Why do men kill their wives?

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, LISA HARTWICK WAS RIDING IN AN elevator in Boston when she overheard a conversation between two men. One of the men was going through a divorce, and he was venting to his friend about lawyers and child support payments. At that point, Hartwick recalls, the man suggested, within earshot of everyone, that maybe he should just kill his wife, that it would be cheaper and easier that way. Hartwick, the director of the Center for Violence Prevention and Recovery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was stunned. "I really didn't know what to say," she recalls. "Luckily, his friend said to him, 'That's a lot of money. I understand. I'm going through it myself. But you've got kids.'"

It was probably just talk. The man was frustrated and likely never had any real intention of murdering his wife. Then again, who knows? Spouses kill spouses for many reasons. But the most intriguing reason may be this: Sometimes men - and let's be clear here, it is almost always men - decide to murder their wives simply as a way to end a rocky, unhappy marriage and avoid a divorce that could ruin their bank accounts or trash their reputations or spoil a dream life they have concocted for themselves. It is bizarre, seemingly inexplicable choice, especially considering the type of men involved. They are not hardened criminals, by and large, but rather domesticated suburb dwellers with fine cars, big houses, and nice wives. When the cops show up after these same wives turn up dead, the neighbors are shocked. Not here, they say. Not this guy. He wouldn't choose murder over divorce, the risk of prison time over child support payments. He wouldn't do this. To observers - and ultimately to jurors - it makes absolutely no sense. And yet the list of apparently nice, normal suburban Massachusetts men who have made this decision is long and infamous.

Take Charles Stuart, perhaps the most infamous of them all. On October 23, 1989, Stuart, who worked at a furrier on Newbury Street, shot his pregnant wife, Carol, in the head and then apparently shot himself as well. Stuart lived - just as he had designed it, while his wife and unborn child died - and went on to tell a sensational story about a black man who had robbed the white Reading couple. What Stuart really wanted, authorities later determined, was to open a restaurant with the money he'd get from his wife's life insurance policy. And once it was clear in January 1990 that he wasn't going to get away with it, Stuart made a second decision: He jumped off the Tobin Bridge.

David Magraw, a real estate investor, strangled his wife, Nancy, six months later in the living room of their Walpole home to avoid what may have been a six-figure divorce settlement. Joseph Romano, a Quincy ironworker, killed and dismembered his wife, Katherine, in September 1998 with a power saw he had borrowed from a neighbor. This, rather than leave, as his wife had apparently asked him to do. The case of Dr. Dirk Greineder - a renowned Wellesley allergist who slit the throat of his wife, Mabel, to protect his secret sex life with prostitutes - captivated the media the following year. Only months after that, in July 2000, Dr. Richard Sharpe, a rich, cross-dressing dermatologist in Gloucester, shot and killed his wife, Karen, to keep her hands off $5 million in assets.

And now the state is gearing up for not one but two trials of high-profile alleged wife killers in Middlesex County. Neil Entwistle, an unemployed engineer accused of killing his wife, Rachel, and infant daughter and then fleeing to England in January 2006, is scheduled to go on trial in October. James Keown, a radio disc jockey who allegedly poisoned his wife, Julie, with tainted Gatorade in September 2004, should have his trial in November.

"It's just not that uncommon," according to Bill Mason, the elected prosecutor in Cleveland, where, he says, three seemingly law-abiding men have ended their marriages by murdering their wives in the last five years. It's become so common, in fact, that last year Mason coined a term to describe these kinds of murders: "divorce substitute." But just why men would choose to kill instead of leave remains a mystery to many.

"Honestly, I think that really is the $64,000 question," says US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan for the District of Massachusetts. "Why not just simply get divorced?"

DAVID ADAMS, A LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST, HAS SPENT A DECADE trying to answer that question. Adams, mustachioed and bespectacled, is a cofounder and co-director of Emerge, a Cambridge program that in 1977 became the first in the nation to offer counseling to men who abuse women. Adams spends his days sitting in a room with men who talk about why they hit their wives or girlfriends. About 10 years ago, he began visiting Massachusetts prisons to meet men who had killed the women they once loved. He wanted to ask that question - why? - and discovered that their motivations fell into five categories: Some men were jealous; some were hopped up on drugs; some were career criminals; some were suicidal or depressed; and some, Adams found, were what he calls "the materially motivated."

Men in this last category lack emotional involvement, remorse, and a conscience. "They don't get jealous, because they don't care much about women," says Adams, whose book based on his research, Why Do They Kill? Men Who Murder Their Intimate Partners, is due out this fall. "They care more about the assets." They're preoccupied with money and status, and they typically live in suburban homes separated from others by fertilized lawns and manicured hedges, where neighbors can't easily overhear fights (and hence are inevitably surprised when the wives turn up dead). Cases of men killing their wives to avoid divorcing them rarely occur in urban areas - and that includes Boston, according to Deputy Superintendent Margot Hill, the Police Department's chief of the Family Justice Division. That's not to say Boston police officers don't respond to their share of murder scenes where a man has killed a wife or girlfriend. But more often than not, Hill says, these are classic cases of domestic violence, often prompted by women trying to leave, with no plotting on the men's part to avoid divorce settlements or minimize damage to assets or good names. In the suburbs, Hill says, the murder cases often take on a different twist and become "more bizarre." The men involved often have something to lose: fine cars, nice homes, reputations they've carefully crafted, or lives that others consider perfect. Yet those lives are never as perfect as they appear. Typically, Adams says, these men are keeping secrets - secrets they will do almost anything to protect. "They tend to have affairs," he says. "They tend to have a lot of financial dealings on the side. Remember Charles Stuart? His secret wish was to marry his mistress and buy a restaurant with her. And when his wife became pregnant . . . that was taking him farther away from his dream."

Of course, lots of men aren't living their dreams. There are plenty who have jobs they hate but wives they love. So who are the Charles Stuarts of the world? "They're narcissists," says retired FBI profiler Candice De- Long, who lives in San Francisco. "Life is all about them." Stuart, for example, was said to show more joy over a great haircut than over the impending birth of his child. One of Greineder's reasons to get rid of his wife of 32 years was that she was "getting older" and "soft," he told a prostitute. And one expert testifying at Sharpe's trial in 2001 said the Gloucester dermatologist, who shot his wife in front of three witnesses, might have had a personality disorder that made him both arrogant and deceitful. In fact, experts agree that most men who kill their wives to avoid divorcing them are sociopaths, able to distinguish right from wrong but not caring too much about that distinction. They will do what's good for them, says De- Long, especially when the life they have carefully crafted for themselves begins to unravel.

"For narcissists, it's not just that they love themselves," DeLong says, "but it's how others see them. Their image to others, to the world, is what's really important. And to have a chink in that armor is totally unacceptable. And that chink can be anything." Often, it's a damning secret. Husbands and wives share things. They know more about each other than perhaps anyone else does. And in a divorce, especially a nasty one, issues once locked away can go public in a hurry, shattering overnight reputations that were built up over decades.

That was Greineder's fear, according to Richard Grundy, the chief of the criminal bureau at the Massachusetts attorney general's office. Grundy was a prosecutor in Norfolk County in 2001 and built the case against the Wellesley doctor, persuading jurors that Greineder not only killed his wife to protect his secret life with prostitutes but also planned the murder for months. Greineder's goal: Make it look like a serial killer did it. "And to do that particularly," Grundy said, "what he had to do was slit the throat, right down to the neck bone, of the woman who brought him three children."

But Grundy knows that protecting secrets isn't always the motive in the murder of a spouse. He also prosecuted David Magraw in Norfolk County in his 1999 retrial for the murder of his wife, Nancy. And there, unlike the Greineder case, the issue was mostly money. Magraw, whose first wife died in 1970 in a suspicious accident, didn't want his second wife, a Walpole schoolteacher, taking half of what they owned. And Nancy Magraw knew it. "He is very angry about my suggestion that I will ask for 50 percent," she wrote to her attorney months before she was strangled in her home. "He feels that I am greedy and don't deserve it because he worked for it."

The cases were different, the motivations different. But in both instances, Grundy says, these men wanted to keep what they had. And because their feelings mean everything and the feelings of others mean very little, murder becomes an option. These men actually believe they will get away with murder, says DeLong, and they begin to think like this: "Divorce is messier than a body in the bedroom."

THE NUMBER OF INTIMATE HOMICIDES - THE MURDER OF A current or former spouse or lover or a family member - has been dropping since the mid-1970s. But this year in Massachusetts, with 22 alleged intimate homicides by the beginning of this month, it's on the rise, already seven more than what the state suffered in 2005 and on pace to surpass last year's total of 31, according to Jane Doe Inc., a Boston-based advocacy group for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.

It's a troublesome trend for Jane Doe's executive director, Mary Lauby. She worries that the statistics may be an indication that domestic violence programs are underfunded and failing to reach those who need help most. And that affects everyone, she says, no matter if they live in Boston or its finest suburbs. As she sees it, the Dirk Greineders and David Magraws, who go to great lengths to conceal the murders of their wives and later make for fantastic Court TV, aren't much different from your run-of-the-mill wife-beating husbands who get no headlines at all. Violence or threats of violence often precede their attempts to kill, says Lauby. These men feel as if they own the woman. And, most of all, they crave control. "What appears around friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers as a guy who's not 'out of control,' " says Lauby, "is somebody who's spending an awful lot of time ensuring that he or she - but mostly he - keeps in control of that relationship."

The most dangerous time for any woman in this sort of relationship is when she begins to empower herself, decides she's had enough, and makes an attempt to leave. Magraw strangled his wife four hours before they were meeting with their divorce attorneys. But sometimes the wife isn't ready to leave. Sometimes she feels as if she can't. Even now in the era of the amicable divorce, when women have greater economic independence than ever before, some women feel powerless, trapped in a relationship that grows more dangerous by the day. Take the case of Harold and Jamie Stonier.

They hit it off at their 20-year high school reunion in Plattsburgh, New York, in 1998. Both were divorced. Both had children. And Jamie was quickly taken with her old classmate. He was good-looking, a Marine. He was confident and smart. Put together, she thought. They went to the Marine Corps Ball in Washington, D.C., a few months later. She became pregnant. They moved in together in Virginia, got married on a boat on the Potomac River, and then, when Harold retired from the Marine Corps that fall, moved to Massachusetts. He had a good civilian job at an IT company. He drove a BMW, and they had a great house in Westwood.

But there were already cracks in the foundation. Harold was prone to fits of rage. At first, Jamie figured her husband was just going through a stressful time. He had a new wife, new kid, new life, new job. But the problems continued. They went into counseling, separated, and got back together. And then, in April 2003, Harold asked a New Bedford mobster to kill his wife. He wanted out of what he called "that little hell of a marriage." But the mobster called the feds, and the feds set up a sting, and just when Harold thought he was getting out of his marriage, he got arrested instead.

On the stand at his trial in 2005, he gave a wandering explanation for why he wanted to hire a hit man to off his wife. There were financial problems. He alleged that she was a bad mother. That she only wanted him for his money. That he was under a lot of pressure. That his job was very demanding. That his wife was out of control. That he was having a nervous breakdown. That he was trying to do everything he could to save the marriage. But it just wasn't possible, he told the jurors, and he began to think about having her killed. As far as he was concerned, this was perfectly logical. Everyone having problems in their marriage, Harold Stonier testified, must from time to time think about these things. Right?

Keith O'Brien is a Globe staff writer covering suburban live in metropolitan Boston. E-mail him at kobrien@globe.com.