No place to hide - wife abuse/murder case - includes related article on how to spot an abusive man

Michael Manley Linton didn't care who knew how much he longed to see his wife dead.

He told old friends, family, even strangers, how he longed for the day when he would read in the papers the headline MAN BLOWS AWAY WIFE IN JEALOUS RAGE.

And so from the summer of 1985 to February 1987, Renee Wynn Linton moves more than seven times; took a series of jobs; enrolled her three children in at least four schools; began legal proceedings to change her name; entered a shelter for battered women on two separate occasions.; got an order of protection from the White Plains Criminal Court for bidding her husband Michael any contact with her or their children; took him back to court when he repeatedly violated the order; and at different times called police in five Westchester County communities, the district attorney's office and the county sheriff, to say that her life was in jeopardy.

Renee Linton was a light-skinned woman of average height, with long, relaxed hair and a big, goofy grin that never quite canceled out the sad, downward tilt of her eyes. She was born Octover 12, 1954, in White Plains Hospital Medical Center to an alcoholic mother who abandoned her only child at an early age and who eventually died of cirrhosis. Renee's father, whom she adored, spent much of his daughter's childhood in a painful, protracted, futile battle with cancer.

Renee was 15 when she met the brother of a classmate at White Plains High School, whose family came from Jamaica. Michael Linton, a year younger than Renee, was lean and handsome, with an aura of quiet calm. He soon became Renee's boyfriend, her first.

She didn't introduce him to her family until 1972, the day her father was buried. Renee by then was living with her aunt Billie Carroll, whom Renee always called Mom. Michael and Renee's courtship lasted five years. Before she would even consider marriage, Renee wanted her degree from the Westchester Business Institute and a decent job in data processing. In the summer of 1975, all criteria were met, and they were married. Renee was ecstatic.

A year later their first child, Michael junior, was born. Soon after, Michael senior joined the army and began training for the Special Forces, the unit for dangerous, undercover missions. His division was stationed at Fort Bragg, so the family moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, into their first house. Soon after the move a daughter, Mikecia, was born.

"It was an ideal family," says a friend. "Beautiful kids, beautiful home. Renee was determined to have her marriage go. The way she kept Michael in line: Whoo-ee! Michael was always taking Renee dancing-Rence loved dancing more than anything. Like a TV family. Always laughing, hugging. Crazy for each other. If Renee walked out of the room for a minute, Michael couldn't breathe." And for a while, the good times got better. Michael and Renee started their own pizza business, preparing for the day he'd leave the army. When they retired, Billie and Widie Carroll, who until then had lived in White Plains, decided they couldn't bear such a distance separating them from their beloved niece. The Carrolls headed south and bought a house next door. Life, Renee said, couldn't be sweeter.

But by the time their second daughter, Billie, was born in 1982, on Renee's twenty-eighth birthday, Michael and Renee were having regular, serious battles over his infidelities. Michael, who normally spoke English like an American, took on a heavy jamaican accent during these quarrels. Women weren't the only problem. Michael's volatile brother Rayon was also now stationed at Fort Bragg.

Renee had never cared for Rayon. She blamed Rayon for Michael's taking up with drugs around that time. She blaimed him for Michael's promiscuity. Renee considered Michael's misdeeds, each and every one, and laid them squarely at the feet of his older brother. The brothers had always been inseparable, and with the way Rayon and Renee got along, something had to give. With each day that passed, the marriage splintered that much farther apart. Renee would lay down the law, and Michael would break it. Three weeks after Billie was born, Renee called Aunt Billie in the middle of the night. "Mom, can I come stay with you?" she asked. "Michael hit me."

Renee and the children spent two weeks in her aunt and uncle's home waiting for Michael's temper to play itself out. For the first time, Renee talked about leaving her husband for good. She began taking stock of her life. Leaving wasn't going to be easy. Her inheritance from her father was gone, sunk into the pizza business, and Aunt Billie's home wasn't large enough for an indefinite stay. None of Renee's relatives had enough money to help out in any significant way. And Michael was promising that he'd see a psychologist, that he'd go to a marriage counselor, that he'd never be unfaithful again. Anything as long as she'd come home. Life as a single mother wasn't what Renee had strived for all these years. She went back. The fighting resumed.

One by one, every anchor in Michael's world was giving way. He left the army. The pizza business went belly up. Michael became increasingly involved with drugs and eventually was busted twice for possession. Michael and Rayon were implicated in the murder of a teenage boy in Fayetteville, and they spent some time in jail. Charges against Michael were dropped because of insufficient evidence, and in 1985 the case against Rayon ended in a mistrial.

One night that hot, tense summer, a woman called the Linton home. Renee, as usual, was home alone with the children. She didn't recognize the woman's voice or name, but by now she knew just how to tell off her husband's girlfriends. This woman, though, was different. She said she wanted to talk to Renee, then coolly announced her intention of breaking up the marriage. A little later Michael returned home to a very angry, very vocal wife. Renee told her husband this was it, this time she was leaving for good. She wanted a divorce.

At the word divorce Michael went berserk. He pulled a gun on Renee and the children, pointed the muzzle at their heads and pulled the trigger. He laughed when he discovered there were no bullets in the chamber, saying, "Fooled you." Leaving his terrorized family huddled on his and Renee's bed, Michael strode into the living room and pulled the trigger again. Renee and the children heard what sounded like a shot.

Before dawn broke, Renee and the children-now 8, 7 and 2-crawled through the bedroom window, piled into Renee's car with little more than what they were wearing and started heading north. Their year-and-a-half-long hunt for sanctuary had begun.

Renee's first way station was a rambling Victorian home in White Plains belonging to Michael's mother, Ionie. Renee had little affection for her in-laws, but until she found a job and saved a little money, this seemed the most practical solution. Her flight was tinged with ambivalence. Disbelief on the part of friends and family-at least initially-encouraged her reluctance to see Michael as a threat. How could the father of her children, a man she'd known half her life, really want to kill her?

On January 19, 1986, the White Plains Police Department got a call-a Renee Linton complaining that her husband had slashed one of her tires. Later that day Renee went to the district attorney's Domestic Violence and Child Abuse Bureau, in White Plains, to press charges against her husband. She requested an order of protection and a police escort to help her move from the Linton family home. Then she found a lawyer and filed for divorce. For the next 90 days, Renee, Mikey, Keeia and Billie lived in the Northern Westchester Shelter for Victims of Domestic Violence, the location of which is confidential.

"Renee stood out because she was so very feisty," says Mary Hartman, the small, precise, gray-haired shelter clinical supervisor." Unlike so many battered women that we see, she was an employed woman, an optimistic woman with ambition and very clear ideas on how she wanted to raise her children."

On March 11, Judge James Reap ruled that Michael's waving a five-inch butcher knife at Renee and saying I fixed your business" probably had little to do with peeling plantains (Michael's explanation for his holding a knife on january 19, the day Renee's tire was slashed) and a good deal more to do with harassment. Michael was given a suspended sentence for criminal mischief. Renee was granted a permanent order of protection (it actually isn't permanent-if the husband hasn't been convicted of a felony, the longest one is three years, which is what Renee was awarded). Under threat of imprisonment, Michael was not to have any contact with her or their children.

New York State allows victims of domestic violence a maximum of only 90 days in a shelter. When Renee and the children left on April 14-their three-month deadline-it was again for a hardscrabble existence, camping out with her side of the family while she kept looking for an affordable apartment. Efforts by the D.A.'s domestic-violence bureau to find her housing in a secret location had failed. But Renee wasn't all that concerned about Michael's finding her now that she had the order of protection to hold over his head.

Normal, everyday life slowly reasserted itself. After years of wearing her hair long to please her husband, Renee cropped it. She found a receptionist job at the Scarsdale Agency, an insurance company. Mary Ann Smith, a colleague who was training her to become a broker, became a good friend. One night at a Manhattan club, Renee met a man she liked, Michael Anthony Anderson, and the two started dating casually. He had a good job with a waterproofing company, didn't do drugs, liked her children and was unfailingly gentle and kind. She had one complaint: "There are enough Michaels in my life!" she laughed. Anderson suggested she call him Anthony.

By summer's end, Renee found a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Yonkers for $386 a month at 21 Mulberry Street. Renee decided that until Michael stopped his threats, she wasn't going to tell him her new address. He could see the children at his mother's home.

The threats continued. They began to seem like just another of life's little inconveniences. "How was your weekend, Renee?" Mary Ann Smith would ask over the coffee machine at work.

"Finished painting the apartment, took Kecia to the doctor for that cough, and when I dropped the kids off to see their cousins, Michael told me he'd kill me before the divorce went through," Renee would answer.

Money was tight. Renee's salary was $225 a week. The children needed new clothes and their beds were falling apart. "Take my Sears card," Michael said one fall weekend when Renee bought the children to his mother's house. Renee bought beds with Michael's card. When Michael got the bill he called Sears and asked for the delivery address. Soon Renee was coming home to find Michael's car parked outside her apartment.

But he still didn't know where she worked. Michael had, however, found out her home phone number (Renee assumed he had wheedled it out of a friend). He got in the habit of calling every few days, sometimes to arrange a visit with the children, sometimes just to threaten. One night 3-year-old Billie, who occasionally spent afternoons with her mother at work, answered the phone at home before her mother could. "Scarsdale Agency!" she said, gleefully mimicking her mother. The next day Renee looked up from her desk and saw the orange BMW drive slowly past her office. That night Renee got a call.

"I could have blown you away today, asshole," said Michael, "but first I'm going to make you suffer. You've got till the divorce goes through, mon."

Christmas drew near, and Michael, felled by his own brand of holiday blues, stepped up the terror campaign. Renee saw Michael's car everywhere she went. By now Michael was calling three, four times a night, informing Renee how her day had gone. He'd tell her what she'd had for lunch, how much she'd spent on groceries at Waldbaum's, how many coffee breaks she'd taken. He was always right. It got to the point where the sound of a phone ringing could give Renee a migraine.

Renee and the children spent a subdued Christmas with Aunt Billie in North Carolina. As soon as the family returned to Yonkers, Michael started calling again. With the day of the divorce approaching-both thought it would be in February-a countdown began. Michael would call, say "Ten more days to live," and hang up. For a while he did a systematic countdown, sometimes he'd start all over again, as though the previous countdown had never existed. More and more, guns, boyfriends and windows were becoming the theme of Michael's threats. The apartment at 21 Mulberry was in a state of siege those early weeks of January 1987. Renee stopped going to church. She stopped dancing Friday nights with Anthony. She stopped going to work.

On January 7 Michael called, and Mikey grabbed the phone before his mother. "Mommy doesn't want to talk to you," Mikey said before hanging up. The phone rang again and this time Renee got it. "I might as well kill Mikey and Kecia, too," Michael said. "They know too much. You've contaminated them. Watch your back, mon. I'm watching you. You'll never get that divorce." The next morning around six o'clock, Michael was pounding on Renee's door, demanding that she let him in. "I'm putting you away, six feet under," he yelled. "If I can't have you, bitch, no one will."

It wasn't just the 6:00 A.M. visit that convinced Renee the time had long since passed for notifying the police; it was also Michael's threats against the children the night before. That morning she called the shelter hot line. She called the D.A.'s office. She called the police. On January 14, with the phone threats still coming and Michael at large, Renee moved back to the shelter.

The shelter staff was appalled by what a year had done to her. "The fight had gone out of her," says Mary Hartman. "There was a feeling of resignation, of doom. In all the years I've worked with battered women, I've never heard a woman talk like Renee." She spoke obsessively of guns and windows and death. Often she said, "I know he'll kill me. I just wish he'd get it over with."

In early February, Renee took shelter counselor Joanne James aside and said she was going back to Mulberry Street. James protested, but Renee had made up her mind. "I'd have to leave in two months anyway," she said. "What difference does hiding out for another few weeks make? Maybe it's better if I don't back down, if I let him know I'm not afraid. Am I supposed to move my kids every three months for the rest of my life? Whatever's gonna happen, I want it over. This running's got to stop." Renee moved back Thursday, February 5, without a police escort.

While in the shelter, she'd decided that continuing to work at the Scarsdale Agency was foolhardy. That Friday she had a job interview at Northern Westchester Hospital Center. Saturday was spent on errands. On Sunday Renee called Aunt Billie, told her she was back on Mulberry Street, scared stiff, but everything so far was fine. She also called her friend Anthony. It was time to resume a normal life.

Sunday night, after he'd gone to bed, Mikey heard his mother scream, "Michael, get off the fire escape before I call the police!" The next morning, his mother was still crying as she picked up the phone to report the incident.

Renee had cheered up by the evening of the next day, Tuesday, February 10. After the children were fed, she got ready for her date with Anthony. At eight o'clock, he arrived with a bottle of Seagram's 7 and a single red rose. Valentine's Day was a few days off.

Renee kept getting calls that night from friends, making sure she was okay. At 11:02 the phone rang yet again. It was Aunt Billie, just checking in. Carolina Telephone and Telegraph records indicate that the call lasted five minutes.

At about 11:05 Paulette sullivan, who lived in the basement apartment directly beneath Renee's, was awakened by a noise, she wasn't sure what. She walked around her apartment to see what was wrong. As she neared the bathroom, there was a crash, the bathroom door flew open, and Michael Anthony Anderson, who had just come through her shattered bathroom window, rushed toward her. He never stopped as he ran for the front door and out of the apartment. Blood pouring from his face and hands, he made it to the corner, where there was a Polish bar. He slowed down and adjusted his tie. Anderson would say in court a year later, "I took a second to myself to say, `Go in there as calm as possible.' " Anderson opened the door to the White Eagle Tavern. "Please excuse the way look," he said. "There's been a shooting.

Peter Eiselman was the first police officer to enter Renee's apartment. She was in the kitchen, apparently unconscious, lying on her side, half in, half out of the oven, which was lit. There was very little blood. Bullet holes dotted her red sweatshirt's logo-SOMEONE IN NEW YORK LOVES ME. Broken glass covered the living-room floor-from a window smashed in from the outside, presumably by someone who had entered from the fire escape.

At 11:56 P.M., Renee Linton, 32 years of age, was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Medical Center in Yonkers. The 13 entrance and exit wounds in her body had been made by five bullets. There were also second-degree burns on the left side of the body, inflicted after death.

Renee Wynn Linton was buried on Valentine's Day in the same cemetery as her father. There were three red rosebuds in her casket, a present from Mikey, Kecia and Billie. Dashing Michael Linton's long-cherished dreams of headline notoriety, newspaper stories that week said police had no leads.

In June 1987, Michael Manley Linton was arrested and charged with the second-degree murder of Renee Wynn Linton. In May of the following year, the judge ignored Michael's protestations of innocence, and he was convicted and sentenced to the maximum of 28 and a half years to life for her murder.

Ellen Hopkins is a freelance writer and contributing editor of Rolling Stone.

HOW TO SPOT AN ABUSIVE MAN

Renee Linton was one of 3 to 4 million women who are battered each year by their husbands or boyfriends. She is also part of a staggering FBI statistic: Nearly 30 percent of women homicide victims are killed by their mates. Other organizations have estimated that the figure is as high as 52 percent. Here are some fundamental facts about domestic violence:

* Abused women are victims; they are not responsible for proviking-or correcting- the behavior of their abusers. * Batterers are likely to be someone a woman knows and loves. Initially he may seem charming, attentive and seductive. * Batterers usually are not crazy, but rather are people whose behavior is deeply rooted in sexism.

According to the country's experts in domestic violence, it is difficult to predict who will batter, but men who exhibit one or more of the following characteristics may be potentially dangerous:

* Excessive jealousy. Has jealous reactions to any male presence in your life, including casual, peripheral contacts with such people as store clerks or neighbors.

* Verval abusiveness. Uses put-downs such as "You're stupid" or "You're not a good mother" to destroy your self-esteem. His abusive language may escalate into physical attacks.

* Controlling behavior. Demands rigid accounts of your every move, and will often make follow-up calls to confirm your whereabouts. He's unable to distinguish between caring and controlling behavior.

* Attempts to isolate you. Tries to destroy your relationships with your family and friends so that he can demoralize you and "mold" you into his own image.

* Inability to control anger. Has frequent violent outbursts such as ramming fists through walls; easily gets into brawls, often with little provocation.

* Use of violence. Uses force or intimidation to "win" arguments; destroys physical objects; has a history of cruelty to children as well as animals; and uses force during sex.

* Alcohol and drug use. Abuses substances, particularly alcohol, but batterers are usually not addicts or alcoholics.

* Macho attitudes. Believes that women are chattel and that they should cater to and unquestioningly obey men.

* Former victim of or witness to domestic violence. Grew up in an abusive household or witnessed domestic violence as a child.

* Lack of sensitivity. Unable to appreciate other people's feelings and cannot distinguish right from wrong.

* Insecurity and low self-esteem. Displays overwhelming feelings of inadequacy regarding his financial status, education and self-worth; may also suffer from sexual dysfunctions.

* Denial of responsibility. Blames his violent episodes on his victim. "She made me do it" is a common retort.

For more information and for emergency referrals to a shelter in your area, contact the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 1500 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Ste. 35, Washington, D.C. 20005, or call the 24-hour toll-free hot line (800) 333-SAFE; (800) 873-6363 for the hearing-impaired.

COPYRIGHT 1990 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group