Diane Hirtzig’s life now is contained in nine boxes stored on the floor of a friend’s apartment.
In them are a television set, a radio, a fan and a blanket she crocheted. And there are the odds and ends–the papers, ceramic bowls, stuffed animals–that seemed so important when they cluttered her cell at Dixon Correctional Center but somehow don’t matter much at all now that she is free.
“In there, your things are important,” she said. “But I have thrown away a lot of stuff since I’ve been home.”
Hirtzig has been home–if a friend’s couch can be called home–for 11 days.
On Dec. 23, Gov. Jim Edgar commuted her 13-year sentence for attempting to hire someone in 1992 to kill her then-husband, Edward Hirtzig, a man who said in a signed affidavit he had battered her for more than a decade.
She is the first battered woman to win early release since 1994, and her case is all the more unusual in that her ex-husband himself helped fight for her freedom.
In an affidavit submitted as part of her clemency petition–a document he now claims he signed but never read–Edward Hirtzig detailed how he repeatedly abused and threatened to kill his former wife. And he argued for her release, saying that her children needed her at home.
Even so, Diane Hirtzig’s case was overshadowed by news of the governor’s pardon the same day of a Crete man who lost his teaching job in 1996 because he had been convicted 22 years earlier of possession of marijuana.
And already, Hirtzig’s freedom carries echoes of the tumult in which she lived for so many years before her incarceration. She says she remains so afraid of her ex-husband that she is keeping her whereabouts secret. Edward Hirtzig, meanwhile, is out of jail on bond in Downstate Odell after being charged with domestic battery against a girlfriend.
He supports his ex-wife’s release, although other members of his family say she deserves more prison time for her crime.
One of at least eight battered women to receive clemency since Edgar took office, Diane Hirtzig was released, according to the governor’s press office, because he felt she had served enough time for her offense and he wanted to see her back home with her family for the holidays.
Freedom came more than five years into her sentence and just 12 months before her scheduled release. And it came as such a surprise that she already had mailed her children’s Christmas presents. She expected to spend the holiday, like the five before it, behind bars.
But she walked out on the morning of Christmas Eve, and a few days later was reunited with five of her six children for the family’s first celebration together since the youngest, 12-year-old Katie, was in 1st grade.
At a pizza party not far from the suburban Chicago hotel where the family gathered last weekend, Katie and 14-year-old Julie gently fingered their mother’s graying hair and occasionally clasped her hands to their lips as she sat wedged between them. Her two other daughters were there, too, as well as a brother and sister who live in the Chicago area and one of her two sons from a previous marriage.
The children chattered about taking a trip to Six Flags Great America theme park and talked, more seriously, of the newfound independence they glimpsed in their mother.
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“Before, she didn’t speak up and she just listened to what people told her to do and what my dad told her,” marveled 16-year-old Melanie. “Now she’s able to stand her ground.”
Still, at 40, she has no job and no home. Her three youngest children are in foster care, and it will be months, maybe much longer, before she has a chance of getting them back. She tried to get a state identification card but was turned down because she had only prison paperwork to prove who she was.
“Right now,” she said, half-joking, several days after her homecoming,”right now, I don’t exist.”
“I’m really happy to be out,” she said, “but it’s like my life was turned upside down again. It feels like all those times when I used to try to leave my ex. It’s strange. You feel you don’t belong anywhere.”
Edward and Diane Hirtzig met and married in Chicago but moved to Odell, north of Pontiac, in 1986. Violence plagued their relationship from the start, according to Edward Hirtzig’s affidavit.
This four-page document, chilling in its detail, recounts a series of attacks upon her and the children.
According to the affidavit, Hirtzig choked his wife until she passed out, hit her so hard she lost hearing in one ear for months and broke her nose during a quarrel in a car.
Like many battered women, Diane Hirtzig sought help but didn’t always follow through. The couple got divorced, but remarried. In the nine months before her arrest, police were called more than half a dozen times to investigate reports of domestic violence or threats involving the Hirtzigs, and Diane Hirtzig obtained at least one order of protection against her husband in 1992.
Edward Hirtzig regularly threatened to kill his wife and the threats only got worse after she moved out with the children, according to the affidavit.
“I understand why Diane might have felt threatened by me,” the affidavit reads. “I know that I made her very afraid of me. I also know that this was the only reason she committed the crime she’s in prison for. She felt she was protecting herself and the kids.”
However, Hirtzig now claims he never read the affidavit and offers conflicting versions of some incidents described in it, including his threats against her.
“There never was no threats of death that I could recall,” he said in a telephone interview.
In a September 1992 meeting that police videotaped at a Pontiac motel, Diane Hirtzig tried to hire a man to kill her husband, saying she wanted to put him through “quite a lot of pain” before his death.
The hit man turned out to be an undercover police officer. Despite her husband’s attempts to get the case against her dropped, Hirtzig was charged with solicitation of murder for hire. The charge later was reduced to attempted murder in exchange for her guilty plea.
In prison, Diane Hirtzig earned an associate’s degree and is now a senior thesis short of a bachelor’s degree in general studies. She learned to crochet and did secretarial work for the head of the women’s division of the prison.
In late 1995, Hirtzig, by then divorced again from his wife, contacted the Chicago-based Illinois Clemency Project for Battered Women in hopes of winning her release. The project’s director, Margaret Byrne, suggested he write an affidavit on her behalf.
His offer to help came just months after the Illinois Department of Corrections barred Hirtzig, a former exterminator, from visiting his ex-wife because he told a counselor he was thinking about poisoning her in prison.
Diane Hirtzig’s petition for clemency, written by two University of Chicago law students, was filed in February 1996. After a hearing two months later, Hirtzig began hoping for her release.
When the news finally came after dinner last Tuesday, it came so quickly that Hirtzig didn’t have time to say goodbye to everyone. She stayed awake all night, packing up her belongings, and left just after 8 the next morning.
Edward Hirtzig, who has called family members attempting to get in touch with his ex-wife, said he does not want her to get custody of their children. “It’s going to be a pretty messy situation,” he said.
He is scheduled to go to trial in January on charges of domestic battery and aggravated assault, according to authorities in Livingston County.
Diane Hirtzig has begun taking the first steps toward reshaping her life. She met with her parole officer this week and picked up a book to study to get her driver’s license renewed. She hopes to find an apartment and a secretarial job soon, so she has a home for her children and a way to support them.
She hasn’t stopped looking over her shoulder–she worries what her ex-husband might do–but she says that prison changed her. Now, she says, she would not stay in an abusive relationship, would not seek the way out she did. Now, she says, she would get help.
“I’m not the same woman who went into prison. Now, I’m independent, outgoing,” she said. “But I’m still afraid.”