The case itself was old news – from 1974, in fact. But only in 2007, thirty-three years later, was a marker to be placed on the victim’s grave, by her daughter.
The victim was Beryl Mitchell, killed by her Army Green Beret husband on December 1, 1974: stabbed, strangled, and dumped nude in a wooded area of Ft. Bragg. Her husband was later convicted of murder and spent several years in an Army prison.
Their daughter, Christine Horne, was in elementary school. She worked for decades to overcome the impact of that trauma. As a closing part of that process, Horne was coming to Fayetteville to organize a memorial for her mother and install a headstone; the fact that the ceremony took place at the beginning of what is called Domestic Violence Awareness Month was entirely not coincidental.
The memorial became an impressive public event; both the police chief and the Cumberland County sheriff were there –though the army did not respond to her invitation to send someone. The event climaxed in the release of thirty-three lavender balloons at the cemetery. A crowd of fifty-plus watched the balloons rise into the blue sky. Among them were many women, survivors of domestic violence, who showed up unannounced to be part of the witness.
I was Director at Quaker House in Fayetteville then; and Quaker House became a quiet part of this story. Domestic violence was not one of our program priorities then, though of course we heard about it in our counseling, and as part of the life of the community. (The military has an ongoing epidemic of domestic violence, which it works diligently to downplay and keep quiet. Of course, much the same thing could be said of the rest of our society as well.)
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