Before last Tuesday, before Connie Chaney was shot repeatedly while fleeing down the office hallway where she worked, no one seemed to think her harrowing years with her abusive husband would end like this.
No one, that is, except Connie Chaney.
”She kept telling everybody, `He`s gonna kill me, he`s gonna kill me,`
” said Mark Dobrowski, a friend. ”Of course, all of her friends were trying to talk her out of it. `No he`s not, he`s just trying to threaten you.` ”
It was a message Chaney heard in one form or another from just about everyone, including a court system that repeatedly failed to protect her from her husband, a man described as a ”maniac” and ”diabolical” by attorneys and others who had contact with him. The system allowed him to walk free even after he allegedly raped her at gunpoint.
”In this particular case, the victim did what the victim was supposed to do. She came forward and reported the crime to police and kept police and the state`s attorney`s office informed,” said Bruce Paynter, supervisor of the Skokie branch of the Cook County state`s attorney`s office.
”What more could the victim have done?”
For Connie Chaney, the question no longer matters. But for thousands of other women who spend many days in dread, finding an answer means more than just peace of mind.
As in the Chaney case, it could mean their lives.
Each year, a growing number of women in the Chicago area are seeking court protection against men who frighten them with telephone calls, follow them, threaten them or attack them.
Often, these stalkers are estranged husbands. But others are men who have dated a woman once, and a smaller number will follow a woman they have never met.
In the vast majority of such cases, the victims are women who have been involved in relationships with a man who doesn`t want it to end, said Jan Russell, a family issues specialist for the Victim Witness Program of the Cook County state`s attorney`s office.
Victims of such harassment can seek court orders to protect them from the stalkers. In 1991, Cook County judges issued 8,094 orders of protection, an increase of 959 from a year earlier and nearly 1,900 more than in 1989.
And in at least 80 percent of these cases, experts say, the legal remedies do work. But such protections are no match for men like Wayne T. Chaney, who authorities say violated several court orders for more than a year. He is accused of raping his wife at gunpoint last July and of killing her Tuesday morning in the Mt. Prospect advertising agency where she worked. He is still being sought by police.
And as with many victims, Connie Chaney apparently used every legal defense possible to sever ties with her husband.
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She left him when the couple lived in a Knoxville trailer park in January 1991, the same month she filed for divorce, records show. She and her 3-year- old son, Max, moved in with her sister in Des Plaines. She obtained four 30-day interim orders of protection against her husband before she got a two- year, no-contact order in December.
She reported Wayne Chaney to authorities after he allegedly broke into her home and raped her last July. She also filed at least one complaint of domestic violence with Des Plaines police.
That didn`t stop her estranged husband. He got out of jail when a judge lowered his bond from $300,00 to $100,000 two months after he was arrested in the July incident. Though the judge barred him from having contact with his wife, Chaney continued his threats, directed at her and others, including her new boyfriend, authorities say.
On one occasion, court records allege, Wayne Chaney tried to run over his wife last year in a grocery store parking lot.
Such pursuits are played out again and again in the lives of thousands of women, and a much smaller number of men, who are tormented by spouses, lovers and strangers.
A North Side woman, for example, hired a private detective to follow her estranged husband after co-workers told her they had seen him rooting through her car. ”He is following you everywhere you go,” the detective told her.
Now she lives with her daughter and parents and doesn`t go out at night. And her husband`s bizarre behavior-turning up the volume on his car radio and cruising by her home as many as 40 times a day-has driven her friends away.
”People stay away from you, and your friends don`t want you coming by their house because they don`t want him coming by the house and causing problems,” she said. ”I can`t live like that.”
Like most victims interviewed for this story, the woman asked only to be identified by her first name, Donna, for fear of angering her stalker even more.
For a 26-year-old accountant named Amy, the decision to leave a boyfriend a year ago had a violent fallout.
Her West Lakeview apartment was burglarized by her ex-boyfriend, she said, and a budding relationship with another man came to an abrupt halt when the boyfriend severed the brake lines and broke the windshield of her date`s car.
The ex-boyfriend has followed her in his van and recently tossed bricks through two of the windows in her apartment, she said. He was arrested and charged with criminal damage to property, she said.
”He said, `No matter where you go or what you do, you`ll never be rid of me,` ” said Amy.
Russell, of the Victim Witness Program, explains: ”What domestic violence is about is power and control. It has nothing to do with love or hate. It`s not that he loves her so much he has to have her.”
While some victims fear they will be injured, others contend with former lovers who try to get them fired from jobs or scare away other men. Many have had to dramatically alter how they live, Russell said.
Christine, 30, a computer programmer, said a former boyfriend has broken into her home while she was on the telephone with a 911 operator reporting that he was outside the home, in violation of a protection order.
”He came in the back, spit on us and dashed out,” she said. ”I was left screaming on the phone, `He`s in here!` ”
While officials say protection orders usually work, both Christine and Amy say the men they were involved with ignored the orders.
Paul Farina, a counselor who has worked with men who batter women, said many of them refuse to take responsibility for their actions and instead focus the blame on the victim. ”They would say, `She should know how to avoid those things,` ” Farina said. ” `It`s her fault.` ”
The men, ordered by judges to attend group sessions, harbored intense anger, Farina said.
”You don`t see a lot of change,” he said. ”Sometimes a few began to re-evaluate their lives. I believe it`s a lifelong process for these guys.”
The stalker`s violence often ripples through the victim`s life, affecting family and friends as the obsession escalates.
For Connie Chaney`s family, her murder means that they now have a glimpse of how she lived the last year of her life, constantly looking over her shoulder.
Since Tuesday, her family, from her father to her sisters, brother and in-laws, have crowded into one apartment, under round-the-clock surveillance of at least three Des Plaines police officers. Max is being cared for in a foster home.
Tense family members wait for word that Wayne Chaney has been apprehended.
As friends and relatives retell the events of the last year, they paint a picture of an ugly pattern of abuse.
From the time Wayne and Connie were dating, and he deliberately wrecked her car, to his numerous visits to her job while they were separated, Connie Chaney was consumed by fear, family members said.
Mark Dubrowski, who worked with Connie at a grocery in Des Plaines, watched as his friend became increasingly ”paranoid.” After she was raped, Dubrowski said, when someone walked up behind her, Connie would scream.
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And whenever Wayne Chaney made one of his frequent visits to the store, Connie would hide in the back room, Dubrowski said.
”He`d say real loud, `One of these days, Connie, one of these days . . .` ” Dubrowski said. ”And then he`d storm out.”`