Teenage rebellion turned deadly, and Melissa Chapman paid the price.

She was 18 when she was arrested on Christmas Eve 1987 along with her abusive boyfriend. She hasn't tasted freedom since that day.

Now 49, Melissa has lived in prison longer than she's lived anywhere else.

It's because of what happened one afternoon in mid-December 1987, when she and her boyfriend, Robert Goodyear, went to a Genesee County Meijer store with Michael Keith Gaines, Goodyear's friend, to set up a drug deal.

Gaines was flirting with Melissa, who sat between the two men on the bench seat of his pickup truck, court records show. In a jealous rage, Goodyear pushed Melissa out of the way and pointed a gun at Gaines' head. He pulled the trigger, twice.

Goodyear then turned the gun on Melissa and said, "I could kill you, too. I could kill you," she told the Michigan Parole Board during a June public hearing.

Also read: Who gets clemency in Michigan? Here's a look at who got out

He let her live, and she helped him drag Gaines' body into a field. Together, they cleaned out the blood-soaked truck, stole items from Gaines' apartment to pawn, and set his remains on fire.

She was acting out of fear, she told the Michigan Parole Board. If she ran, if she tried to tell police what Goodyear had done, she was convinced he'd kill her.

Melissa is among five women whose cases the Free Press examined in an analysis of those who were sentenced to life in prison without parole for their roles in slayings connected to domestic violence and sexual abuse.

All five women were convicted on first-degree murder charges; and all are serving time in Michigan's only prison for women, Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti.

Their sentences will keep them locked up until the day they die — unless they are granted clemency from the governor, which is rare.

The odds for them are slim — a paltry 0.149 percent.

Only six commutations have been granted since 2011 — despite 4,017 requests in that time. Every person who was granted commutations in that seven-year span was freed from prison for medical reasons, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections.

The five women have all appealed to the Michigan Parole Board and Gov. Rick Snyder for clemency, and all wait hopefully for news on whether the governor will grant their commutations in his final weeks in office.

But time is running out.

When Snyder leaves Lansing on Jan. 1, he will take with him any hope these women lifers have for being released for at least four years — or possibly eight if Gov.-elect Gretchen Whitmer wins re-election in 2022.

Also read:Michigan's cost per prisoner, per year? About the same as an SUV

Also read: What is Battered Woman Syndrome? And can it be a defense for murder?

Granting commutations is generally not a popular political move. Most come at the end of a governor's final term in office, when it's less likely they will face political backlash from angry voters at the polls.

The Michigan Women's Justice & Clemency Project, where Carol Jacobsen has been a vocal advocate for women in prison since the early '90s, supports all five bids for clemency.

"Now each case is unique, but the history of violence and abuse is there," Jacobsen said. "These women who are in for murder are not criminals and do not have criminal histories. These are women who were acting in violent situations in survival mode."

Many of the women were sentenced decades ago, at a time when there was limited knowledge of the effects of domestic violence, when there wasn't a large network of support systems for battered women like shelters and toll-free crisis hotlines. It also was a time when police were less willing to intervene in domestic and sexual abuse cases, Jacobsen said.

Laws have also changed. Jacobsen doubts the women sentenced decades ago to life in prison without parole would get such hefty sentences if they were convicted today.

"A lot of the women that we've represented over the years never had abuse presented at their trials," she said. "There are so many that deserve a chance. We don't need to keep people in prison for 30 years. ... We are just way too punitive.

"The governor is the sole person who has this unique power to redress an injustice, and it is critical that that power be employed for the sake of mercy but also for the sake of justice," Jacobsen said.

Rebellion costs Melissa Chapman everything

Melissa was young and in love, living fast and partying too hard.

She'd dropped out of high school in eleventh grade and moved out of her parents' home to live with her boyfriend, Robert Goodyear — even if it meant sleeping on couches and in the garages of friends and relatives. They stole cars and broke into houses to get money for drugs, for food, to pay for the lifestyle.

"I was rebellious against my parents," she said during a public hearing to consider her commutation request.

"I didn't want to listen to a lot of what they had to say. I was a bit of a free spirit. I was involved in kind of a partying life."

At 17, Goodyear had a long history of violence. Melissa quickly discovered that he also was intensely jealous. He didn't allow her to look at or speak to other men; he rarely let her out of his sight — even accompanying her to the bathroom, she said.

At first, she thought the jealous, controlling behavior was proof he liked her. But then the beatings came more frequently, she said. He punched her in the face, threw her to the ground.

"He would put handcuffs on me and handcuff me to things and put a gun to my head. He would sit there and click it until I threw up. He would get off on that," she testified at the hearing.

"Robert would tell me if I ever left him, he would kill my father. He would rape my mother and kill her and make me watch."

The night Goodyear killed Gaines, Melissa testified that he shot at her, too.

"We got into an argument. ... I took off running from him because I wanted to get away from him and he pulled the gun out and he shot at me," she said.

"He shot it once and I felt it whiz by my head. I just stopped and I turned around and I went right back to him."

Pivotal testimony for the prosecution in Melissa's trial came from Ann Denny, one of her cellmates in the county jail. She told the jury Melissa goaded Goodyear into killing Gaines, and said Melissa boasted about licking Gaines' blood and eating his brain tissue. Denny said under oath that Melissa worshiped Satan, according to trial transcripts.

Twenty years later, Denny, who now goes by the name Ann Louis Gordon, recanted her testimony in a sworn affidavit, Melissa's lawyer told the parole board. Melissa insists she never did those things but told doctors during a psychiatric evaluation that she licked the blood off her fingers so it would seem like she was crazy. She hoped an insanity defense would help her at trial.

It did not.

Jacobsen said Melissa shouldn't have to do any more time in prison.

"She's has never excused her actions in any way, yet I think it's important to consider the context of the crime, that she was a teenager not long past the age that the Supreme Court has determined that a sentence of life without parole is unconstitutional," Jacobsen said.

"She did not anticipate, plan nor commit the murder but lived in terror of Robert Goodyear and obeyed him out of a justified fear for her life. Given the torture she survived at his hands, it's miraculous Melissa is alive and that she was not the one murdered."

The Genesee County prosecutor did not object to Melissa's commutation.

But Assistant Attorney General Scott Rothermol said his office opposes her clemency, adding: "This was a very serious and assaultive crime, obviously. We would ask that the governor respect the decision of the jury and the sentence that was imposed upon you and not commute your sentence."

Delores Kapuscinski endures rape, rage

When Delores Kapuscinski went to prison in 1987 for killing her husband as he slept, spousal rape wasn't considered a crime in Michigan.

It wasn't illegal for a man to sexually assault his wife in the state until 1988 — one year after Delores was charged with murder in the death of Thomas Kapuscinski.

She testified during a July public hearing before members of the parole board that her husband molested her for most of their 17-year marriage, forcing her to have anal sex and to pretend she was a prostitute. He had been emotionally abusive as well.

"The sexual abuse had gotten so bad that I, I felt worthless," she said, explaining that she sank into a deep depression and considered killing herself in the wee hours of Feb. 18, 1987, in their home on Porter Hollow Drive Northeast in Rockford, near Grand Rapids. But she couldn't bear the idea of Thomas Kapuscinki raising their children Wendy, 7, and Christopher, 5.

She testified that he often demeaned them, too.

"He would call her (Wendy) a f---ing c---. He would ... call my son a bastard in front of them," she said. "He would tickle them, hold them down and tickle them until they were in tears. ... When he wrestled them or played with them, he would come real close to their groin areas, especially my daughter. And knowing how he was sexually with me, that was, that was a fright for me. I was frightened for my daughter."

So rather than take her own life, Delores turned his .22-caliber hunting rifle on her husband, firing once, reloading and shooting a second time.

She has been in prison 31 years.

Jacobsen said that's an injustice.

"We know about the racism but we don’t hear much about the misogyny of our criminal legal system," Jacobsen said. "It is not justice when it comes to women, especially women, who are seen to be violent.

"The story is that most women — whether it is a petty crime or murder — are acting on some level of survival. You know, sometimes it's stealing or prostitution or whatever to support themselves and their kids whose fathers aren't held accountable by the law. In murder cases, they're often with a male who did the murder and/or they're acting against an abuser to defend themselves or their kids."

Prosecutors built a case against Delores on the Kapuscinskis' financial situation.

They were about to lose their home to foreclosure and were months behind on their mortgage payments. Delores, they argued, killed her husband to get about $200,000 in life insurance money to pay off their debts and be rid of his abuse.

During a July public hearing to consider her commutation, parole board member Anthony E.O. King suggested Delores changed the narrative of her story over the years, adopting the identity of a battered woman to justify killing her husband.

"You're now redefining your life experiences based upon the knowledge that you've acquired about domestic violence and abuse as a very serious social problem in this country," King said. "And if you're trying to force that onto your life, retrospectively, it can be problematic. It can be helpful but it can be problematic and that's what I'm struggling with."

Rothermel objected to her commutation on behalf of the state Attorney General's Office and urged the governor to deny her clemency.

But retired prison psychologist Nels Thompson, who treated Delores, argued otherwise at the hearing:

"I would like to state something clinical and something personal about Delores," he said. "Clinically, a woman who is forced to have anal sex, marital rape with demeaning language is in a rage. Frequently, people who are in rages do not realize they are in a rage. Rage is very impolite to acknowledge and express, so it takes other forms, such as depression, disassociation, et cetera. But Delores had been rageful for some time.

"I wouldn't suggest that she didn't make horrible mistakes and that this is a terrible outcome of that marriage. I wouldn't suggest that. But I would say this about Delores Kapuscinski: She is a woman of integrity and honor. ... She will not hurt the public in any way should she be released from prison. And I urge Gov. Snyder to do so."

Battered women face legal obstacles

Social justice advocates say that for a number of reasons, battered women and those who suffer sexual and emotional abuse like Delores often don't get fair trials when they kill their abusers.

Self-defense cases are extremely hard to win in situations like these, and that's because juries and judges have misconceptions about victims of domestic violence, said Cindene Pezzell, legal coordinator for the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women.

"People still have a notion that battered women should have just left the situation, and there’s a lot of problems wrapped up in that assumption," she said.

"One is that they could have left the situation. Two is that had they left, then their life would have been so much easier or safer, which we know is not necessarily true. Third is that they had a duty to actually leave an abusive situation. Instead of asking why do people batter their partners, instead they ask why didn’t they leave?

"There is definitely a baked-in culture of disbelieving women’s claims of being abused so any time that responsibility can be shifted from what a victim did not do, people take that route. Nobody wants to feel helpless, and they want to feel like if they were in that situation, they would pack up and leave. They just don’t get it."

Piling on is the fact that the criminal justice system is male-dominated, said Lora Bex Lempert, a sociology professor emerita from the University of Michigan-Dearborn who spent years interviewing and meeting with 72 prisoners serving life sentences at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility and wrote a book, "Women Doing Life: Gender, Punishment, and the Struggle for Identity," (New York University Press, $27).

"Judges are men. Prosecutors are men. The women rarely see anybody who looks like them in the process of their defense," she said. "Police are, by and large, men.

"It’s very threatening to men to have women kill their abusive spouses — to have women kill anybody — because the characterization of women is that we have to be monsters if we kill, not that we are victims at the end of our ropes having tried everything. And so, a woman who kills is perceived as much worse than a man who kills. They expect men to kill, but they do not expect women to do so.

"Many of these women did not kill anybody, but they are doing life."

Susan Farrell gets life; son gets 5 years

Susan Farrell maintains her innocence. Like Melissa, Susan said she didn't pull the trigger of any gun or wield a deadly blow.

Rather, she insists it was her then-23-year-old son, Robert Baker, who swung the sledgehammer that smashed Terry Farrell's skull as he lay in his bed one April night in 1989.

Susan is now 73 years old. Her feet shuffled slowly as she walked from her wheelchair to a black plastic chair pushed up to a faux wood Formica table inside the visitor's area at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility.

"If I stand too long, it hurts," she said.

Susan endured years of violence, including sexual assault, that caused so much physical damage, she said, "they've done surgeries because of what my husband did to me. I have a bad vaginal prolapse and a bowel prolapse.

"He would never let me say no" to sex, she said of her late husband, Terry Farrell, who was a mechanical engineer for Chrysler. "He'd say, 'Too bad.' " She said he often used objects to violate her.

"He would punch me, grab me, slap me on my face. If I said no to something, it would get him a little bit angry. I tried to keep myself from being confrontational."

In a case that pitted mother against son, Susan was convicted on first-degree murder and conspiracy charges and sentenced to life in prison without parole on Feb. 6, 1990.

She acknowledges she lied to police about what had happened the night Terry died, but denies conspiring with her son to kill Terry Farrell for his life insurance payout.

"They said I aided and abetted. I didn't tell the truth. I was part of it," she said of prosecutors in her case. "But I didn't do that."

Rather, Susan alleges that her son blew up in an argument over money on the night of April 13 and early morning hours of April 14, 1989. Baker, she said, went to the garage of their Rochester Hills home for a sledgehammer and then coolly walked to his stepfather's bedroom and struck the deadly blows.

He threatened to tell police Susan put him up to killing her husband if she didn't lie to investigators about his role in her husband's death.

"He threatened me. ... He said, 'If you tell on me, I'm going to tell them that you told me to do it,' " Susan said of her son.

All along, Robert Baker alleged it was Susan who smashed in his stepfather's head and Susan who wanted Terry Farrell dead for the life insurance payout.

The jury believed him.

In the end, Robert Baker was acquitted of murder and conspiracy, but was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact on both charges. He was sentenced to 30 to 60 months in prison. He also was convicted separately on a statutory rape charge for having had sex with a neighbor younger than 13. He served five years in prison on all the charges combined.

Susan got life in prison without parole.

"I just know one thing," she said during a July public hearing before the parole board. "I never wanted my husband killed. I never asked to have him killed, and that is the absolutely truth."

Susan testified at her June hearing that on the night Terry Farrell died, she smeared blood on her nightgown, face and body so when police arrived, it looked as if she'd been lying in bed next to him when an intruder killed him.

She admitted she lied to police to protect herself from her son's threats. But seemed confused about the abuse she'd suffered over the years and her relationship with her late husband. Some of her testimony was contradictory.

Rothermel noted that Susan stood to inherit $400,000 from Terry Farrell's estate after his death. She said she thought it was $125,000.

Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper objected to Susan's commutation request, writing: "Inmate Farrell's convictions arose from her direct and significant participation in the planning and execution of the brutal murder of her husband. Her desire was to end ... her boring and unsatisfying marriage in a manner that would ensure that she received a financial windfall from her soon-to-be late husband's estate. Allowing inmate Farrell to re-create her past in an attempt to portray herself as the victim in this case does a disservice to those genuinely battered women. Inmate Farrell is not a victim. She is a ruthless and calculating murderer."

Jacobsen testified on behalf of Farrell, whom she's known for more than a decade.

"Her history of sexual abuse by her father and then her husband were secrets she tried to keep buried out of shame and stigma as a good Catholic girl, then wife and mother," Jacobsen said. "But Robert, at his trial, testified that he and his brother saw their stepfather hit their mother and even break a lamp over her head when she was pregnant.

"She admits that she knew Robert hated his stepfather and made threats against him, and she told me she failed to intervene, but she did not ever anticipate that Robert would ever kill his stepfather and was in a state of disbelief when he did so.

"Today, Susan suffers mental confusion, ... some cognitive impairment and numerous other disabilities, some as a result of her sexual abuse."

Susan's life in prison without parole sentence is excessive, said Lempert.

"What possible danger is Susan Farrell to anyone?" she asked. "What possible danger is she? It always seems idiosyncratic to me, who gets re-sentenced or commuted. ... I don’t know what the rationales are. They’re not … not consistent and they’re not accessible. What do you have to do" to get clemency?

Nancy Seaman and Battered Woman Syndrome

In Michigan, getting an acquittal in cases like these is made more difficult, advocates say, because case law limits the use of expert testimony about Battered Woman Syndrome.

A form of post-traumatic stress disorder, Battered Woman Syndrome occurs when a woman fears her life is in danger because of abuses suffered at the hands of a romantic partner. (It can also occur in men, but experts note the majority of people who are abused are women.)

Psychologists are often called to testify at trial to explain why battered women behave as they do and why they can lash out violently when their lives are threatened.

"For many of the women serving time in prison, having abuse and domestic violence in their backgrounds is a very common thread — in Michigan, especially, because the law is so restrictive," said Lenore Walker, the psychologist who coined the term Battered Woman Syndrome and documented the cycle of abuse.

Walker testified for the defense in the case of Nancy Seaman, a fourth-grade teacher who in May 2004 killed her husband in the garage of their Farmington Hills home.

The case captivated the public, and the press glommed onto the gruesome details: A well-regarded teacher in a sleepy Detroit suburb who brutally killed her husband with a hatchet and a knife after three decades of marriage.

What wasn't explained, she said, were the years of abuse she suffered before that day.

In court, Nancy testified that she and her husband, Robert Seaman, began to argue the night of May 9, 2004, about yard work and overgrown landscaping. It was Mother's Day, but Nancy said she drove that evening to Home Depot to buy a hatchet so she could chop down the unruly foliage.

She testified during her trial that the following morning, she was in the kitchen when she told Robert Seaman that she intended to leave him. He was furious, she said, and cut her with a knife. She fled to the garage, where she said he pushed her to the floor and kicked her.

The hatchet, Nancy told the jury, was the first thing she could grab to defend herself. She swung it over and over again, and then took the knife Robert had used to cut her in the kitchen and stabbed him repeatedly. Later that day, she said, she wrapped his body in a tarp and put it in the trunk of the family SUV and methodically cleaned the garage.

Her behavior, Walker said, can be explained by Battered Woman Syndrome.

"Even though I testified, I wasn’t allowed to testify that it was my opinion that she was a battered woman in Nancy Seaman’s case," Walker said. "I could testify as to what Battered Women’s Syndrome was, but I couldn’t say she had it."

That's because of a state Supreme Court ruling, People v. Christel, that doesn't allow experts to connect the behavior with the crime during a trial.

Nancy testified that her husband had beaten her for years, but she'd always tried to hide it, to cover it up, to make it look as if theirs was a happy marriage. She wanted the world to have an impression that their life was perfect, idyllic.

And that, said Thompson, a psychologist who oversaw a domestic violence program from 2000-2010 for women at the now-shuttered Robert Scott Correctional Facility in Northville Township, is why Nancy went to such lengths to clean up after killing her husband.

The Seamans' two sons, Jeff and Greg Seaman, painted entirely different portraits of their home life, too.

Their younger son, Greg, sided with Nancy in court, corroborating her claims of abuse. The older son, Jeff, testified that his father didn't beat his mother, even though Jeff's wife, Rebecca Seaman, testified that she'd urged Nancy to get out of the marriage "before something happened." She told the jury that Nancy had complained of escalating abuse, of bruises and a fractured wrist.

Nancy seemed to be following that advice. She bought her own condo in April 2004 and was preparing to file for divorce.

"I think the jury had questions," Walker said. "Because she had two children, each of whom testified differently, you’d think that they grew up in different households, their testimony was so different. But that’s very typical in domestic violence cases, where the parent makes an alliance with one child or the child makes an alliance with one parent and not the other.

"It’s very important because the impact from domestic violence flies in the face of what we know intuitively. We are trained to believe it takes two people to make a fight, but not in domestic violence cases, it just takes a batterer to pick a fight.

"In domestic violence cases, the man doesn’t let the woman go. That’s the time when she’s most likely to get killed or more seriously harmed. These are things that have to be demonstrated to the average lay person so they understand, especially those who don’t know anything about domestic violence."

Nancy wrote in an email to the Free Press that the pathologist in her case testified at trial that she and her husband were embroiled in a "face-to-face confrontation" on the day Robert Seaman was killed.

"The autopsy showed my husband was under the influence of alcohol and amphetamines at the time of his death which corroborates my testimony that he was in an uncontrollable rage. The state's own nurse examiner testified that my injuries at the time of arrest were 'defensive injuries.' And, I had the foremost authority on domestic violence, Dr. Lenore Walker, prepared to testify how 31 years of battering affected my state of mind, perception of imminent danger and behaviors, which a jury may have found incomprehensible or irrational, but Michigan law prevented her from doing so. This law likely sealed my fate.



"My point is that I am facing death in this prison unless my sentence is commuted."

Kelle Lynn, a domestic violence survivor from Grand Haven, is an advocate for Nancy and other women serving life in prison.

She founded a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Justice Thru Storytelling and has organized letter-writing campaigns to the governor to advocate for clemency for Nancy and some of the other women.

She's also leading a campaign to push lawmakers to pass legislation that expands the ability of experts to testify about Battered Woman Syndrome in Michigan courts.

When she first heard about Nancy's case, Lynn said it gave her pause.

"My first thought was fear, and I questioned, 'Do I want to be involved with this woman? She was in prison and she used a hatchet. It sounds scary.'

"But then I read the 25 pages of expert testimony I was sent, between Nels Thompson’s letter and Dr. Lenore Walker’s letter. Everything changed for me after I read the rest of the story. I said, 'Oh, this is not what I thought.'

"Nancy had her reasons for not calling the police" to report the ongoing abuse in her marriage, she said. "Women have careers, reputations they want to protect in their communities. ... You don’t want to tell anybody. It’s very hard to tell somebody."

The more Lynn researched Nancy's case, the more she wanted to advocate on her behalf.

"All of a sudden, the whole story completely favored the prosecution," Lynn said. "And for the first time, that changed me. It was a sensationalized story."

Judge troubled by evidence in Seaman case

Although a jury convicted Nancy of first-degree murder, Oakland County Circuit Judge John McDonald was concerned jurors didn't hear all the evidence — particularly Walker's complete testimony on the effects of long-term domestic violence and Battered Woman Syndrome.

Some facts in the case also just didn’t add up in his mind. Why would Nancy kill her husband when she had purchased her own condominium and was about to leave him? Also, why did one of the Seamans’ sons testify that his father had been abusive to Nancy while the other son testified the opposite?

Nancy had gone to great pains to clean up the garage where Robert Seaman was killed, mopping and bleaching the floors, repainting the blood-spattered walls. She also wrapped his body in a tarp and hid it in the back of their SUV.

Walker would have testified that those behaviors all can be tied to things a battered woman would do to hide the abuse, to make everything seem normal in a very abnormal situation, McDonald said. She could have explained why the Seaman sons picked opposite sides.

It was then that McDonald said he realized that Nancy might not have gotten a fair trial.

“After the case was over with, there was a motion filed … by an appellate attorney raising all kinds of legal issues, you know, ineffective assistance of counsel, prejudicial comments made by the prosecution in the closing arguments, a whole number of issues,” he said.

“I denied them all, but I felt that after seeing her report, the written report, that the jury didn’t get the full picture. I felt that had they gotten that, they probably would have said, ‘Look, there was no premeditation, there was no deliberation, which reduces the case from first degree to either second-degree, involuntary manslaughter or the possibility of not guilty by reason of insanity.

“So I reduced the case from first degree to second degree but then I was reversed by the Court of Appeals in a two-to-one decision, saying it was an abuse of discretion for me to do that.”

The case then went to federal court, where U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman called for a hearing where he took a video deposition from Walker, and ordered a new trial, saying that the jury didn’t hear all the evidence it should have heard from Walker on Battered Woman Syndrome.

“He was reversed by the (U.S. 6th Circuit) Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. That’s where the case stands,” McDonald said.

He's written three letters to Gov. Snyder on Nancy's behalf — even though he's never met her outside court.

"I have never spoken to her. I’ve never corresponded with her," McDonald said. "I didn’t want to do that because I never wanted anyone to think this was a personal thing with myself and Nancy or that I was trying to justify what I did.

"I just don’t feel right about sentencing a person to life in prison if I don’t think they deserve it.

Although Nancy appealed to the state parole board and the governor for clemency, she didn't get a public hearing this year from the parole board.

In an email to the Free Press, she wrote: "My conviction has been overturned twice. No other prisoner with a commutation petition before the governor can make that claim. Both the state and federal courts overturned my verdict citing that the evidence did not support the verdict and that combined with ineffective assistance of counsel and omitted Battered Woman Syndrome evidence denied me a fair and just trial.

"I would already be home by now if the prosecutor had not appealed and fought to keep me incarcerated. That's an unconscionable outcome for both me, my family and Michigan taxpayers. ... If the true intent of commutation is to rectify injustice when the criminal justice system has run its course, then I pray the governor will grant me commutation and release me from this prison."

Lu Anne Szenay begged for police help

Lu Anne Szenay couldn't see any other way out.

She called police to report her husband Timothy Szenay's abuse "dozens of times," she said.

"They'd say, 'Lady, it's your husband. We're not going to do anything about that. ... If we didn't see it, we can't arrest him.'

"But I didn't want him arrested. I wanted to keep peace in the family. I wanted them to say, 'Tim, you can't do this.' If somebody would have stepped up and said, 'You're not going to do this to her,' maybe he would have stopped," she said during an interview from prison, where she's served 28 years.

After he twice kidnapped their daughter, Jennifer, and threatened both their lives, Lu Anne said she felt as if she was in a kill-or-be-killed situation. She hired a hit man who fatally shot Timothy Szenay Jan. 18, 1990, in his Bay City home.

She regrets her decision, and says she knows it was wrong. But maybe, just maybe, she wonders, if police had intervened, she wouldn't have taken such a drastic step to stay alive.

She was 19, she said, when she fell in love with Timothy Szenay, a soon-to-be-divorced body builder.

"He was gregarious," said Lu Anne, who wore a blue, button-down prison-issued top and matching pants during a June interview with the Free Press. "He was Superman. He swept me off my feet in 15 seconds. He charmed the world."

She could never have imagined when she said "I do" in May 1978 that their love would turn violent, that her beloved would beat her and stalk her, and that she would end it by conspiring to take his life.

"When I met him, his first wife had left him and I thought she was a fool," Lu Anne said. "He bought me an engagement ring in the first few weeks of dating. His divorce went through, and we were married right away."

The newlywed Szenays lived in Bay City through the late '70s and '80s, and ran a business together selling water distillers. The business blossomed into a health food store they named the Health Nut.

In 1981, Lu Anne learned she was pregnant, and everything changed.

"The lid popped off the can," she said. "It was horrible. He started going out and not coming home at night. When he was home, he would hit me, slap me, throw me on the ground — and I was pregnant.

"People noticed the bruises and when people would comment, he would say, 'She is the clumsiest person on earth. She falls all the time.' I was on crutches and pregnant with bruises.

"I don't mean to slam him," she said, her hands fidgeting in her lap, "because this isn't about him. I did this horrendous act and it was wrong, but I had been so afraid."

At 5 foot 3 and 110 pounds, Lu Anne wears her gray hair short, in a pixie-style cut that she said she is trying to grow out. She is 61 now.

"He was a body builder and lifted weights all the time. He had a fantastic physique," she said.

She talked about how when he was especially enraged, he'd grab her by the neck with one hand, lift her up and then throw her onto the floor, kicking her repeatedly.

"I would say, 'Please, God, just let me live three more seconds.' I would say that over and over and over again until he was done. If I did that, I didn't really feel it as much," she said, sitting in a large visitor's room inside Michigan's only women's prison on an especially bright June day.

In April 1982, she delivered their daughter, Jennifer, in their home because, she said, "Tim refused to pay for the hospital." A doctor came to their house to help her through it.

She says her husband repeatedly told her she couldn't leave him, that she'd never survive on her own.

Still, Lu Anne filed for divorce twice. The first time was when her baby girl was about 9 months old. But it didn't take.

"I felt like people want to throw in the towel too easily," she said. "I thought one day he would open his eyes and realize I was the best thing in the world. I did whatever I could to keep him happy. As long as he was happy, I felt I would be OK. It would be OK. I could win him over."

But by 1989, Lu Anne had had enough. Tim was going out more and coming home drunk or high.

"My daughter started finding cocaine in the house," she said, and the abuse ratcheted up.

"He told me it's my way or the graveyard," she said. "He said he would never let me go. We lived on a river, the Kawkawlin River. He bought a Sea Ray fishing boat. My mother told me when he bought that boat that she thought he was going to kill me and use the boat to dump my body.

"He told me if I didn't do everything the way he wanted me to do it, he was going to kill our daughter, too."

She filed for divorce in November 1989 and moved out the same day.

"He was walking around our store with a bottle of booze in a paper bag in the middle of the day and he was having sex with the help he hired. It was just horrible," she said.

"He'd say, 'I don't know if I'm going to kill you, kill her or kill both of you.' "

A month after she filed for divorce, Lu Anne hired James Blau, a college student, to work at the store. She initially had Blau running deliveries of Christmas gift baskets to clients, but soon began to rely on him for more.

"He thought of himself as a body guard," she said, to protect her from her husband, who was stalking her.

Two days after Christmas 1989, Lu Anne and her daughter went out to dinner and saw a movie. She had parked her car outside her apartment building when, she said, Tim Szenay grabbed Jennifer out of her arms. She sprayed him with pepper spray, but he still got away with their daughter.

"That night I called everyone I knew," Lu Anne said. "I didn't know if Jen was dead or alive and I told them he took her."

The next day, Blau came to the Health Nut and said: "Let me take care of this guy. He won't bother you anymore. I said, 'OK,' " Lu Anne said. "He says, 'I know a guy out of state. He is a professional. He can take care of anything.' I knew he wanted to take his life."

Court documents show that Blau brought Shawn England, a friend he'd met at a Florida security guard training school, to Michigan to complete the crime. In exchange, Blau and England negotiated a share of Timothy Szenay's life insurance payout.

"I felt it was the only way Jennifer and I were going to survive," Lu Anne said. "I feel horrible that I took someone's life and I destroyed a family, but I survived. And my daughter is OK. That means the world to me.

"I understand I have life without parole sentence. But they have to look at the individual situation. If they would have looked at my whole picture, all the violence, I still would have been convicted, but I probably wouldn't have gotten a life without parole sentence."

England also was convicted on first-degree murder charges and is serving life in prison without parole. Blau never went to trial. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and conspiracy and also was sentenced to life in prison.

The commutation clock is ticking down

Thompson supports clemency for Lu Anne, Nancy, Delores and Melissa, but he said he never worked with Susan when he was a prison psychologist, and thus cannot support her bid for commutation.

Although he's retired now, Thompson said all his years working in prisons in Michigan led him to the conclusion that "domestic violence is the absolute worst crime in America. Home is where I want my family to go to be safe. I want home to be where my wife can go where she feels people are on her side, where she is safe …For these poor women, home is a battlefield."

In the program he started, he said, "there were ladies who were criminals and I treated them with compassion because they had been abused by men. But they were lawbreakers," he said. "Then I met women who were anything but criminal. They had finally fought back against the abuser and he had died.

"And they were judged without fair trials because domestic violence was not allowed in trials except in unusual circumstances. They were fine and decent women. In their struggle with that abuse they had taken a life that they felt terrible about taking. They were treated like murderers and sentenced to life in prison without parole."

Thompson advocates for the release of those who fought back against their batterers and hopes to see laws changed in Michigan to allow those who've endured abuse at home to include more complete testimony about that violence in their defense cases.

"I shed tears for the tragedy of listening to them, and hearing about the life that they had," he said. "I also have tears right now, when I think of them still living in prison with no end in sight and their crime is spending years with an abuser until they can take it no longer.

"As we’re talking right now, there’s a woman in Michigan dreading her husband to get home, dreading for him to be in the house, not knowing if she’s going to get a terrible beating, and there is going to be another death and another woman is going to be judged unfairly.

"If I cheat on my taxes, I’m going to prison for that. But when it comes to the death of a man at the hands of a woman, the most salient information that a jury can consider is denied them. We have very good people serving very long sentences who are not criminals."

As Jan. 1 approaches and Snyder's term nears its end, the women lifers who applied for commutations anxiously wait for news.

Nancy and Lu Anne were not awarded public hearings before the parole board earlier this year, and that makes their bids for clemency more unlikely.

Anna Heaton, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Snyder, said in an email to the Free Press that the governor intends to follow the commutation guidelines in the state constitution. That process includes a public hearing with representatives of the parole board. The board then makes a recommendation to the governor about clemency.

The governor can either chose to accept or decline the recommendation of the board.

“There are no plans for the Governor to bypass the hearing process," Heaton wrote.

"The public hearing is part of the procedure established by law. Accordingly, it would not be appropriate to grant clemency without the occurrence of a public hearing and all of the other procedural steps required by law.”

Still, Lu Anne hopes for a Christmas miracle, and she questions what danger she and the others pose to society.

Keeping her and others like her in prison, she said, is an expensive solution to the domestic violence problem.

It has cost taxpayers more than $1 million for Lu Anne's 28-year incarceration at today's average per-prisoner-per-year cost of $36,000.

"I lived in fear for myself and my daughter daily," Lu Anne said in an email to the Free Press. "... I would like people to know that laws need to made to help women before they are placed in the situation I suffered."

Lempert said the women in all five cases the Free Press examined have been model prisoners, and their freedom should be considered.

"They’ve taken the programs, They’ve volunteered. They’re role models. They have clean slates," she said.

"They are stuck in this limbo and the forward progress is not identified. They see people get out. We’re always happy when somebody gets out."

Contact Kristen Jordan Shamus: 313-222-5997 or kshamus@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @kristenshamus.

How to be heard

Let Gov. Rick Snyder know what you think about the possible commutation of life in prison without parole sentences for Lu Anne Szenay, Nancy Seaman, Delores Kapuscinski, Susan Farrell and Melissa Chapman. Call his office at 517-373-3400, send an email to governorsoffice@michigan.gov or write to him at Gov. Rick Snyder, P.O. Box 30013, Lansing, MI 48909