It reads like a line from a clever whodunnit:
The aspiring actress told an operator: “I can’t breathe. I’ve been stabbed. Please help me. I’m dying. He’s stabbed me to death.”
There’s something about the murder mystery that holds a unique place in our popular lore, from Hitchcock to Agatha Christie to CSI. Such mysteries are fun and intellectually diverting in a removed, antiseptic way.
In this popular genre, the victim’s words from the grave are a persistent, haunting plot element. There’s a peculiar resonance to such soliloquy, straddling the final line between life and death, just waiting to be listened to, and parsed endlessly.
On that last fateful phone call, the police operator asked the dying actress who did it. The actress, Amy Leigh Barnes, replied clearly:
“My boyfriend . . . I’m going . . . I can’t see.”
Mystery solved.
In the real world, aspiring actress and glamor model Amy Leigh Barnes was murdered by her boyfriend Ricardo Morrison. The sentencing Judge told Morrison:
“You controlled and abused Amy over a period of months. It was a sustained campaign of prolonged physical, emotional and psychological abuse.”
Barnes, who was from Manchester, England, had just turned 19.
Morrison, who had four prior assault convictions and a record of violence towards women, got 24 years to life in prison for murder from the English Court.
His mother, Melda Wilks, a police officer herself, was acquitted for letting Morrision wash his bloody clothes at her house after the murder.
In the real world, domestic violence is more brutal, less tidy, and far less clever than in murder mysteries.
I write this post while watching Bones, a procedural crime/odd couple buddy TV show about a (female) prosaic forensic anthropologist and a (male) cocky FBI agent. It’s a show known for grisly murders, quirky characters – and a dark sense of humor.
But it only works because it’s not real.
I’m not suggesting that there’s anything inherently wrong with enjoying light murder mysteries. Life is full of such uneasy dichotomies, after all. I only suggest that it sometimes makes sense to step back and drop the fiction that dead bodies represent little more than plot points along the way to that last, fiendish twist.
In real life, there were plenty of clues to Amy Barnes’ death. The odd thing is that these clues were revealed well before her murder. As the London Times reports:
The jury heard that she was often seen in bars and clubs frequented by professional footballers [soccer players], some of whom she dated. Morrison resented her friendships with other men …
“For the past seven months, Ricardo’s been hitting me, locking me in rooms with him so I can’t go out, putting knives to my throat, telling me he’s going to kill me, putting pillows over my face,” she wrote [in a text message to a friend].
On the morning of her death, she texted another footballer, saying that Morrison had punched her and slammed her arm in a door.
I wonder what their response would have been had she confided that her car was being broken into, or that someone had stolen her ATM card. How long would it have taken her friends to advise her to call the police, or to even do it themselves on her behalf?
Morrison was a soccer player and soccer coach. Amy Barnes’ funeral was attended by a slew of actors and soccer players. Many of them apparently knew of Morrison’s abuse, and knew Morrison. Said the Daily Mail:
Miss Barnes was a regular at nightclubs popular with millionaire football stars and had dated Blackburn Rovers striker Benni McCarthy.
According to the Mirror:
[L]ess than a month before he knifed Amy to death, Morrison attacked five women, butting and punching them in the face at a London nightclub.
In real life, such warning signs are so common that we, both individually and collectively, often do little to “interfere.” Serial batterers like Morrison come out of the jails and go back to their familiar bars and clubs and parties. Thus even when our police and courts do their job, and emphasize not only punishment but offender treatment (see our latest article on the Rihanna/Chris Brown situation), there is often scant social pressure to contain and ostracize such tyrannical behavior.
Confronting delicate issues is never comfortable of course, especially in a group or on a team. I remember in college reading about a freshman, Mark Seeberger, who died of alcohol poisoning in a fraternity hazing ritual. I happened to play rugby (for the University of Texas) with one of the fraternity guys who was drinking with the freshman the night of his death. I asked my teammate about it, two days later, at practice. My teammate, who played right next to me on the line (Inside-Center to my Fly-Half) nonchalantly demurred “the lawyers told us not to talk about it.” His comments indicated a general attitude that the dead kid simply couldn’t hold his liquor – a kid who had been handcuffed in the back of a van and “asked” to drink 16-18 ounces of rum.
I never said anything else to my teammate about this – despite my horror at my teammate’s casual response and my general strong feelings about Texas fraternities. No one, of course, was ever prosecuted for this death (The operative fact against prosecution seemed to be that the kid’s hands were handcuffed in front of him, not behind him, so that he actually put the bottle to his own mouth).
In part, I said nothing because there was nothing more to be done. Also, when playing rugby your very physical safety often depends on how quickly your teammates get to you while you are in a ruck or a maul – so I did specifically ponder whether saying anything at all to this jerk might make him just a little less eager to help me out in such situations.
But I wonder, looking back, if I would have said or done anything had it been an ongoing, volatile situation rather than the aftermath of a tragedy. Would I have had the courage to confront someone, or even to take more direct action on the hope that it might make a difference? I simply don’t know.
My question in this case is not why the police were absent, but whether his friends, and hers, were as vigilant as they could have been when faced up close with a dangerous and unstable situation. This tragic crime was, after all, reasonably foreseeable.
One reason for the possible inaction of Barnes’ and Morrisons’ wider group of friends and acquaintances may be that in most societies it is a greater taboo to be a victim of domestic violence than to be a habitual perpetrator of it (see our article about rape in South Africa).
The natural corollary to this flawed social contract is to allow this particular type of criminal behavior to proceed mostly unchecked until it’s too late. Why do we continue to stand by and let this happen?
That’s the real mystery here.
