Gretchen J. Nelson, who is not a lawyer -- in fact, she's not even a college graduate -- is about to address the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

Nelson asks whether she can present her arguments from the attorney's table, rather than from the podium. If she stands at the lectern, her back will be to Norman Laurence, who's also acting as his own lawyer.

Laurence is serving a life sentence without parole, convicted of first-degree murder. In 1997, an accomplice and he drove a woman to the woods of West Greenwich and kicked her to death, so she wouldn't tell the police about a burglary committed by the pair. Nelson doesn't want to turn her back on Laurence because she's afraid, despite the elegant and august setting of the Supreme Court, that he'll leap up from his seat and attack her. She has long believed that the woman murdered in West Greenwich could have well been her.

One of the justices notes the presence of court officers. So Nelson steps forward, pauses a moment to fight back tears, and then proceeds to deliver her legal arguments.

The case involves the single tie between Nelson and Laurence: their six-year-old son. Laurence has filed suit to force Nelson to bring the boy for regular visits at the Adult Correctional Institutions. Nelson is fighting the demand.

Besides being a savage killer, Laurence brutalized and terrorized

Nelson during the four years they lived together, she says, and their son grew up in that violent atmosphere. Now from prison, she says, Laurence is still at it: harassing her and their son, still trying to orchestrate her life and their son's through a legal fight about visitation rights.

Nelson uses legalese to state the obvious:

Hauling their son to the ACI to see his violent father would not be "in the best interests" of the boy.

Tha Gretchen Nelson had to personally take her case before the state's highest court shows how far the campaign to end domestic violence still has to go.

Her case also hints at the complexity of the subject -- that there is detail upon detail in the unfathomable challenge of keeping some family members, mostly women, safe from the other people in their own households, usually men.

The fact is that the powerful and well-thought-out laws enacted in Rhode Island and other states 20 years ago to help end violence against women and children aren't enough. They help, of course. The 1988 law that made it mandatory for a police officer to arrest an abuser when called to an instance of domestic abuse has undoubtedly saved lives and prevented terrible injury. Society has also come to understand that there is no sacred right to violence behind closed doors, that a man's home is not his castle, at least when it comes to the safety and well-being of his spouse and kids.

But because of scores of loopholes, and because the lives of men, women, and their children are so complicated, domestic violence persists as a breach in civil society.

The proof is in the carnage.

This year alone, there have been seven domestic abuse-related deaths in Rhode Island.

The latest occurred early on the Fourth of July, when a Pawtucket man went gunning for his ex-partner. In his attempt to get at her, he first killed another man so he could steal his car, which the assailant drove to confront his partner's sister. The gunman then shot and wounded the sister, fired at police, then killed himself.

The same kind of furious torrent took place three times earlier in the year.

On February 13, a North Kingstown woman shot a man with whom she had a relationship -- twice in the head, once in his shoulder, and once in his torso -- then shot herself in the head.

On March 20, a Westerly man used a rifle to shoot to death the woman with whom he shared an apartment.

The case that got the most attention was that of Barbara Lombardi, a Coventry real estate agent, who had obtained a protective court order to keep her ex-husband away. The man, Russell Arlia, had been arrested for harassment, but was released on bail over a weekend. Concerned for Lombardi's safety, police checked her house frequently.

When one patrolman arrived March 12 shortly after 2, Lombardi warned him that Arlia was there with a gun. Shots were traded, but Arlia forced his way into the house, murdered Lombardi, and then killed himself.

Shocked by a spate of killing only weeks apart, anti-violence advocates, joined by a newly formed Friends of Barbara Lombardi, proposed a series of reforms last winter, some of which were subsequently enacted into law.

One of the new laws tries to eliminate the loophole exposed by the Lombardi case. It requires bail commissioners to hold probation violators without bail until a judge can decide whether they should be freed. A second makes stalking a felony. And a third requires Family Court judges to make the safety of children and abused parents an important factor, when there's a history of domestic violence, in deciding child custody and visitation cases.

This latter one touches on the issue that Gretchen Nelson faced when she addressed the Supreme Court on October 31, 2000.

Nelson first came to public notice two years ago when she was a witness during the trial of Laurence, who was accused in the gruesome killing of a former girlfriend, Betty Jo Gardiner.

What wasn't clear during the trial, Nelson says, is that she had also been a victim of Laurence's abuse. In fact, Laurence's torment of Nelson had gone on much longer and foreshadowed what would happen to Gardiner.

Nelson feels her childhood destined her to fall into the orbit of a man like Laurence, whom she met in 1993. She says her father was abusive, an alcoholic who created an atmosphere of fear in his home before his wife divorced him. The psychic scars were such that she couldn't settle into a normal life during relationships with two decent men, including a police officer whom she married.

"I was very uncomfortable with them," Nelson says. "I'd never been around men like that; that were reassuring, positive."

Nelson suffered from depression. At one point, she was treated at a hospital where another patient knew Norman Laurence, who was just getting out of the ACI on home confinement after being convicted of conspiracy to commit murder of a fellow inmate.

"He was really a nice-looking man," Nelson recalls. "He was in really good shape . . . and he had a really good outlook as far as he wasn't going back to prison. He wanted to work -- all the good things you want to see when you first meet someone."

Laurence, however, was also more like what she was accustomed to. He put her down, told her that people just pretended to be her friends, assured her she was no good. Later, he would beat her, Nelson says. More importantly, he dominated her every move and thought.

"It was like being in a cult," she says.

The abuse began with isolation. Laurence insisted they move far from Nelson's mother in East Providence to a campground in West Greenwich, near the Connecticut border.

Then he got physical. Enraged one night that Nelson disagreed with him about something, Laurence punched a door so hard that a picture fell off the wall.

On another night, he struck Nelson in the face. She immediately picked up and left. But it was the middle of the night. She looked at the gas gauge, which was on empty. She had no money. And she drove back to Laurence.

He beat her more as time went on. He would grab her ponytail and drag her around their cabin.

She kept to herself. When she was outside their home, she looked at the ground. In the company of others, she kept opinions to herself.

At Laurence's insistence, they quickly had a child, a son born in 1994. Nelson maintains she did most of the work -- feeding, changing diapers and so forth -- while Laurence criticized her every move.

Laurence, she says, fantasized that during the times he was away, working as a house painter, baker (and burglar), she was having affairs with other men. She says he got into arguments with neighbors.

His behavior was bizarre in other ways. One night, she says she woke up to discover Laurence standing over her, holding knives and begging Nelson to kill him.

He'd sometimes drive her to the woods in West Greenwich and talk. Before one trip, he hid their son with relatives, and made her promise not to talk to other people if she wanted the child back. Another ride was particularly ominous.

"He opened up the glove compartment, and in there was a razor, gloves, and a rope. And he looked at me, and he said, `You are really naïve to be out here with me.' "

After Laurence began feuding with others at the campground about his suspicions of their involvement with Nelson, they moved to Pawtucket apartment. He accused her of having sex with two apartment maintenance men in view of their son, and got into a fight with one of them, punching him in the face.

It was then, in 1996, Nelson made her second escape attempt. She filed a protective court order and swore out a complaint with local police, assuming the attack on the maintenance man would put Laurence back in the ACI, since he was free on a suspended sentence.

But, she says, officials couldn't find computer records of his previous sentence, and he was released. Cowed again by his presence and the way that he ignored the no-contact order, Nelson fell back into the relationship.

Laurence later moved out and began living with a new girlfriend, Betty Jo Gardiner, a 24-year-old mother of four children.

After Laurence and a friend, Jay Young, burgled a house, they became afraid that Gardiner would tell the police. Early in 1997, Laurence and Young, accompanied by a pit bull, drove Gardiner out to the same woods where, Nelson says, Laurence used to drive her.

Nelson says the pair later told her, in terrible detail, what they had done.

First, Laurence tried to persuade Gardiner to recant her story to police. But Gardiner shrugged off Laurence's suggestion with a flippant "Whatever." Nelson suspects Gardiner's disrespectful tone enraged Laurence.

"So they just pulled her out of the car, and they started to kick her," Nelson says. "That night, Norman told me that he kicked her at least 75 times, with steel-toed boots."

The men were dismayed by how difficult it was to kill Gardiner.

"She kept getting up," Nelson says. "They thought she was dead at one point, or they heard her take a breath, and finally -- I think it was Jay -- Jay dragged her off a little bit more off into the woods, and put his foot on her throat until she stopped breathing."

Afterwards, Nelson says, the men tried to blame each other for the murder; Nelson, because he did so much kicking, Young, who put his foot on Gardiner's throat.

The next day, they went back to burn the body.

And weeks later, they had Nelson drive them near the area so they could bury Gardiner's charred corpse, ordering Nelson to return for them after their task was done.

To keep Nelson in line, Laurence would provide her with West Greenwich weather reports.

"It's raining," he would note.

"And it's raining on her."

Rholde Island has a strong and seasoned system to deal with domestic violence. The state Attorney General's office fields a four-person team of prosecutors who specialize in domestic and sexual crimes.

Six local agencies deal with domestic violence and operate shelters for women and children escaping abuse -- and Rhode Island is one state that has no regular waiting lists for shelter beds.

The agencies cooperate through the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which, in turn, works closely with police, the attorney general's office, and the state Department of Corrections.

The state is small enough, says Stacey Veroni, who heads up the Attorney General's unit, that advocates and government officials can often work well together.

Still, people die, and in numbers that seem to fall into familiar patterns, year after year.

Statistics compiled over the last 21 years by Karen Jeffreys, a staff member at the Coalition Against Domestic Violence, show 105 deaths: 82 murders; the rest suicides by some of the killers.

The number of domestic violence-related deaths in tiny Rhode Island in a given year has varied over the last two decades from none to 12. There have been five so far this year.

Deborah DeBare, the domestic violence coalition's executive director, says the campaign against domestic violence is taking longer than early reformers expected. "I would say that 20 years ago there might have been a naïve hope that if we could just reform the criminal justice system, this would make the problem go away," she says. "What we've done has made a difference. But we haven't made it go away."

This past March, after the initial three incidents in only two month's time, the coalition and others devised a seven-point plan to close some of the most obvious loopholes.

Two points -- bail system reform and strengthening the stalking law -- were enacted by the legislature, but others, such as increasing public knowledge about services available to victims and the unique nature of domestic abuse, remain ongoing goals.

A prime area for attention, DeBare and others say, is to give court workers -- judges, clerks and sheriffs -- the same kind of information that police and prosecutors receive from domestic violence experts, so they'll understand the issue better.

One advocate of more education is Veroni, the prosecutor. "Everyone benefits from domestic violence training," she says, because the reaction that victims have isn't easily understood."

It's frustrating to well-meaning jurors or judges when a victim of abuse is too frightened to leave her abuser, recants earlier testimony, or refuses to cooperate, Veroni says.

DeBare says she been talking to court officials about starting such a training program.

Another reform just getting underway is having a broad-based team of experts to conduct "critical case review," looking closely at domestic violence-related fatalities to find out what went wrong and what can be improved.

With the Department of Corrections coordinating the effort, this group intends to analyze cases in which someone has died, as well as on-going cases that might result in death, to prevent murders, DeBare says.

In what may be the most difficult change, domestic violence experts in Rhode Island and elsewhere realize that simply separating victims and abusers may not always be the answer.

When the movement first started, helping women escape abuse was the goal, and this resulted in the establishment of temporary shelters and strengthening of law enforcement. Experts, however, are now hearing from women that they don't want the relationship to end, just the abuse.

"We haven't really wanted to hear that or listen to that," DeBare says, "because it's so hard. I think that we will see, over the next 20 years, more domestic violence programs grappling with that really challenging question."

"Let's start with the assumption that she [the abuse victim] is going to stay, and we want to provide whatever we can for her, and figure out how to get services provided for him, to make the abuse stop."

IN THE MONTHS after Betty Jo Gardiner's murder, Gretchen Nelson kept the awful secret, both out of fear for what would happen to her and because Laurence kept a close watch on her.

Even when Laurence was out of sight, the phone would ring, and in the next instant, he would show up at the door. Her anxiety level rose after he showed her a shotgun he had taken during one of his break-ins.

One day, when Laurence was away, he called and ordered her to bring their son to him. She protested that she didn't have gas for the car. Soon, he was at her door, dropped off by a friend. After a brief visit, the friend's car returned and Laurence was gone.

Nelson figured it was a dry run, that Laurence was timing how quickly he could get to her, and spirit her into a car. On May 13, 1997, she called a lawyer, and they went to state police.

Nelson had worried that authorities would charge her for covering up the crime after being told about it, but the police granted her immunity in return for her testimony.

Police quickly arrested Laurence and Young. Young pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 60-year sentence.

But although Laurence would remain confined to prison, Nelson's contact with him was by no means over.

Laurence wanted to see his son, and for a while, Nelson brought him to the prison. As time wore on, she decided that more visits would harm her son.

The result was a lawsuit by Laurence, followed by series of five hearings in Family Court in 1999.

Since Laurence acted as his own lawyer, he was able not only to compel his former partner to come into court, but grill her on the stand as a witness -- something he would repeat while representing himself during his murder trial.

In the eyes of domestic violence advocates like the coalition's Karen Jeffreys, this amounted to a different form of abuse, in which the antagonist once again tries to dominate and belittle his victim.

Laurence questioned Nelson closely during the visitation dispute, bringing up past allegations of unfaithfulness, accusing her of wiretapping him during their son's visits to the prison, and bringing up her mental health record. He argued how important it was for him and his son to see each other. Nelson and her Legal Services lawyer, meanwhile, argued that the history of domestic abuse was relevant to whether the visits should be allowed.

Initially, Judge Peter Palumbo seemed to focus narrowly, saying, "The only issue here is what's best for the child, not what's best for him [Laurence], not what's best for the mother. The issue is what is good for the child, and if the child has had a prior relationship with the man."

Laurence went through the hearings, subpoenaing his prison psychologist and a guard, demanding mental health records and recordings of conversations between himself, Nelson, and their son. The subject of Betty Jo Gardiner came up several times.

"Is it true that on February 2, 1997, that you had gone to see an attorney because you were scared?" Laurence asked.

"Yes," Nelson responded. "It was about four days after you had murdered Betty Joe Gardiner. I was concerned. Yes, I went to see my attorney."

Laurence then demanded whether she had actually seen the killing.

"Did you witness me kill Betty Joe Gardiner? It's a very easy question."

"No. No."

"Let's try not to make statements about me murdering Betty Jo Gardiner by stepping on her throat," Laurence said, straying into a disputed detail of the killing that Nelson hadn't mentioned.

The Family Court trial ended Sept. 29, 1999, and Palumbo had still not ruled by the time the Betty Jo Gardiner trial had started.

Nelson said she was used to being questioned by "attorney" Laurence by then. But there was one chilling moment.

Laurence told the Superior Court judge he wanted the same privilege as the prosecutor to move about the courtroom and to show witnesses trial exhibits.

What he wanted to show Nelson, Laurence said, was the shovel he had used to bury Betty Jo Gardiner. Laurence was convicted of first-degree murder in January 2000 and sentenced to life without parole. Family Court Judge Palumbo ruled on May 2000, agreeing with Nelson there should be no more father-son visits, at least until the boy was older.

The judge noted threats of violence against Nelson, and said that at this stage of the boy's life, "His mental and moral health will be endangered by contact with plaintiff at the ACI."

Laurence appealed. Nelson hunted for another lawyer. One turned her down flat; another confessed she had no interest in facing Laurence in court.

"I'm really embarrassed to even say it," Nelson says the lawyer told her. "I wouldn't even want to be in the same courtroom with him."

Behind the scenes, the lawyer counseled Nelson on how to present the case herself.

In November 2001, the Supreme Court issued its decision, upholding the Family Court ruling.

Nelson, meanwhile, had joined a group called Sisters Overcoming Abusive Relationship (SOAR), whose members are domestic violence victims.

Among their goals this year was to get a new law requiring judges to take domestic violence into account while deciding custody and visitation issues. The bill was enacted by the legislature, along with stalking and bail reforms.

Nelson is remarried and with the Supreme Court decision, she says, her fear has subsided but not vanished. She has become a public speaker for SOAR, because she wants the public to understand what victims go through.

Nelson also believes she owes a debt to someone who saved her life and her son's.

"I'm lucky," she says. "I made it out of the situation I was in."

Issue Date: July 25 - 31, 2002