Aaron Romo had been thrown out of a bar in the city of Orange. A woman he had approached slapped him, the bouncers put him on the sidewalk, and the fight that followed left him with two black eyes. It was the early morning of March 17, 2023. He picked up his phone and called his ex-girlfriend.
There was a restraining order between them. She had taken it out in December, after he hit her and threw her over a patio railing, and it ran another two years. He had been arrested for that. He was out on bond, waiting for trial, under a court order to have no contact with her at all.
He had called her 616 times in the previous month.
She had written back to tell him to stop calling and to quit trying to be in her life, that she was done helping him at the expense of her own, and that no contact meant no contact.
Twenty-four-year-old Mirelle Mateus was killed by her ex-boyfriend, thirty-six-year-old Aaron Romo.
Mirelle Mateus was twenty-four. She lived in La Palma; she was a student, and she spent her free hours at a women’s gym in Fullerton where her friends said you always knew when she had walked in because you could hear her laughing. She was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, and an aunt to nieces and nephews.
Her sister Sandy would explain later why she went. He said he was going to kill himself. What Mirelle had told her, Sandy said, was that she was afraid he would take his own life. She couldn’t live with that.
She drove to Orange, picked him up, and took him back to the apartment on South Union Street they used to share.
The next day her mother could not reach her. Alice Mateus drove to the apartment and found the door unlocked. She went in. Her daughter was in the bathroom, beaten and strangled.
Romo had gone to another girlfriend’s house in Riverside County and told her what he had done. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder in May 2024. He is serving thirty years to life.
At his trial, prosecutors told the jury something else. Five different women had taken out restraining orders against Aaron Romo. Two of them said he had choked them.
Both of those women are alive.
Ten Seconds, Then Four Minutes
Nobody knows how long it took, and nobody ever will. The physiology is the same in every apartment in the country.
The carotid arteries run close to the surface on either side of the neck. Bill Smock, the forensic physician who trains police and prosecutors on this, puts the pressure needed to close them at about eleven pounds. The jugular veins take 4.4. Collapsing the windpipe takes thirty-three, which is roughly twice what it takes to open a can of soda, and a man who wants to shut off the blood to a woman’s brain needs a third of that.
At eleven pounds, she is unconscious in about ten seconds.
If he lets go at that moment, she comes back within another ten seconds. She will be confused, and her throat will hurt, and she will probably not remember the last few seconds before she went under, but she will be alive and awake on the floor.
If he does not let go, the clock keeps running. The timeline used to train first responders comes from a 1943 study of induced cerebral circulatory arrest and from a 2011 analysis of fourteen hangings that happened to be caught on film. Bladder control goes at fifteen seconds. Bowel control at thirty. Among those fourteen, the first stopped breathing at sixty-two seconds and the last at a hundred and fifty-seven. A hanging is not a pair of hands, so the seconds are a guide and not a stopwatch. Brain death arrives at four to five minutes.
Pressure on the carotid body, a cluster of receptors in that same stretch of neck, can stop the heart outright. It is uncommon, but it means a small number of these deaths arrive in seconds instead of minutes, faster than the man doing it expects. He cannot read the clock he is working.
And unconsciousness looks like death. A man who is not watching closely, or who does not want to, can let go believing he is finished.
What he is deciding, in those four minutes, is whether she lives. Not the way any killer decides. He is deciding it continuously, with his hands on her, and at any second he could stop and she would come back.
He Choked Her Three Times and Asked the Same Question Each Time
T.J. had been dating Ernest Reynolds about two months.
Ernest Reynolds
On the night of October 13, 2016, they sat in his truck in her mother’s garage on the South Side of Chicago, drinking and talking for hours. At some point, he asked her if she was cheating on him. She said she was not. Around ten, she said she was going inside. He told her to get back in the truck.
She fell asleep as he drove. She woke around three in the morning with him on top of her.
What happened over the next hour is in a published Illinois appellate opinion, drawn from her testimony at his trial. He told her he was going to torture her, slit her throat, and kill her. He hit her in the face with the blunt end of a box cutter close to a hundred times, until her face went numb, saying while he did it that she had been cheating with a man named Randy and with her roommate.
Then he put one hand on her throat.
She told him she could not breathe. He said, “I know.”
After a minute or two, he let go. He asked her whether she had cheated on him, and whether she was going to take the lie to the grave with her.
About two minutes later, he started choking her again.
He did that three times.
He was not losing control and regaining it. He was taking her past the point where she could breathe, easing off so she could speak, asking, and closing his hands again when the answer was wrong. He could go as close to killing her as he liked and bring her back as many times as he needed, and each round made the next question more urgent for her and cost him nothing.
Afterward he pulled her head back by the hair and held the blade of the box cutter against her neck, digging in until it cut. She said wait, wait, wait. He took it away and asked again whether she had cheated. When she did not answer, he put the blade back.
Then he told her to perform oral sex on him. After a few minutes, he told her to stop, because he was not getting aroused. He said he wanted to have sex instead, so she pulled down her pants, and he climbed on top of her. He stopped after about five minutes. He could not get an erection.
She escaped by jumping from the moving truck as he turned into an alley, dangling from his grip until her jacket came off, hitting the ground and having her leg run over. She got up and ran to a fire station on a broken leg. Her throat hurt for three weeks.
The Illinois Appellate Court vacated his conviction for attempted murder.
Not because they doubted her. They accepted every word. The court reasoned that he had a deadly weapon and did not use it in a deadly way, cutting her only superficially when he could have opened her throat, and that he had a clear opportunity to kill her while his hand was on her neck and did not take it. Instead, the court wrote, he repeatedly choked her for short periods of time before releasing her neck and asking her whether she had cheated. From that pattern, the court concluded that the character of the attack was more consistent with an intent to torture or terrorize her into confessing than with an intent to kill her.
Two judges read a man’s purpose off the timing of his hands. Not off the method, not off her injuries, and not off his words, since he told her he was going to kill her over and over and the court set that aside as not determinative.
The rest of the verdict stood. Sixteen years on each of two counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault, to be served one after the other, and four more for the beating. The only count that fell was the one that required the court to decide what his hands were for.
The presiding justice dissented from that part of the ruling. Justice Gordon asked what the majority imagined was supposed to happen after she confessed. Reynolds had told her he was driving to an alley to leave her body there, and then he drove to an alley. He said he had to kill her because if he let her go she would call the police. She survived by throwing herself out of a moving vehicle. On that reading, the pauses were not evidence that he meant to spare her. They were what he did on the way to the alley.
He Can Let Go and She Comes Back
Reynolds had a box cutter in his hand the entire time. He used it to open her skin and not her throat.
Ask why a man killed a woman with a particular weapon and the honest answer is usually that it was what he had. A gun, if there was one in the house. A knife from the block. Something heavy from the garage.
The neck is different.
A gun is a decision made once. His finger moves, and whatever he wanted from it is finished in an instant, and he was standing four feet away when it happened. A knife is fast and messy, and it lets him look somewhere else. Strangulation offers him none of that and gives him something no other method can; time.
He has to stay. His hands are on her throat, so her pulse is changing under his fingers. Her face is right there, and there is nowhere else to look. He feels her arms give out before the rest of her does. He feels the second she stops fighting.
It is the most personal way to kill,
He pulls a trigger, and she is dead before he can change his mind. He puts his hands on her throat, and she is not dead for four minutes, and every one of those minutes is his. He can open his hands at ten seconds, and she wakes up. He can open them at two minutes, and she wakes up. He does not, and he does not, and he does not.
When people say a man held her life in his hands, they mean it as a figure of speech. Here it is a description.
Reynolds was not attempting a murder that kept failing. He got what he wanted every time he let go.
Aaron Romo wanted something simpler and got it once. He had thrown Mirelle Mateus over a patio railing in December, been arrested for it, and been ordered by a court to stay away from her, and then he called her 616 times in a month. He wanted her to come when he called. She came once, and he put his hands around her neck.
Two other women had already told a court that he put his hands on their throats. Both of them got up. What was different this time was how long he held on.
He had already tried beating her. It got him arrested.
A beating tells her he will hurt her, that he is stronger, that she cannot stop him. She already knew all of that, most likely, and she has a set of ways to live with it. She can decide he loses his temper. She can decide it was the drinking. She can tell herself she saw it coming and can see it coming next time.
Strangulation does not leave those exits open. What it establishes is not that he will hurt her but that whether she continues to exist is a thing he decides. There is no version of that she can shrink down. She went under, and she came back, and the only reason she came back is that at some point in those seconds he chose to let go.
Then he releases her. The release is not mercy. A dead woman cannot live inside what she now knows, and she can. Thirty seconds of effort bought him years in which he never has to say it out loud again.
She Wakes Up, and the Relationship Continues
A woman called Ellen was one of sixteen who sat down with researchers from CQUniversity in Queensland to talk about being strangled by a partner. The names in the study are pseudonyms. Ellen’s partner drank heavily, and she wanted the interviewer to understand that the drinking was not the explanation.
He was very aware of what he was doing, she said. It was not a fit of rage. He had built the fear himself, and he knew he had. He knew where on her neck to press to produce the sensation of choking.
“He knew exactly how long to choke for.”
In the same breath she called it premeditated. It takes an instant, she said, no one can tell it is happening, and nothing is left behind.
Most men who put their hands on a woman’s throat do not kill her that night. They stop, and the relationship continues, and it happens again. Another woman in the same study, Debbie, estimated she had been strangled more than a hundred times across five years.
Emergency physicians surveyed sixty-two women at two shelters in Dallas and Los Angeles and at a violence intervention center in Dallas. Forty-two of them, sixty-eight percent, had been strangled by an intimate partner. The same Dallas group asked a hundred and one different women whether they had been strangled more than once. The ones who had reported more neck and throat injuries, more neurological trouble, and more psychiatric trouble than the ones strangled a single time. Thirty-nine percent of them had seen a doctor about any of it.
The strangling does not start the abuse. In that same survey, the women had been in the relationship an average of 5.2 years before they were strangled, and had been physically abused for an average of 3.1 years before it started. Ninety-one percent of them were strangled at home. It arrives late, after everything else, once the relationship has already taught her what he is.
A team led by Kristie Thomas sat down with seventeen women in an American shelter who had lived through it, all of them strangled at least once and most of them more than that. Seventeen is a small number.
They did not describe it as a failed murder attempt. They described a message: he was showing her that he could kill her, and then choosing not to.
Every one of them was stunned the first time, including the women who had been beaten for years and thought they already knew what he was capable of. What she learned was not that he had tried to kill her. It was that he could have, and that she was breathing because he had decided she would.
One of the Queensland sixteen said the same thing, eight years later and half a world away: her life was his to end whenever he chose.
Resisting made it worse; the women who fought back were strangled harder for it. And he only had to do it once. A single episode told her he could kill her whenever he decided to, and she remembered that in every argument that followed.
It is also nearly invisible. When the San Diego City Attorney’s Office went through three hundred of these cases in the nineties, half the women had no visible injury at all, and only fifteen percent had anything worth photographing. Twice since, researchers have gone back through police files behind the officers who wrote them, once in a Florida county and once in a city department. Both times, roughly six in ten of the strangulations they could see in the file had not been written down as strangulation.
Amy, another of the Queensland women, arrived at a hospital unable to open her mouth wide enough for anyone to look down her throat. Her partner stood over her, telling her to say nothing. She told the staff she had dropped a weight on her neck at the gym, and then he made her discharge herself against the nurse’s advice. The pain and swelling took two or three weeks to go down.
Vanessa reported hers. The officer asked whether she had lost consciousness. She said she could not remember. He concluded from that answer that she had not been strangled. Memory loss is one of the documented effects of being strangled.
It frightens her more than anything else he does, and it goes into the file as a disturbance.
Nancy Glass, Jacquelyn Campbell, and their colleagues compared 506 attempted and completed intimate partner homicides against 427 women who were being abused and were not killed. Ten percent of the abused women had been strangled at some point. Among the murdered women, forty-three percent had. Prior strangulation raised the odds of a woman turning up in the attempted homicide group by 6.7 times, and in the completed homicide group by 7.5.
That number circulates as a forecast. It is not one. It does not mean a strangled woman has a seven-in-ten chance of dying, and it does not mean a man who strangles will go on to kill. It means that when investigators look backward from the bodies, his hands had been on her throat far more often than chance would put them there. A meta-analysis of seventeen studies later placed prior nonfatal strangulation near the top of the risk factors for intimate partner homicide, alongside his access to a gun and his prior rape of her. Access to a gun is a circumstance. Controlling behavior and threats are patterns that build over months. Strangulation can put a man on that list the first time he does it.
Underneath the numbers is a man who took her past the point where she could breathe, opened his hands, and did it again. Every time he opened them, he showed her that her life was his to give back.
None of that requires him to want her sexually. Whether he did is a separate question, and it is the one the domestic violence researchers rarely get to ask, because the men are not in their data. They only have her.
She Learned to Turn Over So She Could Keep Her Hands Free
Claire Gravel had been dead for six years when Charlene Carey went looking for a boy she had known in the seventh grade.
Twenty-year-old Claire Gravel was murdered in 1986
Charlene was thirty-two, and her first marriage had ended. She had not seen John Carey since Gloucester High. They had gone together for a couple of months when she was fourteen or fifteen, the kind of thing where you play baseball and go bowling. She had thought about him for years afterward. In 1992 she called a friend of his who worked at a golf course, found out he was in Danvers, looked him up in the phone book, and called. They had dinner in Boston the next weekend. He moved into her house in Ipswich four months later. Her children were six and three.
She was marrying a man who had strangled a twenty-year-old stranger to death in 1986. A jury would not establish that until 2026. Charlene did not know. Nobody did.
Within the first year, during sex, he took the tie off her bathrobe and put it around her neck.
She had her hands under it before she knew what it was. She asked him what he was doing. He said it would give him sexual pleasure.
She did not tell him no. On the witness stand, decades later, a prosecutor asked her why. She said she had never been with anybody who did things like that; he was thirty-two and had probably had multiple experiences, and she had not, and she wanted to make him happy. She was totally in love with him. If it would please him, she figured it was all right.
John Carey was twenty-seven when he murdered Claire Gravel and sixty-three when he was arraigned for it in 2002.
It became frequent. He used what was at hand. If they had been out and she had worn a dress, her nylons would be over the back of the bed, and he would use those—otherwise, the belt from her robe.
If she was on her back, he pushed her hands away from her throat. So she learned to turn over onto her stomach when she saw him reaching for something, because face down she could get both hands underneath the ligature and hold it off her neck. She said she was very strong. She could let him have his pleasure while she held on tight.
He did not want her to keep her hands safe.
A couple who choke each other during sex build in a margin. Carey was removing hers. What he wanted required that she not have one.
The nylons were worse than the robe belt, she said, because nylons do not give. You can tie them very tight. When they were that tight, and her fists were underneath, the backs of her hands pressed into her own trachea. She would scream and cry for him to stop.
He did not stop. He continued, she testified, until he was ready to finish his act.
Finishing meant this. The ligature stayed around her neck. He would withdraw. He would ejaculate on her body. Her neck was the sex.
It was worse when he had been drinking.
She stayed until 2002. Ten years, a daughter born in 1996, and a marriage that a prosecutor summarized in one question: did you enjoy participating in this activity? No, she said. I did not.
The diagnostic manual has a category for arousal at being asphyxiated. It sits under sexual masochism, and it covers the person who wants the belt around their own neck. There is no category for the person holding it. The definition does not distinguish between them, and nobody has fixed it.
So there is a name for Charlene and no name for John. The closest available is sexual sadism, which requires arousal at another person’s suffering, and Carey’s interest was narrower than that and more specific. What he wanted was her neck.
Where the Line Should Be and Cannot Be Found
Reynolds spent an hour choking a woman into unconsciousness and out of it, and then could not perform sexually. The intercourse failed. The interrogation had not.
Carey spent ten years strangling his wife during sex and finished by withdrawing, leaving the ligature on her neck, and ejaculating on her body.
One man is a jealous boyfriend interrogating a woman about someone named Randy. The other has a sexual interest so specific that a state police sergeant named Thomas Neff sat in a courtroom and told a jury what was on his home computer. Four hundred or more strangulation images—a ninety-second video of a woman being strangled to death. Nine hundred and seventy-eight hits and forty-seven saved files on the word asphyxia. And an article he had opened about a man whose convictions for strangling four women were reversed on appeal.
All of that came in because of the defense he ran. Carey told the jury that what happened in Rosemary Diskin’s kitchen had been a consensual sexual encounter. That is the argument he chose to make about a woman who fought him, went down, told him her son was upstairs, and lost consciousness with a necktie around her throat. He was not denying the act. He was calling it sex, and the Commonwealth answered him with his own computer.
Reynolds is a domestic violence case. Carey is a sexual homicide case. The people who study one do not read the journals that publish the other.
But in both men, the sexual response was to the strangulation, not the sex.
Whether that makes them two things or one thing at different levels is a question nobody has answered, and not because it is unanswerable. No dataset contains both men. The domestic violence research reaches offenders through women who survived, and it does not ask about arousal. The sexual homicide research reaches them through convictions for killing strangers, and it does not ask about their marriages.
I have evaluated enough men who hurt the people closest to them to have stopped assuming the line is there. In the room, asked directly, most of them cannot tell you either. They describe wanting her to understand what he could do, and they describe wanting her, and the two accounts are not sequential and do not sort. For some of these men, the domination is the arousal.
That is a clinical impression. What is on the record is that these two men did the same thing to a woman’s neck for reasons the field files separately, and that neither file would have predicted the other.
His Wife Filed for Divorce the Same Summer Another Woman Reported Him
Gary Ridgway’s wife filed for divorce on July 21, 1980, and asked the court for a restraining order. He filed one against her in August. It was final the following May, and she got custody of their son.
Marcia and Gary Ridgway, married from 1973 to 1981
Years later, Marcia Ridgway told investigators what the marriage had been like. He liked rough sex. He liked to have it outdoors, sometimes near the Green River. He liked to come up on her in the woods without warning to frighten her. And one night after a party, in their driveway, he choked her from behind.
That same summer he was arrested for choking a woman near the Sea-Tac airport. She lived too. No charges were filed. He told police she had bitten him, and he had been defending himself, and that was the end of it.
Two years later, on July 15, 1982, two boys on bicycles in Kent saw something caught against a piling under the Meeker Street bridge. Wendy Coffield was sixteen. She had been running away since junior high; she was living in foster care in Puyallup, and the last person to see her was her mother, on a visit Wendy had set up by telling her foster placement she had permission she didn't have. By then she had a file: a county psychologist’s report, arrests, a school she had stopped attending. It was the kind of file that tells the people reading it not to be surprised. When detectives came to tell Virginia Coffield her daughter was dead, she said she had kind of expected it. Wendy had been strangled with her own clothing.
Sixteen-year-old Wendy Coffield
Ridgway would eventually admit to forty-nine murders. He strangled almost all of them. He began with his hands and switched to ligatures because the women were leaving marks on his forearms while they fought him, and he was worried someone would notice. In the written statement he gave when he pleaded guilty, he wrote: choking is what I did, and I was pretty good at it.
A wife choked in a driveway. A woman near the airport who reported it. Then decades of strangers. The interest never changed. What changed was who he was willing to do it to, and what happened when he did.
Marcia’s account lives in a divorce file and a restraining order petition. She is a domestic violence statistic. The forty-nine women are a serial homicide case, studied and coded and entered into a database researchers still draw on. The two bodies of work that would have to be combined to see that this is one man do not share data, do not sample the same populations, and do not cite each other. Had he stopped after the driveway, he would exist only in the first, and nothing in it would suggest what the second contains.
The official numbers say men like this are rare, that offenders specialize, that the man who hurts his wife and the man who hunts strangers are different men. Those numbers come from conviction records, which is to say from what got charged.
Ask the files and crossover looks rare. Official records on 1,345 incarcerated sexual offenders put it at 8 percent. Ask the men themselves, in treatment, with a polygraph attached, and the figure has run as high as 73 percent.
Those are different men measured in different ways, not a before-and-after on the same sample. And none of the polygraph figures is corroborated. Men in mandatory treatment have reasons to over-report as well as under-report, and the Justice Department’s own review of this literature says so. It is what men disclose under those conditions, not a measured rate.
But the same pattern turns up in a source that doesn’t require anyone to confess. When investigators ran DNA from untested rape kits and let the evidence link the cases, more than a quarter of the serial offenders it identified had assaulted both strangers and people they knew. Nobody had to admit anything. The kits did it.
None of it shows a direction. Nobody has demonstrated that these men start with the women closest to them and work outward, or the reverse. Crossover is documented as a fact about offenders, not as a sequence. Ridgway looks like a progression because we have dates. He may only be a man who did it to whoever was available, in the order they were available.
What the research does show is that the specialized offender, the one who only hurts partners or only hurts strangers, is substantially a product of what got charged.
Most of what we know about men who strangle comes from serial killer databases and prison treatment programs. That is why a woman can tell a court that her husband choked her in the driveway and have it filed where nobody studying the other kind of killer will ever read it.
Nobody Stopped Him
Claire Gravel was twenty. North Andover High, class of 1983, then a sophomore at Salem State, and a job at National Braille Press making books for people who could not see. Her sister Donna remembered how much she loved sports. Her brother Bob said she wanted to study law, have children, and go everywhere and do everything. Her brother Jim said she was Irish, feisty, and tough.
On the night of June 29, 1986, she went to Major Magleashes’ Pub on Washington Street with her softball team. A male friend dropped her at her apartment on Loring Avenue at half past one in the morning. Three workmen found her the next afternoon, in the woods on the northbound side of Route 128 in Beverly, strangled with her own tank top.
Twenty-one years later, John Carey put a necktie around Rosemary Diskin’s throat in her own kitchen in Hamilton. She fought him and went down. A chair went over, one of a heavy new kitchen set she had just bought, and the sound of it hitting the floor carried upstairs. She told Carey her son was upstairs. She was going under when the boy reached the bottom of the stairs, and what she told him was to get a knife. Jason Diskin was twelve. He put it in Carey’s back.
Neither T.J. nor Rosemary Diskin got her attacker to stop.
She fought him, and he pressed harder. She stopped fighting, and he kept going. There was nothing in between for her to find.
He can let go at any second, and she lives. He cannot tell by looking at her whether she still has four minutes or four seconds.
In Charlene Carey’s marriage, he let go, and it ended when he finished. In that kitchen in Hamilton, he did not let go until a knife went into his back.
Rosemary Diskin is alive because she told her son to get a knife. T.J. is alive because she opened the door of a moving truck.
Somebody came for Mirelle Mateus too.
A security guard named Rudy Ruelas watched Aaron Romo pull her into the apartment and called 911. He told the dispatcher that a man was beating up his girlfriend, that she had been screaming for help and had gone quiet, and then, seconds later, that she was screaming again. Two Anaheim officers were at the door within minutes.
They announced themselves and knocked for five minutes. Officer Raphael Borjon put his ear to the wall and heard what he took to be muffled conversation. He testified that there was no active screaming by then, that he and his partner discussed whether they had grounds to force the door, and that they decided they did not. A second guard told him he had seen her out on the patio, which Borjon understood to mean she was not in immediate danger. They left.
She had stopped making noise because his hands were on her throat. Ten seconds is all that takes, and a man strangling a woman can go on talking in an ordinary voice the whole time. The quiet the officer listened for was what he should have feared.
According to the lawsuit her family later filed against the city and the county, the medical examiner put her death at roughly half an hour after the two officers drove away.
The boy’s knife did two things. It got his mother out of that kitchen alive. And it sent John Carey to a Massachusetts prison, where the state took a DNA sample and put it in a database, where it sat until a laboratory matched it to material on a black tank top that had been in an evidence locker since 1986. He was indicted in 2022. In March 2026, a jury convicted him of murdering Claire Gravel and found he had done it with extreme atrocity and cruelty. He is serving life without the possibility of parole. He is appealing.
Nobody knows what happened to Claire Gravel after one thirty in the morning on June 30, 1986. No one witnessed it, and no one will.
There are witnesses to the rest. Charlene Carey spent ten years learning how his hands worked. Rosemary Diskin felt the necktie tighten and told her son to get a knife. T.J. got the door of a moving truck open. Every one of them can say what Claire Gravel cannot: at any second he could have let go, and he knew it, and he did not.
As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoyed it, please pass it along to one of your true-crime-following friends. See you next week!
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Simons, D. A. (n.d.). Sex offender typologies. In Sex offender management assessment and planning initiative (Chap. 3). Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking, U.S. Department of Justice.
Smith, D. J., Mills, T., & Taliaferro, E. H. (2001). Frequency and relationship of reported symptomology in victims of intimate partner violence: The effect of multiple strangulation attacks. Journal of Emergency Medicine, 21(3), 323–329.
Spencer, C. M., & Stith, S. M. (2020). Risk factors for male perpetration and female victimization of intimate partner homicide: A meta-analysis: trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 21(3).
Strack, G. B., McClane, G. E., & Hawley, D. (2001). A review of 300 attempted strangulation cases, Part I: Criminal legal issues. Journal of Emergency Medicine, 21(3), 303–309.
Thomas, K. A., Joshi, M., & Sorenson, S. B. (2014). “Do you know what it feels like to drown?”: Strangulation as coercive control in intimate relationships. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 38(1), 124–137.
Wilbur, L., Higley, M., Hatfield, J., Surprenant, Z., Taliaferro, E., Smith, D. J., & Paolo, A. (2001). Survey results of women who have been strangled while in an abusive relationship. Journal of Emergency Medicine, 21(3), 297–302.
Cases
Commonwealth v. Carey, 463 Mass. 378 (2012).
People v. Reynolds, 2021 IL App (1st) 181227.
Primary documents and contemporaneous reporting
Castillo. A case study on the first five victims of the Green River Killer. Seattle University. Citing King County Medical Examiner Green River Case File 82-0802.
Essex County District Attorney. (2022, August 24). Indictment announcement in the murder of Claire Gravel. Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
HistoryLink.org. Essay 1356, on the discovery of July 15, 1982.
King County Superior Court. Divorce petition and restraining order filings, Ridgway (July and August 1980); Ridgway written guilty plea statement (November 2003).
Orange County District Attorney and Los Angeles Times trial coverage (May 2024), for the 911 call, the responding officers’ testimony, and the medical examiner’s estimate.
Liked the point about the gaps in the research. Domestic violence and sexual homicide are often studied as separate worlds, even when the behavior can overlap. That can make the person look very different depending on which file you happen to read.
I consider myself very fortunate to have escaped after the first time he put his hands around my throat.