Possessed.

• Author: Pudlow, Jan

Possessed

By Philip J. Crowley and Kenneth C. Wylie

Why would a smart, attractive schoolteacher return again and again to the husband who brutalizes her? Why couldn't she finally escape her sometimes charming, bourbon-sopped, civic-club-connected, real-estate selling husband with the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split personality?

Possessed may not be great literature, but it is a riveting read that accurately chronicles the insidious grip of terror and emotional imprisonment suffered by a battered woman. It's a true-crime page-turner with a psychological undercurrent and a social conscience.

At one point, Iris Harris is locked for days in a root cellar on a farm and hears a gun shot. As she huddles in the dark among the canned goods and sacks of potatoes, her husband, Rodney, cracks open the door to nail up the bloody collar of her beloved dog-a warning sign of what could happen to her if she doesn't obey.

As Iris escapes only to return to Rodney's sometimes loving arms, she is filled with self-disgust, so beaten down that she says to herself: "I am nothing. Not even to myself. I exist only for him to use and abuse. I am that and nothing more."

Increasingly, her life is cut off from the rest of the world, as Rodney makes sure she never gets the full-time teaching job she's offered, disables her VW Beetle, and isolates her from family and friends.

For anyone who ever wondered how a battered woman's life can spiral from hopeful love into helpless subservience, Possessed lays out every excruciating detail, to the point the reader wants to shout: "No, Iris! Don't go back!"

Finally, Iris kills her husband so she can finally feel free, even as she waits in a jail cell charged with murder.

Crowley, now a Tampa attorney at Macfarlane, Ferguson & McMullen, specializing in professional liability defense, was the young prosecutor of Kalkaska County, Michigan, in the real 1978 headline-grabbing case of Jeannette Smith that inspired this novel. He teamed up with Wylie, a freelance writer who served in the Peace Corps, to write Possessed.

Though the real killing was a knife stabbing to the husband's back, the fictionalized Iris loads a shotgun and blows a hole through her husband's back, then axes off his toes as he had once done to a former wife to keep her hobbled so she...