By Joanne Kimberlin
The Virginian-Pilot
© January 8, 2012
Fished from a sea of divorce files at the Virginia Beach courthouse, Case No. CL11-3455 contains the usual affidavits and orders, the meltdown of a marriage chronicled in cold legalese.
Only hindsight makes this folder more haunting - that, and a single sheet of paper now resting atop the stack of documents.
Filed Nov. 18, 2011, it notifies the court that Deborah and Robert Wigg will not be pursuing their divorce. Both parties, it explains, are "now deceased."
There is no hint of the shocking violence behind that statement.
Not a glimmer of the rage and terror that enveloped the last moments of their relationship.
And no clue that Debbie and Rob were part of a record cluster of murder-suicides.
Eight times last year in South Hampton Roads, a man used a gun or a knife or his bare hands to kill a woman he once loved - and then he killed himself.
Half of all marriages end in divorce.
Why do some end in two funerals as well?
The brick rancher sits on a quiet street in Suffolk, a modest house in a modest neighborhood with basketball hoops, neat shrubs and folks who wave to each other.
Grove Avenue seems an unlikely place for murder-suicide, an act that turns children into orphans, devastates at least two families, and speaks to our darkest fears.
Debbie Wigg moved there in hopes of finding refuge. Her roots were in small-town Suffolk - her childhood and her parents. College took her to Norfolk.
Smart, pretty and petite - 5-foot-1 and barely 100 pounds - she enrolled at Old Dominion University, became a cheerleader and met Rob. He was athletic, intelligent and outgoing. They married in 1995.
For 15 years, Debbie and Rob seemed to live the American Dream. She found a good job as an accountant in Norfolk. He went to work at Southeastern Elementary in Chesapeake, where he taught fifth grade for four years.
When Debbie became pregnant with their first son, Rob left teaching and launched a lucrative business, buying and installing ATMs in convenience stores. They bought a big house with a pool in Chesopeian Colony, a high-end neighborhood in Virginia Beach. They threw block parties and entertained friends. Debbie gave birth to another son.
One year ago, their marriage collapsed. Debbie filed for divorce in February, saying her husband had become someone she couldn't live with. According to her complaint, Rob had started using drugs - cocaine and crack - and admitted he'd been unfaithful. Some evenings he didn't come home, and when he did, he was wrung-out and aggressive, badgering her until the wee hours of the morning.
Debbie moved out, retreating to Suffolk, where she and her boys holed up in her late grandmother's house on Grove Avenue, just half a mile from her parents' place. As the divorce trudged on, the bitterness escalated.
Rob accused Debbie of trying to keep him from his sons and ruin him financially. Debbie accused Rob of being an unfit husband and father.
Tensions exploded in April. Debbie said Rob attacked her while she was picking up the boys at his house, slamming a door on her head, pulling her hair and knocking her to the ground.
When their oldest son, a 10-year-old, called 911, Rob yanked the phone cord out of the wall. Debbie escaped the house and flagged down police.
Chesopeian Colony isn't accustomed to flashing blue lights. Neighbors watched as Rob was taken away in handcuffs.
"I am in fear for mine and my children's safety and welfare," Debbie wrote in her complaint. "My husband does own a handgun..."
Debbie was granted a protective order, a legal document instructing her husband to stay away from her.
Rob was charged with assault, but with no criminal record to hold him, he was released from jail that night.
His 9 mm pistol, carried for protection as he serviced his ATMs, was left in his hands.
No one tracks the country's murder-suicides. In the few reports that do exist, Virginia is often mentioned - not for our private tragedies but for our most public one: the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, a massacre that, in the end, was murder-suicide.
Most are family affairs, a toll told in smaller headlines on inside pages: "Two found dead in home."
The Violence Policy Center in Washington scours the Internet for those news clips, and estimates that 1,000 to 1,500 people die that way in the nation every year.
Weighed against regular homicides (about 18,000 annually) or even traffic fatalities (30,000), the body count for murder-suicide is relatively small. Yet we'd be hard-pressed to name a death that's more deeply disturbing.
"The family unit is regarded as a crucible of peace and love, not violence," said Jack Levin, a Northeastern University professor who's considered an authority on murder-suicide. When one occurs, he said we all feel unsafe, wondering "who could be next?"
Virginia is one of the few states that keep murder-suicide statistics, as part of its participation in the National Violent Death Reporting System, a project of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to a decade's worth of data collected by the state medical examiner, Virginia averages around 18 a year. In the Tidewater District, an area far larger than just South Hampton Roads, the average is less than three.
But in 2011, South Hampton Roads alone had eight, the most ever recorded.
There is no simple explanation for the spike, particularly since crime overall is down. Some blame the economy; unemployment and foreclosure can tip the already-troubled over the edge. In a recent CDC survey of 9,000 women, one-in-four said they'd been attacked by husbands or boyfriends.
Men are almost always the perpetrator of murder-suicide, especially the kind that claims intimate partners.
"Then again, murder in general is a masculine pursuit," Levin said. "Ninety-one percent are committed by men."
Women who do commit murder-suicide tend to kill their children, but not their husbands or boyfriends. Men might target the children as well, but the woman is almost always among the victims.
The phenomenon knows no bounds. It strikes in gabled homes, middle-class suburbia, rusty trailers. And while the lack of survivors can make it tough to piece the story together, motives often fit distinct categories.
Florida, with its large elderly population, has more of what experts call "altruistic" murder-suicides: an aging husband who can no longer care for his feeble wife decides to take their fates into his own hands.
A sense of love, although twisted, can also fuel the "family annihilator" syndrome: a psychotic father who really believes his family is better off dead.
The most common pattern, however, is defined by rage, revenge and obsession, and divorce is often the catalyst. Killers tend to be possessive, domineering, lonely, paranoid and depressed. And when the woman makes a break, she's viewed as the source of all his pain.
"Control is a big thing here," Levin said. "He's lost it, and this is his way of getting it back."
Neighbors don't want their names used in this story, and the families can hardly bring themselves to talk about what happened.
A call to the Virginia Beach home of one of Rob's relatives was answered by a man who explained it this way: "We just want to go on with our lives and try to be at peace with it."
From his home in Florida, Debbie's brother, Wade Brown, acted as her family's spokesman: "On behalf of my Mom and Dad, I can tell you it's... so terrible, you can't even imagine it."
The only good that can come from reliving it, Wade deduced, is that a stranger might be spared: "If you see a woman going through this, don't dismiss it. Be aware. You think this kind of thing only happens to other families."
Wade knew his sister's marriage was in trouble, but he never thought she was in danger.
"We were all surprised," he said. "I mean, I had known Rob for 15 years."
In Chesopeian Colony, residents were stunned as well.
"I think Rob was hanging out with a rough crowd," said a neighbor who lives near his house, "but he was not an evil person. He was friendly. He was involved in the community. When Debbie and the kids still lived here, he used to wait at the school bus stop for his son every day."
Brandon Ziegler, Rob's divorce attorney, would only say a few words about his former client: "Obviously, he was the person who did this, but that's not who he was."
George Christie, Debbie's attorney, saw a darker side of Rob.
"On a number of occasions, he made veiled threats as we were leaving the courtroom," Christie said.
As pressure mounted to divide assets, Rob unraveled.
He fell behind in his mortgage payments and child support. He didn't show up for a hearing on his assault charge.
At one point, he told the court he was working for the FBI. When word surfaced that his drug use had led to an armed robbery at his house, the judge cut off Rob's visits with his children and ordered him to enter rehab.
"There were times when Debbie could have put him in jail, but she didn't," Christie said. "We decided that would only further enrage him."
In an attempt to convince the court he was stable, Rob had himself evaluated by "a licensed clinical psychologist with a doctorate degree," Christie said.
The conclusion:
"He didn't think Rob was a threat," Christie said. "Now if a guy like that can't tell - if he can't see it - how in the heck are you and I supposed to?"
Suffolk was shrouded in fog on Nov. 8, 2011, the night Rob drove his red pickup to Grove Avenue.
Debbie heard him banging on her door around 11 p.m. In a panic, she called her parents. They told her to dial 911, then hurried to their car to race over.
Suffolk police refuse to release the tape of Debbie's 911 call. According to reports, she was on the line with a dispatcher when Rob kicked in the door. A "loud struggle" was heard before the phone went dead.
That's when Brandon, a 19-year-old neighbor who doesn't want his last name used, pulled into his driveway, accompanied by his twin brother and a friend.
"We heard her screaming," Brandon said. "She hadn't been living here long, and she mostly kept to herself. But I knew her story, what she was going through. She'd told me to call police if I ever heard anything over there."
But it was too late.
"She came running out of the house, and he shot her in the back," Brandon said. "I pulled out my knife - it was all I had - and me and my brother ran over there. She was down, and my brother tried to cover her, tried to crouch down behind her to shield her.
"I got as close as about 10 yards to him - I was gonna gut him - but he shot at me. A 9 mm with a silver slide and black handle.
"Bullets went right by my head. Then he went back over to her and shot her a second time. He said, 'She'd better be (expletive) dead.' And then he left."
Brandon said his mother tried to give Debbie CPR, "but she died, right there in our yard. I couldn't sleep for days after that."
After Rob left Debbie's, he drove to her parents' house. It's likely he crossed paths with them as they sped toward Grove Avenue. Christie believes that Rob intended to kill them, as well.
"But when he got there and they were gone," Christie said, "he decided to take his own life."
Police and Debbie's parents converged at her house at about the same time. Her 4-year-old son was asleep in bed. The 10-year-old was hiding in a closet.
Debbie is the second client Christie has lost to murder-suicide.
"She did everything she was supposed to do," he said. "She had a protective order. What else can you do?"
Violating a protective order is a crime, but "if someone is willing to die," Wade said, "they'll walk right through it."
At the prosecutor's office in Suffolk, Shavaughn Banks has been handling domestic-violence cases for eight years.
"It's heartbreaking," she said. "Horrifying. What could Deborah have done? Short of shooting back at him, nothing."
Paul Speece doesn't believe that was a realistic option. Speece is a partner at McPhillips, Roberts & Deans, the downtown accounting firm where Debbie worked for 15 years.
He's also the president of Samaritan House, a Virginia Beach shelter with a focus on domestic violence.
And, as improbable as it seems, he has been through this before: His own brother committed murder-suicide six years ago in Cincinnati, despite Speece's efforts to protect his sister-in-law.
"We brought her down here to get her away from him," he said. "When she went back, he was stalking the house waiting for her."
Should Debbie have gotten a gun? Would it have done any good?
"I guess that depends on whether you can bring yourself to pull the trigger," Speece said. "That's the father of your children, and the children are in the house. By the time you're sure he intends to kill you, it's probably too late."
Debbie, he said, "was a very sweet girl. There wasn't a mean bone in her body."
Speece said he tried to warn her.
"I sat her down and told her point-blank, 'I see a lot of the same patterns in Rob that I saw in my brother.' I offered up Samaritan House. Had she wanted to, we could have made her disappear."
He thinks the system should do more to protect women like Debbie.
"Rob should have been arrested when he missed his hearing on the assault charge. And someone should have confiscated his gun. Sure, he could have gotten another one, but let's at least make it harder."
The Violence Policy Center is pushing for a national surveillance system that would keep an eye on murder-suicide trends and collect details from each case. Right now, says Northeastern's Levin, psychologists and criminologists are at a loss.
"People do drugs, people endure nasty divorces every day, but they still don't hurt anyone," he said. "We're really not yet in a position to predict this hideous crime."
He advises women to look for red flags early on.
"In the dating process, a man who's jealous and possessive may seem cute - even flattering to a woman. But that's behavior that can transform into something extremely dangerous."
Wade, Debbie's brother, said 600 people attended her funeral in Suffolk. No obituary could be found for Rob. Their boys are being cared for by Debbie's parents. McPhillips, Roberts & Deans is collecting donations for their future expenses.
Wade said the older boy is in counseling: "He's aware of what happened, but he doesn't really understand it yet. And I know it could have been worse. Rob could have killed the entire family, including my parents. I'm just grateful that my Mom and Dad have a strong church family. I don't know how anybody who doesn't have faith gets through something like this. It's incredible, the trickle effect one person's ex can have on so many. And it will go on for a lifetime."
Speece is still haunted by his brother's crime.
"I feel for Rob's family," he said. "They will feel some guilt, like I do... a sense of failure. Everyone walks away from this with that."
Joanne Kimberlin, (757) 446-2338, joanne.kimberlin@pilotonline.com
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