Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Billy Stafford

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

A violent marriage ends in a bloody murder. Police solve the case -- but it’s the victim who ends up on trial in a case that thrust the issue of domestic violence into the public conversation and made it impossible for law enforcement to ignore. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, there are resources to help. In Canada, you can visit https://sheltersafe.ca/ for domestic violence resources and information or for more information on the Avalon Sexual Assault Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia please visit https://avaloncentre.ca/ In the United States, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE or text the word START to 88788. For more information on the Coburn Place in Indianapolis please visit https://coburnplace.org/ For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-billy-stafford/ 

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, and I'm Brett. And the story I have for you today is about a woman who spent six years in a relationship that got increasingly more violent, with a man feared by pretty much everyone in their small community. But her path to freedom is anything but a straight line. This is the story of Billy Stafford and Jane Hirschman. It's March 12, 1982, and a man named Carl Croft is on his way to work in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, which is this tiny town on Canada's east coast, walking along the country road when he sees a truck pulled over on the shoulder. At first, he thinks it probably belongs to

one of his neighbors. The long dirt driveway gets so muddy in the spring that people really can't even use them, so sometimes they'll just park on the main road and walk home. But the thing is, Carl doesn't recognize this specific car. What he does recognize immediately, though, is something on the door, blood. His first thought is, someone must have gotten into an accident. But there's no real telltale signs of an accident. There's no tire marks, there's no damage. Carl glances in the window as he walks past and realizes there's someone inside, slumped way over to the left with his head almost laying in the driver's seat. Carl doesn't think so. Not to mention, the man isn't moving an inch, so that, along

with the blood, sends him racing to the nearest neighbor's place to see if there's anyone who can help. And together, they drive back down the main road to check things out. Well, no, and I'm not entirely sure why, to be honest, but my gut is thinking, again, they're trying not to overreact, this could just be a guy napping, it doesn't feel necessarily like an emergency yet. Yeah, and maybe they just want to get a good look around before the cops come. Yeah, there's maybe a little bit of small town morbid curiosity, too, because they really want to know who this person is. But even when he brings this neighbor, that guy doesn't recognize the truck either or the person inside. But when he peers through

the window, there is no doubt in his mind that this man is dead. And to him, it doesn't look like an accident. His first thought is suicide. They drive back up to the house to call police and first responders arrive at the scene around 730. According to the book Life with Billy by Brian Valet, they find the victim, a man, sitting in the cab of the pickup. When they finally move his body, they realize he's been killed by a shotgun blast to the head. One fired from close enough to virtually decapitate him. Wait, so you're telling me that no one noticed that this guy's head was practically blown off? If they did, the source material doesn't mention it. But there's a good chance they didn't notice it because

of the way his body was positioned. There's actually a photo of the crime scene in Brian Valet's book. Let me actually show you. Okay, so this picture is taken like looking in from the passenger side of the truck. And I see, you know, I presume a man, a pretty big one by the looks of things. And you're right, he is slumped all the way over towards the driver's side door, like almost lying into the seat and like the door itself, actually. Yeah, it took me forever to wrap my head around this because I'm like, how can you be shot with a shotgun almost decapitated? And like, there isn't blood everywhere. And it's not so clear. But when I saw that picture is like, Oh my gosh, you would think this guy is sleeping.

But when police get there, they obviously look close and they see what really happened. And what they notice is that inside the windows and walls of the truck, it is actually covered with blood and tissue and slug fragments. The truck's keys are still in the ignition. And just outside the driver's side door on the ground, they find a set of false teeth. But here's the thing, unlike the neighbor guy, they don't think that this was a suicide. Why not? Well, there's no gun. Now, the men who called the police didn't know the car and they couldn't ID the victim. But an officer at the scene does recognize the vehicle and the body inside it. The victim's name is Billy Stafford, a 41 year old husband and father

who lives about 10 miles away in an even smaller town called Bangs Falls. So is Billy like a friend of his or just like, you know, this is a small town, everyone knows everyone kind of thing. No, they're not friends. In fact, the officer who recognized him had only spoken to Billy one time before, like a year ago in this very truck at a routine traffic stop. But it's more than just your usual like small town, everyone knows everyone stuff. Like, you don't need to know Billy Stafford to know of Billy Stafford. Most people, most police officers specifically in the area know exactly who he is, even if they'd never spoken to him in their lives. Billy had been involved in all kinds of illegal activity. He had illegal

guns, used drugs, was thought to probably sell drugs, that kind of thing. And years ago, Billy worked on fishing boats, the kind that leave for a couple of weeks at a time and he used to brag about how he killed a guy on one of those boats by throwing him overboard. And was he ever arrested or served time for that? Well, he hadn't even been charged for that because none of the other sailors would testify against him, which had kind of been a running theme of Billy's life. What do you mean by that? I mean, somehow he was always able to get away with this stuff. In some cases, people he knew would vouch for him. In at least one case Elizabeth Sheehy writes about in this piece called Defending Battered

Women on Trial, one guy legit perjured himself on the stand because he was so terrified of what Billy would do if he told the truth. So the real issue is that he pretty much had everyone in town too terrified to dare press any charges. People would call police and complain about Billy for different things, mainly for threats and intimidation, often anonymously, and police would try to investigate, but most of the time those investigations went nowhere. So really, most of the time, instead of trying to involve police, people would just go out of their way to avoid Billy. Even police tried to avoid him if they could. The head of the RCMP detachment had told his whole team that if they had to go to Billy's house

for any reason, always go in pairs. And not only that, but according to a 1983 Canadian press article, they should go armed and ready to shoot. But murder is murder, even if the victim is a bad dude. And police need to find out who is responsible for Billy's death, even if the list of people with an axe to grind against this guy is a mile long. Officers call for a canine unit to search the woods around the crime scene hoping to track down the murder weapon, while police start canvassing the area to see if anyone saw or heard anything unusual the night before. They knock on every door along River Road where Billy's body had been found, and one by one, the residents tell police they didn't hear or see anything

out of the ordinary. They also go to Billy's home in Bangs Falls, and when they get there, they're met by his common law wife, Jane, who is home with her 16-year-old son from a previous marriage, Alan, and her 4-year-old, Darren, who's Billy's biological son. They ask Jane when she'd last seen Billy, and she says that she hadn't seen or heard from him since the night before when he left in his truck. She tells them he didn't say where he was going, and so she has no idea where he is. That's when the officer tells Jane that they do know where he is, that, unfortunately, Billy had been murdered. The news is such a shock to Jane that she literally faints on the spot. Now, I couldn't find

any detail in the source material about the step-by-step police investigation that day. But Brian Valet wrote in Life with Billy that within the first day, they have 10 officers assigned to and working the case, which is a lot considering the size of this community. According to another book I read on this story called Life and Death After Billy by Vernon Oeckel, it's around this time that police get the results of Billy's autopsy, which confirms some of what they already know, that he died from a close-range gunshot blast to the head, and it puts his time of death at 10 o'clock the night before. It doesn't take long for word of Billy's murder to get around in the community, and when it does, rumors

start to bubble up and come to police's attention. Rumors about a murder for hire. Within the first day of the investigation, police hear a rumor that Jane had been looking to hire someone to kill her husband. Apparently, Jane had approached this guy named Beverly just a couple of months back, like in January, and outright asked him to kill Billy in exchange for $20,000, which, it turns out, is exactly the amount of Billy's life insurance policy. Hold up, she was going to pay this guy the entire amount of the life insurance policy? Like, all of it. So she's not doing this for money, why pay someone to kill him then? Oh, he knew why, and everyone knew why. Back in January, Beverly flat out asked Jane if

Billy was beating her, and Jane said yes, and not just her, but her youngest son, Darren too. And of course, the next question he asked her was, why don't you just leave then? But Jane told him that she couldn't leave. Billy threatened to kill her family members one by one if she ever tried to leave him. Okay, so if Billy had been beating her and the kids, like, it seems like something the police would already know about, you know, from being called out to the house time after time or whatever. Well, that's just it. They'd never received a domestic violence call from Jane, which actually doesn't surprise me at all because of the way domestic violence

was treated at the time, which is more of a, you know, it's not a crime. It's something you deal with at home between the two of you. Exactly. But they shouldn't have needed a call to know that something was going on. Police are well aware of Billy's reputation as a bully. Again, many officers had seen it for themselves. In her article, Elizabeth Sheehy writes that Jane had actually been to the police station in person just two weeks earlier about a summons they had for Billy on illegal hunting charges. And when she showed up, she showed up with two black eyes. Did any of them ask her how she got the black eyes? Not as far as I can tell, which to me says they knew how she got the black eyes. And since

she didn't bring it up, they probably figured she had it under control that she was doing what society wanted her to do about domestic violence at the time was just to keep it to herself, keep it quiet. Because apart from the advocates, no one talked openly about domestic violence, not even victims. There were like a few handful of like organizations working quietly to get women out of abusive relationships, but they weren't even well known. And they for sure weren't operating in Jane's small town, which left her with very few options to escape the violence. Really, only one option. Yeah, to kill him. Or in Jane's case to pay someone else to kill him. At least that's what investigators are thinking.

So late on the night of March 13, this is the day after Billy's body was found, they bring Jane in for questioning. But she tells them she had nothing to do with his death. That he'd been involved in drug deals for a long while and she thinks he was killed in some kind of drug related mafia hit situation. And not only that, she's also terrified that whoever killed him is going to be coming back for her and her children. But police aren't buying it. They tell her look, everyone in town is out there celebrating. No one is going to argue with you that Billy deserves what he got. Just tell us the truth. But she doesn't budge from her story. But then she asks if she can see Billy's dad, Lamont. Police say

yes. And when Lamont finally gets to the station and sits down in the interview room next to Jane, who has been literally up all night at this point, he flat out asks her, did you kill Bill? And she just answers yes. I mean, that means she had him killed, right? No, I mean, she killed Billy with her own bare hands. That's when she begins to open up to police and she tells them that she and she alone is responsible for the murder of Billy. Jane says that she didn't plan to kill him that night. Not really. She certainly thought about killing him many times. She thought about it after every single assault, including one that had happened two weeks prior when Billy beat her with the metal part of a vacuum

cleaner hose. She thought about it every time he aimed a gun at her head or at one of her kids' heads or fired a bullet that missed her by inches. She thought about killing Billy when her 16 year old son, Alan confessed that he was thinking about suicide because he couldn't see any other way out of the hell they'd been living in. And what's the point anyway? But mostly when she thought about killing Billy, it had nothing to do with her and everything to do with her little boy, Darren. And unfortunately, his abuse toward Darren happened more than anyone wanted to believe. And it was bad. I know abuse against kids can be hard to hear about. It's awful to talk about. But I actually said recently in one of our headlines episodes,

we have to talk about it. It's the not talking about it that lets these people continue their abuse because we all just can't be faced with it. But we have to face it. Jane tells police about a time when Darren was just three years old. She was working in the garden and Billy yells out, you have a mess to clean up in the bedroom. When Jane got to the bedroom, she found Darren again, three year old Darren lying on the bed choking back tears. And he's doing that because he wasn't allowed to cry. Billy had beaten him with a broken mop handle so severely that he pooped himself. The bed was covered in blood and feces. And Darren's tiny body was black and blue. Jane immediately started to cry because of course she did.

And Billy punched her in the face and told her to clean him up. They were going out. So she did. And the three of them went out as though nothing had happened. And that's just one example. There's another that comes up often in a source material for this case that happened during dinner one night. Billy had this rule in the house that everyone had to eat at the same pace he did. And as a toddler, Darren couldn't keep up. And so sometimes Billy would just force feed him one bite after another after another. And on at least one of those occasions, Darren actually threw up at which point Billy just force fed him that. So yeah, Jane tells police that she thought about killing Billy quite a lot. Every time she watched his rage boil over, every time he beat her, their

son, whomever. And every time she would have this thought in the back of her mind that one day one of these times, she was going to be the one left dead. So was there some sort of altercation that night that she killed him? Like, was it particularly bad? What happened? Again, every day was bad in that house. But actually, the night Billy died hadn't been overly memorable in terms of physical violence. Jane tells police that Billy and this other guy Ron who boarded with the staff had spent the entire day drinking. And then later that evening around 8 30pm, according to Vernon Oicals book, Billy demanded that Jane drive them to a party a few miles away. The whole way there, Jane says that Billy kept going on and on about their neighbor Margaret who I guess he fought with

all the time and saying how this was it he was going to end their ongoing argument over the property line once and for all. And they like get to the party and he kind of drops it. But then as soon as they're back in the truck and head at home, he picked right back up where he left off ranting about Margaret. And here, but I'm going to get you to read this passage from Brian Valley's book about what Jane says he was actually saying. Quote, when Margaret turns off her lights down there tonight, it'll be lights off for her for good, he shouted. I got five gallons of gas in town today. And I'm going to dump it all around that trailer and watch them burn. They'll never get out. Can't you just see Margaret with her game leg and Roger with his bad heart running

around trying to get out? They won't have a chance. End quote. Right after Billy turned to her and said quote, and I'll deal with that son of yours at the same time. I've waited a long time to deal with him. I might as well clean them all up at one time. End quote. Jane says she was terrified, terrified for Margaret for Alan for all of them. She knew what Billy was capable of and she worried about what the next several hours would bring. But she tells police that by the time they pulled into the driveway at the Stafford's home, Billy had passed out. Ron stumbled into the house. But Jane stayed where she was behind the wheel because that was the rule. She had to stay in the truck with him until he woke up and gave her permission to go inside. She says she just sat there. And for

whatever reason in the stillness of the night with Billy slumped over asleep next to her, everything he'd said and done to her, everything he had said and done to her children, everything he had said he was going to do to Margaret and Alan that night, it all just hit her at once. And she decided she was done. That she wasn't going to live like this anymore. And that there was only one way to end the cycle of hell she and her children had been living in. Journalist Alan Story reported for the Vancouver Sun that Jane beeped the horn to wake up Alan and asked him to get the gun, load it and bring it outside, which she tells police he did. She didn't tell him who the gun was for or why.

Once she was confident Alan was back in bed, she says she walked to the truck, put the barrel of the gun through the open driver's side window, pointed it at Billy's head, turned away and pulled the trigger. She tells police that of course the shot woke Alan. And when he came outside, she told him not to ask any questions. Just get rid of the gun. Her focus at this point was on getting the truck away from the house as quickly as she could before Darren woke up and saw anything. She says that she didn't once look at Billy's body or beyond the steering wheel of the truck after she pulled the trigger. She didn't have any idea whether Billy was even alive or dead. She just drove with Billy's body slowly inching closer

and closer, leaning more and more against her the whole way. When she got there, she left the truck by the side of the road. Again, she didn't even know for sure that he was dead or that she and her kids were really truly safe until the officers came the next day to notify her. So when they notified her and she fainted, that may have been more relief than grief. Relief, exhaustion, shock, all of it. Right. So she doesn't seem like a threat to public safety to me at least. I mean, if anything, Billy had been a threat to the public. But it is still technically a murder. What did the police do? I mean, they're sympathetic, obviously. In fact, according to reporting by Lois Sweet for the Edmonton Journal, one of the officers famously said that

Jane deserved a medal and that she probably even saved a couple of officers lives by killing Billy. They asked Jane where they could find the murder weapon and she tells them Allen had taken it apart and thrown it in a river at her direction. They all stop on the way back to Bangs Falls and she tells them exactly where to find it. And then they take Jane home to get some rest, which don't get me wrong is very weird to me. But like you said, police don't think she's a risk to the public or anything, nor do they think she'll run. I think they just probably feel like she'd been through enough at this point. I don't know. And they're they're not letting her off by any means because three days later on March 16th, police formally charged Jane with first degree murder, first

degree murder, like planned out, very deliberate first degree murder. Yeah, Jane actually offers to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter. And according to Brian Valley's book, Life and Death After Billy, the ground prosecutor is supportive of this and so is the RCMP. But when they take that deal to the Attorney General, which is the elected official in charge of the Justice Department, he's like hard pass. Wait, why? Well, they didn't want to be seen plea bargaining on a first degree murder charge mostly. And they aren't willing to reduce it to manslaughter because Billy was asleep when Jane shot him. So they don't consider it self defense either because they say, listen, like you weren't in imminent danger at that exact moment. And so the crown holds their

ground on the murder charge and says that they'll let the jury decide. During the month long trial, which begins in November 1982, the jury hears from a slew of witnesses who according to coverage from the Canadian press, tell the court about the extent of the violence and abuse Jane and Darren both lived through from 1977 until that fateful night in March. Billy's former wife even gets up and talks about her experience, which included abuse against their five children from the time they were babies, literally six months old in a crib. Billy's former common law spouse tells a very similar story about her experience. So how did they manage to get away from him? Like, I assume they faced similar threats that Jane faced. Yeah, they had to leave the province to

get away from Billy. His first wife, Pauline, waited until he was gone on this like two week sale and moved herself and the kids to Ontario to stay with a cousin. And then his next partner, this woman named Faith, did the same thing but fled to Calgary. But Jane couldn't do that because by the time things were bad enough to start looking for a way to escape, there wasn't one. Billy wasn't spending two weeks at a time at sea. He wasn't working at all anymore. So had Jane known about Billy's two former spouses and like their histories? I mean, it's such a small town. Well, Jane says that she didn't know about Billy's violence when they first got together, which I don't think is that uncommon. In fact, she says that he was loving

and charming in those early days of the relationship. He spoiled her, doted on her. He made her feel safe. It wasn't until she got pregnant with Darren that his dark side started to come out. Yeah, which we know isn't that uncommon. The stat that the American College of Obstructrix and Gynecology gives out is that for like one in six victims, violence starts in pregnancy. Yeah. Now, at the trial, her parents testified in court that they had no idea how bad things really were for Jane, how bad they'd become in the five years since the abuse began. Now, they knew Billy was no saint, but they didn't know what day to day life with him was like for Jane. Partly, that's because like so many victims of domestic violence, Jane had been

isolated from her family and friends over time. And Jane's parents gave Billy a wide birth themselves and they had ever since he attacked Jane's father. He apparently ripped the door off the hinges, smashed a window, pushed him and punched him in the face. Okay, so they were clearly scared of him too. So they couldn't say that they didn't know. Yeah, this is where I get a little confused. Like again, maybe they didn't know what day to day life was like, but they clearly had to have known he had a violent streak if that's the reason they're staying away from him. Yeah, like if he attacked them, like what would keep him from attacking her and the kids as well? Like, I don't know. But again, she was totally separated from her family. They were

scared of him. The police were scared of him. Everyone was scared of Billy. Jane couldn't see a life raft anywhere. There was no escape from the hell that she was living in with Billy. She had no one to turn to and nowhere to go. And with Billy home all the time, there were no opportunities to escape. Not until that night when he passed out in the truck, and she decided to just end the nightmare once and for all. And it only happened that night because he was threatening her son and their neighbors. I mean, doesn't that qualify as self-defense? At the time, no. Self-defense was really about stopping imminent danger. And it's hard for anyone to see a sleeping man as a threat to anyone. But that's largely because

people didn't understand the issue of domestic violence at the time. And Jane's trial was one of the first times people heard about what's known as battered wife syndrome or battered woman syndrome. And Brett, I actually asked you to do a little bit of digging into this and share a bit of background. So do you want to give people a bit about what you found? Sure. So I found an article on the trauma awareness and treatment center. And it defines a battered woman as someone over the age of 18 who is repeatedly subjected to forceful physical and or psychological abuse in an intimate relationship. And to define that a little bit more, they consider an intimate relationship as romantic, affectionate or sexual. And the abuse, as we know, can take a bunch of

different forms, including course of control, psychological abuse, sexual assault, physical assault threats. I mean, the list goes on. And according to the Supreme Court of Canada ruling, R versus Lavalie, in 1979, a clinical psychologist and domestic violence researcher named Dr. Lenore Walker put forward the Walker cycle theory of violence. And in her research, she outlines these phases or patterns of violence that occur really in a cycle. And the first phase is called tension building. And that's when the abuser becomes, you know, increasingly more hostile towards the victim over a period of time, like, and the victim just responds in whatever they can do to keep the piece. Just I'll do whatever just to make things okay. Then the second phase is what happens when all

that tension boils over into an episode of violence, whether it's physical or psychological, like it's essentially a release of all that tension that I've been building. And then after this outburst, there's the immediate reduction of tension, like taking a boiling pot off a burner. And Dr. Walker says, quote, this in itself is naturally reinforcing violence often succeeds because it does work, end quote, because at the end of this outburst, the last phase of the cycle is called loving contrition. And this is basically like, I'm so sorry, it's never going to happen again phase. Right. So after this explosion of violence, there's kindness, remorse, apologies, promises, presence, you know, the abuser says, I'm never going to do this again. And a lot of times,

both people believe that that's true, that that's actually going to happen. And the person who emerges from the tension and violence is the one that the victim feels like is the person they met and fell in love with, the one that they're still in love with in a lot of ways. Now at this point in 1982, the law hadn't quite caught up to the growing research and understanding of domestic violence and how a victim trapped in this cycle might respond to being provoked over and over, again, over a period of years. Right. And victims of domestic violence actually don't tend to react to defend themselves with force at the moment of an attack. Like, it's usually the opposite. They often retreat, get away, just anything trying to survive.

Yeah, until they feel safe or at least safe enough to defend themselves and to do what they feel is necessary in order to protect themselves and their families, just like Jane did. The jury hears all this information during Jane's trial, which lasts 19 days. And they're sent off to consider the evidence and come to a conclusion. At this point, everyone is holding their breath, the prosecution, the defense, the community, domestic violence advocates, everyone knows how important this verdict is. And so when the word gets out that the jury has reached its decision, the entire country is watching. When the jury finally files back into the courtroom after 18 hours of deliberation,

the judge does the whole, you know, have you reached a verdict thing? And the foreman says, yes, they have. So the judge is like, great, hand me the indictment. And then the foreman's like, oh, we're supposed to write it down? Like, they didn't even write it down. So the judge is like, sends them back out of the courtroom to fill out the paperwork. What a comedy of errors at this point. Yeah. They return for a second time. They find Jane not guilty of murder. According to Alan's story's piece in the Vancouver Sun, the courtroom literally breaks into applause. For advocates, the not guilty verdict seems like a step in the right direction towards the legal system,

finally putting victims of domestic violence ahead of their abusers. But not everyone is celebrating. And for the people who are, the cheers and applause are short lived. Because a few weeks after Jane's acquittal, the crown appeals the not guilty verdict. Wait, what? The prosecution appeals the not guilty verdict by the jury? Like, yeah. Can they do that? Isn't that like double jeopardy or something? That was exactly my reaction because here in the U.S., you're right, that is double jeopardy. You can't- You can't be tried for the same thing twice when it comes to murder. Yeah, you can appeal. Like, if you were found guilty, you can appeal. But if you're found

not guilty, it's over. But apparently in Canada, the crown can appeal a not guilty jury verdict. Not all the time and not just because they don't like it. I guess in order to appeal, the crown has to argue that the judge made a legal error serious enough to impact the verdict. What was that argument? Like, what did the trial judge do wrong? Well, according to court documents, the crown's argument is more or less that the judge just did a bad job directing the jury. Like, apparently he took literally a full day to do it, like five hours of which was spent revealing the evidence, which wasn't necessary. But the crown also called the jury's verdict perverse and said that there was no way the

jury could find Jane not guilty given the evidence presented at trial. But they did hear all the evidence and they still found her not guilty. Well, the evidence is the other important thing because the Supreme Court actually agrees with the crown that the jury had been improperly instructed. In his decision, Justice Gordon Hart wrote that the evidence presented at trial about Billy was unnecessary and inadmissible and, quote, served only to create sympathy for the respondent, end quote. And so the Supreme Court overturns the not guilty verdict and orders a new trial on the first degree murder charge, which is set for February 1984.

Okay, so I guess what makes the crown think that the result will be any different this time? Like, do they assume that the passage of time will just make the jury less sympathetic? I think the jury would be less sympathetic if they didn't hear anything about the years of domestic violence Jane and Darren lived through. But they're not willing to take any chances this time around. Remember that plea deal Jane's attorney brought to the prosecution before her first trial? Yeah, it was for manslaughter, right? Right. Well, this time the crown's like, you know what? We'll take it.

You're kidding me. I wish. I mean, arguably it was the right charge in the first place, not first degree murder. Right. And by pleading guilty to this new manslaughter charge, it's up to a judge to decide what her sentence will be. Basically, leave the jury out of it. According to Brian Valet's book, during the sentencing hearing, the judge says that while Billy Stafford had been, quote, a man on the outer fringes of the definition of humanity, wives don't have the right to take the lives of their husbands, end quote.

But he can't ignore the original acquittal, a decision the jury reached after 19 days of testimony. And so he sentences Jane to six months of jail time plus two years of probation. Not as good as no time, but certainly not 25 to life either. The judge also says that Jane can leave the jail to attend nursing classes, which she'd been taking for several months at that point. So basically she just sleeps in jail? Yeah, considering it's a two hour drive each way from the jail to the school, and then a full day of classes, pretty much.

And Jane is observing just two months of that sentence before being released. And in the years that follow, she uses her experience to advocate for other victims of domestic violence. And she goes on to work as a nurse to support her children. She worked with Brian Valet on the book Life with Billy, and then later on a film based on that book, a film based on her life. She takes positions on community boards and government advisory councils. She even gets married again. After all those years of hell, both before and after Billy's death, all Jane really wanted was to live a normal, quiet life, which she does to a degree,

until February 23rd, 1992, almost 10 years after Billy's death. When a passerby finds Jane in the front seat of her car on the Halifax Waterfront, dead from a single gunshot wound to the chest. What? Dean Beebe reported for the Vancouver Sun that police's initial theory around Jane's death was suicide, because there's a weapon at the scene and no signs of a struggle. But not everyone is so sure. Jane's work as an advocate had brought a lot of haters out of the woodwork. She'd get threats by the phone and people would leave notes on her car, basically telling her that if she didn't shut up, they would do it for her.

In the six weeks before her death, Jane reported a slew of anonymous letters and phone calls to the police. And in fact, she was scheduled to speak to them the very next day about it. That's interesting. So is the medical examiner able to say for sure that it was suicide, or is there a possibility that it was a homicide? Not really. The Emmy says Jane's death is consistent with a suicide, but isn't able to rule out homicide. So police do open a criminal investigation, but in the end, they find no evidence to suggest Jane was murdered. I mean, that kind of trauma must have done a serious number on her mental health through the

years. Absolutely. And for Jane, actually, that trauma manifested as depression and kleptomania. You mean like shoplifting? Jane had been fined the year before for stealing greeting cards and perfume, and she had charges dating back over 10 years. She said that anytime something triggered a memory of her time with Billie, she got this uncontrollable urge to steal. Police find that Jane had actually been scheduled to face trial on shoplifting charges the next month, which may have been a contributing factor in her death if she did in fact take her own life. Now, Jane tried to escape her abusive husband in 1982. And if there had been resources available

to victims like her in her community at the time, things may have ended very differently. So if you're out there listening to this right now, if there are parts of Jane's story that sound like your story, there are options. One of those options here in Indianapolis is called Coburn Place. It's a safe and secure building where survivors can live rent free in their own fully furnished apartment for at least six months, but up to two years. We know how important safe housing is for victims of domestic violence. In some cases, it could be the difference between staying in abusive relationship and leaving. That's why Audio Check has made a donation to Coburn Place to fund one of those apartments and to help ensure survivors of domestic violence

and their children can live rent and utility free. They can access supports and services and build a life they truly deserve. And I want to thank all of our listeners for supporting us and giving us the ability to do that. In some ways, Jane did escape Billy when she pulled the trigger to end his life, but in other ways, she could never escape. And her death 10 years later was Billy's final act of violence. If you are experiencing domestic violence, there is support out there and people who can help. In the US, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE or text the word START to 88788. If you suspect a loved one may be experiencing domestic violence, but don't know how to help, the hotline is there for you too. And it's also

there for perpetrators of violence who want to get the help to change. You can find all the source material for this episode on our website crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?