A thrill kill

CORRECTION: The ad campaign for Running Free, mentioned at the end of this post, was rejected by the company and never used.

I was going to blog my treeware column today, about my doggie Jericho, but I was sidetracked by this, by my colleague Bob Mitchell. (Emphasis is mine.)

A Brampton man told a police interrogator that he felt "a rush" when killing his girlfriend on July 31, 2005.

"I just wanted the noise to stop... I wanted it just to be done and over with," Ryan Bucknor told Peel Det. Mark Armstrong in a police interview after his arrest in describing his brutal beating of Audrey Cote.

"I don't know what it was... It was a rush... Well they say... The first time is easy..." Bucknor, then 26, told Armstrong in a video played yesterday before jurors in a Brampton courtroom. "A thrill kill. It was just everything was just coming out."

Bucknor, now 28, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Cote, 21, a Montreal-born stripper.

Prosecutor Dave King rejected his manslaughter plea before this trial began last week before Justice John Sproat.

Bucknor spent 10 hours being grilled by Armstrong, most of the time being unresponsive and at times crying, but eventually revealed details about what happened when he killed Cote in her basement apartment in a home on Fletcher's Creek Blvd. that Sunday afternoon.

"I punched her. I hit her. I slapped her. I was just trying to hold on..." Bucknor said. "No matter what I did she was still there."

Later, Bucknor said he "didn't know he was going to kill" Cote.

"I felt I was in a play, like, at a point I was, like, acting," he said. "It was like a scene out of a movie.

And, from Bob's story today:

Jurors have been told that Cote and Bucknor had an off and on relationship for about two to three years before her badly-beaten body was discovered by police after Bucknor said they could find a dead woman in the apartment.

Earlier in the month of her death, Cote's lip "had been busted" and she had bruises on her cheek, an arm and hip, her friend Kayla Nugent testified today.

"She told me that she and Ryan had been physical. That it was the first time this had ever happened," Nugent said about the July 6 conversation when she picked up Cote on the way to Canada's Wonderland.

Nugent said Cote told her that she had been at Bucknor's place when the fight started.

"She said he held her face down on a couch and she had to bite him in the chest to get away," said Nugent, who like Cote, worked as an exotic dancer at a Brampton strip club.

More about this story here.

What perturbs me about the ''movie'' line is that's completely understandable -- especially when you consider a lot of the porn out there, porn that brutalizes women, that fetishizes violence against women.

Since last June, when I stopped covering media and switched to writing about social issues and cultural trends, almost not a day goes by when I don't see a story somewhere in one of the three papers I read everyday about a man who kills his partner. My clipping file is now almost four inches thick.

The carnage never ends. And, as I wrote last June after two murders, each case is treated as an isolated one.

Nobody connects the dots. The word "femicide" is never used – and indeed is not even recognized by my spell checker.

In the U.S., reports the FBI, men murder an average of three women – and often their children – every single day. That's down 25 per cent from the period 1976-1996, perhaps because there are more shelters. But fears are that as the personal bankruptcies increase and employment nosedives, the killing will increase.

Canada's record is also spattered with blood.

Yes, as in the U.S., our rate of spousal homicides has declined in recent years. Women's groups report an average of 80 femicides in Canada per year – and that's unacceptable. Some 25 women a year are killed every year in Ontario alone, while the health-care system staggers under the $1.5 billion cost of abuse.

Most of these deaths are deemed "preventable and predictable" by the experts. The warning signs are well-documented.

At the University of Western Ontario's Centre for Research on Violence Against Women, there are stacks of studies, including a 2005 Domestic Violence Death Review Committee report to Ontario's chief coroner.

It shows that the "most consistent" and "most common" factors are "an actual or pending separation; a prior history of domestic violence; and depression (or other mental health or psychiatric problems)."

A couple of months ago, The Star ran an excerpt from Brian Vallee's The War on Women. Here is some of it:

Compare the raw numbers. In the same seven-year period when 4,588 U.S. soldiers and police officers were killed by hostiles or by accident, more than 8,000 women – nearly twice as many – were shot, stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death by the intimate males in their lives. In Canada, compared to the 101 Canadian soldiers and police officers killed, more than 500 women – nearly five times as many – met the same fate.

Those are the deaths. Then there are the wounded. In the same period, about 24,000 U.S. military were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, while about 80 Canadians were wounded in Afghanistan.

In the United States, it's conservatively estimated that in addition to the 1,200 to 1,300 women killed each year by intimate partners, another 5.3 million, age 18 and older, are victims of non-lethal domestic abuse.

Based on those numbers, the violence costs the country more than $5.8 billion annually – nearly $4.1 billion in direct medical and mental health care, and $1.8 billion in lost productivity and lost earnings due to homicide.

These numbers are believed to underestimate the problem for several reasons, and additional efforts are needed to determine more accurately the full cost of intimate-partner victimization of women in the United States.

In Canada, the federal government estimates the annual cost of violence against women at $1.1 billion in direct medical costs alone. That figure rises to more than $4 billion a year when social services, lost productivity, lost earnings, and police, court, and prison costs are factored in.

Wars usually produce large numbers of refugees: witness the United Nations camps scattered around the world. And the War on Women has its own refugee camps, in the form of the 2,500 or so shelters for battered women and their children across North America.

In the United States, more than 300,000 women and children seek safety in shelters each year. In Canada, the number is between 90,000 and 100,000.

Things are so bad that, in Florida, a 17 year old girl who was being targeted for abuse and harassment by her boyfriend was told by police to stop bugging them, or they'd arrest her because she was complaining about ''normal relationship problems.''

The "normal relationship problems" include nine incidents of harassment and violence which were logged with the local police since November, including one where Kufner hit Hall in the face and another where he tried to drag her out of a store by her hair.  Hall's family also noted that Kufner threatened to burn down their house.  You know, "normal" teen romance stuff.

Three days after the police told her to quit complaining, she was shot. Dead.

And yet, la-la-la-la, nothing ever changes. This issue never gets comprehensive coverage.

Meanwhile, everytime I write about it, I get bombarded with emails from men who say I discriminate because I never cover the instances of women abusing men.

But I am not talking about abuse here though. I am talking murder. Not self-defence, as when a woman finally fights back. Murder.

But hey, it's just another day of being a war correspondent.

Funny, how I feel so alone out here.

Oh one more thing: NOT FUNNY.

Here's a sample from an ad campaign for jogging bras for Running Free, a sports outfitter in Markham, Ontario.

The slogan?

"Support bras, now available."

Get it?

Har-de-har-har.

Hilarious to see women with their faces bashed in and bleeding because, you know, boobs do that.

Comments

[...pat.]

It's definitely a scary world.

There are also the untold thousands who are "only" emotionally/psychologically/verbally abused. Walking wounded whose children see and hear what is going on, and learn either bullying behaviour or compliance in the face of anger...

Walking wounded who are, in dollars and sense, reducing productivity because they just can't be as productive as they would be if they had been able to sleep, or weren't rehashing last night's belittlement, or had some shreds of self-worth left to fight against injustice in the workplace.

It's such a spectrum of hatred.

And somehow, we have to be able to teach boys that it is not OK to lash out in anger. I don't know how we do that.

[arthurdecco]

I'm embarrassed to say I had no idea this was such an overwhelming issue, Antonia. I had smugly thought we'd gotten beyond men beating their partners to get off. I live a fortunate life, with nothing like this near me. That's not an excuse, because there is no excuse for my ignorance, but it's my weak explanation.

I suppose I need to lose my middle-aged complacency.

So... how does someone get a story like this printed on the front page of the Star or made the subject of an hour-long, prime time, men-must-watch documentary - (with the resources to continue with follow-ups as necessary, of course?)

How does that happen?

[Tor]

Wow, those stories are really depressing. I find it so upsetting that patriarchy and violence against women aren't being discussed at schools. Thanks for keeping this in the public sphere Antonia -- keep it up!

[deBeauxOs]

"I just wanted the noise to stop... I wanted it just to be done and over with," Ryan Bucknor told Peel Det. Mark Armstrong in a police interview after his arrest in describing his brutal beating of Audrey Cote. Bucknor spent 10 hours being grilled by Armstrong ...

Peel Detective Mark Armstrong did his job well. And then of course, there are the Florida police - their careless disregard of a 17 year old woman's complaints about her violent boyfriend resulted in her death. Should we anticipate how the anti-feminists are going to spin this story to make all women once again accountable for some men's behaviour?

[Myckie]

How does an ad like this actually get used? No woman could possibly have said that this add would make them buy a sports bra. I completely don't get it. And why wasn't there a deluge of write-ins to the company saying that this ad campaign was unacceptable?? Very disturbing.

[MissMay12]

You should really amend this post - the company did not actually use/approve the ad - it was pitched to them but they found the same objections to it as you (and I) did:

"My name is Nick Capra I am the owner of Running Free. Those horrendous images were pitched to us by an ad agency. When we saw them our first reaction was 'you've got to be kidding me.' We will never and have never used those pathetic excuses for marketing..."

[Ann]

That is such a disgusting ad. Terrible and tasteless. Well, that's one company I'll definitely boycott. Ugh.

[Ann]

Intriguing, now it seems that Running Free didn't mean to run those ads at all. Apparenty it was the ad agency DDB Toronto that made the ads in the first place, "pro bono". How awful. So it's not Running Free's fault. Rather, DDB Toronto. Alright, the real target is them.

[Kristin]

Hi Antonia, I've read Broadsides a few times but this one really hit home.

On Saturday night I witnessed domestic abuse for the first time. On our way back from a dinner my boyfriend and I noticed a trio--two men and a woman, all probably early 20s--walking on the other side of the street. We realized she was bawling and screaming and he had her by the wrist and was yelling and dragging her against her will. The other male did nothing. We tailed them as they went down a sidestreet and eventually they got into a car and drove off. We'd called 911 by then.

To say I was scared is somewhat of an understatement; I feared for the girl's safety, absolutely, but suddenly I was faced with the reality that something could happen to me.

It is certainly a scary world out there sometimes.

Kristin

[anon]

Unfortunately, it's not just Florida police who are like that. When I was planning my escape from an abusive man, I went to the local police station in St Catharines, Ontario, at the suggestion of friends, to ask for protection on the day that my family was coming to move me and my pets out of the house. I will never forget that experience. The police officers actually smirked, and told me they could do nothing unless I produced 'proof' that my husband was abusive. When asked what they needed, they replied that I needed a witness to an assault. I said "well of course he never does anything in front of other people", which was met by more smirks, and I was told that they couldn't help me. Then they just ignored me until I left. Luckily my husband wasn't as violent as the scum bag who killed the girl in Florida, but he did stalk me when I moved 3 hours away to live with family.
The really troubling part was that I had just 'graduated' from a ywca program for abused women. Our class was full of badly abused women, most with kids, who got no support from police. The problem of abusive, controlling, violent spouses is still very big, it's just hidden, and people in smaller communities tend to look the other way in embarrassment and pretend it's not happening.

[Nick Capra]

Hello, this is Nick Capra the co-owner of Running Free. I would appreciate you posting at the top of this blog that we (Running Free) did not approve this so called "ad" campaign. We were pitched this idea and flat out rejected it. Our company is not and has never been in a position to ever use an ad agency let alone afford the marketing budgets to support those campaigns. Most of us who see these "ads" are offended but anyone who has lived through abuse is hurt - all over again, and that is what upsets me most about this fiasco.