How Kristin Dies

Read the following Case Study:

The phone was ringing insistently, hurrying me back tomy desk. My daughter Helen was on the line, sobbingso hard she could barely catch her breath. “Dad,” sheshouted. “Come home! Right away!”I was stunned. I had never heard her like this before.“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What happened?”“It’s—it’s Kristin. She’s been shot . . . and killed.”Kristin? My Kristin? Our Kristin? I’d talked to her theafternoon before. Her last words to me were, “I love youDad.” Suddenly I had trouble breathing myself.It was 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 30. In Boston,where Kristin Lardner was an art student, police werecordoning off an apartment building a couple of blocksfrom the busy, sunlit sidewalk where she’d been killed90 minutes earlier. She had been shot in the head andface by an ex-boyfriend who was under court order tostay away from her. When police burst into his apart-ment, they found him sprawled on his bed, dead froma final act of self-pity.This was a crime that could and should have beenprevented. I write about it as a sort of cautionary tale,in anger at a system of justice that failed to protect mydaughter, a system that is addicted to looking the otherway, especially at the evil done to women.But first let me tell you about my daughter.She was, at 21, the youngest of our five children,born in Washington, D.C., and educated in the city’spublic schools, where not much harm befell her unlessyou count her taste for rock music, lots of jewelry, andfunky clothes from Value Village. She loved books, wenttrick-or-treating dressed as Greta Garbo, played one ofthe witches in “Macbeth” and had a grand time in tap-dancing class even in her sneakers. She made life sparkle.When she was small, she always got up in time forSaturday morning cartoons at the Chevy Chase library,and she took cheerful care of a succession of cats, mice,gerbils, hamsters and guinea pigs. Her biggest fault mayhave been that she took too long in the shower—andyou never knew what color her hair was going to bewhen she emerged. She was compassionate, and strong-minded too; when a boy from high school dropped hispants in front of her, Kristin knocked out one of his frontteeth.“She didn’t back down from anything,” said AmberLynch, a close friend from Boston University. “You couldtell that basically from her art, the way she dressed, theopinions she had. If you said something stupid, she’dtell you.”Midway through high school, Kristin began thinkingof becoming an artist. She’d been taking art and photog-raphy classes each summer at the Corcoran School of Artand was encouraged when an art teacher at Wilson Highdecided two of her paintings were good enough to goon display at a little gallery there. She began studies atBoston University’s art school and transferred after twoyears to a fine arts program run jointly by the School ofthe Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. She par-ticularly liked to sculpt and make jewelry and, in thewords of one faculty member, “showed great promiseand was extremely talented.”In her apartment were scattered signs of that talent.Three wide-banded silver and brass rings, one filigreedwith what looked like barbed wire. Some striking sculp-tures of bound figures. A Madonna, painstakinglygilded. A nude self-portrait in angry reds, oranges andyellows, showing a large leg bruise her ex-boyfriend hadgiven her on their last date in April.“It felt as though she was telling all her secrets to theworld,” she wrote of her art in an essay she left behind.“Why would anyone want to know them anyway? Butmaking things was all she wanted to do. . . . She alwayshad questions, but never any answers, just frustrationand confusion, and a need to get out whatever lay in-side of her, hoping to be meaningful.”Kristin wrote that essay last November for a courseat Tufts taught by Ross Ellenhorn, who also happens tobe a counselor at Emerge, an educational program forabusive men. He had once mentioned this to his stu-dents. He would hear from my daughter in April, aftershe met Michael Cartier.By then, Kristin had been dating Cartier, a 22-year-oldbouncer, for about two and a half months. She broke64Chapter 2 / The Formal Structure: The Concept of BureaucracyHow Kristin DiedGEORGE LARDNER, JR.“The Stalking of Kristin: The Law Made It Easy for My Daugh-ter’s Killer,” George Lardner, Jr., The Washington Post,November22, 1992. Reprinted by permission.Copyright 2009 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.

off with him on the early morning of April 16. On thatnight, a few blocks from her apartment, he beat her up.They “became involved in an argument and heknocked her to the ground and started kicking her overand over,” reads a Brookline, Mass., police report. “Sheremembers him saying, ‘Get up or I’ll kill you.’ Shestaggered to her feet, a car stopped and two men as-sisted her home.“Since that night,” the report continues, “she has re-fused to see him, but he repeatedly calls her, sometimes10 or 11 times a day. He has told her that if she reportshim to the police, he might have to do six months in jail,but she better not be around when he gets out.“She also stated the injuries she suffered werehematomas to her legs and recurring headaches fromthe kicks.”Kristin didn’t call the police right away. But she didcall Ellenhorn in hopes of getting Cartier into Emerge.“I made clear to her that Emerge isn’t a panacea, thatthere was still a chance of him abusing her,” Ellenhornsays. “I told her that he could kill her . . . because shewas leaving him and that’s when things get dangerous.”Cartier showed up at Emerge’s offices in Cambridge,around April 28 by Ellenhorn’s calculations. Ellenhorn, onduty that night, realized who Cartier was when he wrotedown Kristin’s name under victim on the intake form.“I said, ‘Are you on probation?’ ” Ellenhorn remem-bers. “He said yes. I said, ‘I’m going to need the nameof the probation officer.’ He said, ‘[Expletive] this. Noway.’ ”With that, Cartier ripped up the contract he was re-quired to sign, ripped up the intake form, put the tat-tered papers in his pocket and walked out.“He knew,” Ellenhorn says. “He knew what kind ofconnection would be made.” Michael Cartier was, ofcourse, on probation for attacking another woman.Cartier preyed on women. Clearly disturbed, he oncetalked of killing his mother. When he was 5 or 6, he dis-membered a pet rabbit. When he was 21, he torturedand killed a kitten. In a bizarre 1989 incident at an An-dover restaurant, he injected a syringe of blood into aketchup bottle. To his girlfriends, he could be ap-pallingly brutal.Rose Ryan could tell you that. When Kristin’s murderwas reported on TV—the newscaster described thekilling as “another case of domestic violence”—she saidto a friend, “That sounds like Mike.” It was. Hearing thenewscaster say his name, she recalls, “I almost dropped.”When Ryan met Cartier at a party in Boston in thelate summer of 1990, she was an honors graduate ofLynn East High School, preparing to attend Suffolk Uni-versity. She was 17, a lovely, courageous girl with brownhair and brown eyes like Kristin’s.“He was really my first boyfriend,” she told me. “Iwas supposed to work that summer and save my money,but I got caught up with the scene in Boston and hang-ing out with all the kids. . . . At first, everything wasfine.”Cartier was a familiar face on the Boston Common,thanks to his career as a freelance nightclub bouncer.He had scraped up enough money to share a Com-monwealth Avenue apartment with a Museum Schoolstudent named Kara Boettger. They dated a few times,then settled down into a sort of strained coexistence.“He didn’t like me very much,” Boettger said. “Heliked music loud. I’d tell him to turn it down.”Rose Ryan liked him better. She thought he washandsome—blue eyes, black hair, a tall and muscularframe—with a vulnerability that belied his strength. Tomake him happy, she quit work and postponed the col-lege education it was going to pay for. “He had methinking that he’d had a bad deal his whole life,” shesaid, “that nobody loved him and I was the only onewho could help him.”Cartier also knew how to behave when he was sup-posed to. Ryan said he made a good first impression onher parents. As with Kristin, it took just about twomonths before Cartier beat Ryan up. She got angry withhim for “kidding around” and dumping her into a bar-rel on the Common. When she walked away, hepunched her in the head; when she kept going, hepunched her again.“I’d never been hit by any man before and I was justshocked,” she said. But what aggravated her the most,and still does, is that “every time something happened,it was in public, and nobody stopped to help.”Cartier ended the scene with “his usual thing,”breaking into tears and telling her, “‘Oh, why do I al-ways hurt the people I love? What can I do? My motherdidn’t love me. I need your help.’ ”Shortly after they started dating, Ryan spent a fewdays at the Cartier-Boetgger apartment. He presentedher with a gray kitten, then left it alone all day withouta litter box. The kitten did what it needed to do onCartier’s jacket.“He threw the kitten in the shower and turned thehot water on and kept it there under the hot water,” Ryanremembers in a dull monotone. “And he shaved all itshair off with a man’s shaving razor.”65George Lardner, Jr. / How Kristin DiedCopyright 2009 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.

Respond to the following questions (be sure to reflect upon the elements of the bureaucracy described in Chapter 2 prior to the case study):

• Was this the best way to go to protect Kristin. Do you suggest any other ways to go about it? What are your suggestions and why?
• Explain and discuss if the system failed to protect Kristin and if so why?
• There were many elements of bureaucracy that were present, which one was the biggest issue and why was it?

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