Jonathon The Madman.

My 23 year old daughter Sarah and I were recently returning from Portland Oregon to Medford, almost three hundred miles to the south. My daughter lives in an apartment and is the single mother of 6 year old Chelsea. We happened meet her friend and next door neighbor, Aubrey, and her six year old daughter Jourdan, in a gas station about 80 miles from Medford. They were accompanied by Aubrey’s boy friend Jonathon Baldridge. He is eighteen, muscular with red hair and a beard. He introduced himself and seemed normal enough but Sarah told me she thought he was not a good person.

We arrived home late in the evening. Sarah called me at 11:30pm to assure me of her safe arrival home. I received a second call from her at 2 am. At about 12:30 a.m. Sarah had been awakened by a splintering crash. She told me later she knew immediately what it was and jumped up to call 911. Only seconds later she heard a woman’s voice screaming in the courtyard for someone to call the police. The voice was Aubrey’s. She ran across the courtyard to get help from either of two men who lived in the complex. One of the men didn’t wake up. The other one answered his door, but denied Aubrey help, even as Jonathan followed her into the man’s living room and beat her head against the furniture. The man told them to take it outside. Jonathan proceeded to take her outside and beat her forehead against a stucco wall. He then forced her to the ground and beat the back of her head against the concrete. Sarah walked out her front door to witness Jonathan beating Aubrey’s friend, who was visiting from Portland for the specific purpose of helping Aubrey to get free from this threatening man. The woman’s two year old daughter was asleep upstairs with Jourdan. Before the police arrived Aubrey managed to find temporary safety in another apartment, but without her daughter. Sarah heard her screams from an adjacent apartment, “I have to get my baby, I have to get Jourdan,” followed by the pleas of Amy, the woman who had let her in. “No! Don’t open that door!” As Sarah went back into her residence to call the police a second time she heard the sound of shattering glass. Jonathon had found Aubrey, jumped through a closed front window, and continued to beat her in the front room. Amy, ran upstairs to grab her six month old baby and hide in the closet. After the officer arrived Sarah and the other two women returned to Aubrey’s apartment to get the two little girls who lay shivering in their bed at the top of the stairs. Aubrey’s face and clothing were covered in blood, and her right eye was starting to swell. Meanwhile, Jonathon overpowered the policeman, escaped from his custody and re entered the first apartment which now had all three women and two little girls in it. While Jonathon was attempting to hold the door shut from the officer Sarah and Aubrey escaped out the sliding glass door to the rear of the apartment. They jumped over the fence adjoining their residences as they heard the officer break down the door and chase Jonathan up the stairs, where he was pepper sprayed for the third time and finally cuffed. My granddaughter Chelsea witnessed the entire incident through the upstairs bedroom window. Other police arrived and Jonathon was arrested and transported to jail.

The arresting officer came by the next morning to tell the women that the police had charged Jonathon with six offences including 2 felony charges. He had more than ten prior arrests, at least one for burglary and another for assault. The officer also told them that Jonathon could possibly be released in five days on bail. Sarah said they all feared he would return to the apartments in a rage and asked me what she could do. I told her to contact the Assistant District Attorney to make sure he was aware of all the circumstances. The Assistant DA told Sarah that he had added 10 more charges against Jonathon and that he was going to request that the bail be set at $500,000. Jonathon had been arrested on Monday and a grand jury hearing was set for the following Thursday. When Sarah testified, the jury members asked her how much Chelsea saw and what the effect was on her. In Oregon domestic violence committed in front of a child is a felony. Chelsea had drawn a picture of the incident on her chalkboard. The picture was amazing in its detail. Jonathon was drawn in red. He had a frown on his face and his hands were very, very large. He was not wearing a shirt. The women and children were colored in green. All of them had big round eyes which portrayed fear. The policeman was big and wore a cap. He was colored in blue. He was holding a long flashlight pointing straight up with a shaft of golden light coming from the end. Chelsea told me her little friend was moving from the apartment because her room smelled like pepper spray. The grand jury added ten more charges, making a total of 26 counts against Jonathon. Six are felonies. He is in jail waiting trial or to plea bargain. He faces 48 months in prison.

Miraculously, Aubrey suffered no broken bones or serious head injuries. She did end up with two black eyes, six stitches in her upper lip, a concussion, and a hairline fracture in her cheekbone, which the doctor said would take up to a year to heal. She limped for a week. After three weeks she has not been able to return to work and is moving to another state. Anita, her friend, suffered back injuries from being picked up and thrown across the room, several large bruises from being kicked, and bruises on her neck from being choked. Jonathon has called Amy, the woman from the second apartment, from the jail telephone. Both Jourdan and Chelsea are still in counseling.

Eileen The Black Widow

I live in an area called the “Upper Rogue.” The community is comprised of several small towns that are on the banks of the Rogue River. I am a farrier and a few years ago I was called by my neighbor, Eileen Waggler to trim her horses. Eileen’s horses were in a mountain pasture fifteen miles from her house. Eileen was a registered nurse when my daughter Sarah was hospitalized with Colitis. Sarah said that of all the nurses Eileen was the most caring and kind.

I knew Eileen well. I had visited and eaten dinner with her and her live-in boy friend, Sonny. However, when I went to the front door that morning, the two were arguing. I escaped to my truck to wait. Eileen came out and jumped into the cab of my truck. She was wearing a bikini top and shorts. She worked out regularly at a gym and had a fabulous body and a pretty face. In jest, I asked her how her love life was going. She had grumbled and said that Sonny was trying to obtain custody of his two small children and that she didn’t want them. Then she laughed and became cheerful. There were two sides to Eileen, two distinctly separate personalities. One was the kind person that Sarah knew, who was intelligent and loved animals. The other person was irrational, addicted to drugs and alcohol and had a prior history of domestic violence.

I had stopped one night to help Eileen bury a foal that had died in her pasture. She was distraught and angry, blaming Sonny for not giving her sympathy. She said her horses were her children. I ran into Eileen a couple of weeks later. She told me that inebriated, she had fallen from her horse in the dark and had wandered into the Rogue River. She said she was too intoxicated to find her way home and that Sonny came looking for her at midnight and carried her to his truck. The Rogue River is swift and fast. Eileen said she was lucky she didn’t drown. She had recently lost two jobs due to her alcohol and drug addiction.

That morning, after we finished with the horses I dropped Eileen off at her house. She went in the house to write a check. When she came back she told me to say hello to my daughter Makenzie. She laughed and said she was going into the house and start a war. I went to town to do some errands. When I passed her property an hour later there was crime tape stretched across her driveway and three police cars in her yard. I thought Oh no. One of them has killed the other one. A week before, Eileen had taken a stainless steel Detective Special, .38 cal Smith and Wesson revolver from her hand bag to show me. When I arrived home that night there was a message from Eileen on my answering machine, telling me there had been a problem between her and Sonny, that a detective would probably be contacting me. The next day a detective called on the telephone. He told me Eileen had shot Sonny a few inches above the genitals. The hollow point bullet had nicked Sonny’s liver and intestine and exited through his back. His spleen had been surgically removed. The detective said there was a question of self defense and Eileen had not yet been arrested or charged. The rest of the story I got from Eileen over the following months. A few days after the shooting I stopped and talked to Eileen. She told me that she had locked Sonny out of the house and he kicked the back door in to gain entrance. She said she called 911 and the dispatcher asked Eileen if she could stay away from Sonny until the police arrived. Eileen replied that she thought she could. Eileen lived in an older single wide mobile home. She had shot Sonny from the front of a 15 foot long hallway. He was standing in the rear of the hallway when she pulled the trigger. She volunteered that he had never touched her. Eileen said that initially the police had placed her handcuffed in the back of a police car. It was a hot day and soon they took her out of the car and removed the handcuffs. I had the impression she had not even been transported to jail. Eileen told me the police failed to find the twenty two marijuana plants growing in her back yard in pots. She said she later transported the plants to a friend’s house. When I had the opportunity I inspected the back door. It was falling apart from dry rot. The aluminum was rolled up at the bottom but was not dented.

The door appeared to be in too poor of condition to be effectively locked. A few weeks later Eileen told me she had failed a lie detector test. She said that her case was being referred to the grand jury. It was months before the case came before the grand jury. The grand jury failed to indict Eileen. Sonny recovered from his injuries.

At the time the incident occurred I was a college psychology student. I was also a Court Appointed Special Advocate for abused and neglected children. I had written my term paper for the class Sexual Child Abuse, on domestic violence. I have been a detective on a county Sheriff’s department. I told Eileen that it wasn’t personal but the bias demonstrated by the Jackson County law enforcement and the court system distressed me. She said she understood how I felt. Eileen soon had a new live in boy friend. Somehow, I felt that the final chapter of this story had not yet been written. Last year, in the late evening Eileen demanded that her boy friend go into town to buy beer. He told her it was too late and he didn’t want to drive to town. She then informed him that if he didn’t go she was going to kill herself. When he refused she walked onto her front porch, put the barrel of a handgun into her mouth and pulled the trigger. Could it possibly have been the same gun she shot Sonny with?

Jonathon Baldridge is in prison. He received a 44 month sentence. Perhaps he will receive help or perhaps he is beyond help. In any case he is where he belongs. The Assistant DA told Sarah he brokered the plea bargain because all too often a male biased jury will allow a perpetrator of domestic violence go free. A few years ago the Jackson County Public Defender went public in the Medford Mail Tribune, our local newspaper. He complained that the District Attorney was wasting resources prosecuting domestic violence cases he could not win. The reply from the district attorney’s office was that the domestic violence task force was making a statement.

Eileen Waggler is dead from her ultimate act of domestic violence.... committed against herself. I liked Eileen. In her way, she was open and honest. She had a great sense of humor and her heart could be soft....but when she was hurt, angry and irrational, (common denominators of domestic violence) she was incredibly violent. Sonny owned a portable sawmill used for milling trees on site. Eileen’s brother in law recently told me that shortly before shooting Sonny she had blown up his sawmill with dynamite. Yet, in a warped zeal to place all blame on the male, Eileen’s violent nature was ignored. Ironically, she was denied the help she desperately needed from those who protect only women and deny equal justice. Did they contributed to her death?