Free Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong

on the issue of premeditation
    and planning. The state could have retried the penalty phase before
    a new jury and sought another death penalty verdict, but that would
    have required remounting virtually the entire six-month case. Not
    wanting to put Anne Marie’s family through that again, prosecutors
    agreed to a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
    Q
    The cardinal feature of all three syndromes, which plays into all the
    individual characteristics of Dark Triad disorders, is the absence of
    empathy. The ability to empathize with others, to ‘‘feel their pain,’’ is a
    core part of what makes us human. People with this ugly constellation
    of traits can lie, cheat, use, manipulate, hurt, and kill with impunity
    because they are completely indifferent to the suffering of others. The

    The Dark Triad
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    utter callousness displayed by eraser killers is all the more astonishing,
    considering that their victims are supposedly their ‘‘loved’’ ones.
    When it came to disposing of his wife, Katherine, ironworker
    Joseph Romano exhibited no more compassion or remorse than the
    professional assassins in Brian de Palma’s blood-soaked remake of
    Scarface . After beating his thirty-nine-year-old spouse to death, most
    likely with a baseball bat, in their Quincy, Massachusetts, home in
    1998, he carved up her corpse with a power saw he had borrowed
    earlier that month from a neighbor. He placed her severed remains
    in fifteen plastic garbage bags, which he helped city trash collectors
    hoist into their truck the following day. He then set about cleaning
    up, repainting the basement where the dismemberment took place,
    and hosing down Oriental rugs in his yard—the latter act so strange
    that neighbors noticed and remembered it.
    Their two-year-old son witnessed the dismemberment of his
    mother, acting out the scene with dolls when questioned later by
    pediatric trauma specialists.
    ‘‘The last memory that Bruno talks about is seeing his mother’s
    head in a bucket,’’ said Mary Louise Fagan, Katherine’s sister, con-fronting her brother-in-law at sentencing. ‘‘That’s what you gave
    Bruno, Joe: nightmares, memories, and horror.’’
    The Romano’s marriage had been breaking down for years, and
    Katherine had given her husband a deadline to leave the home she
    owned by the first of the month. Three days before that deadline,
    she disappeared. Like many eraser killers, Romano was dead set
    against sharing anything with a soon-to-be ex-wife, even if it actually
    belonged to her. When police came to his door after her father
    reported her missing, Romano expressed a profound lack of empathy
    and indifference to her absence.
    ‘‘Who the hell knows where she went?’’ he told the astonished
    officers.
    Romano had once threatened to put his wife ‘‘where her family
    would never find her.’’ In that, he succeeded. Her body was never
    found, the trash bags incinerated before police could ever search the
    dump. But bits of bone, cartilage, and deep-body tissue were detected
    on hidden parts of the saw after Romano returned it to the neighbor,
    and minute amounts of blood spatter were found in the bedroom
    and basement.
    For months before the murder, Romano had been talking about
    how much he hated his wife and wanted to kill her. Only one juror at

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E R A S E D
    his 2002 trial, however, pushed for a first-degree murder conviction. A
    conviction for first-degree murder requires a finding of premeditation
    and intent, that the killer thought about and planned the murder
    in advance. Another juror actually wanted to vote for manslaughter,
    which would have meant Romano did not even intend to kill his
    wife—an option the jury was not allowed to consider. Instead, the
    panel found the forty-four-year-old guilty of second-degree murder,
    making him eligible for parole in fifteen years.
    ‘‘I guess he did feel as though he was backed into a corner
    and acted out in a rage