That day outside the trailer home, the dog disobeyed Bob Hennum again. It was a mangy mutt-never had been trained. It shot down the road after another dog and didn`t stop when Bob called it back.
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The next thing Jo Ann Hennum knew, her husband had yanked the door open and grabbed the 12-gauge shotgun from the closet. ”I`ll teach that son of a bitch a lesson,” he said. She remembers thinking, ”He`ll shoot over its head to scare it, and it`ll come back. He`s done it before.” Then a feeling of sudden dread: ”He`s going to do something.”
Bob stormed back out, and the dog was there, cowering against the trailer, tail between its legs. Jo Ann got to the door, poised to protest, just as Bob blew the dog`s head off.
Blood splattered in the dirt, on the trailer, on the steps.
Instinctively, Jo Ann ran for a rag to clean up.
”Leave it alone,” Bob said.
”I have kids coming over today,” Jo Ann argued. ”I`m not leaving that on the ground like that.”
”Don`t touch it,” he snarled. ”It`s a lesson. That dog didn`t come when I called it. Let that be a lesson to you.”
The dog`s carcass lay there for days; Jo Ann cleaned up the mess gradually, when Bob wasn`t home.
This was another sorry snapshot of her life with Bob-12 years of cringing in fear and following orders: dinner on the table when he demanded, a constant supply of Coors in the refrigerator and Camels in the cupboard and no visiting friends or driving the truck without his permission.
The price of disobedience was too dear. Once, when she threatened to leave, he came down on her bare foot with the full force of his steel-toed work boot and broke her toes. During a fight at a barbecue in 1982, he split open her nose with a beer bottle. She mopped up his vomit after drinking binges. He tore the telephone out of the wall when she threatened to call the police at the height of their fights.
To hear Jo Ann tell it, she might have put up with the abuse forever. Each day that passed, her life mattered a little less. But in rural Hammond, Minn., on Nov. 28, 1986, when Bob stumbled into the trailer near midnight, blind-drunk on beer; well, that night was different.
Jo Ann was baby-sitting four neighbor children and her 6-month-old grandson, Robert, named for Bob. For the first time, she says, the children were in danger. That changed everything.
The fight that followed was one of their ugliest. Bob broke a rocking chair and threw the pieces at Jo Ann. He threw firewood and a car part at her. He pulled hanks of hair from her head, then tore her flannel shirt in shreds from her body. He picked up a pot of oatmeal on the stove, smashed it against her head and dumped the mush over her.
When little Robert, sleeping on the couch, awoke screaming, Bob grabbed the baby by the arm, dangled him in the air and said: ”Shut this little b. . . up, or I`ll kill him.”
Jo Ann remembers the fear, and then saying: ”Put him down; he`s innocent. That`s all you`re good for, beating up women and kids. You could never hold your own with another man.”
Bob turned and retreated. He used the bathroom, then staggered to the bedroom, stripped to his underwear, and passed out on the bed.
Later, Jo Ann would testify: ”When I looked at his face, he had an expression I`ve seen before. He had this look in his eyes that I just knew something was going to happen.
”And after he went to bed I thought to myself that somebody had to scare him, just scare him so badly like he scared us.”
Jo Ann went to the closet and picked up another of Bob`s guns-a .30-30 rifle. She fumbled the bullet into the chamber.
Jo Ann Hennum remembers: moving down the hall to the bedroom, ”like I was on the floor and yet I seen me walking.” And then, turning her head, pointing the rifle into the bedroom and squeezing the trigger.
Then she bundled up the baby and 8-year-old Jada Schoenfelder and left three other children sleeping on the floor. Jada had witnessed everything except the shooting. They ran to the neighboring farmhouse of Kenneth Hovde and called Jada`s father. He went to the trailer and retrieved the still-sleeping children.
Three hours later, Wabasha County sheriff`s deputies, responding to a call from Hovde, found 38-year-old Bob Hennum on the bed, his brain stem severed by a bullet above his left ear.
The legal maze
They arrested Jo Ann Hennum, 46, at the Hovde farm as dawn was breaking Nov. 29, and charged her with two counts of second-degree murder. She would be learning no more lessons from Bob Hennum. But for others, there was something yet to be learned from his violent legacy.
On April 3, 1987, a jury of eight women and four men convicted Jo Ann of second-degree murder without intent, but with the intent to commit assault with a dangerous weapon. One month later, Wabasha County District Judge Lawrence T. Collins sentenced her to 8 1/2 years at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Shakopee, Minn. But her journey through the legal system was only beginning.
The Minnesota Court of Appeals overturned the Hennum conviction in September, 1988, ruling that a court-ordered mental examination by an expert for the prosecution violated her constitutional right against self-
incrimination.
The state appealed the decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and on June 16, as Jo Ann began her third year in prison, the court upheld her conviction but reduced her sentence to 4 1/2 years. Counting time she served in the Wabasha County Jail while awaiting trial, and with time off for good behavior, she will leave the women`s prison before the end of this year.
The court also ruled that the trial judge erred in ordering Jo Ann`s mental examination. But lawyers and women`s advocates are cheering a larger victory: a decision that allows testimony from experts on battered woman`s syndrome in similar trials in the future.
Jo Ann claimed that as a victim of battered woman`s syndrome-brought on by a history of abusive relationships-she was driven to kill Bob Hennum in self-defense.
Ruth Brinker of St. Paul was the first woman in Minnesota to use battered woman`s syndrome in explaining why she stabbed to death her husband, Donald, in 1978. Lucy Tisland of Bemidji, Minn., a battered woman who shot her sleeping husband to death in 1983, used similar testimony in her defense. Both women were acquitted at the trial level. The Hennum case was the first of its kind to reach the state Supreme Court.
”We had to be able to explain to a jury why Jo Ann Hennum didn`t bundle up those kids and run away,” said James Nordstrom, the Rochester, Minn., attorney who defended Jo Ann. ”In the context of being a battered woman, it makes sense. She had no power, and she was literally beaten down. But an average jury might not understand that without testimony from experts.”
Nordstrom presented a long list of friends and relatives who witnessed years of Bob`s violence against Jo Ann, her children and family pets. His key expert witness, Minneapolis psychologist Lynn Powers, testified that Jo Ann was a victim of battering not only by Bob, but by her first husband. Hampered by poverty and little education, she was emotionally and physically powerless to escape the brutality.
”It`s a tragic case,” said Paul Kempainen, the assistant attorney general who argued the case before the Supreme Court. ”You can feel a lot of sympathy for Jo Ann Hennum. You don`t even have to feel a lick of sympathy for Robert Hennum. But the man suffered a violent and bloody death, and he was sleeping. He posed her no imminent harm. This is not a case of self-defense.” Not among friends
Hammond, population 178, is a one-drag town tucked in the verdant Zumbro River valley of southeast Minnesota. A battered woman on foot had no shelter to run to. There are two bars in town, one on either side of the road, and a wood-sided general store. The major traffic consists of canoeists and fishermen who stop for beer or the telephone.
Rochester is 21 miles south, down a winding stretch of County Road 11.
Jo Ann Hennum said she had no friends in Hammond, and that is certainly true at Freddie`s Bar. The three men drinking in the dank, smoky bar in the middle of a recent day remember Jo Ann as the troublemaker-she`d get a few beers in her and turn mean. She came after Bob more than once, kicking him and accusing him of having affairs, they said.
Judy Miller, director of the Rochester Women`s Shelter, where Jo Ann once hid from Bob, said the attitude in many small towns toward wife abuse is that it`s a family matter-nobody else`s business. But it should be, she said.
”When a small community looks at something like this, they are faced with the fact that they let it happen,” Miller said. ”There were people who knew. No one ever stopped Bob Hennum, and now they are putting the blame on Jo Ann for protecting herself. Why did they let it come to this?”
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At Shakopee, the state`s only prison for women, inmates walk through an unfenced prison yard, moving from work detail to lunch to free time in their dormitories.
Jo Ann lives in the Anthony dorm, in a standard 10- by 15-foot room with one narrow window overlooking a grassy yard. She has her own toilet, a coffeepot and a small desk and chair. The bulletin board above her bed is filled with photos of her children, grandchildren and children of her attorneys and friends. A lavender banner reading SURVIVOR hangs diagonally on the board; a woman who marched in a Rochester ”Take Back the Night” rally sent it to her.
She is 5 feet 4 inches, and at 48, carries the extra weight of middle age around her waist and hips. Her dark hair is curly-permed, peppered with gray and nearly shoulder-length. Her face is puffy, a remnant of her days of heavy beer drinking. She`s given up drinking, but ”I still enjoy my coffee and cigarettes,” she said, dragging on one of the generic cigarettes she buys from the prison commissary.
Therapeutic work situation
Everyone here has a job; they made Jo Ann a baker and started her out at 55 cents an hour. On the outside, she won radio contests for her cake- and bread-baking. ”I won a Tiffany lamp for my daughter for a doll cake I entered in a Rochester radio contest,” she remembered. ”I won a La Machine that could chop up anything you`d want to. Bob took it away. Everything that was just mine, he took away.”
When psychologists try to understand the genesis of battered woman`s syndrome, they often look to a victim`s childhood. ”It`s important to look at the conditioning a woman has had all her life, not just one relationship,”
said psychologist Lynn Powers, who counsels Shakopee inmates who have been battered.
In her pretrial evaluation of Jo Ann, psychiatrist Satterfield tried to find evidence of a violent childhood. It never surfaced. The youngest of 13 children, Jo Ann claims she never saw her father-who died when she was 10-hit her mother.
Jo Ann never has lived more than 25 miles from Rochester. She grew up there, and dropped out of school in the 9th grade. Her first job was at a Woolworth`s soda fountain. When Jo Ann was 16, she married Ronald Atkinson. It was 1956.
”I can remember when I was pregnant with my first baby, he kicked me. I thought, `No way. I don`t put up with this.` I told my mother about it, and she said, `Jo, you made your bed. You lie in it. You make that marriage work. He`s young yet, and he`ll straighten out.` ”
According to testimony in the murder case, Jo Ann endured abuse for 10 years of marriage, until she filed for a divorce. She had five children with Atkinson. But when you are living with a man who thinks he owns you, she said, a divorce decree means nothing. In subsequent years, Atkinson followed her to work, she said, and came to her home and threatened her.
Her only protection from Atkinson, she said, was Bob Hennum.
It was around 1974 that Jo Ann first saw him. She was working on an assembly line, putting together stereo components, and went to Roxies, a favorite Rochester bar, for a few beers with friends on payday. Bob was there- a lanky 6 feet 2 inches, with a full beard and long, dark hair. A biker without a bike. He picked her out of the crowd, swaggered up to her bar stool and slapped her on the butt. It became his regular greeting.
”I hated that,” Jo Ann said, with a little giggle. ”I didn`t have no time for him.”
Atkinson frequently showed up at the same bar. Bob was bigger, stronger.
”When Ronnie came around, pretty soon Bob started showing up, too, getting in between us. I thought I could get the protection from him I couldn`t get anyplace else,” Jo Ann said.
She moved in with Bob, a seldom-employed welder and mechanic. He knew about machines, and he was self-taught. Neighbors and people he met in bars hired him to fix their cars or to weld broken machinery.
”He could take anything broke down and make it like new,” Jo Ann said. Two years later, they were standing before the captain of the Salvation Army in Rochester, reciting their wedding vows. By then, Bob was already beating her.
Wishful thinking
Jo Ann`s eyes glaze with tears and her voice is coming from some distant place when she tries to explain the marriage: She was 34 when they met; he was 26 and already drinking like a man with no future. He belted down Mad Dog 20-20 wine and shots of Jack Daniel`s and could put away a case of beer in one sitting. If he could protect her from harm, she could surely save him from self-destruction.
”I thought if I could get him to stop drinking, then it would change his behavior. And sometimes it would be great.”
During her history with Bob, Jo Ann fled countless times, but she never sought a separation or divorce. Usually, she ran to one of her daughters`
homes. He always tracked her down. She charged him with assault once, and he spent 30 days in jail. But Bob was back beating Jo Ann one week after his release. Finally, on Aug. 13, 1982, after spending a few days in the Rochester Women`s Shelter, Jo Ann got a temporary restraining order against Bob. He was not to come on their property or have contact with her.
He came anyway. When Jo Ann pulled the order from her purse, he pulled a knife from his pocket, grabbed the document and slashed it. ”This is what I think of your legal papers,” he said. The shredded order now sits among bloody crime scene photos and tape-recorded interrogations in an evidence box at the state Supreme Court.
At her trial, Jo Ann said she thought his destroying the order made it invalid. She never filed for another one.
She felt she had nowhere safe to go.
”Where would I have run to?”
Jo Ann asked that question while sitting in the interview room at Shakopee, working through the events of that night. ”It was dark. It was cold. I had five kids with me. No car. No. I couldn`t run.”
But in Minnesota, running away from a fight is an integral piece of a self-defense claim. The law allows a person to kill only after weighing things like imminent peril to herself or others, what a reasonable ”man” would do in the situation, and whether she reasonably tried to escape.
Battered women`s defense cases, they argue, require a more subjective reading of the law. Two states-Washington and North Dakota-have a subjective standard.
”We`re asking juries to look at the circumstances as it appeared from the defendant`s perspective,” said Susan MacPherson, a staff member of the National Jury Project Midwest, which helped the defense research Hennum`s case. ”And from Jo Ann Hennum`s perspective, the violence had escalated that night to the point of `it`s him or me.` ”
Although both sides of this case find the ”sleeping man” aspect the most troubling, Jo Ann`s advocates are convinced that it is no different than if Bob were awake and lunging at her.
A new life
Jo Ann Hennum is not thinking like a woman who soon will be free. She has settled into the kind of secure routine she never had on the outside. She is two points away from getting her own high school diploma.
Every other weekend, her children and grandchildren come up from Rochester. Little Robert is 3 now. ”I worried a lot about the effect of that night on him,” said Jo Ann. ”But he`s a typical 3-year-old. He`s okay.”
There are some certainties. She will not appeal her case any further. There will never be another man in her life. Press her a little, and she looks straight on, refusing to waver: ”No more men. I can`t be walked on again.”
The Rochester Women`s Shelter, where Jo Ann is something of a hero, may find a place for her as a peer counselor. She will be able to live there until she finds an apartment. But most of the time, independence is a hazy commodity-a prize she should covet but somehow fears.
”Sometimes, I get a little scared about doing things on my own. It`s like I used to feel with Bob sometimes. Like knives were cutting right through me. And I have to say, `Jo, you gotta.` Then I make myself. I have to.”
It will be Nov. 28, 1989, when she is scheduled to walk free from prison- three years after she freed herself from Bob Hennum.
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