Behind Enemy Lines
by author Jenn Farrell

The book was shelved in theWomen’s Studies section, which could be found, as the store clerk helpfully pointed out, right next to the True Crime ection. “Not that that’s a judgment or a statement or anything,” he quickly added.

Little did he know how accurate a spot it was, for the book in question is The War on Women: Elly Armour, Jane Hurshman, and Criminal Violence in Canadian Homes by Brian Vallée (Key Porter, 2007).

Vallée, a writer and investigative journalist, is perhaps most famous for his 1986 book Life With Billy (Seal, 1986), which recounted the story of Jane Hurshman, a Nova Scotia woman who eventually killed her abusive common-law husband, Billy Stafford. Hurshman’s dramatic case, in which she was required to publicly recount the shocking violence and sexual torture her partner inflicted, eventually led to the acceptance of “battered wife syndrome” as a legal defence.

Vallée followed the book with the sequel Life after Billy (Seal, 1995), which chronicled Hurshman’s ongoing struggles with her own personal life after the horrific abuse, her tireless efforts to speak out on violence against women, and her eventual tragic suicide.

Nearly 20 years had passed since Vallée had worked on Life after Billy, and he wasn’t in a hurry to revisit the subject. “I didn’t want to write another book,” he says. “I felt that if you changed the names and the geography, it’s the same story, over and over. But I was wrong.”

The Tragedy Continues

In 2002 Vallée started compiling news-paper articles of women (and sometimes their children) who had been murdered by their domestic partners, and as the file of clippings grew thicker and thicker, he realized that there was much more work to be done.

As Vallée considered starting another book, he was contacted by a 72-year-old woman in Calgary named Ella Armour, who was known to many locals simply as “Miss Elly.” She told Vallée she was fed up with hearing constant news reports about women being murdered and children being abused, and wanted to do something about it. She said she had a story to tell.

It is Miss Elly’s story that forms the framework for The War on Women. Armour married her “knight in shining armour,” Vernon Ince, in her home province of Nova Scotia when she was little more than a girl. The beatings began almost immediately, but, ashamed and confused, Armour tried to hide the severity of the abuse from her family and friends.

In 1951 at the age of 19, with two small children and pregnant with a third, her husband attacked her while Armour’s mother was in the house. In an effort to defend herself from yet another beating, Armour shot Vernon Ince dead with his own hunting rifle.

In recounting Armour’s story, Vallée sometimes compares it to that of Jane Hurshman, and creates not just two interwoven sagas of suffering but a multi-decade cross-section of the aftermath–political, legal, and most of all, personal–of domestic partner abuse.

The reader sees that the fear and anguish caused by violence doesn’t subside when the relationship is over, even when the perpetrator is dead and buried. Despite their willingness to reach out and help others in similar circumstances, Jane Hurshman was so troubled even 10 years after Billy’s death that she took her own life, and Armour had a long history of moving from city to city and job to job while having dysfunctional relationships, especially with her own children.

A Preventable Epidemic

The War on Women is not an easy read, nor is it meant to be. To remind the reader that the two personal stories within the book are not isolated incidents, but only two examples of a larger epidemic, each of 17 chapters opens with a small grey box containing the details of one of the Toronto-area newspaper clippings that Vallée collected.

Chapter after chapter, another woman is killed–sometimes with her children–by the man she lived with or had tried to escape from. The cumulative effect is chilling. What’s even more chilling is that each of these killings occurred during the space of less than a single year.

Jenn Farrell is a Vancouver writer and editor.

Source: alive #304, February 2008