I Never Saw It Coming — Book 3
Introduction: The Other Story We Were Told
There is a story we tell about women and violence.
It is a story of rarity. Of aberration. Of the exception that proves the general rule that violence — especially lethal violence — is something that men do.
The story we tell about this rarity is where things get complicated. Because within that story lives a second assumption that is more dangerous than the first: that a woman who appears distressed, who appears to grieve, who appears to be a devoted mother or a brokenhearted wife — cannot be doing what the evidence says she is doing.
This book is about what happens when those assumptions meet the specific women who understood them most completely. Who used them. Who maintained, for days or months or years, the performance that the assumption expected — and who were protected by that performance.
This book examines sixteen women across more than a century, five countries, and every major category of female violence. What these sixteen cases share is not the method or the motive. They share the protection.
Time that was measured in victims who should still be alive.
Part One: The Wives
Chapter One: The Perfect Life She Was Owed
Betty Broderick and the Divorce That Became a War
San Diego, California. November 5, 1989. 5:30 in the morning.
Elisabeth Anne Broderick was forty-one years old when she drove to the house on Cypress Avenue — the house that had been the marital home until Dan had changed the locks, the house that was now his house and the house of the woman who had replaced her.
She had a key. She had made a copy. She had a revolver in the cloth bag she was carrying.
She climbed the stairs in the dark. She pushed open the bedroom door.
The third book in the I Never Saw It Coming series examines sixteen women across more than a century and five countries — black widows, poisoners, killers who used proxies, and mothers who turned on their own children — and the specific cultural assumption that protected each of them.
J. D. Roberts looks at what happens when the assumption that women are less likely to kill meets the specific women who understood that assumption most completely, and used it to buy time — sometimes days, sometimes decades.
Who this book is for
Readers of the first two books in the series, and true crime readers interested in the specific dynamics of female-perpetrated violence and the assumptions that let it go undetected.
