UPDATE: Bruce Pardo: Nice, Generous Guy, Church Usher, No Criminal Record: Why He Shot and Killed His Ex-Wife and Eight Others on Christmas Eve
Dec 30th, 2008 by admin
What remains of a family photo found in the burned family home. The smiling man was Sylvia Orza Pardo’s father.
UPDATE: Pardo intended to kill not only as many members of his ex-wife’s family as possible, but his mother and his ex-wife’s attorney as well. He was mad at his mother because she had recently expressed support for Sylvia Orza Pardo and had been invited to the Christmas party. She did not attend because she was ill.
Also, the 16-year-old Pardo shot in the back was his step-daughter, the daughter of his first ex-wife.
But you know what? I’m not prepared to make him any focus for my rage. There are many, many men in the world who are just like him. That’s where my focus is going to be. — Heart
I’ve read all I could find now about Bruce Pardo, the apparently nice, generous guy, the church usher and family man, who dressed up in a Santa Claus suit on Christmas Eve and — carrying a homemade torching device wrapped like a Christmas gift, along with a handgun or four — went to his former in-laws’ house where the family was assembled to celebrate the holiday and opened fire, killing his ex-wife and eight of her family members and injuring two young girls. When Pardo knocked on the door of the house that night, one of those girls, 8 years old, answered, all excited about Santa Claus coming. He then shot her in the face. He moved on to shoot her 16-year-old cousin, also a girl, in the back. He then shot nine of her family members execution-style, finally dousing the house with some sort of flammable liquid so that it went up in flames. He left the house and drove 40 miles to his brother’s house, even though he had third-degree burns on his arms, and even though his Santa suit was burned to his body. When he arrived at his brother’s house, despite his injuries, he rigged his rental car so that it would explode when police opened the doors to investigate. He’d already rented a second car he intended to use to drive himself to the airport. He had $17,000 strapped to his body and a plane ticket to the Midwest, where he’d arranged to spend Christmas Eve with a friend, the same friend he’d spent a few days with when he was going through an earlier breakup with another woman. In the end, he never made that trip. He killed himself instead.
Pardo’s divorce from Sylvia Pardo was finalized on December 18. His attorney says there was nothing remarkable about this divorce and it wasn’t even particularly acrimonious. He said the last time he’d seen his client he seemed to be in good spirits. The divorce settlement wasn’t horrible or bone-crushing and was certainly something from which Pardo — in his 40s, with a master’s degree in engineering and years of IT experience — could have recovered. Pardo kept his house (appraised at $546,000 and in which his equity was $107,000), his Hummer and his Miata. He was a guy who liked his “toys,” friends say. Sylvia, his ex-wife, received the family dog (which she said Bruce Pardo never wanted) and a one-time payment of $10,000. That’s it.
But Pardo had been all “whoa is me” about the divorce for months, telling friends he was being “taken to the cleaners” by Sylvia Pardo. Headlines in newspaper and media accounts throughout the world suggest or state outright that the divorce settlement or the “loss” of Pardo’s job must have been to blame for the fact that Pardo “snapped” and offed nine human beings. After all, he’d never been in trouble before; he had no criminal history. His divorce attorney said Sylvia had not sought any restraining order concluding that Pardo must not have been particularly violent. So, the reasoning goes, “something” must have pushed Bruce Pardo over the brink. Something must have been the final straw that drove him to murder, mayhem, shooting 8-year-old little girls in the face, and so on. Because normal men, according to the ruling mythology under white male heterosupremacy, don’t kill people, don’t shoot people, and particularly in this carefully-planned, methodical, extremely cruel and vindictive manner, unless they are “pushed.”
Bruce Pardo may not have ever come across the radar of law enforcement. It makes sense that he did not– most abusers never do. Pardo is white, middle class, a college-educated homeowner with a number of fancy “toys”. He’s not the kind of guy who generally raises the suspicions of law enforcement. He might not have been physically violent, either, in the ways most would define physical violence.
He’d have raised suspicions, though, for anyone who works with survivors of domestic violence and battering. He’d had a son with another woman years earlier. She’d left him to babysit their child when the child was about a year old; when she returned, Pardo was watching television and the child was not in the room. She went looking for him and found the boy unconscious in the swimming pool. He had suffered brain damage and is now a paraplegic. Accounts say that Pardo spent a week at the hospital, foregoing food to sit at his son’s bedside. Then, he split. He never paid the child’s mother child support and he never saw or attempted to contact his son again. He never told Sylvia about this son during the four years of their relationship either. She found out somehow though, probably because she came across Pardo’s tax returns and noticed he was claiming the boy as an exemption every April 15.
Sylvia had children from two previous marriages; two were adults and one was a Kindergartner. Her kids were afraid of Pardo and didn’t trust him; he was aggressive, they said.
Media reports say Pardo “lost” his job in July of 2008 and “couldn’t get unemployment” and did not receive any severance package; they suggest, again, that this might be one reason Pardo “snapped”. There is certainly more to this story, as anyone, again, with experience working with battering and abuse victims quickly recognizes. The month prior to the “loss” of this job, in June of 2008, the Court had ordered Pardo to pay Sylvia spousal maintenance and back spousal maintenance pending the finalizing of the divorce. Sylvia Pardo was an administrative assistant who made $19 an hour, $31,000 per year. Bruce Pardo made $122,000 as an IT professional. I have a hunch Pardo quit his job because he didn’t want to pay spousal maintenance. There’s no other reason he would be ineligible for unemployment or would not receive any severance package.
If you read carefully — and you have to, because the sympathies of most who have reported this story are clearly with the murderer, not his victims — you recognize that Bruce Pardo was always abusive. He didn’t just “snap”. Abusive men don’t just “snap.” They are violent because they are abusive. It’s not only that Sylvia’s children were afraid of him, though that is critically important information. When Sylvia filed for divorce, Pardo told her she’d have to move out of the house, which was in his name. Sylvia asked to stay through her child’s Kindergarten year, promising to pay for food and utilities and to stay with family on the weekends. Pardo refused and threw all her things out in the yard while she was at a birthday party. That was abusive.
I think Pardo had made a nice, cushy little deal for himself. He had the mortgaged-up-the-ying-yang house and the expensive vehicles he liked so much. That was his contribution to his marriage to Sylvia, he figured. He would pay the mortgage and the huge credit card bills and other bills he had racked up for himself. Sylvia had brought her houseful of furniture and her job to the marriage. He figured her furniture, and her money, should be HER contribution to the relationship. I’m betting you dollars to donuts when she moved in, she turned his all-but-empty house into a home, then used all of her modest earnings, month after month, to buy groceries, pay the utility bills, pay for all of the family’s ongoing, everyday needs. From his standpoint, this was perfect; it freed him up to spend his money on himself, which is what I’m sure he believed was just and right. After all, what a great guy he was, providing shelter for this woman and her child. They should be grateful. They should consider themselves fortunate. And he shouldn’t be expected to contribute one thin dime, she had a job didn’t she? And that wasn’t his kid, let her dad take care of her.
I think Bruce Pardo was a childish, entitled, male supremacist, abusive son of a barstool all the way up until he decided to murder nine people, orphan 14 children, and possibly irretrievably traumatize a family. I think he was resentful as all hell that his wife was divorcing him and bringing his cushy deal to an end. I think he was enraged that she expected or wanted anything at all from him — money, especially – and that she dared to ask him for anything. I think he resented everything he ever might have given to her or to any other woman. My hunch is he felt entirely justified claiming the son he had not supported nor seen for eight years as an exemption on his income taxes; after all, he supported him for one year, didn’t he? He should get that back. And the boy’s mother collected $100,000 on Pardo’s homeowner’s liability insurance, something that probably ate away at Pardo. Never mind that in the first year after the near-drowning, the boy’s medical costs were over $350,000. Never mind that not a penny of that $100K came out of Bruce Pardo’s pocket (and his son’s mother didn’t ask for money from Pardo; my hunch is, she knew better and wouldn’t have risked it.) I think Pardo thought, possibly in the quasi-conscious way of abusers, that he deserved so much more in life than he ever got, that he was so underappreciated, that women had really screwed him over. After all, look what a great guy he was, everybody said so, everybody thought so. How dare his wife or any other woman cause him any difficulty at all. And look at how ungrateful her kids were! Her family was! He’d provided the house and rides in the Hummer and they rewarded him by being afraid of him and kicking him to the curb. He’d show her; he’d show all of them, all those ungrateful people who never appreciated him the way he believed he deserved to be appreciated.
The fact that Sylvia Pardo sought no restraining order says nothing about whether or not Bruce Pardo was an abuser. Restraining orders are completely useless against most kinds of abuse, and particularly against certain specific forms of abuse– economic abuse, for example, of the type Pardo, I’m betting, inflicted on Sylvia Pardo. Pardo demonstrated that he could and did hold the fact that the house was in his name over her head. The moment she wanted a divorce, she was out of there and her child as well, belongings in the driveway. I’m betting if she didn’t buy the groceries, there were no groceries. If he was true to form for abusers of this type, he may have bought food for himself only, then made it strictly off limits to her children, especially. If she didn’t pay the phone bill herself, the electricity bill, or asked for help, there may have been hell to pay of some kind or another, him berating and haranguing her for long distance phone calls or leaving the lights on, finding ways to blame her, finding ways to make her responsible to take care of everything, including him.
Restraining orders don’t work against the relentlessness of emotional, psychological and verbal abuse, either. They don’t keep a man from mistreating a woman’s children in a million inventive, ingenious ways. They don’t keep a man from turning family members against one another either or causing endless problems in a family. Restraining orders don’t keep men from using pornography or bringing it into the house or from going to strip joints or topless places or racking up debt calling phone sex lines. Restraining orders don’t keep a man from a million abusive acts, large and small, that harm and undermine women and their children and make their lives miserable — verbal attacks, shouting, insults, threats, mocking, stonewalling, refusing to communicate, “forgetting” what it is crucial not to forget, refusing to pull their weight and to share the responsibilities of housework and yard work, making huge messes they expect the women and girls in their lives to clean up, and just garden variety, everyday meannesses that communicate to women and children how little they are respected or cared for or valued.
Beyond all that, for all we know, Bruce Pardo was physically abusive, as well– to Sylvia, to her daughter, to her dog. It’s very possible she didn’t seek a restraining order because she didn’t want to make Bruce Pardo mad, because she was afraid of what he might do next. As we now know, she’d have had reason to be.
But, far and away, most who are reporting this, are sympathetic to Bruce Pardo, murderer of nine people, who shot an eight-year-old in the face on a night he was scheduled to be an usher for the Christmas Eve mass at the local Roman Catholic church where he regularly ushered. Reporters muse over his depression, his desperation. Commenters blame the judge who ordered Pardo to pay — actually, probably reimburse — Sylvia Pardo $10,000 for her four years of misery with him. Some suggest he couldn’t bear the loss of the dog, ignoring what Sylvia Pardo says about the dog, that he never wanted it. Why believe the murdered woman, after all?
As to media outrage over the brutal murders of nine people? Or over shooting a little girl in the face and a teenage girl in the back while dressed as Santa Claus? Some of the news reports don’t even mention these latter things. Mostly, it’s all about the difficult conditions that must have “driven” Bruce Pardo to these unbelievable atrocities– anything to avoid facing up to what men actually do to destroy the lives of women and children.
There was significance, meaning, in Pardo’s choosing to wear that Santa Claus suit. He was resentful as all hell. There the family was, celebrating Christmas, planning a party, a party he might, in part, be having to pay for. He had complained bitterly during the divorce about the fact that Sylvia Pardo had gone to nice restaurants and had massages after their separation, that she had bought herself a new car. How dare she? How dare he not be the center of her life? How dare she not devote her energies to him, spend her money on him? How dare she have a nice car? That was a privilege that should be reserved for him alone (and he deserved two). And for her to ask for anything from him? Unthinkable. Who cares if she bought all the groceries and paid all the bills for the years they were together and brought her furniture and made a home for him, so what. That’s what women are supposed to do. That’s all they’re good for.
Some have suggested it was learning about Bruce Pardo’s child and Pardo claiming him as a tax exemption that caused the rift between the Pardos. I’d agree, but I’m betting I see that a little different than most people do. Here was a guy who had rigged a pretty nice setup for himself on the backs of women and children. He had a woman paying the bills, cooking the food, buying the groceries, making a nice home and going to work everyday. He had a tax writeoff every year and didn’t pay a penny in child support. He enjoyed being seen as the big ol’ generous teddy bear to people who didn’t know him — neighbors, people in the cafe he regularly went to to drink coffee, people in the church where he ushered — and he enjoyed, got off on, mistreating the people who knew him best, as abusers do. I think learning about Pardo’s son may have brought Sylvia Pardo face to face with what was true: that she had married an abusive man, wholly lacking in compassion or empathy, that she and her child were not safe.
Women are least safe, not during their abusive marriages, but after they have left their abusers. Lundy Bancroft, who has worked with abusive men for decades in groups set up for that purpose, describes it well:
The abuser’s dehumanizing view of his partner as a personal possession can grow even uglier as a relationship draws to a close. I sometimes find it extraordinarily difficult to get a client to remember at this point that his partner is a human being with rights and feelings rather than an offending object to destroy…For abused women separation is a time of particularly high risk of homicide or attempted homicide, which can sometimes involve murderous assaults on her new boyfriend, her children, or on other people she cares about. …
Why doesn’t [the abuser] allow the break to happen? On a conscious level he may simply miss her, but down deep he has other interests. He experiences the separation as a declaration by his partner that she is capable of surviving without him, that she is the best judge of what is good for her, that her needs shouldn’t always take a backseat to his, that her will has force. These messages represent a powerful summary of everything that he does not want in his relationship, and he feels driven to move quickly to prove them false.
The abuser is afraid of what his partner may discover if she succeeds in getting a respite from his control. She may see how good it feels to live without put-downs and pressure. She may notice that there are other people in the world, both women and men, who respect her and treat her well…She may start to think her own thoughts, without him there to monitor her reflections and channel them toward the views he wants her to have. Above all, she might discover how much better off she is without him. In short he doesn’t tolerate the break because on some level he senses that it is too healthy and healing for the woman…
Does he think carefully through these concerns? Probably not entirely. He reacts largely on automatic, based on ruts in his thinking and his behavior that have been deepening for years. And yet, I also keep observing how much more aware my clients are of their own strategies than you might expect; when they are upset with me, as they so often are, they often forget to keep their masks on, and they blurt out their honest thoughts and plans…
I was close to a case recently in which a woman left a psychological abuser who became increasingly threatening and scary over the months after she left him, to the point where she went as far as making arrangements with relatives regarding who should care for her two children in the event of her death. And although he had never hit her during their relationship, he tragically did in fact kill her, hiding a block away from the courthouse to ambush her as she was leaving a hearing… after which he committed suicide.
I think Sylvia Orza Pardo removing herself from her abusive relationship was unbearable to Bruce Pardo. The guy thought he’d done her a favor. He figured he’d given her everything he had and look what an ungrateful so-and-so she was.
He’d show her. He’d show them all. And so he did.
I pray for the 14 children who are now without parents to care for them. I pray for healing for the entire family. And I pray for an end to abuse and for justice for abused women and children everywhere.
Heart
While I’m dealing with one on the phone: tech guys, engineers are the most controllilng, misogynistic of men. They are I think, genetically superior in their field and choose it because they are like machines themselves. Probably have autism spectrum disorders and personality disorders. Marc Lepine?
I think these guys need the woman so much more than she needs them. They make a big deal of the settlement she’s asking for, and might get, or the lifestyle he “gave” her, but finally, what it is, is not that he even loves her, but that he cannot go on without her because he’s an emotional cripple. A child, stuck somewhere at the “terrible twos”. I know a lot of people want to blame the mothers of men like that, but I think, no, look to their fathers who were probably also control freaks.
Sorry this phone conversation is fracturing me.
I don’t mean to imply that Pardo or any man who behaves like this is mentally ill. I mean, what would be determined to be mental illness in a woman, is just par for the course for men. It is their decision whether they do this or not, and society will make excuses for them and validate them.
There’s an interesting thread over at Stan Goff’s Feral Scholar, titled prison gardens. Go read what Stan says is normal for men. You have to read the comments, because that’s where it comes up. And it’s men saying it.
Feral Scholar should be mandatory reading for men.
Thanks for everything you say here, Heart. It never cease to amaze me that anyone, ever, could hear about a man killing his ex and anyone close to her and wonder what happened. Really? Really, people fucking believe that there is any other explanation for a man killing his ex and people close to her/around her, besides he’s an abusive fuck who got angry that she left? Cuz me, I can’t in all my wildest imaginings think of a single other reason a dude ever does that or ever would. Thank you again for saying it.
Brilliant articel, Heart. I pray for all of the invisible women, who men murder, and the Media treat as ‘collateral damage’. Of all the murders of women, 99% are done by men.
How much do you want to bet that the child found in the pool was thrown there by this guy because the child was being a “pest” or “obnoxious” or “bothersome”? Was any mention made of this incident being investigated with that in mind at all?
I’m glad you reminded us that for abusive men, just the FACT of divorce makes it “acrimonious” enough. There was no “snapping” .Derrick Jensen in his book Endgame also discusses Bancroft’s work on abusive men and devotes several pages to emphasizing just how coldly calculating and able to turn it on and off on command these men can be.(He uses his abusive father as a very personal example). Pardo knew EXACTLY what he was doing and was in complete control of himself throughout the entire horrible, disgusting thing.
Thank you for posting this, Heart. I was shocked at how all the reporting was on the murderer and how he must have felt. I didn’t want to know about any of it if all of the words were going to be about him him him. His damned situation, his damned feelings, his damned life. The victims becoming more and more of these faceless blurbs next to the *tragedy* that was his damned life. I’m not sure what I would know about certain events had you not taken the time to write about them, Heart. Again, thank you. Your hard work is much appreciated.
When I was trying to find commemmorative ceremonies for the Montreal Massacre (Dec 6) in my area I phoned the editor of the university paper. Did I mean (later gunman rampage in another college). No, not that I said, filling him in on the 14 murdered female engineering students, slaughtered by Marc Lepine while he screamed that feminists were ruining his life. Hmm. Oh. That. Didn’t have anything in the pool. But oh wait, yes, Lepin’s mother’s book about him was coming out and that, that would be interesting.
I am really learning so much from this blog. This article was so shocking and SO real! I must fess up, I’ve been one of those, “But why do they do this…(fill in the male name and newspaper headline)?”
Perhaps I’ve wondered all my life about my cousins and their very abusive and weird father (PhD and scientist), and my other cousins who I found out only eight years ago had been abused throughout childhood by their father. I never wanted to be near the creepy PhD uncle, even when I was very young, and lucky for me, my parents somehow managed to protect me. I complained about how weird and mean he was to my Mom, who actually listened to me seriously. She saw him as “an SOB” — very strong words from my usually non-swearing Mom. It’s because of him that I stayed clear of the sciences in college, and was very suspicious of science/engineering type men all my life!!
I’m rambling a bit here, but I never realized how these mysteries of evil men who look “good” to the outside world stuck with me. How I wanted to know why “the Mason (middle class nice girls) got stuck with a creepy like him…”
So thanks Heart for being so good about putting this together for us, for sticking by these women and little girls, for being loyal, and for explaining what the hell is going on with these creepy men who commit 93% of the non-war related murders in the U.S. I’m still in shock over this article, because I saw the news reports of
Sylvia Pardo and her children. “What the heck, Christmas EVE!!,” shock shock and I had to turn the channel.
Thank the goddess I really got to YOUR story of this first, so that I didn’t have to hear that man’s side of it in the news. What causes them to snap indeed!?
Why I don’t have tv. It’s hard enough to face it here. I think for those who don’t get it, we need sites like this. But I sometimes have to disconnect, figuratively and literally.
And you know, this guy would have no problem with leaving her if he decided it was over. It was her making that decision which he could not tolerate.
The Santa suit: you know Heart I think this guy planned that knowing Santa would be seen but not suspiciously so, and he’d be able to mosey along everyone smiling at him ho ho ho right up until the door opened.
In the article I read (I’m pretty sure it was CNN.com) they don’t even mention the 8 year old he kicked off this mass murder with. Nowhere in the article.
I can’t believe she survived no. 1 and I can’t believe they didn’t mention he shot her no.2
How horrific can you get? Shooting an 8 year old in the face. And it’s not included in the article.
Nor do they mention the 16 year old he shot in the back as his second course of action.
Like Avril Joy I didn’t appreciate having to read all about this mass murderer’s life, his possible thought processes, his possible snapping point. The victims are like an afterthought in the article I read.
The article I read was also quite passive in its explanation of the son who drowned — (in what I read when the mother returned and he was panicked, holding the baby, though). They note his monetary contribution to the son like it’s admirable– that the mother had to fight for. And that it’s only fair he pay for when he lets his baby almost drown.
If this were a poor man (or *mother*) whose child were near-drowned due to his negligence, he’d probably be doing time for gross negligence. Too bad this creep didn’t have to do any time- it may have prevented him from murdering nine people.
This man was a typical narcissistic and sociopathic abuser, period. He didn’t snap he just got enraged his worshippers lost their religion.
You know I thought about that a moment ago? If this had been a woman, they would be burning up the presses with rages of condemnation and calling for her blood; cries of various tortures she should have to endure, and then the death penalty, or the mental institution… . Remember how Andrea Yates was treated?
There was an article in the Los Angeles Times today, but none of these details. As I said before, it’s amazing to read this stuff here first, because then you have time to really think in a feminist way as your first exposure to information. Wow, what a transforming process this is!
I’m spooked now when I hear about ads for “The Sheepfold” a battered women’s shelter run by right wing christians and advertised on a christian radio station. The words are always, “women and children who suffered from abuse,” but never is it “Women and children who were beated by men… ” Men are never mentioned as an agent at all. Just like Gaze — Israel did this or that, Palestinians did this or that, but the pictures show only men doing these attrocities. Never is it “the men of Israel attacked the women and children in Gaze,” for example. It’s how men and their dreadfulness is hidden in plain view. This is deliberately done to slow the process of women finally realizing who is doing what to whom in the world, in homes, to your children.
P.S. Sorry for such bad spelling — Gaza and “beaten” Shock keeps me from seeing straight on these articles!
Yes Sis, I keep thinking about the Casey Anthony case and the hate and calls for her to burn in hell she gets compared to this man. No one seems to care to wonder why she snapped or anything (of course she is presumed innocent until proven guilty, but the press has declared her guilty already and never talk about how horrible her life must have been for her to murder like they do for men). Also the moment I heard about this story I knew exactly why he killed those nine people. I knew it was because he was mad at his ex-wife for leaving him and he was mad at her family for helping her in her time of need. It was never a mystery to me.
Sylvia Pardo dared to ask for a alimony that was bigger than her salary after only two years of marriage …I don’t think she was afraid of Bruce at all .Abused women don’t think to ask for any money from their abusive husbands not even after 20 years of marriage , on the contrary, are ready to lose everything they may have achieved together ( house, car , savings etc. ) just to get ride of them .
Heart, thanks so much for this insightful, powerful article. I, too, read yours first before reading anything else about this story. After I read your article, I Googled “Bruce Pardo” and the articles that I’ve read so far are maddening, for reasons already stated - they’re quite sympathetic to Pardo and ignore his victims. Even more appalling are some of the comment threads. The second link I clicked on contains comments from three men who APPLAUD Pardo’s actions. One even thanks Pardo for “lashing out at those responsible for the Misandry Machine so prevalent in today’s society” and calls him a hero. I have no words.
Satsuma, I, too, get so angry when mainstream media ignores the fact that it’s MEN ABUSING WOMEN, not “women being abused.” Sometimes it’s even worse than that - 6 months ago Michael Jacques sexually assaulted and murdered his 12-yr-old niece, Brooke Bennett, and lured Brooke to his house by forcing her 14-year-old cousin to tell Brooke there was a party there. Jacques had been sexually assaulting this 14-yr-old girl (also a relative) for five solid years, and yet, an ABC news article referred to the 14-yr-old as Jacques’ “lover” and “accomplice.” For real. I was so enraged, and emailed ABC and the article’s author and everyone I knew and commented on the website and blah blah, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good and the article is still there as originally written, followed by comments by people agreeing that the 14-yr-old should be charged as an accomplice. Oh, and lots of mother-blaming comments, too (i.e. “How could a mother let someone do this to her child!”)
It just never ends…
Thanks Heart for writing so clearly and succinctly how abusive and violent men manipulate and control women and children. We constantly need to learn and understand how such violent and abusive men enforce their power and control over women. One thing common to many violent men is how they represent themselves as ‘respectable, middle-class model citizens’ to the outside world but safely within their castles they show their true colours. Such men are never out of control rather they are always in control and it is when as you and so many others say Heart, when the woman dares to leave the violent male then he has to take action in an attempt to retain his ‘property.’ This is is why separation is the most dangerous time for women because violent men do not suffer ‘temporary madness’ rather they do everything possible to enforce female submission and if this fails why they murder the woman because she is their property and in their minds ‘no other man will own her.’
Always, but always these men as Lundy Bancroft shows are in control and they use cunning and guile to deceive most individuals into believing they are the ‘real victims.’ Pardo was not a sociopath - rather he enacted the extremes of patriarchal masculinity - which is the belief women and children exist solely to service his needs. But of course our male-dominated society does not want to hear the truth instead we only hear/read partial truths and always it is from the male perspective. But at the same time, male accountability is never admitted, because it is always women who are the ones who supposedly provoke such men to commit mass murder and femicide.
Pardo sought to retain his ‘rightful power and control’ over Sylvia Pardo and she - well she dared to attempt to escape and so she had to be murdered because women are never human beings but only adjuncts to men. As regards Pardo deliberately and cold bloodedly murdering an 8 year old girl and a 16 year old girl - well the media once again is conveniently suffering from amnesia and so we only hear the partial truth. It is called hiding and denying violent men and the complex ways they use to enforce male power and control over women and children.
Agirl, I have approved your comment ONLY because it serves my own purposes in educating those who read here about domestic violence, abuse and what abusive men do to women and children in the world. I have deleted the link to your site, in which you lavish your sympathies and compassion on a man who has brutally executed nine people, shot two young girls, including his stepdaughter, torched his ex in-laws’ home, destroying everything and anything survivors might have had as mementoes of their murdered family members, and left his own mother to go on with her life knowing he planned to kill her too.
What a prize this guy was. Yeah. Let’s really lavish our sympathies on him. But you are one of MANY, agirl (and I hope you aren’t actually a girl or a woman because I fear for you, given your sensibilities and denial around male violence) and that is what is really horrifying. This is a time in history in which it is absolutely A-okay to publicly hate on women, to the point of defending their murderers, and A-okay to support the men who murder them. Good job, Agirl, way to represent.
On to some dearly-needed education.
You say, Agirl:
Here are the facts.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gm6-_k-0T2iGWVOGoVqXVg8I4HogD95BKU7G2
Now, mathematics is not my forte, but even I can follow what happened here. More on point, abusive men ARE, sadly, an area of expertise to me, and what happened here is clear as day.
How do you think the couple managed to build a nest egg of $88,500 in two years? Given Pardo’s debt. The guy had a $2,700/month mortgage payment and $31K in credit card debt. He sure didn’t amass that during the two years of his marriage. This was a guy who liked to live high on the hog. If he made $122K a year, he probably brought home about $6,000 per month, meaning he was already in trouble debt-wise when he married Sylvia. This is what I mean; marrying her was a cushy deal for him. She brought with her an extra $31k a year, probably $2,000 per month take home, just about exactly what he needed to make ends meet, if, as he says, his monthly expenses were $8,900. She also filled his house with furniture.
How do you think, with him paying $2,700 a month mortgage and car payments on a Hummer and a Miata, that the couple was able to save $88,000 in two years? Not on his salary, I’ll tell you that! They were able to do it because she brought HER SALARY to the marriage.
Be that as it may, when she left him, he took the money they had saved together. He drained their community savings account down to the $17K the lying sack of horse manure strapped to his body when he went to kill her entire family. Then he quit his damn job. There is NO other explanation for the fact that he got no severance pay and no unemployment.
He is pulling ALL, EVERY LAST ONE of the pathetic, despicable, misogynist tricks of the Men’s Rights Movement. A more sick and disgusting crowd of men it would not be possible to find anywhere.
And to top it off the guy whines to his little buddies at the coffee shop about Sylvia taking him to the cleaners. That was a REVERSAL. HE TOOK HER TO THE CLEANERS.
She was entitled to HALF of that $88K AT LEAST. They were able to save that money in two years because of HER. And yet what did she get in the end? $10,000, one fourth of that. The equivalent, roughly, of five months of her take home pay when she contributed ALL of her take home pay to the marriage for two years, TO HIS BENEFIT, because there he still was with the HOUSE, the CARS, and whatever else he bought that racked up that $31K in debt. Yet the sucker WHINES because she goes to restaurants (though he seemed to virtually live in one, all about the lattes and pastries and whining to the waiters and waitresses who had no clue what an abusive, murderous bully this apparently “gentle” man was) and gets a massage once in a while, and because she “didn’t have to pay rent” when she was living at her parents (because he kicked her out!). It would be shocking, but it isn’t, not at all, sadly. Men do this to women every minute of every day of every year, year after year, with disgusting dedication and disgusting malevolence. They do it and they feel JUSTIFIED in it and they SUPPORT each other and they ENCOURAGE each other to do it to DEATH, as HERE.
So that’s what happened here.
But here’s the other way in which you are WRONG WRONG WRONG Agirl.
When a woman goes to an attorney for a divorce, the ATTORNEY figures out what she is entitled to under the law of the state that she lives in and under the most current case law. She didn’t waltz in to the attorney’s office or into court and say, “I want twice my monthly salary per month!” She presented the figures to the attorney, the attorney or his paralegal or secretary plugged them into a template, and up popped the number Sylvia Orza Pardo was entitled to. While the guy was working, based on the amount of money he was earning, the amount he had in savings, the amount of money allotted by law for rent and utilities and so on, the amount the attorney asked for WAS THE AMOUNT SYLVIA ORZA PARDO WAS LEGALLY ENTITLED TO. The guy sees that, sees that his gravy train is coming to an abrupt end, and he does what all stupid, cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face-but-whatever MRAs do, he QUITS his job. Because goddamn it, no matter what, he’s not giving her a DIME. That’s how these guys THINK. It’s why they will go so far as killing THEMSELVES, cutting off their own LIVES to spite a woman. Pathetic, miserably SICK, miserably dangerous men.
Anyway, that figure wasn’t her figure. It’s what she was legally entitled to. And then he quits and lies his ass off about that and, oh, he doesn’t really know where the $60K went to in two months, oops, but gee, he is just really broke.
So in the end, again, she gets $10,000. Which is NOTHING. And it is more than nothing because he never gave it to her! She never got it! Read the link, he was complaining, in his latest whining fit, that he couldn’t come up with it. Actually, he was planning to strap it to his body when he killed her and eight other people she loved.
The ignorance around how this works is WILLFUL. Men, men’s rights people, KNOW how this works. You go to the attorney, the attorney tells you what your rights are, what you are entitled to, and that’s what the attorney asks for. Then the ex’s attorney argues the ex’s side and tells the court why the ex shouldn’t have to give the full amount the other side is entitled to. And then the judge makes the decision, if the parties can’t agree. It sounds like in this case the attorneys negotiated the $10K figure and the judge just rubber stamped what the parties agreed to, for god’s sake.
Of course, this piece of work, Bruce Pardo, knew he was going to be going on a killing spree so he had nothing to lose in agreeing to the $10K, he was out of there after murdering folks, on to Iowa with his $17K and who knows how much of the couple’s savings he had stashed away in other bank accounts.
This was an abusive, abusive man. He may not have been physically violent in the ways people define physical violence prior to murdering all of these people, but guaranteed, he was abusive. I don’t know whether Sylvia Pardo was afraid of him. But all of us know now that if she was not, she certainly would have been right to have been.
So that’s what I’ve got to say to you, Agirl, and to all the people who share your sad sentiments who are reading here. Read. Get an education about what these men really do to women.
Heart
Oh, agirl, why do I doubt that you are? No grown woman calls herself ‘girl’. You massive waste of space you. A man your age calling grown women girls? I wish we could trace your ISP number to warn all the women in your area that you are a potential (if not actual) predator. The first thing men who abuse do, is think of the women in their lives as “girls”.
Fuck right the hell off.
Not to mention, this guy certainly had a 401(k) or profit sharing plan from his employer which was probably included in the calculations of what Sylvia Pardo was entitled to.
HAVING SAID ALL OF THIS:
It would not matter at all if Sylvia Pardo HAD tried to take him to the cleaners. (She did not. If she had intended to, all she’d have had to do was remove the money from the bank accounts BEFORE she filed for divorce. The money was not what was on her mind.) This is a guy who MURDERED her and eight of her family members, shot two little girls and intended to murder his own mother. NOTHING a woman could EVER do would have ANYTHING to do with that. I don’t care what it is.
Heart,
This is amazing reporting and educating around this horrible act and D.V. in general. Your work on D.V. has always been impeccable and informed so well by yours and other women’s experiences which you have always taken the time to listen to and incorporate into your reporting and educating. What you have done here is priceless and spot-on. I can not praise and thank you enough for your tireless efforts to remember and work on behalf of Sylvia Orza Pardo and every other woman who is or has been victimized by batterers and abusers.
Thank you. And I’m so sorry you, or anybody else, has to do this work.
I plotted and planned when and how to get out. From the time I knew I had to but couldn’t. As I’ve mentioned before the plane out of the Arctic settlement was driven by the abuser.
Anyway, I would help any woman plan her escape and give her advice about what to do. It does not stop the abuser though. Just gets you out with a teeny fraction of what you deserve after being a ‘room and board’ slave for X years.
Men will always abuse the children, even if they are adults, if they can’t get at the wife.
Sylvia Pardo dared to ask for a alimony that was bigger than her salary after only two years of marriage
Yes, god forbid that any woman actually ask for what is hers by law. Like alimony and the financial equity she brought to and helped create in the marriage. Even after “only” two years.
But it doesn’t matter because she didn’t get the alimony you say, without citation, that she asked for. “In the end, Sylvia didn’t get much more than a $10,000 settlement and a dog that Nord insisted Pardo didn’t want.” I don’t see any alimony award in excess of $31,000.
But, hey, she asked for it.
Abused women don’t think to ask for any money from their abusive husbands not even after 20 years of marriage , on the contrary, are ready to lose everything they may have achieved together ( house, car , savings etc. ) just to get ride of them .
And if they’re not ready to lose everything they’ve gotten or contributed to during the marriage, if they instead have the nerve to ask for anything they’re entitled to by law — well, then, they asked for it.
What a load of woman-hating shite.
@Agirl. I’m remaining anonymous for this reply to albeit briefly reply to you. I was an abused woman for twenty seven years of marriage (in many ways). Yup I spelled that out. And you know what? even after seven years of separation and almost one year of divorce (yeah that’s how long he’s strung it out) I continue to fight him for HALF of our assets. Yup HALF, that’s all. And you know what? I’m gonna get what I am demanding. HALF of our assets. So don’t come on here with your pathetic little stereotypes that abused women don’t fight for what is rightly theirs.
Hear that?
Your analysis brings back a great many memories (same old story, abusive men all work from the same textbook). Years later, I learned that all the running down of assets, derelicting the house, refusing to pay the bills but running up the bills, transferring assets out of his name - was illegal.
Doesn’t make any difference. They feel entitled, feel wronged and they do whatever they please. Some of what my Dad did wasn’t just claiming what he felt he had a right to, but purely manipulation and revenge - he tried to claim custody of us saying his wife was unfit and had abandoned us - did he want us? Heck no!
So that guy could have been charged for negligence of his kid, eh? Our neighbour half a mile down the road snatched me up once when I was 3 years old and runing like heck straight for a major highway. Dad (babysitting) was asleep on the sofa. So nice of him, he agreed to ‘babysit’ us twice a year…
And it’s true that the lawyers seem to have more say than anyone else. Our mum wanted rid of him and no money, just a roof over her head so that she could raise her kids. The lawyers forced the sale of the house because she wouldn’t back down.
This just makes me mad. I knew at the time that she was scared for her life. Until I learned how ordinary it is, how many ‘normal’ guys snap like this, there was always that doubt in my mind that she had reason for that fear.
AMB: good luck. I’d guess it’s criminal that it’s taken so long already.
Sheesh - I think it took four years even before my parents divorce came through - dad refused to sign the divorce papers or summat.
I am glad that Pardo suffered burns when he tried to burn the house down; he deserved to feel that pain.
It is a pity that we did not capture Pardo alive. Having to fight his burn wounds in the hospital while knowing he would be sent to prison would have been continuing justice.
I wish I could open the NYT and read this piece. By making us small and invisible (like the language Jeyoani talks about) we get used to not seeing ourselves, and then it becomes easy to empathize with the man, the murderer. Reading these comments reminds me of the one thing bell hooks has written that makes me furious: she, too, wonders why Nicole stayed in the marriage, talks about the glamour and comfort (?) of being married to a wealthy star. All I can think is patriarchy trains women to stay - through everything, even death. Patriarchy trains us to not even see ourselves, much less defend ourselves.
This will mark a little more than one full year since I came across this blog, and I must say, it’s provided such shocking insights into how women have to deal with men. You read about all the attrocities committed against women worldwide, and how the media covers it all up with “Israel attacked” or “three children were abused” or the catholic church settled a huge lawsuit against “those accused of child molestation” — i.e. rape etc. and never do you read the words “MEN DID ALL OF THIS.” I think this lulls women into this false sense of security out there, and yet this blog and Heart’s commentary finally expains the unexplainable.
Lundy Bancroft was also a big help to me.
I have so many friends who I come to know in time grew up in terrible circumstances with really abusive and mean fathers. You can know women for many years before these stories emerge.
This site has helped me a lot to connect with women, and to try to guy at underlying pain that women struggle with. This helps, because I can be more aware or more present, or gives my ideas on how to do a better job or be a better friend.
This hetero family violent awful world where men live in your home and become monsters is just something that I myself am not a part of. Even in my office, I interact in meaningful ways almost only with the other women. The men are so dead or so clueless or so creepily sexist, that I just leave them alone.
I hope this website can really educate young women as to what to look out for, what to see as a red flag BEFORE they ever get overly involved with these men. I know it’s hard, because they hide behind such snake oil salesmen smiles and charm, but again, if you know the patterns, if you suspect something or feel uneasy about a potential date or boyfriend, REALLY look into your Heart. It’s never too late to just back away if you feel disrespected even for an instand. It’s this flicker of insight that can protect you before it’s too late.
I’m very impressed with Heart’s ability to take the news that everyone else settles for and create a fountain of women’s insights into the true face of daily evil that is these abusive men who will kill entire families just because THEY didn’t win out in the end, or just because the woman chose to leave them.
The gravey train aspect of how these women’s small incomes get riped off was a shocker too — how Pardo “stole” his wife’s income to finance his lavish lifestyle, all the while the media trumpets HIS huge income and thus misses a sneaker and creepier truth.
I know how hard women work for money, and I know how women feel a lot of the time when a husband finally dies. I’m often surprised that they don’t feel much grief at all, they seem free of some burden, and now I’m beginning to see that women can live with men for 25 years and it’s a living hell. One of the other women financial planners in our office mentioned this to me about here clients who are recent widows. She’s been in the industry longer than I have, and she’s also straight, and perhaps has more insight into this — she’s divorced and made a successful second career–SHE KNOWS!
I’m rambling a bit. It takes time for me to really understand how it is that so many women’s lives are ruined by men, or how society is ruined by the crime, the violence the creepiness that is so much a part of men out of control worldwide. As a lesbian, I just don’t deal with any of this; it is the living nightmare of straight women, and how they actually have to be more vigilent around men than women ever have to be around other women.
I meant Nicole Brown Simpson.
“AMB: good luck. I’d guess it’s criminal that it’s taken so long already.”
Thanks Sophie, yes it’s been seven years and I still haven’t had a penny from an apparently ’straight forward’ divorce mostly because he delays, refuses to sign forms, put house up for sale etc. While he, I may add continues to live in a ‘paid for’ house half owned by me. No mortgage or rent while I live on incapacity benefit,
It just infuriated me that ‘Agirl’ (heaven help you if you are a ‘girl’) thinks that abused women automatically have no fight in them.
A.M.B., I’m so sorry. It sounds like you need a new attorney/solicitor though? One of my exes tried something like this, and the situation was solved when I got a new attorney who immediately issued a subpoena and a notice of deposition. He didn’t want to be deposed because he didn’t want to testify to anything under oath and he sure didn’t want to produce documents, so on the day of his deposition he showed up and we settled. This after just the kind of stonewalling you are talking about.
The problem, of course, is he’s probably bled you dry and you don’t have the money to hire a new attorney.
And heck yeah, we fight, we survivors, you better believe it. Sometimes the feeling is, you might take me out, sucker, but I’m going to go out fighting. God. If we didn’t have any fight in us we’d never have left in the first place!
Well, it’s as I supposed, as I knew, because I know these guys way too well. This is from an AP article where Sylvia Orza’s best friend was interviewed– her last name is Juarequi.
The sucker wanted MONEY. He was taking HER to the cleaners, not the other way around. He wanted her paycheck, her services, her homemaking, and for her to keep her mouth shut unless he told her he wanted to hear from her.
Another article says Sylvia Pardo wanted to have a baby with this guy– then she finds out he’s abandoned his disabled son. He won’t add her name to any bank accounts, though he’s building an $80K-plus nest egg thanks to her. She said he expected her to bear all of the expenses for her own children without looking to him for help, despite the fact that he made four times what she did and supposedly loved her and cared about her. Translated, all of this means, he thought he bought himself a possession for his use and exploitation and pillaging.
Just like I said.
For sure, Julia, this is not going to show up in the New York Times. The woman-hating Men’s Rights garbage has so filled the airwaves and media that even people who should know better do not, like bell hooks.
Emma, thanks so much, xxxooo.
Heart
http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_11332090
I’m getting tired of the stereotypes of abused women too. “Abused women don’t”… because, you know, we’re all alike. Once a man hits us with his fists we all become weepy with our head down and can never stick up for ourselves again! If we dare speak up for ourselves or ever lift our chin again, why, he couldn’t have been abusive.
So true, Amananta. Of course, when we DO leave it’s, “Why did she stay so long?” or “Why didn’t she say anything?” or “Why did she marry him in the first place?” or the WORST, most DESPICABLE one (imo), “Well, she must have issues to have hooked up with an abuser.” But then, if we leave and demand what we’re entitled to, it’s, “Well, she must not be afraid of him then, she must not be really abused.” Anything but face up to the fact that men in large numbers abuse and batter women, and there is no 100 percent for sure way to know ahead of time that you are connecting with an abuser.
Sick, sick, misogynist garbage.
Most people don’t know why people are bad. There are stereotypes of what “bad” is. Most people also ask, “Well why didn’t she _________?” What we need to look at is that something really awful did happen to not only the woman, but also to children and relatives as well. These monster men are pretty much everywhere, they have created weird corporate cultures that serve to preserve their clueless dehumanized ways of being.
I believe that most men actually do lie to women, they brag about it on talk radio all the time. You wouldn’t believe how openly they brag about how they lie, cheat and use up women sexually, and this is viewed as mainstream “entertainment.”
So what we can do as women is report the truth of the survivors, the truth of those women killed by the men, and learn what is the big picture of it all.
I think it is very hard for people to see institutionalized patriarchy for what it is, institution, and thus not about individuals, but about a deeply rooted and evil system. It is a system when fundamentalist christian men sermonize about women being submissive to their husbands (gods). It is everywhere in Mormonism, in Islam, in Catholicism.
There is the myth, “Well why are women members then?” and that I admit is one that makes me wonder as well. I think when you are a lesbian, you just really are pretty outside of all common human social situations, institutions and events. So nothing in the worlds that might be attractive to heterosexual women hold any attraction for us. We are bored a lot in hetero normative worlds, and boredom is always a sign of patriarchy, according to Mary Daly. Such a good insight.
I believe that Heart and Bancroft and others are revealing the depth of what these men are really about, and we have more information than ever before about how perps work, how pedofile men lure children, how battered woman syndrome sets in. We know more than we did in 1975 when almost no one (except Susan Brownmiller) knew about spousal rape of women in marriage by their husbands. What!! rape in marriage, isn’t that an oxymoron? I heard many men say this back then.
But if all marriage is really about male ownership of women, and is so deeply contaminated with this legacy, then it is our job as feminists to model what can work in a new world.
We are digging up the evil to study it, and learn how to flee from it in time. We are saving children by warning them what to look for in adults. Women are protecting children every day by being open and loving, and LISTENING to their daughters, and BELIEVING them.
Women are coming here and telling their stories, and this is enlightening to all of us, whether we were ever in the same situations or not.
When I see the womanhatred going blatant malestream, and the epidemic of violent porn, and the trafficking that men put women into, I know that patriarchy is panicing, running away, getting very fearful. We know that we can keep fundamentalism on the ropes, and I believe the biggest challenge as women, is to create alternative places for women to be and think. Here is one such place, but we need even more places.
We know that men need to do their own work, and that they waste our time. Liberal men waste our time, conservative men are not going to change. Women can change, and we must change.
We have to know that the one common denominator of all of this is that it is men doing it! We know how dangerous they are, and how they try to use women all the time. We know this, and we can tell the truth and be lighthouses of warning, but also oceans of inspiration to create a world where women are fully human, alive and fantastic. I’ve seen this fantastic world, I know it can be done, and I know we have more resources than ever before to report this to us.