Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 17, 1993 TAG: 9304170239
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS PARDUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
OF LOVE AND DEATH: IS DOMESTIC VIOLENCE DISREGARDED?
HIS GIRLFRIEND accused him of beating and threatening to kill her, a magistrate let James Sol Fox go free on bond. Two days later, he killed his girlfriend, their daughter and his girlfriend's father. Could their deaths have been prevented?The shotgun murders last week of three members of a Clintwood family might never have happened if Virginia's legal system showed more concern about domestic violence, family members and advocates for victims say.
Lilton Estep says his sister, niece and father needlessly died because the Dickenson County Sheriff's Department and magistrate's office didn't pay enough attention to his sister's fear for her life.
"It's a terrible situation," Estep says. "It's ridiculous. We're going to change things. It ain't going to bring anybody back, but perhaps it will stop it from happening again."
Estep says the murders would not have happened if James Sol Fox, his sister's live-in boyfriend, had been locked up two days earlier. Fox should have been jailed, Estep says, on charges of beating his sister and threatening to kill her with the very shotgun he used two days later. Instead, Fox was allowed to go free on personal recognizance bond.
About dinner time on April 5, Fox killed his girlfriend, Jutannia Estep, 28, their 1-year-old daughter, Angela Belle Estep, and Jutannia's father, Edgar Dale Estep, 54. Fox also wounded Jutannia's mother, Freda Estep. Fox, 33, then used his shotgun to kill himself.
Freda Estep, who crawled out of the house after Fox shot her legs out from under her, says she doesn't want to talk about what happened. "All I know," she says, "is things should have been done differently."
Elizabeth Betterley, the director of HOPE House in Norton, says legal authorities across the state often discount domestic violence. It's not uncommon, she says, for a jealous or abusive husband or boyfriend to be charged, freed with little or no bond, and then "go back and beat up or even kill his spouse or girlfriend."
Betterley, whose home gives temporary housing to domestic violence victims in the state's coalfields, says "if the state can learn one thing from what happened in Dickenson County, it's that we need to take domestic violence more seriously."
Kristi VanAudenhove is administrative director of Virginians Against Domestic Violence, a statewide organization pushing for stronger domestic violence laws. She says magistrates and police need to seriously consider locking up abusive men at certain key dangerous times.
Studies indicate that the most dangerous time for a woman and her family is within three days of leaving the abuser, VanAudenhove says. She says special caution must come into play whenever beatings occur, guns are used or death threats are made.
All of those warnings were there on April 3 when Jutannia Estep went to the magistrate's office in Clintwood to swear out a warrant against Fox. Family members say she called the sheriff's office begging for help because Fox had beaten her that morning and she was afraid he would carry out a threat to kill her. Instead of sending investigators, the sheriff's department told her to come in and swear out a warrant.
Jutannia Estep, her face bruised and a tooth missing from the beating, did that shortly before noon April 3. She had left Fox and moved into her own home a couple of weeks earlier because she was afraid of him, family members say. In a handwritten complaint she told magistrate Carolyn Mullins that, shortly after 1 a.m. April 3, Fox came to her house drunk and armed with a shotgun.
She said he grabbed her by the throat, threatened to kill her, punched her several times in the face and hit her with the shotgun barrel. He stayed about 30 minutes, said he'd kill her if she went to police, knocked a hole in a wall with his fist and ripped the phone cord out of the wall.
Sheriff's deputies picked up Fox that afternoon on charges of assault and battery and using a firearm to threaten Jutannia's life. Deputies reportedly had to chase him through the woods, but Fox, 6-feet-1 and 240 pounds, cooperated after they caught him.
Deputies hauled him back before Mullins, the magistrate. She found out Fox had no criminal record and allowed him to go free on personal recognizance after he promised to stay away from Jutannia and her family.
Mullins did not return numerous telephone calls over the past week to explain why she decided to let Fox go.
But authorities say Fox gave her a good line, and friends and associates say she is deeply troubled over a decision that she thought was right at the time.
Dickenson County Sheriff Frank Childress says he isn't going to second-guess her. "I just done my job and magistrates done theirs."
Kyle McClanahan, the chief magistrate for the court district that includes Dickenson County, says Mullins' critics are "Monday morning quarterbacks."
"It's pretty obvious now" that Fox should not have been released, McClanahan says. "I feel for the magistrate that set bail."
But, McClanahan says, under the state's bail reform laws people accused of crimes are entitled to reasonable bail. It must be remembered, he says, the people are only accused, not convicted.
And, he says, magistrates repeatedly see women come in to swear out warrants against husbands or boyfriends only to drop them the next day.
Nevertheless, McClanahan says he is concerned enough about how to handle domestic violence accusations that he is sending a memorandum to all magistrates in his multi-county district. He says the memorandum will caution magistrates to "work more cautiously with this type incident."
McClanahan says he suspects those accused of domestic violence - especially where injuries, guns and death threats are involved - will find it harder to get out on bond.
Don Askins, the commonwealth's attorney for Dickenson County, says the magistrate shouldn't have had to be told to be more cautious. Given what Fox did - the threats to kill, the shotgun and the beating - the magistrate should have little doubt about what to do, Askins says. "I would damn sure not have let him out on bond."
Askins says magistrates often call him for legal advice, but he was gone that weekend. If he'd been called, he says, he would have told Mullins to keep Fox in jail until the next court arraignment day. That means Fox would have been held for at least three or four days, which might have been long enough for him to cool off.
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