, M., & Daly, M. (1993). Spousal homicide risk and estrangement. Violence and Victims, 8(1), 3-16.

Case Sources

Probable cause affidavit, State of Ohio v. Kyle Foster Long, Madison County Municipal Court (filed March 2026). Public record.

911 call recording, Madison County Communications Center, October 23, 2025. Obtained and reported by ABC6 Columbus / WSYX.

Madison County Sheriff’s Office. Press release: Arrest of Kyle Foster Long, March 4, 2026.

ABC6 Columbus / WSYX. Multiple reports, October 2025 – March 2026. Reporter coverage includes statements from Sheriff John Swaney, attorney Sam Shamansky, and Rachel Long’s friends and family.

Columbus Dispatch. Coverage of arraignment and bond hearing, March 7, 2026.

Thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoyed it, please pass it along to your true crime community.

Joni E. Johnston, Psy.D., is a forensic psychologist, licensed private investigator, and the author of Serial Killers: 101 Questions True Crime Fans Ask. She is the principal investigator of the Staged Suicide Database, a systematic audit of homicides staged as suicides. She writes The Mind Detective on Substack and for Psychology Today.