From San Diego Union-Tribune
Tuesday, Oct. 6, 1998

Wife who killed abusive husband living new life

By Bill Callahan
STAFF WRITER

October 6, 1998

Nearly three years ago, Sara Dean knelt on the bedroom floor of the Point Loma apartment she shared with her husband, grasped his handgun, and opened fire at the man who had beaten, tortured and bullied her for three years.
When she exhausted the rounds in that weapon, she found another and blazed away. She had to make sure he was dead.
If she didn't kill him, she was convinced, he would kill her. Eleven of her 17 shots slammed into his body.
Dean walked outside and laid the guns at the top of a stairway. "I'm free," neighbors heard her say, "I'm free."
Dean pleaded guilty to her husband's killing. Her case could have been prosecuted as a murder calling for a prison term, but in a rare three-way agreement, prosecutors, the defense and a judge decided otherwise.
She served little more than six months in jail for manslaughter in what all parties agreed was one of the worst examples of battered-woman syndrome they had ever seen. They essentially recognized a killer as a victim.
Today, the 34-year-old Dean looks back on that early morning of Nov. 8, 1995, and sees those seconds as horrific, but still liberating.
Through those acts she was extricated from a lifelong spiral of abuse. In jail, Dean said she got the psychiatric treatment that convinced her there was another side of life.
"I finally realized what I had gone through wasn't normal," Dean said late last week in a cozy wooden chair in the lush patio outside her Pacific Beach home.
"I grew up believing that things like being beaten, locked in a closet, having your teeth knocked out, being burned with a cigarette were normal. It was only through therapy that I learned, and am still learning, that life is really sweet and nurturing."
After being abandoned by her parents, Dean ran away from her foster home and turned to prostitution. Her first husband was her pimp. Then, she married Christian Vanessen on Halloween 1992.
"That date is just uncanny," Dean said. "How strange, it really did turn into a nightmare."
Vanessen was a former paralegal who turned mean when he mixed methamphetamine and liquor. The couple's landlord watched in astonishment one day when Vanessen chugged a fifth of vodka.
His moodiness made neighbors wary, as did the long knife he always carried in a sheath around his waist. Dean said Vanessen frequently plunged the knife into their furniture to demonstrate what he would do to her if she disobeyed.
Over the years, the orders became more bizarre and dehumanizing. Dean bears a scar from when Vanessen bound and gagged her, marched her into the kitchen and branded her with a hot spatula.
He knocked out her front teeth and threatened her with a beating if she spilled blood on the carpet. She said she was bound, gagged and sexually assaulted.
She turned Vanessen's gun on him shortly before they were to drive to Florida, where her two children from the previous marriage were living. Dean feared she and her children were targeted for death.
"I knelt there thinking I am going to kill my husband, and I'm going to die in prison or in the electric chair, but it had to stop, I had to free myself from the chains of domestic violence," Dean said.
Her lawyer, Milly Durovic, described Dean as "a basket case" in the months after the shooting.
"She was in the same mental condition as a survivor of a concentration camp," Durovic said. "She was the worst battered woman I have seen in 24 years as a lawyer."
Now, Durovic describes Dean as a success story.
"This was a unique case in which even the authorities recognized her as a victim, and we had a wonderful judge who didn't pander to public hysteria and instead gave her a break."
The judge placed Dean on probation for 11 years, which means if she gets in trouble again, she could be sent to prison. Her progress has been so good that Dean said she now only has to correspond with, instead of report to, her probation officer.
Prosecutor Brenda Daly, who handled the case, agreed Dean's ordeal had been horrible. Yet, Daly stressed that the way to escape abuse is not to take a life but to turn for help, to the police, social service agencies or battered-women's centers.
Vanessen, Daly said, should have been locked up, not pumped full of bullets. The prosecutor and judge told Dean she must learn to survive on her own, not lean on those who would take advantage of her.
With chimes ringing softly on her patio, Dean said that is exactly what she is trying to do.
She works part time for a La Jolla veterinary clinic and a Sports Arena novelty store and has the support of a boyfriend, Clay Bennett, a gardener with a talent for orchids, like the yellow and orange butterfly varieties that were clustered around Dean.
"I came from a dysfunctional family myself and turned to alcohol and drugs as a result of that," Bennett said. "So when we tell each other our stories, we both empathize and connect."
But while Bennett pulled himself from addiction nearly 12 years ago, a world of peace for Dean is a new experience.
"She says 'Thank you, God' every night before she goes to bed and every morning when she wakes up," he said.
Dean was in a particularly bubbly mood the day she was interviewed. She had just had the final fittings for false teeth to replace the ones Vanessen had knocked out.
"I've got my smile back," she said.
Telling her story seems to be cathartic for Dean. She has told it to a Japanese television audience and to local law school students.
But she doesn't just talk. She reaches out to women who are like she was, often inviting them to seek refuge in a spare room where a bed is crowded with colorful stuffed animals.
At the veterinary clinic where Dean works, office manager Amanda Edward said, "Most of the people who work here and many of the customers know about what she's overcome and find her inspiring.
"She's so kind and gentle with every person and animal she encounters here that it's almost impossible to imagine her doing what she did."
At the novelty store, where Dean has worked for three years, manager Mary Kathryn Dowling marvels at Dean.
"She's actually one of the hardest workers I've ever had," Dowling said.
"I'm aware of what's happened to her and I'm amazed at how she's turned such a devastating past into such a positive. . . . She's truly a remarkable person."