Six years before the day Janelle literally fought her way out of jail and her impending sentences, Steven Stone felt bad for his slightly younger but much more immature and unintelligent wife when they first met. She was very manipulative and had a way of making him believe certain people, like her own parents, were much worse than they actually were. Perhaps they were a little strict, but abusive? He wasn’t so sure about that one. What he had been relatively sure of was that Janelle would mature with time, age, and the responsibilities of marriage.
He was wrong.
The harassment that escalated to violence started with the neighbors and would eventually include family members on his side. In hindsight, he realized he was lucky to have survived Janelle without serious harm. He may not have been the perfect husband. Yes, he sometimes found delight in gaslighting his wife if only because it amazed him just how dumb and gullible she truly was. And yes, he had issues when it came to intimacy with Janelle because of her desperate obsession with having a child and all the weight she had packed on. Most importantly, he wasn’t sure he wanted the responsibility of a child but also didn’t trust Janelle with one either.
The more time he spent with her, the more her true colors shone, and the more he feared she would abuse a child of theirs. As soon as it broke something she cherished. As soon as the crying fits got too loud and lasted too long. As soon as it imposed on her freedom. As soon as it inconvenienced her in any way.
Steven began to spend more time at his sister’s house, where their aging mother also lived since his father had died. Even his family began to sense something was amiss with Janelle. The way she came across so phonily and almost too eager to impress and please grated on their nerves.
It was Ramona, Steven’s aunt, who first lost her patience with being polite to Janelle. Ramona was his mother’s half-sister and about 15 years younger than his mother. Deanna was his sister. They also had other siblings. Stephanie was Ramona’s daughter, and she too wasn’t always very respectful of Janelle and would ultimately come to suffer the most out of all the family members.
While some may say that two wrongs don’t make a right and that it’s people like Ramona and Stephanie who help create the Janelles of the world, if you knew Janelle well enough, you knew it was hard to resist a crack here and there just as it would be with the likes of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, or Charles Manson. Once you knew what Janelle really stood for, it was hard to feel sorry for her or give her much respect and kindness. Sometimes, when you made your own bed, you just had to lie in it.
When a black family on Section 8 moved in next door blasting their car stereo regularly, it drove Janelle crazy. Even Steven found it to be a bit annoying, though he didn’t believe that should warrant violence. Nonetheless, he feared the worst. Janelle had already proven that she handled things poorly with the previous family that had lived next door. Their many children would often play in the yard, and with the houses so close together, their shouts grated on Janelle’s nerves daily. Steven didn’t mind, though, and found it simply a matter of regular daytime noise. Yet Janelle insisted it was excessive and Steven wondered if it was really due to her own lack of a child. Or at least a part of it anyway.
Instead of politely asking the parents to quiet them down, however, she rudely screamed at the poor little preschoolers who were soon too terrified to play outside, and the family eventually moved.
But the black family was more defiant at first. They would assure Janelle that they would turn the volume down upon coming and going but quickly went back on their word. Some of their visitors were just as loud and obnoxious, and it seemed they just didn’t care about those around them.
One day, already in a bad mood after an argument over what Janelle considered to be too infrequent and “freakish” sex because hey, how the hell could they ever have a child when they hardly got together and Steven “held back” in bed, the guy that wasn’t supposed to be living next door with his girlfriend and their baby came blasting in so loud the windows practically rattled in their frames. That was what pushed Janelle over the edge that day.
“NO!” Steven shouted as Janelle burst through the front door like a racehorse from its stall once the gate sprung open. Janelle, being the idiot she was, took her husband’s shouts of protest as him siding with the neighbors rather than not wanting to deal with the legal ramifications.
Steven grabbed his camcorder and pressed the record button. When he stepped outside, he found his wife pinning a tall, lanky kid in his early twenties against the brick wall of their house, which next door’s carport ran alongside. A woman reached into the car to turn the stereo off and was shouting at Janelle to leave the guy alone.
“You’re going to kill him!” she screamed as Janelle slammed him like a rag doll.
Absolute shock and horror filled the guy’s features as he flailed helplessly to escape the crazy bitch that had a death grip on him. Janelle dragged him over to the car and slammed his face into the trunk of the car as the woman ran to call the police.
There were a few hedges just in front of Steven and Janelle’s place, so Steven had to dart out beyond them to film what was going on but couldn’t get a good angle for the most part.
The fight ended with Janelle body-slamming the guy face-first into the wall of their house. But Janelle was too quick for her husband, who darted back to the other side of the hedges to record the evidence as the guy was soon knocked unconscious and slumped to the ground.
Minutes later, the guy was hauled away in an ambulance, and Janelle was arrested while insisting that her husband had filmed what had “really” happened. She wasn’t at fault, she was the victim, and the evidence was on her husband’s camcorder.
Yet that “evidence” that Janelle believed would show she wasn’t the instigator was actually Steven’s hope of seeing his wife do a longer stint in jail to give him some peace for a while. Both were out of luck, however, as the video showed little more than a blur of motion sprinkled with a frenzy of swears from Janelle and shouts of fear and pain from the neighbor.
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