Her dogs went crazy the day she died.
They howled and ran around the overgrown yard biting Anniston police as they tried to enter the Moore Avenue house.
When officers emerged with Geri Vaughn’s body on a stretcher, animal control workers used metal rods to finally round up her 20-odd dogs.
The 56-year-old woman’s death effectively rendered the animals ownerless, police at the May 19 scene explained. Her husband, Preston Vaughn, couldn’t take care of the dogs anymore, either.
He was on his way to the Calhoun County Jail, charged with shooting his wife in the head.
Preston Vaughn had left his marks on her at least once before that fatal night, police said.
Anniston police Lt. Fred Forsythe said that in late 2008, dispatchers sent patrol cars to 2101 Moore Ave. to talk to Preston Vaughn after his wife showed up unconscious in a local hospital emergency room.
“She had injuries ... looked to be caused intentionally by him,” Forsythe said of 2008 police report. “But she decided not to prosecute ... and there were no charges.”
Court records show Preston Vaughn remains in jail awaiting trial on the May murder charge. If convicted, he’ll be yet another in a long line of Alabama men guilty of killing their wives, girlfriends and other female relatives.
An ‘unfortunate’ ranking
Alabama has the second-highest rate in the country of men who kill women, a national study released in September shows.
The state’s 64 female victims of male killers in 2009 — the year the Violence Policy Center’s study analyzed — saddled it with a rate of 2.64 per 100,000, just behind Nevada’s leading rate of 2.7.
Local law-enforcement officials and domestic violence experts said they aren’t shocked by Alabama’s high ranking; they point to a recent rash of domestic violence homicides across northeast Alabama as a regional example of the state trend. The Violence Policy Center conducted the annual study by breaking down the crime statistics that law-enforcement agencies across the country report to the FBI each year.
“This is something we see from year to year,” said Carol Gundlach, executive director for state Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “Alabama is always in the top 10 on this list and, unfortunately, usually in the top five.” Gundlach points out the state numbers include all women killed by men, not just those murdered in domestic violence situations. Still, 42 of Alabama’s 64 women killed by men that year were domestic violence homicides, and that kind of violence remains a leading cause of concern for local police.
In the past 18 months, there have been six domestic violence deaths in which men are accused of killing women in northeast Alabama, according to statistics from Second Chance Inc., an organization that offers services to domestic violence victims across Calhoun, Cleburne, Etowah and Talladega counties.
That’s up from the two or three domestic violence homicides Second Chance Director Susan Shipman said her agency is used to seeing in a similar given period.
“That’s a high number,” she said. “It’s very troubling, because these are women that are gone from us now, and we don’t know whether it’s a statistical anomaly or not.”
Recent increase bucks long-term trend
The area’s recent uptick in domestic violence homicides could be a “statistical anomaly,” domestic violence experts said. That’s because for the past 25 years, domestic violence homicides have been in decline across the state, in spite of Alabama’s high ranking on the national study.
Coalition Against Domestic Violence statistics show that in 2010,
36 women were killed by men during domestic incidents compared to 78 of those homicides in 1985.
Police officials across Calhoun County say domestic violence incidents make up the majority of their response calls but noted that until recently, this type of homicide didn’t occur frequently.
“We’ve had at least two this year already where we can definitively say a male killed a female,” Forsythe said. “And both of them were domestic incidents where both males had access to guns and both of them used it.”
In Geri Vaughn’s case, police were tipped off to her murder by the suspect himself. Forsythe said Vaughn’s husband called police to tell them he’d shot her, moments before officers arrived on scene. Preston Vaughn was arrested as soon as officers entered the house and identified him.
Since 2008, the victims in six of 30 homicides in Anniston were women killed by men. The “large majority” of those happened during or as a result of domestic incidents and involved guns, Forsythe said.
Jacksonville statistics show the last woman to die at the hands of a man occurred in December 2005. Police labeled that case a domestic violence homicide because a husband shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself, Jacksonville Chief Tommy Thompson said.
In Oxford, investigators have dealt with women killed by men more recently. Each of Oxford’s two homicides since 2008 included female victims killed by men, officials said. One of them occurred this spring, when a woman fell prey to a male relative’s beating, reports show. The other happened earlier this month between two strangers during an armed robbery at a pizza parlor.
Attempts to collect similar statistics from the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Office were unsuccessful.
With a gun, ‘you don’t have to get
all bloody’ Local and state officials attribute Alabama’s high rate and the recent regional homicides to a number of factors, some of which include economic tension, a cultural perception that men should control women and the easy accessibility to and prevalence of guns.
The latter in that group is a focus of the national study and was mentioned by many local officials as a major reason for the state’s high ranking, especially in terms of domestic violence homicides.
About 57 percent of Alabama households included gun owners in 2002, according to the most recent numbers reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“If you’re in the heat of passion and you’ve got a gun in your hand, the act is less physical,” Jacksonville’s Chief Thompson said. “You don’t have to get all bloody.”
Gundlach noted that nearly all of the other states included in the study’s top-10 list are Midwestern and Southern states with high gun ownership numbers.
The study lists Louisiana, Arizona and Tennessee rounding out the top five. It indicates what Gundlach refers to: These states all have relatively high numbers of residents who buy and own handguns.
According to the 2002 CDC numbers, 45.6 percent of all Lousiana households own guns, 36.2 percent in Arizona, 46.4 in Tennessee and 31.5 in Nevada.
“While this study does not focus solely on domestic violence homicide or guns, it provides a stark reminder that domestic violence and guns make a deadly combination,” the study reads.
Shipman said it’s the mission of Second Chance and other domestic violence shelters across the state to warn women about that “deadly combination.”
“If we were not able to offer our emergency shelters … there would be undoubtedly more of these homicides,” she said. “And when there is a weapon in the home and she’s looking for an escape, she needs to know that is the very most dangerous time for her.”
‘Believe him when he says he will kill you’
Gundlach estimates Alabama’s 19 domestic violence shelters and prevention groups have saved more than 770 lives since they began their programs in earnest 25 years ago.
In 1987, domestic violence shelters in the state provided emergency housing to 2,978 women and children, the coalition’s statistics show.
In 2010, that number was up by 1,000.
“More importantly,” according to Gundlach, shelters provided outreach services to more than 10,500 women and children who needed help but not necessarily living arrangements.
Shelters and their services help stop domestic violence before it reaches a homicidal level, Shipman said.
Despite Alabama’s high number of women killed by men and despite the recent rash of domestic violence homicides in her service area, Shipman said she feels encouraged by the ever-increasing community awareness of Second Chance.
Before 2008, it only used to see about four or six women at any one time. For the past year, the Second Chance shelter has been over its 20-person capacity, she said.
Shipman partially attributes the increase to the economy’s downward spiral, which she said causes more domestic tensions and raises the number of women who need to use the shelter. Other than that, the Second Chance director said she thinks more area women are increasingly aware of the shelter’s services.
“It’s heightened in our service area,” she said. “That’s good, because we hope to get at domestic violence earlier.”
Domestic violence officials said heightened awareness and preventative action is key for combating Alabama’s high ranking in the number of women killed by men.
Shipman said if she can successfully counsel women in situations like Geri Vaughn’s to press charges the first time violence happens, it increases the odds that what happened to Vaughn won’t happen to others.
For that reason, Second Chance employees plan to focus their attention in October — National Domestic Violence Awareness month — on getting this message out:
“Believe him when he says he will kill you.”
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