The Murder Story

(God you crazy psycho! What the hell were you thinking?)

 
Dean and I at my Junior Homecoming Dance in 1991. I was 16, he was 22.

Here is how it ended with Dean. A couple months after the last abusive incident where he chased me, screaming that he was going to kill me, Dean ended up on crack cocaine again (he would go on binges every few months.) He spent an $80,000 inheritance check in three weeks and went into debt with the drug dealers and couldn't pay them off.

I had just graduated from high school and was working at my first real job at this time and was not seeing a lot of him for obvious reasons, the main reason being that he was always threatening to kill me and I had started to believe that he really would since his abusive rages were so out-of-control.

One day, I was at work, and he came up there. I hadn't seen him for a couple of weeks. I had broken up with him for obvious reasons. Even though I loved him, he was a violent maniac who couldn't be trusted. He wanted to talk to me and so I went outside to talk to him. He told me that the drug dealers had threatened him, saying that if he didn't pay them back, they would rape me and kill him (that never happened.) He said that he was leaving town. He was going back to his hometown in Baltimore, Maryland to get away from the drug dealers that were after him. I actually cried when he left. I guess I knew it would be the last time I'd see him. He didn't see me cry, but I broke down in the bathroom after he was gone. He told me goodbye and held me close and hugged me and said he would call me. I watched him drive away. Even though I feared for my life when I was around him, I was sad to see him go.

After a few days, he did call. He was living in Maryland, still smoking crack. We kept in touch on and off for the next three months. I could tell he was strung out on crack a lot of the time.

On September 20, 1992, he called around 11:00 pm and asked me, "What would happen if a person just disappeared?"

I said, "What are you talking about?"

He said, "This guy I'm staying with... I'm going to take him out in a field and tie him to a tree. I'm going to douse him with gasoline and set him on fire."

The man he was living with was 56-year-old Robert Earl Murphy. Dean told me that he had gone to the hospital because he was coughing up a lot of black stuff from smoking too much crack. While at the hospital, he had met an x-ray technician, Robert, who offered to let Dean stay with him since Dean was homeless.

(I am actually certain that he had known Robert for years. I think it was the same guy who was molesting Dean and his friends in exchange for drugs and money when they were teenagers.)

When I asked him why he wanted to set the guy on fire, he told me that he (Dean) had stolen some money and jewelry from Robert to buy crack with and that Robert had threatened to call the police and call Dean's mother and tell them both.

I can tell you that a more likely story is that the man threatened to tell Dean's mother that Dean was performing gay sex acts for money and tell the police that he had stolen jewelry or money from him. I would say it was the "telling his mother" part that set him off (not to mention the childhood molestation.) Not that Dean needed any provocation to abuse or murder people. He abused and threatened to kill me all the time for no good reason at all. So we talked about it for a little while, maybe 20 minutes or so. Then I heard a voice in the background. Robert had come home. Dean said he had to go. I heard Robert tell Dean in a gruff voice to get off the phone. Dean sounded anxious as he told me he had to get off the phone. We said goodbye and hung up.

A few hours later (I had already fallen asleep) he called back.

"Hello?" I answered.

"I did it."

"Did what?" I asked.

"I stabbed him in the back."

"Oh shit. Really?"

"Yeah."

"I don't believe it!"

"He's laying here on the bed bleeding and asking for help."

"He's still alive?"

"Yes. He's begging for me to help him!"

"I don’t believe it. Let me talk to him."

"Hang on..."

Dean put Robert on the phone with me.

I said "How's it going?"

He said, "I've been stabbed and I'm bleeding! Please help me!"

Dean took the phone back. I was in shock. What should I do? Being 18, I didn't know how to handle a situation like this. I didn't have their address so I couldn't call the police. Dean always used a calling card to call me so the number came through as "Unknown Number" on the caller I.D. 

I told Dean to call an ambulance to help the guy. He seemed unsure of what he should do. He and I talked for a while, maybe 20 minutes or so, about really odd stuff, like how things were in the old days, practically ignoring the dying man that was laying there on the bed. I urged him again to call an ambulance. Finally, he agreed that he should call an ambulance for the man so he wouldn't die. He told me he would hang up and call the ambulance and call me back. "Okay, bye." "Bye."

About 20 minutes later, he called me back. I could hear the paramedics there. Dean told me, "Someone broke into the house and stabbed my roommate. He's laying here on the floor dead."

I could hear the paramedics say, "He's dead." 

Dean told me not to say anything about this to anyone and I agreed. We ended the conversation at that point.

Dean called me at 3:00 pm the next day from jail. He had confessed to the police. He told me what had happened after he hung up with me to call the ambulance. After he got off the phone with me, he went to the kitchen to wash the knife off before he called the ambulance. He was at the sink washing the blood off the knife when Robert made a run for the back door. His attempted escape caught Dean off-guard. Dean panicked and threw the guy on the floor and stabbed him repeatedly. Ten times he stabbed him, in the face, neck, and chest. He butchered the poor guy. I guess he or the neighbors called the police after that.

It just goes to show you that you shouldn't run from Dean. I guess I could have told the man that. I've walked (not ran) away from him before and he attacked me pretty viciously (and that was after he insisted that I leave and promised not to hurt me.) I didn't really think Robert would try to run or that he was even capable of getting off the bed.

It really is amazing how desensitized you can become to violence when you are around it all the time. For some reason, it didn't seem like a very big deal to me that Dean was killing a man. Maybe it didn't occur to me that the man would actually die. Being stabbed once in the back is far different from being stabbed repeatedly in the face, neck, and chest.

Dean was charged with 1st degree murder, but somehow plea bargained down to 2nd degree murder. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. That was in 1992. I kept in touch with him for many years while he was in prison. It was a weird relationship. Sometimes I pitied him, other times I hated him so much that I would write horrible things to him, knowing there was nothing he could do but read it. I suppose it was my way of getting him back for the pain he had caused me. I was still very traumatized by the abuse I had endured and the horrible murder I had been a witness to. And since I'm the type of person that always pretends like nothing is bothering me, these feelings would build into a rage. I was very self-destructive, the typical recovering victim. I also had (and still have to some extent) Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Not from the murder, I don't think, but from other incidents.

I wrote to Dean shortly after he was arrested, while he was still in a holding jail before his trial. I told him that I hoped he got punked (Definition #4 in the Urban Dictionary.) when he went to prison because he deserved it after the ways he had treated me (which is more abuse than I've disclosed here, so don't think I'm pure evil for saying that to him.) Some of his prison buddies read the letter, and wrote me back and said some frightening and horrible things to me about how they would rape and kill me when they got out. Dean later apologized for their behavior. He was trying to live a Christian life at this point, and even though he denied that any abuse took place between he and I, he apologized that his "friends" had written that to me and assured me it would not happen again (and it hasn't.) I had also apologized for saying I hope he got sexually assaulted in prison. I got to thinking about that recently though and came to the conclusion that it was probably Dean who wanted to make those threats to me, not his friends. But he knew that by threatening me through the mail he could potentially get additional time added to his sentence. So I'm guessing he had some lifers write to me instead since there is nothing you can do to someone serving a life sentence.

It's pretty crazy knowing that your ex-lover, who you've only been apart from for three months, brutally stabbed a man to death. And anyway, who calls their ex-girlfriend while they're murdering someone? It's so insane. That's the kind of stuff that really messes with your mind. The fact that he threatened to murder me repeatedly and then actually murdered someone else is frightening. I guess he wasn't joking around. He wanted blood and it was just a matter of time before his rage turned to murder.

Freak.

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