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| Published in Extra!, November/December, 1999 |
Day Trading...or Domestic Violence?
Coverage of a killing spree missed the significance of a family's murder
The deaths of Mark Barton's wife and children were obscured behind a shower of attention to his killing spree in the Atlanta offices of two day-trading firms. The family's story never stood a chance in a nation where the media consistently neglects the reality of domestic violence.
Before his killings at the day trading office, Barton killed his wife Leigh Ann and his two children, bludgeoning them in the head with a hammer. Five years earlier, his first wife and mother-in-law were killed by an almost identical method. Barton was also the prime suspect in those murders; he was the beneficiary of a $600,000 insurance policy he had purchased only days before the deaths.
Before the second set of murders, Barton had been accused of sexual molestation by his daughter; Leigh Ann had left him for a time, and expressed fear for her own safety in the months leading up to her death. She died the same day his stock trading account was closed, with a loss of $105,000.
After stuffing Leigh Ann's body in the closet, Mark Barton waited a full day before killing his children--out of kindness, if you believe his notes, in which he also denied responsibility for his first wife's murder. Carefully read, Barton's rambling note does reveal his thoughts about Leigh Ann:
I have been dyeing [sic] since October [the month Leigh Ann left].... I killed Leigh Ann because she was one of the main reasons for my demise. As I plan to kill the others, I really wish I hadn't killed her now. She really couldn't help it. And I loved her so much anyway.This October date is clearly significant. Yet Newsweek (8/9/99) begins its timeline of with Barton's opening a day-trading account the following March. Including the domestic events in the chronology would have brought a fuller perspective to Barton's motives.
Amid a multitude of stories and sidebars about shooting sprees, day-trading and gun control, media outlets rarely covered this aspect of Barton's rampage in depth. A few started in this direction, then veered away. The CNN website began its interactive page with: "By the time Mark Barton shot to death nine people in a pair of Atlanta office buildings, he already had killed his wife and two children with blows from a hammer as they slept. "
It went on to ask, "Tell us your thoughts on these murders. What can society do to keep workplaces safe?"
U.S. News & World Report (8/9/99) stated: "For Atlantans, Barton's rampage was a shock, the third in a series of ugly incidents involving guns. Recently a man killed a family of six, and a teenager opened fire at a school nearby." U.S. News doesn't point out that two out of three of these shocking gun crimes involved domestic violence.
A U.S. News & World Report sidebar was headlined "Congress feels the pressure"-- referring to gun control. Congress also has pending bills to include women in hate crime legislation and to update the Violence Against Women Act, but these proposals were ignored.
One exception to the general drift of coverage was an Associated Press story focusing on Leigh Ann Barton that ran in several papers across the country on August 1. "Mass killer Mark O. Barton's first victim in a murderous rampage last week--his wife, Leigh Ann--had been worried for her safety but loved Barton's children and wanted to continue to be involved in their lives, her sister said Saturday. 'I'm sorry it happened to my sister but I'm not surprised," said Dana Reeves, Leigh Ann Barton's older sister. "I've felt that this has been coming for a couple of years."
Evidence indicates that many murders involving domestic abuse are predictable. Once they've decided upon murder, some abusers don't hesitate to become mass murderers. Within days after the Atlanta shootings (7/29/99), the Los Angeles affiliates of ABC, CBS and NBC carried another mass murder as their lead story. This time members of the ex-wife's extended family were gunned down, while a niece was kidnapped and raped.
When Newsweek (8/9/99) summed up the Barton story, it wrote that "the shooting spree was ghastly but depressingly familiar. The twist this time was millennial cybergreed."
Looking for a "twist" in a story that began, familiarly and depressingly enough, with domestic murder, Newsweek offered Barton's family only one sentence in its first two pages. Victims of domestic abuse deserve better coverage of their plight.
