NO WAY OUT

By ELIZABETH GLEICK/BOONE COUNTY

When traveling through parts of West Virginia, it is easy to start feeling a bit haunted by the Hatfields and the McCoys. For one thing, if you go to lunch with a bunch of Boone County lawyers at Freda's, their favorite hangout, you may find yourself sitting next to Burr Hatfield. For another, the folks down here routinely make jokey references to the infamous dispute as if it had happened yesterday. But all family violence is not alike. And what most infuriates Marcella Kay Weekley's advocates--the band of lawyers, friends and relatives battling to get her out of jail--is when people describe what happened between Jackie and Kay Weekley as nothing more than some petty family feud.

This much in the tangled case of Kay and Jackie is certain: during their 10-year relationship, right up until the night Kay shot and killed Jackie, the couple was locked in an escalating cycle of violence and reconciliation. Though the story Kay tells is as dark and twisted as the road out to her family's house up No. 3 Hollow in Jeffrey, West Virginia, the evidence of the abuse she endured over 10 years is clear as day. In addition to the stories people who knew Jackie tell, in addition to chilling accounts by Kay and her two children, there are pages of police complaints. And there are the scars: Kay and several members of her family still bear jagged reminders of Jackie's nasty handiwork. A few weeks before Kay shot her ex-husband, he stabbed Kay, her sister Debbie and Debbie's boyfriend William Robinette with a butcher knife--a crime for which he was out on bond when he died.

This is why Kay, 32, insists that she was convinced Jackie was coming to kill her when he knocked at the door of her trailer the night of June 28, 1992. "It's like going down the freeway, and you see these cars piled up, and you're going at a certain speed, and you know you'll hit the cars," she says during an interview at the South Central Regional Jail in Charleston, where she is serving a 5-to-18-year sentence for murder. "It's just something that a battered woman knows." The Boone County prosecutor's office insists--and a jury agreed--that the shooting was premeditated. But the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, spurred by Dr. Kimberly Martin, a pediatrician and shelter volunteer who once took in Kay and her children, is urging Governor Gaston Caperton to pardon Weekley. The Governor declined to speak with TIME, but a spokesperson says Caperton intends to announce a decision before he leaves office on Jan. 13.

Since Kay killed Jackie, the general public has reached a greater understanding of the potentially lethal relationship between an abuser and a victim--thanks in part to the endless examination of O.J. Simpson's volatile marriage to Nicole Brown Simpson. Police officers, judges, doctors and lawyers have begun to get educated about the "battered woman's syndrome"--the psychological dependency that keeps a spouse trapped in a violent relationship, repeatedly forgiving her abuser and even sometimes blaming herself for the attacks. In recent years, legal protections for victims of domestic abuse have also been dramatically strengthened in ways that might have averted the Weekley tragedy. The 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which was part of the federal crime law, made grants to states contingent in part on tougher domestic-violence laws. But, cautions Bonnie Campbell, the director of the Violence Against Women office at the U.S. Justice Department, "it doesn't matter how good the law is unless you can change the attitudes of the people enforcing the law."

In West Virginia, where one-third of all homicides are domestic, that change has been slow to come. In 1994 it became the last state in the nation to enact a "probable cause" provision permitting police officers to arrest batterers on the spot, even when the victim refuses to press charges--a law that domestic-violence advocates consider essential. The state's rural nature makes it hard to get services to the women who need them. And though the laws and access to the court system are now up to, or even ahead of, those in other states, even some of the state's educated professionals, like a group of Boone County lawyers, still think domestic violence is a joking matter. "Oh, of course, the woman is always totally 100% innocent," notes one sarcastically. The lead prosecutor on the Weekley case, Samuel Hall, does not seem to understand why Kay did not simply leave Jackie for good. "When your complaining witness--the person that is being abused so terribly--doesn't show up in court [to press charges], where does the blame lie?" he asks.

Hearing about the violence Kay endured can seem almost surreal to those at a distance from her life. To those in the middle of it all, though, the abuse has an almost everyday quality about it. Kay's daughter Amanda, 14, a pretty girl with a sharp sense of humor, refers blithely to the time "when Daddy kidnapped us," and remembers going to bed with her shoes on so she could run to the neighbors for help. "I got used to the hitting part," Mandy says, "but what I hated was when he spit in her face or slung food." Ask Kay's son Joe, 12, whether he remembers any happy times with his dad, and he tells stories of outings that end in car crashes or fighting. Other friends and relatives trade Jackie tales like essential bits of oral history. They tell about that time when Jackie stole the pickup truck or dynamited the beech tree or bashed in the windshield or held the church congregation hostage. Says Kay's father, Chester Williams, a retired coal miner and preacher: "He felt like he could do anything and get by with it."

Kay says she left school after the seventh grade. When she was 18, she gave birth to Mandy out of wedlock, around the same time she met Jackie, a year older and from nearby Logan County. At first, she says, Jackie was "the perfect dream." But barely a week after their wedding in September 1982, the beatings began. According to Kay, he first hit her when she tried to serve him hot dogs for dinner. "He thought that that's the way you were supposed to do your wife," says Kay, speaking so softly she can barely be heard. "I was a piece of property. If he went to work and had a bad day, he'd come home and smack me." Smacks led to punches, hitting led to stomping--"the worst kind of abuse you could ever imagine. He'd stick his fingers up my nose. He'd break my glasses--he broke three pairs of my glasses." When she became pregnant with Joe, who was born in 1984, he called her a fat pig and kicked her "through the house."

Afterward, Jackie would apologize and bring his wife gifts. "He'd say, 'I hate myself,'" she recalls. "He'd buy me a camera, then the next time he got mad at me, I'll tell you, that was it for the camera." For several years Kay tried to keep the abuse secret from her family because she was ashamed, because she loved him and because she "thought he would change." Besides, she says, "usually if I had a problem I was taught to pray about it, and the Lord would take care of it." Better God than the local authorities. "I can remember one incident when the cops pulled in," she says. "One said, 'Ma'am, we can't interfere in this. This is a marital squabble.'"

Jackie's parents, James and Sibby, and his sister Lucinda have repeatedly denied that Jackie abused Kay. "I never once seen Jackie strike that girl," Lucinda says. But witnesses are not hard to come by. Jake Henry, a neighbor who occasionally worked at logging with Jackie, recalls a night when Jackie stayed out getting drunk for several hours after work, then beat Kay for serving him a cold dinner. A paramedic with the Boone County ambulance company confirms that she picked up a battered Kay on at least one occasion, while Boone County Deputy Sheriff Larry Greene, who was the investigating officer on Jackie's shooting, confirms that there was a history of complaints at their residence, filed by both Jackie and Kay. Even the assistant prosecuting attorney in Boone County, Richard Riffe, who helped try the case, says, "The family will tell you he wasn't [brutal], but he was."

Then there was the matter of what has come to be called the Raid on the Dobra Church. In 1988 Jackie and Kay divorced but continued to see each other, mainly, according to Kay, because every time she left, her ex-husband would threaten to hurt her parents. This was no idle threat. On June 11, 1988, Jackie barged into Chester's tiny church in Jeffrey, where there was a revival meeting in progress, waving what authorities describe as an "Uzi-type gun." As the stunned congregation looked on, Weekley kidnapped Mandy and Joe, who were sitting in a rear pew, stabbed Chester and pistol-whipped Kay's mother Christine. Charged with malicious wounding, Jackie pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and spent only a few days in jail.

Weekley's final act of violence was on June 6, 1992, when he stabbed Kay, Debbie and William during an argument at the mobile home where Kay was living. Three weeks later, as Kay tells it, she returned to clean blood from the trailer, bringing her father's shotgun for protection. On Sunday night, Jackie parked his car outside a pool hall just up a small incline from the trailer and put a quarter on the table to reserve a game. He then went down to see his ex-wife. Kay says she shot Jackie on the porch after he "busted in the door." His body was found several yards from there, at the edge of a small garden. Though there was no question who killed Jackie, Kay was not actually indicted until two years later. "It looked like a righteous shoot," explains assistant prosecutor Riffe. "If her story had panned out, she wouldn't have been prosecuted." The Weekley family kept the investigation alive, however, and when authorities turned up inconsistencies in Kay's story, she was charged.

These inconsistencies are undeniable. The ballistics report shows that Jackie was shot from 24 ft. to 28 ft. away, not the 12 ft. or so Kay claimed. Nor did the door appear to have been broken down. After the guilty verdict, Kay wrote a letter to the judge explaining that she had actually used her brother-in-law's sawed-off shotgun but lied because she did not want to incriminate him for possessing an illegal firearm. A witness came forward to say that Kay told her she had laid in wait to kill Jackie two days earlier but changed her mind. The Weekleys also testified that Kay telephoned their son several times the weekend of the murder, trying to lure him to the trailer. Kay insists that she called only to check on her children, who were staying with Jackie's parents that weekend.

When the defense rested its case, "all the court watchers came and congratulated me," says Nelson Bickley, one of Kay's original lawyers. "The world--or what little world was there--felt she was going to walk." Even Riffe says, "Frankly, if they'd found her innocent, I wouldn't have been too upset." So the jury's verdict, guilty of first-degree murder, which carried a 15-year-to-life sentence, was a shock. Says Bickley, who in part blames himself for inadequate presentation of expert testimony: "I think the jury did not fully understand what the battered woman's syndrome was."

Other people involved with the case agree with that assessment. Even the state's expert witness, psychiatrist Dr. Russ Voltin, who testified that on the basis of inconsistencies in her story he believed Kay was "malingering," has changed his position. He testified at a recent sentencing hearing that after further interviews with Kay he believes she suffers from post-traumatic-stress disorder, resulting from the years of abuse by her deceased husband. "I don't think this woman poses a threat," Dr. Voltin says. "[She] felt backed against the wall." It is too late to sway the court, however: in October Kay gave up her right to further appeal in return for a reduced plea to second-degree murder.

The current and future Kay Weekleys of Boone County may have a better chance of stopping the violence before it ends in death. Under the new laws, a victim of domestic abuse can drop just one complaint, and that only after signing a waiver and agreeing to counseling. And along with the new laws has come what Riffe calls "substantial consciousness raising." Since 1990, the number of domestic complaints has jumped more than 300%, while the arrest rate for such complaints has tripled.

Though women in rural areas like Boone County are at no greater risk for domestic violence than other women, escaping the home or seeking help may pose unique difficulties because of poverty, lack of access to a car and psychological isolation. "Everything about reaching rural communities is harder," explains the Justice Department's Campbell. "There's very much a culture that says you don't discuss your personal affairs, maybe even a culture that a man's house is his castle and what happens in it isn't anybody's business." This year Congress appropriated $5 million in domesticviolence outreach funding specifically earmarked for rural communities.

Campbell says she would like to see all Governors, not just Caperton, take a close look at the cases of women currently serving time for killing a batterer. Some are already doing so. Two weeks ago, for instance, New Hampshire Governor Stephen Merrill and the state's executive council decided to pardon June Briand, who has served nearly 10 years of a 15-year-to-life sentence for shooting her abusive husband. "You want to approach these with the same skepticism as you would other cases," Campbell says, "but if there's evidence and we can apply the relatively new knowledge we have, then I think those women deserve a second chance."

The Weekleys have given up fighting the drive to pardon Kay. "What's done is done," says Lucinda. "It's not going to bring my brother back." Kay, who is studying for her G.E.D., says that if she gets out of jail, she would like to help other battered women. For now, though, she cries when she thinks about her children, who visit her every Saturday. "What hurts me the most is that the kids will say, 'Mommy, I need to talk to you, just me and you,'" she says. "That's just something that can't be done, because someone has to bring them. And it's hard for them to express themselves over the phone." As for the other victims in this tragedy, Kay's friend Kim Martin says, "I don't think anyone should have to die, but if Jackie had been put in jail like he should have been, he'd be alive today."