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Episode Swap with True Crime Cat Lawyer: Wendy Maldonado
3.7k Plays3 years ago
For today's episode swap, we head to Oregon to hear Elyse discuss a nuanced issue in domestic violence cases: when a victim kills her abuser. This is the case of Wendy Maldonado.
Elyse & Winston
True Crime Cat Lawyer Podcast
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Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:45
Speaker
Welcome to True Crime Cat Lawyer. I'm your host, Elise, and sometimes my cat Winston joins me. This podcast contains content of a graphic nature that might not be suitable for all listeners, including descriptions of violence, sexual assault, and crimes against animals and children. Listener discretion is advised.
00:01:11
Speaker
Hi guys, before we get started with today's episode, I want to add an extra trigger warning here. The case we're going to cover centers around domestic violence and child abuse. We strongly advise listening with caution or skipping this episode if you're triggered by these topics.
00:01:29
Speaker
Last month was Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I know domestic violence is a sensitive topic for so many of our listeners and others out there, but I also know it's something that still needs to be talked about because there's still people out there victim blaming and asking why doesn't he or she leave? Which those of you who listen to our show and others like it know that that isn't helpful, nor does it accurately capture the reality of an abuse survivor.
00:01:56
Speaker
So I knew I wanted to cover a case involving domestic violence this season, but I also wanted to present something a little different on this topic.
Case Background: Wendy Maldonado
00:02:05
Speaker
Today's case came to my attention when I was looking for cases involving women who were incarcerated for killing their abusers. This is a nuanced area of the law and something that is evolving, albeit at an incredibly slow pace.
00:02:19
Speaker
Battered Women's Syndrome was introduced in the 90s as an explanation for why some women end up killing their spouses or partners. Essentially, women who are abused over time can be assaulted to the point where murder of their abuser seems like the only option to escape their torment. Obviously, things are much more complicated than that, but you can see how the circumstances of a domestic violence survivor could work to justify homicide in those cases.
00:02:47
Speaker
With that background in mind, let's head to Grants Pass, Oregon to tell you about Wendy Maldonado. Wendy met her future husband, Erin Maldonado, in high school. They started dating when Wendy was 15, and two years later, when Wendy was pregnant with their first child, they got married on January 3rd, 1987. It was shortly after Wendy and Maldonado got married that the abuse started.
00:03:11
Speaker
Maldonado would smash Wendy's head into walls and punch her in the face on a daily basis. Wendy lost 17 teeth and had to get dentures because of Maldonado's abuse. Maldonado knocked Wendy outside their home while it was snowing and she was naked at Maldonado's demand, of course. Maldonado routinely threatened to kill Wendy's parents and other members of her extended family if she ever left him or if she ever called the police.
00:03:42
Speaker
The Maldonados ended up having four sons together, and unfortunately, their sons weren't unscathed from the abuse. The boys live in constant fear of setting their dad off. According to Tyler, the Maldonado's youngest son, he remembered threatening to kill his dad when he was in preschool. Preschool. In a documentary for this case called Every Day of My Life, Tyler recalled the following incident.
00:04:08
Speaker
Quote, when I was eight, I went to my grandma's house and me and some girl named Misty were throwing a snow globe back and forth and it hit the coffee table and broke. My dad took me outside with a snow globe and then he sat me in the yard and started yelling. Then a minute later, he took the snow globe and threw it at me and hit me in the head. So I went inside a minute later and I noticed blood running down my head. Then I asked if I should cry, end quote.
00:04:37
Speaker
This poor child, who needed stitches after this by the way, was afraid to cry after he'd been severely injured by his own father. What makes all of this even more disgusting is that in the documentary, they played this home video where Maldonado is making Tyler show off the gash on the top of his head and Maldonado is laughing about it.
00:05:01
Speaker
At the time, no one but Wendy, Maldonado, and their sons knew how the injury actually occurred.
Community and Police Involvement
00:05:08
Speaker
Tyler also mentioned seeing his dad abuse his older brothers as well, and he felt that if even his oldest brother was being abused, there was no chance for him to defend himself against the abuse.
00:05:21
Speaker
Neighbors often heard the abuse at the Maldonado home and even called police. But Wendy declined to press charges, something all too common in domestic violence cases. When asked why she didn't want to press charges, Wendy said she knew Maldonado wouldn't be in jail for very long. And when he did come home, he'd be pissed, resulting in retaliatory violence against her and possibly their children.
00:05:48
Speaker
Again, this is unfortunately commonplace in domestic violence cases because the victims fears almost always come to fruition. In my mind, I think survivors are just trying to protect themselves as best as they can. And they're trying to avoid anything they believe will bring them harm. And let's face it, the criminal justice system does not protect survivors of domestic violence.
The Decision and Act of Killing
00:06:11
Speaker
So Wendy not pressing charges makes complete sense to me.
00:06:17
Speaker
Like I mentioned earlier, Maldonado often threatened to kill Wendy's family if she ever left him, but Maldonado didn't stop there. He repeatedly threatened to kill Wendy and their sons, and he provided the graphic details of how he'd do it. Wendy eventually became resigned to the idea that she was never going to get away from her increasingly violent husband.
00:06:40
Speaker
On April 30, 2005, Maldonado's behavior was, quote, even more bizarre and threatening than usual, end quote. It got so bad that Randy, the oldest son, made an anonymous call to police at 2.15 a.m. When police showed up to the home, Randy and Wendy stopped them out in the yard and denied any issues and told police that Maldonado was sleeping.
00:07:06
Speaker
Randy later claimed he had tried to covertly let police know that his dad was watching them on a security camera over the front door, but police didn't get that message. As officers pulled away from the Maldonado home, neighbors block them from leaving, asking them to go back to the house. But police refused. I think it's easy to blame police here, and I do think they deserve some of that blame because they had a third party telling them to go back and check on this family.
00:07:36
Speaker
But I also think this highlights the lack of domestic violence training police have. From watching home movies in the documentary, it's clear that Wendy and her sons were afraid of Maldonado. There was a look behind their eyes and Wendy's smiles often felt forced.
00:07:56
Speaker
I'd like to believe there was something in that encounter with police that could have or should have tipped them off that something was going on in the Maldonado household, especially if Randy was in fact trying to signal them in some way. Around 5.15am, Maldonado went to sleep. Wendy went in to check on him and he jolted awake, grabbed her arm, and threatened to kill her.
00:08:22
Speaker
That's when Wendy ran into the hall and told Randy she was going to, quote unquote, do it.
Legal Repercussions and Sentencing
00:08:28
Speaker
That it she was referring to was killing her husband. Wendy's mom said that Randy was Wendy's best friend. From the moment Randy was born, he and his mom were inseparable. So there was no way Randy was going to let his mom kill Maldonado on her own.
00:08:47
Speaker
So Wendy and Randy said a prayer together, then they grabbed a hammer and a camping axe and went back into the bedroom. Wendy took the first swing and then the two took turns bludgeoning Maldonado until Wendy said to stop. Wendy then left the bedroom and called 911, telling the dispatcher she had just killed her husband. Wendy told the dispatcher she hit Maldonado in the head with a hammer and she said his head was caved in.
00:09:17
Speaker
She said, quote, I don't know what to do. My kids are going to hate me. I just want my kids to be safe. End quote. Wendy sobbed into the phone and the 911 dispatcher talked to her like she was a victim of domestic violence rather than a cold blooded killer. When police arrived, Maldonado was still alive. His head was covered in blood. Officers said they saw brain matter on his pillow. Maldonado later died at the hospital.
00:09:49
Speaker
Wendy was arrested on the night of the attack and was charged with first degree murder. Her son, Randy, was arrested 12 days later, also charged with first degree murder. Wendy was eventually released on bail so she could take care of her sons. The prosecutor decided to combine Wendy and Randy's cases. A plea deal was offered for both Wendy and her son. 75 months for Randy for second degree manslaughter and 120 months for Wendy for first degree manslaughter.
00:10:19
Speaker
Although many people thought Wendy had a good shot of being acquitted, she took the deal because she didn't want her son to go to prison for a significant amount of time just because he was trying to protect her. At the sentencing hearing, Wendy laid out even more of the sadistic and relentless abuse she'd suffered from her husband.
00:10:40
Speaker
Maldonado had raped her, threatened to kill her anytime she talked back, and he told her about his fantasies, including nightmarish stories of raping and torturing other young women. Maldonado regularly strangled Wendy until she blacked out, and the walls of the family's home were covered in holes the size of a man's fist.
00:11:05
Speaker
Although the judge acknowledged that it was one of the worst cases of domestic violence he'd ever seen, he said that it wasn't up to Wendy to take Maldonado's life. Tyler, the youngest son, also spoke of the sentencing and he told the judge, quote, I don't think they should have to go to jail. They made the world a better place, end quote. Wendy couldn't provide an explanation for why she chose that night to kill her husband.
00:11:33
Speaker
Her son Randy would say his mom didn't have a choice when they killed Maldonado. Essentially, it was kill Maldonado or be killed by him. Randy was released from prison in 2011 and Wendy was released in 2016 after being denied an earlier request for clemency from the governor at the time.
00:11:56
Speaker
Before we end today's episode, I want to get into the laws that were at play in Wendy and Randy's cases, along with a discussion of how the law should work for domestic violence survivors.
Legal Defenses and Need for Reform
00:12:08
Speaker
There are two primary legal defenses that are raised in a case where a domestic violence victim kills his or her abuser.
00:12:16
Speaker
First, there's self-defense. Under Oregon law, generally a person is justified in using physical force and self-defense from what the person reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of unlawful physical force. The degree of force is what the person reasonably believes is necessary. But there are further limitations when it comes to using deadly force.
00:12:42
Speaker
In that case, a person has to reasonably believe that the other person is using or about to use unlawful deadly force against them. For Wendy and Randy's case, there was a problem with using self-defense. The prosecutors argued that although Maldonado had threatened to kill Wendy and her sons in the past, at the moment the murder occurred, Maldonado wasn't an active, immediate threat.
00:13:10
Speaker
So if Wendy and her son had gone to trial, they would have had an uphill battle to establish a justifiable homicide or the use of self-defense. As written in an article on the Domestic Shelters website, quote, when women kill an abuser, the narrative doesn't fit as neatly into the self-defense paradigm we often think of, which demands an imminent threat, end quote. The second offense often raised is one of provocation.
00:13:39
Speaker
In these cases, the victim argues that they killed their abusive partner out of fear of future violence. Basically, the danger to them is ongoing and constant just by nature of that abusive relationship. If a provocation defense is successful, homicide can be reduced to manslaughter instead. And this is what happened in Randy and Wendy's cases with their plea deals.
00:14:03
Speaker
For Randy, he was convicted of second-degree manslaughter, which is a measure 11 crime subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of 75 months. Under ORS 163.125, voluntary manslaughter in the second degree means that a defendant has caused the death of another human being and the act is committed recklessly.
00:14:25
Speaker
Organ law defines recklessly to mean that a person is aware of and consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that death will occur. I think it's fair to say that even with the abuse of history presented in court, Randy's involvement in the murder does technically meet the elements of voluntary manslaughter in the side degree.
00:14:48
Speaker
Manslaughter in the first degree, the crime Wendy was convicted of, is also a measure 11 crime, subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of 120 months.
00:15:00
Speaker
According to ORS 163.118, a person is guilty of manslaughter in the first degree when he or she causes the death of another human being and the act is committed either recklessly with extreme indifference to the value of human life or the act is committed intentionally under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance. Again, I think this fits the facts of Wendy's case and would provide a way better defense for her than self-defense.
00:15:30
Speaker
But even if Wendy's case technically met the elements to charge her and convict her of first degree manslaughter, is that really the best use of the criminal justice system's resources? The legal future for abuse victims slash survivors is changing, but very slowly. It's important for us to keep talking about these cases and having these conversations because we're the people who are going to be members of juries, deciding whether someone is guilty or innocent.
00:16:00
Speaker
Domestic violence, like so many other areas of the law, isn't black and white. And maybe our approach to these cases shouldn't be black and white either.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:16:12
Speaker
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Please subscribe and leave a review if you like the show. You can email case suggestions or comments to truecrimecatlawyer at gmail.com.
00:16:23
Speaker
The links for our social media pages are included in the show notes. You can find our discussion group on Facebook by searching for true crime cat lawyer in the group section. And if you want more content, head over to Patreon to join one of our available tiers. You can get monthly mini and bonus episodes as well as early access to our main episodes.
00:16:44
Speaker
Finally, if you're interested in learning more about my co-host, you can check out her Instagram at WinstonTheCatPDX. Thanks again for listening and stay tuned for our next episode.