According to different sources Saturday night at the Chloe Randolph Organization’s Evening of Remembrance, Kentucky has the highest or second-highest domestic violence rate in the United States.
And if nationwide projections hold true—one in five women will be a victim of a rape or committed rape in their lifetime—then there are 450,000 women in the commonwealth currently who will fall into that category.
The eye-opening numbers were shared to raise awareness and were supported throughout the evening by speakers who shared their personal stories related to domestic violence and sexual assault, including keynote speaker Lt. Mark Wynn, who spent 21 years in the Nashville Police Department, much of it as a detective, and who now owns and runs Wynn Consulting, a domestic and sexual violence prevention training and consulting organization.
Wynn has traveled all over the U.S. and the world speaking and teaching about domestic violence and policing techniques.
The impetus of Wynn’s life work started when he was a boy. His mother and father divorced, and she later married another man, whom Wynn described as charismatic but also an alcoholic and a sharecropper who soon took her and her children from their native Tennessee to his home state of Texas.
Wynn said he witnessed many incidents when his stepfather abused and almost killed his mother. In one incident, his stepfather opened the passenger side door and pushed his mother out of the car while speeding down the highway. The stepfather pulled over moments later, walked back to his mother, picked her up and brought her back to the car, Wynn said.
“She was broken and looked dead,” he said.
It was then that the 7-year-old Wynn and his 12-year-old brother decided to kill his stepfather. They first thought the best plan would be to stab him when he’d passed out. But as they were about to attempt that, Wynn’s older brother remembered how he’d seen the stepfather engage in violence and his stepfather’s toughness. They decided stabbings wouldn’t do it.
Instead, they plotted to poison him with Black Flag insect spray that they poured into a bottle and gave to him while he was drinking. Wynn said he drank the whole bottle but the poison did nothing to him.
And so, the stepfather would remain, and the beatings continued.
Years later, his brother joined the service and went to Vietnam, leaving Wynn, now 13, with his mother and a sister. It was after another brutal beating that his mother decided she was going to kill the stepfather. Still bleeding, she grabbed a knife and was going to the stepfather who was drinking on the porch.
Wynn stopped her. “You won’t kill him, and you’ll go to jail,” the 13-year-old Wynn said.
Later that night, the police came to their residence and took the stepfather to the jail. Luckily, a godsend—and unlike the past when he was released immediately—he was kept in jail for the night, having been told by jail officials to say and sleep off his drunkenness.
That was the window for their escape. Wynn, his mother and sister fled, hightailing it out of Texas and leaving all their possessions behind.
Wynn said that’s how it goes when a person can finally leave a domestic violence situation.
“You just leave (all your possessions),” he said. “None of it matters because you’re running away from death.”
It’s also support for CRO Director Kristie Randolph’s goal to bring an emergency shelter to Henderson so that domestic violence survivors have a safe place to go as they flee abusive situations. An emergency shelter does not have a listed address and is kept secure and hidden so abusers can’t find their victims.
“I want to bring a shelter to Henderson because I think we need it,” Randolph said at the end of Saturday night’s event.
Randolph, and husband Jay, started the Chloe Randloph Organization to honor their daughter who was killed by her estranged husband in March 2019 by both raising awareness about domestic violence and to improve conditions and offer more help for survivors.
Wynn said his mother was always on his mind when as a cop years later he would respond to domestic violence calls. On one of the first ones, the door opened up and the victim looked at him.
“I swear to God, she looked just like my mother,” he said.
When she told Wynn and his partner, everything was OK because he’s asleep now, Wynn’s partner was ready to leave. But Wynn wanted to stay, to talk to the woman, to get her side—something he said had never happened in the 1960s in Texas when the police came to answer a disturbance at his house.
Wynn said police in the past have done an atrocious job of dealing with domestic violence, exemplified how domestic violence was mostly ignored when he was a boy. He also said that in Nashville, during his early career, 23,000 domestic violence calls came in each year and there was only one detective dedicated to investigating them.
Nashville, he said, has come a long way from his early days. It now has the largest family justice center in the world, Wynn said.
Also at Saturday’s event was current Miss Kansas Alexis Smith, whose story made news nationwide this summer when she informed the judges that her abuser was in the audience at the pageant.
She said she grew up around abusive relationships and experienced it firsthand as well. She said her purpose as a pageant winner is to help teenagers who are experiencing abusive relationships to understand that what they are going through is not healthy and could be dangerous.
And starting off the speeches was Jennifer Adkins Miller, a Henderson native whose daughter is Hadley Duvall. Duvall, a reproductive rights advocate, earned notoriety for political commercials she appeared in during Gov. Andy Beshear’s campaign last year in which she told the story of being raped by her stepdad at age 12. Duvall got pregnant and later miscarried, but her message was that Beshear’s opponents’ stance on abortion would have forced her to have the child.
Duvall has also appeared with Vice President Kamala Harris on her presidential campaign. She was scheduled to speak Saturday, but was unable to attend. Miller spoke about some of the details her ex-husband subjected her daughter to and the manipulations he used on her.
