Mandy Karolkiewicz Wasn’t Safe
Mandy Karolkiewicz and her six children were un-alived by her husband. A cheater. She reconciled for the children and shared her struggles online.
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Another cheater offed his wife and kids.
Just like Chris Watts. Scott Peterson. Christian Longo. Neil Entwistle.
Is there a pattern here?
We’d have to have researchers who see infidelity as a form of abuse first. We’re not there yet. No one is linking infidelity with domestic violence. So I can’t tell you with scientific certainty if sexual entitlement can turn lethal. I can’t point to a study that correlates malignant f*ckwittery with cheating and family annihilation.
But I can tell you with certainty that Mandy Karolkiewicz wasn’t safe.
Before she died, Mandy was on Reddit reconciliation boards looking for support.
A Michigan mother who was killed by her husband before he died by (un-aliving) previously shared on Reddit that she feared leaving him after his affair.
Amanda “Mandy” Karolkiewicz, 39, and her six children — ages 5 to 15 — were fatally shot by 47-year-old Kristopher “Kris” Karolkiewicz at the family’s Grand Haven Township home on July 24, authorities and family members have said.
Following the tragedy, Reddit posts shared by Mandy under the username “MandyK1179” have surfaced, detailing the struggles she described within the marriage. Mandy’s posts were first reported by The Detroit News and The Holland Sentinel, which independently verified that the account belonged to her.
I wish she’d found Chump Nation.
I wish she could’ve met women who had big families and left. And made it. Even though they struggle, and it’s hard.
She wrote that she was “terrified” of being a single parent. She had every right to be terrified. There’s post-separation abuse with FWs. They don’t pay support. The system doesn’t enforce it. It’s not safe. But it’s less NOT not safe than staying.
“We have six kids, so the idea of leaving is insanely terrifying,” she wrote in the post. “He’s always had major red flags that I ignored due to my own trauma and anxious attachment. He was raised in a toxic family dynamic that encouraged lying about everything.”
There’s Mandy untangling the skein.
We’ve all done it. Come up with the FOO issues why they’re this way. Trying to manage their chaos, fueled by the Reconciliation Industrial Complex that this is a noble pursuit, and possible! And What’s Best for the Children.
You don’t want to be one of those pitiful Single Mothers do you?
So they sell the illusion of safety. And the status of the Intact Family.
If you don’t think misogyny is real, look at how People magazine led with this damn story. NOT with the victims. But with Kristopher Karolkiewicz’s CV. The poor sausage lost his job!
Shortly before he killed his wife and six children in an apparent (un-aliving), Kristopher Karolkiewicz’s employment with the American Heart Association had ended, according to a statement from the organization.
“The American Heart Association national headquarters is aware that one of its former staff members was among those who perished under tragic circumstances Friday in a western Michigan home,” the organization said in a statement shared with PEOPLE on Tuesday, July 28.
Karolkiewicz worked remotely for the American Heart Association from September 2023 until July 2026, when his “employment ended,” the statement read.
He served as the organization’s national vice president of sales and marketing, supporting the division of the Heart Association responsible for CPR and first aid training and products, according to the statement.
Kristopher Karolkiewicz extinguished his family. He is NOT “among” those who “perished under tragic circumstances.” He IS the INSTIGATOR of the tragedy. His sales and marketing bonafides are absolutely beside the point.
Can you imagine a person of color getting this write up? Or a woman? Would we lead with their white collar careers?
As if this is somehow understandable and not utterly indefensible.
Mandy Karolkiewicz wasn’t safe because this is the world she lived in. Himpathy for her abuser. The centering of him would’ve been true if she’d stayed or had left.
But I really wish she had left.
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What a tragedy.
And that subreddit, r/AsOneAfterInfidelity, is such a nasty place—full of hopium dealers and stories about how chumps found true love and happiness with their cheaters through forgiveness.
P.S. You’ll get instantly banned just for mentioning Chump Lady’s book there.
Further validation for Chump Lady. She’s right, so they’re scared.
I’m proud to be a subversive influence.
Tracy, you stand in that power and never stop beating that drum 🥁. Too many of us have been buried and no one knew the truth..no one except the now silent one. Which is why I believe in that front seat in Hell you speak so well of…and a peaceful reward for the lost ones. Justice must prevail in the end
Also a former workplace creep, apparently. According to the media, they met at work when she was about 21 and an intern and he was about 29 (and divorced). Later on, he cheated on her with another young intern, according to news reports. Maybe his job loss pushed him “over the edge” because he wasn’t able to prey on young interns anymore. Scary and horrifying.
What do you want to bet he was let go from his job due to either his previous affair with the intern, or a new affair / sexual harassment?
Maybe preying on interns is why he wasn’t working for the AHA anymore.
Oh my God, I saw that horrific news and it’s devastating to read. Understanding more deeply than ever the lack of character and integrity people who cheat have, it’s unfortunately not that surprising that a cheater does stuff like this.
And like you saying your book it’s not a gender thing, It’s a character thing. Because female cheaters do this heinous shit as well. It’s not a sensationalistic but names like Jennifer Gledhill, Marie Polling, Michelle Mills, Kelly Cochran, Kelli Lane paints a bleak picture of what someone who lacks any empathy, remorse, or character can do to another human being.
It’s so important to understand the tactics and abuse that these people use on their victims as soon as possible after discovery.
When you’re a caring empathetic and loving human being that has character you know that there’s evil in this world, but you never suspect that it’s sitting right next to you on the couch. And I think most of us have no clue what’s in Store for us once we first discover.
If you’re new here after discovery and just reading through this stuff heed these warnings.
What terribly sad news.
Though, as others point out, domestic unaliving is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, studies on the correlation between dark triad traits and cheaters and so-called “mate poachers” (side pieces) might argue that, if you’re looking for red flags for potential lethality, cheating/poaching is one of them. Then there’s another potential red flag in studies on a sort of female counterpart to “toxic masculinity” among women– something called “hyperfemininity” or “toxic femininity” showing that women who internalize rigid partriarchal gender roles (male sexual dominance and strength and female subordination and squishiness, etc.) are more likely to be coercive towards the opposite sex.
The latter findings actually surprised some of the authors of the earlier studies on the subject who approached the subject with a certainty that women who identified as feminist would show more aggressive tendencies towards partners but it was actually the reverse that turned out to be the case. But when I thought about it, it actually fits the organizational science and civil rights concept of “subordinate authoritarianism.” Basically subordinate authoritarians “stoop to conquer”– meaning that those who appear to accept, internalize and even enforce an artificial hierarchy despite being granted inherent lower status within that hierarchy are still attempting to gain higher status through enforcement against others rather than questioning the system that’s keeping them and people like them down.
This idea echoes Malcolm X’s criticisms of what he called the “house slave” mentality, a reference to the many narratives of how house slaves who were given paltry benefits such as sleeping in the master’s house and getting better food and fewer beatings were less likely to rebel than the more brutally treated field slaves and also often informed on field slaves who were planning rebellion.
But it still seems odd at first that women exhibiting so-called hyperfemininity would be more aggressive and coercive (for the studies, gaslighting and deceit were ranked as coercive behaviors) towards male partners if they view all men as “superior.” But I think the rub is that these women are highly critical of men who do not exhibit the proper domineering, knuckle dragging qualities that they’ve been conditioned to view as “true masculinity.” They might be more likely to view a nice guy/good dad/good husband type as weak and therefore undeserving of the honor or respect (or loyalty). So perhaps out of “fealty to the hierarchy” or a way of assuring themselves of higher status within it, women like this police against this “masculine failure” and punish accordingly. Women like this are also no friend to other women.
Anyway, food for thought. This type of aggression may not be that common among women but abuse is abuse and individual survivors of it suffer the same. I’m glad its being studied.
My theory is that particular type of woman is actually quite contemptuous of all men and the hyperfeminine, pick me type behaviour is a pose to attract men to manipulate. They get a thrill out of manipulating them. It’s often not even done for an end goal, it is the goal itself.
I have an old nemesis who is exactly like that. She pretends to look up to men, but got caught betraying a misogynist she was flattering by spilling embarassing private info about him. She even tried her game out on a severely mentally ill misogynist who was making threats towards women. She wanted to manipulate him into believing she was the one woman he could trust. She had a stable of vile misogynists and she would get together with them to trash feminists.
I’m happy to say I exposed her game and got her shunned by every decent person she knew.
She tried to get the mentally ill misogynist to harm me, but he was a complete f***up so he failed. She faded away after that and wasn’t seen until her favorite misogynist died of a drug overdose. She contacted some of the old crowd about it, made it about herself by bragging that it had inspired her to become an addictions counsellor so she could save lives, and when she saw that nobody cared, she was never heard from again. She was as clearcut a narcissist as I’ve ever seen.
The second paragraph, where you detail subordinate authoritarianism, is very clearly on display in the TV show (and book, I suppose.. but the show carries on for much longer) The Handmaid’s Tale. The wives, though being considered “lesser than” in society, still attempt to conquer all those other women that are beneath them on the totem pole, while strictly adhering to the rules in their patriarchal society. Serena Joy is a great example of this.
Margaret Atwood really gets the divide and conquer/divided we fall/house slave vs. field slave dynamic. She exposes the same idea in The Penelopiad where women are pitted against each other by design within patriarchy.
I understand that female cheaters do heinous things, but I believe that males commit 80-90% of all “family annihilations.”
The late, great Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” is so shocking because you never expect a sane, loving woman to kill her children. One of the greatest and most searing books of my life. I will never forget it.
I understand this is a devastating topic, and as a survivor of betrayal and abuse, it hits painfully close to home for me and I’m sure many others.
Thank you for your post and sharing that disgusting statistic. To clarify, I’m not debating, rationalizing or supporting anything about violence, gender, or abuse, especially since I’m an abuse survivor myself. I also don’t know the research of domestic violence as it pertains to non-cheaters, I can only imagine the inexcusable lopsided nature of that.
My position and personal experience is that abuse from cheaters is almost identical no matter what the race, religion, gender, or sexual preference of the cheater themselves. My research has shown me that in today’s social landscape, labeling one gender as evil and the other as caring has made some focus on something other than the core issue, that cheaters’ lack of character and empathy enables them to abuse their victim’s mentally, emotionally and many times physically in very much the same ways. The pathologies of these cheaters usually are exactly the same.
Physical abuse is never acceptable and anyone who resorts to that should be put in jail for a long time. In the same vein, I believe that anyone who resorts to emotional and psychological abuse should face severe consequences as well. The research shows that those types of abuse can be just as damaging, especially impacting long-term mental health, as a broken arm.
Bottom line, if people just found out about deception, lies and cheating from their partner, no matter what the cheating partner identifies as, expect ramped up abuse that could escalate to these levels
Yes, all chumps should consider this in the realm of possibilities and act accordingly. And even if it isn’t the she-FW herself committing physical aggression, there’s the built-in risk– at least in the case of heterosexual female cheaters– of statistically high rates of psychopathy among the “mate poachers” they’re consorting with and the fact that male psychos are statistically more likely to be overtly violent.
Also some lethal acts don’t require direct aggression. Any male victim of cheating should think hard about what could happen if, say, he had an accident and ended up in a coma and his cheating partner held the POA to pull the plug on life support at the soonest opportunity.
Today’s blog I can’t even finish reading..the PTSD HITS me and I break down. My first Ex told me it was better for a man to leave his family then to ” kill them all”..This is what he said to me when my sisters husband left her for the pastors wife. Yes better to abandon than to murder. This first husband left me 2 years later, armed as well and i needed a protection order. The threats were there as he polished his gun in front of me during a visit to see our newborn…
My #2 Ex was armed to the teeth, guns all around our bedroom and carried a weapon on him at all times. This while furious at me for not saying YES at all times, having affairs at work plus basement activities. He was on meds and raging. I found CL right after my police protection order which is as my first husband reminded me, ‘just a piece paper”. This story could be me. Quietly buried and no one looking at the years of subtle and not so subtle demeaning abuse. What will it take?
I mean, who even thinks about that comparison? That lethal violence should even be in the discussion about spouse and children?
Tracy, I am so glad you wrote about this today. The employer’s ‘slant’ was horrendous. He perished under tragic circumstances??? Seems like the Heart Association has a lump of ice for a heart. Wow.
I don’t understand why modern journalists use such fluffy, flowery language. I’m almost old and remember when writers used the “M” word to describe what this man did to his wife and children.
Excessive politeness? To be afraid of using accurate language to tell information or facts, is to ignore the entire point of journalism and non-fiction writing. Don’t just dial M, write the word!
Today it’s an algorithm thing, if people write the m or s (un alive oneself) the search engines or socials flag it and could block it and your website too. It’s crazy I know, but unfortunately the reality today. I think most would rather say the real words, but fear the impact from some bot algorithm.
“Both sides”-ism in action, symptom of a wholesale inability to acknowledge reality, especially when the perp is a professional white male. See also: “Thoughts and prayers.”
yes, language matters.
I now read of these horrific events and recognize the shared characteristics with every cheater. The sense of entitlement, the expectation of secret keeping, the blame shifting, the capability to abandon a spouse or parenting responsibilities.
All of this is rampant in a society which “minds their own business” and denies safe options.
“The capability to abandon a spouse or parenting responsibilities,” ain’t that the truth?
The Center for Domestic Peace is my local domestic violence prevention organization. Thankfully they do teach that affairs are abuse.
Tragically this is not accepted conventional wisdom.
In looking up this case, I found some words that Mandy wrote in her blog that have helped me today, sadly after her death:
“After about a year of self-loathing, I remember crying and looking at myself in the mirror and realizing how (expletive) it was that I was the one who was living so miserably because of what he did. I finally realized that I had been the only person who has ever showed up for myself my whole entire life.”
– Mandy Karolkewicz
Years ago on the Chump Nation Facebook page, (which is NOT a page that belongs to Tracy but was created and managed by a couple of readers here), one of the administrators came after me for posting about a case like this involving someone I went to high school with. “Cheating doesn’t cause m*rder!” Evidently she thought it was irresponsible and harmful of me to post such a thing.
Yes it does.
I will NEVER EVER advocate staying with someone who engages in deceptive sexual behavior. Cheating is the emotional and psychological equivalent of beating the sh*t out of someone with a lead pipe.
There is nothing to save. There is no love there.
Please leave.
♥️
I think so many more women die at the hands of cheaters than we will ever know. Some men yes, but I do believe it happens to women way more; and most of it is never proven and in many cases not even suspected.
I think the overwhelming stat is that while not all cheaters go on to battery, nearly all batterers are also cheaters. I forget where I read that stat. Maybe it was here, from HellofaChump, or maybe in Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That?
Not even mentioning the woman that take their own lives slowly, by neglect of themselves or quickly..after being devalued and abused behind closed doors. The numbers…. even years later could be staggering.
“The woman that takes their own life slowly by neglect of themselves“ I called it suicide on the installment plan.
Ooof. I can relate to that.
My timeline was D-Day, then 3 years later I finally got him to move out, then a year of pretending to be the most amicable co-parents who ever lived- while the lack of boundaries and the continued contact delayed real, meaningful healing for me. After that year I finally started with boundaries/low contact. It took another year for the divorce to finalize. Once it did, it was an entire year of slowly feeling better before I got off the suicide installment plan. Started taking care of myself again.
TL/DR it took me SIX years to go from D-Day to actually prioritizing myself again. That “installment plan” is no joke.
Yes. Two in my social circle within a few years of each other, hundreds of miles apart.
Friend of a friend, on the verge of finalizing divorce with her controlling, cheating, high-powered husband. She had moved out already. About a week before they were meant to sign the financial settlement, she was beaten to death in her apartment, almost certainly by a professional hired by her husband: no clues, no perp, no charges. Her husband tried to persuade the police that she went to bars and picked up random men. Every one of her friends told the police otherwise. But he got away with it. They had two adolescent boys.
A different woman hundreds of miles away, one of my oldest childhood friends, was taken out into the woods one night and shot by the cheating scum she had become engaged to. She put his name on her life insurance policy, and signed her own death warrant. Again, no proof, no charges. As a career criminal, he probably knew exactly how to pass it off as suicide.
I just did a quick AI search to see if there are any statistics on how many abusive women kill children and partners rather than accept divorce and shared custody. Instead it came back with a list of articles from NGOs on domestic violence, including a report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime which opens with a statement that 47,000 women and girls were killed by a partner or family member worldwide in 2020. The same report notes that gender-related killing of women and girls decreased by 13% across Europe in the last decade, whereas it’s increased by 9% in the US in the same time frame (quelle surprise).
This is such a sad story, for her and especially the children.
We had a case where a woman I worked with was strangled by her husband when she was in the process of leaving him. He then killed himself, leaving behind two teenage kids.
Another woman who worked at another office of my company had brought her adult sons with her to move out of her boyfriend’s house. He shot her right in front of them.
These both were smart, educated women who had taken safety precautions.
I was so blindsided and devastated by my supposedly loving husband’s sudden declaration that he wanted a divorce that I spent much of the next few weeks when I wasn’t at work or pick me dancing sleeping, from shock and depression, I think as much to protect my mind as to rest my body.
He had become increasingly nasty about how much money he wanted and whether he could make me move out of the house. One Sunday afternoon I woke up from a sleep to find him kneeling by the bed, watching me. Trust that he was not watching me because I looked so adorable in my sleep.
Luckily he just stood up and left without a word, and finally moved out shortly after that. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if he thought he could get away with getting rid of me, taking all the money he thought he was entitled to without me to interfere.
Please be careful out there.
Cheater ex did so many things that were inconceivable, not because they were out of character, but because I I believed his image management and couldn’t–or wouldn’t– see his true character.
After I discovered some of his financial thefts and he assaulted me and then-tween, who tried to intervene and protect me, traitor “friends” called to help us pressured me not to call police or even get medical care. Some friends; they were protecting him, not me and tween. He started calling and threatening tween secretly in attempts to get the new codes to the locks and security system. Tween, terrified, eventually disclosed his threats to kills us and the family pets, and his regret that he didn’t throw me down the stairs when he assaulted me. I thought it was “just” threats to get the security codes. I didn’t fully register the wish to have thrown me down the stairs while I was unconscious from his beating, because I didn’t believe he was in his right mind. My immediate thought was “Brain tumor!” because I thought he’d never been physically aggressive before. Until I remembered multiple times when I was asleep and he kicked me so hard, “in his sleep,” that I had trouble walking for a year at a time. Or how he’d kicked out at tween for walking by his chair and blocking his view of the TV for a second. (I HAD gotten family counseling because of that.) Or how now-adult son had claimed, when he went to college, that cheater had physically abused him, claims ex had said were fabricated to fit in at college. Now I wonder why a relative took back guns he had given cheater, and if he knew, suspected or feared something years earlier.
It didn’t even connect when I discovered multiple things he had done before leaving to sabotage the house and disable smoke detectors, and the further sabotage he carried out while supervised during court-ordered visits to inventory house contents and pick up specific items. Fortunately, other people put the actions together and realized he made multiple deliberate attempts to cause fires, electrical shocks and gas leaks that would have killed me and tween. There was no way to prove he did these things, although nobody else had access, knowledge, ability or motive. Fortunately, his secret threats and other actions were enough to convince CPS, the Parental Responsibilities Evaluator, and ultimately the court to revoke custody and all contact with then tween, now a teen.
Several other chumps have come forward to state that their exes wanted, plotted or tried to kill them. Just as it’s initially hard to believe our exes cheated, it’s even harder to admit, even to ourselves, that the person we loved and trusted would do this. I think there are far more of us than we know.
I agree. We don’t want to admit to ourselves that they are capable of awful, awful things. But then one day, you face it.
I think the only reason my FW didn’t off me was he didn’t think he could get away with it. Once I found out about Schmoopie, I wasn’t quiet about it. I let everyone know what he did and why I had to have sheriff come pick me up so he couldn’t tag me with abandonment. I wouldn’t play his image management game anymore. He was furious! He is to this day furious. He is an abusive ba$tard.
Just remembered other likely early signs: repeated “accidental” injuries he attributed to awkwardness. That was no reason to step on my feet repeatedly when walking by, and even less likely that he’d repeatedly elbow me in my ear or face “by accident.”
It was odd how he kept breaking MY special possessions, and kids’ things, but never his own.
Even stranger that he managed to completely alienate three of my close female friends over three decades to the point they stopped speaking to me. By the time it occurred to me to ask, two had died. The third told me that at the birthday party she hosted for her child, then in elementary school, Ex’s offensive actions included punishing HER child, the birthday boy, for being loud and excited, and she thought I knew.
There are doubtless more if I think about it.
Also, above, I meant to write Some”friends” It was one couple, who claimed, on arrival, to be neutral like Switzerland; instead, they looked at my blood, bruises and lump on my head, and chose to protect him. Their actions showed that they were NOT my friends.
I cannot comprehend how a man offs his wife and children and the writer of the article leads with “he probably haz a sadz because he lost his job”. Seriously??? It’s enraging. Looking at that photo of that innocent woman and her babies and then picturing the scene of what it must have looked and felt like as he did what he did…it makes me sick. But it makes me even sicker that people actively look for a way to excuse it.
Though it’s been said before, I just have to note again that, in our current age of #MeToo backlash, it doesn’t seem accidental that algospeak filters are making it so awkward to discuss DV because we have to put condoms on all the correct terminology. All power to CL for muscling through it and refusing to be silenced in spite of the Orwellian absurdity and attacks on clear language.
Anyway, I agree with the main point here that, in an age when science often grounds laws and policies, nothing is going to change until the science exists supporting what most of us already know: that coercive control is a typical manner that adulterous abusers use to enforce one-sided monogamy, aka “cheating.” But even that may not have mattered for victims like Shannan Watts, Lacy Peterson, Rachel Entwistle and Mary Ann Longo and their respective children without the criminalization of coercive control in the US (where all were unalived) which, aside from giving the state the power to imprison perpetrators and give victims safe cover to escape, would afford victims the same structural and financial supports available to victims of physical abuse.
But I disagree that leaving alone is always the perfect remedy because the science already exists showing that coercive control– with or without histories of physical assault– is the “golden thread” in forensic science best predicting eventual domestic unaliving and the science already exists showing that leaving increases risks for victims by more than 800%.
I also wish that Mandy had found this forum first if just because, along with the validation that cheating is abuse, she also would have gotten a heads up about the fact that her husband’s coercively controlling tactics (she explicitly feared financial abuse if she left and financial abuse, as a recognized component of coercive control, is present in 51% of domestic unaliving cases) were potential harbingers of doom. It might have put a more specific name to her fears of leaving which, in turn, might have given her a narrow window to more safely plan her and her children’s extraction and escape. But the fact remains that, because coercive control is not yet criminalized in the US and custody laws would have still made the family accessible to her abuser, not to mention the woeful state of child support enforcement or social safety nets, it might have made no difference either. I still wish she’d been given that validation and slim chance.
In response to bystanders saying of unalived domestic abuse victims “If she’d left ten years ago, she’d still be alive,” the director of the organization I worked for twenty years ago (before “coercive control” was even a legal concept) used to drily respond, “Or if she left ten years ago she might have been dead ten years ago.” Point being that, in domestic abuse situations, whatever worst things that happened in the final analyses were the very things we must assume that victims sensed all along in their guts (and from their singular day to day, front lines perspectives that no mere bystander could understand) and the specter of which likely kept them entrapped.
This isn’t just an assumption. As Evan Stark demonstrated over his half century of ground-breaking research and advocacy, victims of domestic abuse are remarkably accurate in guessing the severity of consequences for any act of independence. These guesses tend to be very specific in cases of overt physical assault. But for all the deftness of their intuition, most victims of coercive control don’t even have the precedent of violence to foreshadow unaliving so don’t have crystal balls to gauge precisely what the catastrophic consequences of leaving would be, only a gut sense that it will be very, very bad. It could take the form of severe financial abuse and legislative abuse that puts children at dire risk. It could be direct violence against the victim or against children or it could be family annihilation. Or maybe they know but just can’t prove it to law enforcement.
That’s the diabolical nature of coercive control in the absence of previous assault. Adulterer and domestic unaliver Fotis Dulos is another example of an abuser who wasn’t “sufficiently violent” to be legally contained. Jennifer’s Law in Connecticut– which added coercive control to existing legal definitions of domestic violence– is named for Dulos’s victim and former wife, Jennifer Dulos, and Jennifer Magnano, who was also killed by her adulterous husband.
The takeway is that the above victims had already left their abusers and the killings represented post-separation escalation. Neither were afforded permanent restraining orders much less having their abusers imprisoned because they could not prove their abusers were physically abusive, thus the new legislation and why these two women are cautionary tales of what happens when women leave coercive controllers without adequate cover and protection..
The same may have been true in the Watts case, which also had no reported precedent of assault but seemed to show hints of coercive behavior leading up to the family being extinguished. Because Shannan Watts had discovered the affair the very day she was unalived, I’ve always suspected that it was her threats to leave and divorce that night that set off Watt’s frenzy, not– as he claimed– the fact that she was an obstacle to his affair. Watt’s threatened “right to cheat” could also have been a motivation but the statistical pattern is that the threat of “abandonment” or actual escape by the victim is almost always the true triggering event.
Another “category” of family extinguisher are abusers driven to self-unaliving by dire financial straits who pretend to themselves that they are “saving” their partners and children from destitution by taking out their families as they off themselves. But since when are abusers’ rationales ever genuine reflections of their own MOs? The reason reason that financially cratering abusers with self-unaliving motives take out their entire families when they off themselves is far more likely to be because they secretly fear their partners will thrive after they’re gone and that their children will eventually be calling other men “daddy.”
From what I’ve witnessed and read, I know that victims are usually overtaken by a sudden compulsion to leave the second they can see an actually safe path to do so. While working in advocacy, we used to quote the Johnny Nash song I Can See Clearly Now when survivors would get that sudden 180 shift from paralysis to sudden escape impetus:
I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind…
Victims don’t leave and may not even have a concrete, decisive impulse to do so until they can pinpoint the obstacles, conceive viable ways to clear them and see the path. Or they don’t leave until the danger of staying clearly exceeds the already substantial danger of leaving– though the latter is mostly in situations of overt physical abuse where the risk of being unalived has already been amply illustrated. That’s why I think getting legislative “cover” in place– whether it’s restraining orders, imprisoning coercive controllers or just granting victims custody and thus breaking the access and lever of control that many abusers wield– is the main thing that will increase rates of safe extraction.
Maybe she subconsciously knew anything could trigger this horrible violence in him. Apparently, in this case it was the job loss (and the resulting damage to his ego, the loss of opportunities to prey on vulnerable coworkers and/or – as you wrote – his fear that she may leave him as a consequence). I guess leaving him outright might have looked even more dangerous than that. Sadly, she wasn’t able to save herself or the kids anyway.
Maybe she should have tried leaving him while his career was flourishing and he was busy wooing some schmoopie. However, even this may not have saved her (and the kids!) from his destructiveness.
Statistically, it isn’t just “anything” that can trigger this type of violence. Lots of things might trigger someone to unalive themselves. But his final act categorized him as a domestic abuser and the main impetus for domestic self-unaliving/family-unaliving is more specific.
If he’d never been violent before (there were no prior police reports), she still would have sensed that something awful was looming but wouldn’t have had concrete validation of it which is why her fears may have centered on the one consequence she was sure of: catastrophic post-separation financial abuse that could (as statistics show) viably threaten her children’s futures or even their lives. Evidence that she was fiercely devoted to her children is that she published a book several years prior for her children titled Magical Mantra: A Tiny Book About Self Talk in which she encourages her children to recognize their inner beauty and decency.
The consistent evidence is that, even in abusers who go to great lengths to mask this (such as by cheating and general “who needs that bitch” bravura), blinding fear of abandonment is a built-in, self generated pathology in domestic abusers that exists long before there’s any indication victims are planning to escape. This is why abusers subtly entrap from the get-go and why their initial acts of abuse inexplicably appear to be some sort of “revenge” even before victims have done anything that could possibly be construed or misconstrued as offense. This certainty that victims will abandon them is partly that abusers know they’re eventually going to do something that would make any normal person run for the hills and partly because batterers are overgrown petrified infants and pathologically dependent.
So, given his final act, according to forensic research, this guy always feared his victim would leave him and take the kids. This fear only grew as he began doing things that would make any normal person bolt. He always envisioned her finding love again and his children eventually calling another man “Dad.”
It’s somehow the flip side of this patriarchal idea that only the man should be the “provider”, that a woman shouldn’t earn any meaningful income of her own etc. (or have access to any financial assets he cannot control). Once the man loses his ability to fulfill this role, it may be “game over” according to that logic (sadly, often for the woman and the children).
I grew up steeped in this ideology, and it always cr*ped me out for some reason. Maybe it is because (as I mentioned earlier) my grandmother died under mysterious circumstances when my mother (who became very narcissistic and abusive later on) was still a toddler. Today I wonder whether my (very patriarchal) grandfather had a hand in my grandmother’s death somehow (he married a much younger close relative of his soon afterwards). This seemingly “benign” praise for “happy” families in which the men were the sole providers while their wives were completely dependent (all women in my family were stay at home wives) always had a dark undertone to me.
Yes, the patriarchy. Thankfully, I finally felt the push to shake it up and refused reconcilation after he left even though that meant potential financial ruin. My ex got to claim that he “had” to divorce his “rebel wife,” thus becoming a hero to his religious family.
I certainly was in danger though from what my husband said both before and after he left for separation #2. He had a suicide attempt between #1 and #2, which was another factor.
Then he foolishly told his own attorney of what he thought to be “the solution,” and his attorney called mine. Of course, he did. Officers of the court have that responsibility. Mine sent me to a domestic violence professional who did a formal risk assessment, and we weighed what to do next.
Ultimately, we got the divorce done with the prayer that would dial down the drama. Sorta, but at least my ex stayed put in his state, from what I know. My attorney made me promise to never engage with my ex unless it involved a legal matter and not to reveal anything personal. He said he would be “wrecked” if something happened to me. I stuck to that.
I left my long-term church denomination. Ironically, my former church viewed me as innocent in the divorce because my ex filed. I felt like they were viewing me as powerless in the whole thing, as if he tossed me by the side of the road and broke me. They also viewed me as inept at times, unable to handle complex decisions. I chose to handle the details myself and also got trauma therapy and saw a life transitions coach, which they said were unnecessary. The church would handle whatever I needed. Bluntly, they were clueless.
But life on the other side is wonderful. Both young adults are coming for dinner this week. My mama heart is singing. We’re also planning for another special celebration dinner in August. I’ve active in my new church and am enjoying everything about it. So, so good!
Might be interesting to note that according to the media reports, Kristopher Karolkiewicz was divorced as well when Mandy met him. I’m wondering about his first wife’s side of the story. I hope at least she was able to come out ahead, much like you did. Even so, it must be awful to realize that an ex was capable of doing such a horrible thing (whether it was just hypothetical, like in your case, or something that actually happened, like here).
Yes, I wondered about the first marriage as well. Why did it end? Were there red flags waving that the first wife refused to tolerate that the second wife tolerated?
I know very little about the women in my ex’s life, but if he wanted to unalive me, they would be at risk as well. My trauma therapist observed that the desire for the power-over dynamic will remain an undercurrent of their relationships. The leopard doesn’t change its spots, ya know…
Thank you for posting this. I’m a chump who stayed after DDay #1 nearly 30 years ago.
Well FW proceeded with decades long secret life and asset theft culminating in considering (planning?) a fatal accident for me. One of his calls was to a known gun enthusiast trained sniper.
I know now had I stayed after DDay #2, 3,4,5,6 happened in 2023 chances are I would have become a statistic.
Hope newbies reading are quitting the hopium. RUN
I actually feel quite lucky to be alive. My father, who was mentally ill, paranoid, a cheater, violent and abusive to my mother and siblings, and in addition sexually abused me, exhibited a number of the traits of those who are family annihilators, and routinely throughout my parents’ marriage threatened or attempted to un-alive himself (he finally did un-alive himself at age 72, with a handgun). My mother chose numerous times to stay with my father, even after I once intervened when he had her down on the floor with his hands around her throat. Once she hid from him in a closet, then opened a window and climbed out to go down the street to the neighbors, leaving my brother and me in the house (the sounds in the house that night still give me nightmares 65 years later).
I was 25 and out of the house when my mother, after 30 years of marriage and at the age of 52 did leave and divorce him, when he claimed those who were after him also threatened his family, and concocted a scene to prove it, complete with a knife through a photograph of my sister, who at 15 was still living at home. I say I feel lucky to be alive, but I feel even luckier that I didn’t lose my mother and sister.
Oh, and I forgot this one: the night when I was twelve years old and my mother came to me in my room and told me I had to go up the hill to the haybarn because “Daddy is up there with a gun threatening to [un-alive] himself, and you’re the only one who can stop him. He loves you enough to put the gun down.” I refused to go, but only as an adult did it occur to me that there was as much a chance that he would shoot me as that he would put the gun down. Yeah, I feel very lucky to be alive.
This story gives each of us here an opportunity to be thankful that we are alive. There is a woman who posted here in the past (and might pop in every once in a while) whose son was m-worded by the cheating dad. It is probs better that I didnt know the extent of my Cheaters undertakings when he was alive because I might have threatened to broadcast all and I dont know if he would have let me live to tell the tale.
Yes, I remember the story about the son. Just horrific! I am indeed thankful to be alive with two offspring who are acing young adulthood, if I do say so.
My ex ran off to another state for separation #2, which my attorney called a “strong sign that he’s guilty as sin” (said with his Southern accent). That break was tough to process but was such a mercy in the end. After giving me h*ll legally for several years, he let go. Afterall, then he could control the narrative and live his way without an ex and grown children to contradict him.
Well, good luck with that.
Given today’s fatally sad topic, I dedicate this post to my murdered cousin who assumed her husband was normal, because she was normal.
Let me explain..
Tracy and others (ex., Drs. Ramani, Pete Salerno) are educating people about the continuum of personality disorders (PDs). This is vital for those of us without PDs because another reason we may stay or reconcile despite red flags, FOO empathy, and fears of single parenting is because at our core, chumps are normal, *so we assume the cheater is normal.* They are not!
Please know this is NOT blaming chumps…it is just another way to understand an unconscious part of the human condition summed up in the saying “we see the world not as it is, but as we are.” This is why education about the continuum of personality disorders is key to getting truly free from abusive relationships, i.e., what is not good for us and not normal.
I got out alive. Rest in peace sweet cousin, Kate. Mandy and children too…
This is a really important point. I couldn’t really see what cheater was doing, mainly because I couldn’t conceive of it. I couldn’t conceive that anyone would lie like that! I didn’t recognize the behavior (or the danger) at all, because I’d never been exposed to it before. My system didn’t warn me.
— until it did.
Im an amateur genealogist and have learned of 2 wife killings in my father’s family. One of the husbands was arrested but he was so old they just let him go. In the other situation, the dude just walked.
Oh no. 😥 Not again. Reading her post about reconciling is heartbreaking. Baby chumps, please don’t do it. If this isn’t proof it’s potentially dangerous, then I don’t know what is.
Re untangling; most chumps do untangle and may see reasons why the FW behaves the way s/he does. I did too, but only because I need to know the why of everything, not in order to stay. So I don’t think untangling, in and of itself, is a bad idea. It’s just a bad idea to use FW “brokenness” as a reason to forgive and reconcile. Ultimately the reasons they are the way they are don’t matter. In fact, knowing they were raised in a toxic environment is a reason to leave because it’s further evidence that they aren’t going to change. If, for example, you discovered the reason was a brain tumor (almost never happens) that would be different, because medical intervention could fix it and the FW was deprived of rational choice. Being raised in a toxic home doesn’t remove your ability to make rational choices. It either makes you toxic yourself or it messes you up, but not in a harmful way and therapy can help. But therapy, even if it’s the best therapy possible and specifically designed for abusers, doesn’t change them, as domestic abuse expert Lundy Bancroft attests to.