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2 Powerful Words Atlanta (AP)—An abusive husband killed his common-law wife by setting her on fire, then died in an explosion when he apparently yanked out a natural gas line in hopes of making the blaze look accidental. Police said William Reese, 45, doused Rosemary Flournoy, 41, with gasoline and set her on fire early Thursday. . . . A badly burned Flournoy died in a hospital. [A neighbor] said she had been “afraid something bad was going to happen.” The couple had had a 15-year relationship. “She took a lot off him. . . . People say when you take a lot of abuse, you love them. I don’t see how.” . . . Battery and false-imprisonment charges were pending against [Reese] for allegedly tying Flournoy to their bed with an extension cord in 1997. The police report said he told her “he was not going to let her out, feed her or allow her to go to work.” [The neighbor] said Reese [when incarcerated previously] would spend his time in jail writing poems and drawing pictures of the couple in wedding attire. Columbia Daily Tribune, April 10, 1999 O N LY A DAY O R T WO after I began answering the hot line at the shelter, I took a particularly disorienting call. At 9:30 one morning, I answered the phone and could barely hear the small, young voice on the other end. The line was crackling, thin, far away. The woman’s voice was breathless; she was nearly in tears; I could hear the sounds of babies in the background. “How can I keep my children away from him, if I leave?” These were her first words. No time for hello; no social niceties. Here we were. I asked her the proper questions in the correct order: Are you safe? Are you in a place where you 35 36 W O M E N E S C A P I N G V I O L E N C E can talk with me for a minute? Should I call the police? Have you called the police? She answered my series of questions with more gasps than words, then said: “I’m in the car. He stole his ex-wife’s child and they didn’t find her for three months. How can I keep that from happening? Can you help me keep him away from my kids? Can you guarantee that he won’t take my children? That’s the main thing; I don’t want him to steal my babies.” “Where is he now?” I asked her, trying to remain calm. “What do you want to do?” “He’s in the house and if I go back in there he’ll scream and yell and beat up on us. And if I try to leave, he’ll go nuts. I don’t even know if I can leave.” “Is that what you want?” I asked her. “To leave? You have the children, can you drive to Centerville, which has a shelter—the closest one to you. Do you want to go there?” I could hear her and I could hear her children, in the car. There was a long pause. “I don’t have the keys. I’m out here in the car on the car phone, but I don’t have the keys and I don’t know what will happen if I go back in there and try to get the keys. I don’t know if I can get the keys and leave.” I talked with this young woman for several more minutes, as the already bad reception of her cellular phone drifted in and out. I don’t know what happened to her; I probably never will, unless I hear of a homicide somewhere in that part of the state and I put two and two together and guess it was her. I never really heard her full story. Another day, not too long after I began working at the shelter, I cleaned out a room vacated overnight in the whirlwind departure of a young woman and her small baby. I don’t know what happened to her, either. My job that morning was to clean out her room and prepare it for a woman and her three children who were arriving with help from the Salvation Army that afternoon at two. I thought of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as I collected this woman’s most personal belongings, wondering...

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