Families honor loved ones lost to domestic violence during annual Silent Witness March

CHEYENNE — Friends and family of women lost to domestic violence in Wyoming walked in silence Monday to memorialize their loved ones.

Participants in the Zonta Club of Cheyenne’s annual Silent Witness March carried images and silhouettes representing their loved ones from the Wyoming Supreme Court Building on Capitol Avenue to the Laramie County Library, where domestic violence survivor Mary Billiter shared her experience with abuse.

Billiter met her abuser when she was in her early 20s. She said he was handsome and made more money than she did. At 26, Billiter eloped with him.

“It was very small, because he did weddings for a living, so he hated weddings,” Billiter told the crowd. “He controlled the whole thing. I mean, looking back, all the signs were there.”

Going through a slide show, with pictures and documents from her 10 years married to her abuser, Billiter continued to tell the crowd about how during her second pregnancy, after giving birth to twins and again being pregnant with twins, her husband would hit her, even kicking her pregnant stomach.

Billiter gave birth two months early, in April of 2001, to twins, a boy and girl. Her son did not survive, and her daughter was only 3 pounds, 9 ounces.

“(My abuser’s) wedding band fit over her wrist,” Billeter told the crowd. “You don’t know how tiny that is.”

“The (operating) room was just deadly quiet,” Billiter said. “They pulled (my son) out, and his head was all smashed in. The priest came, and he had holy water in a seashell and gave him (and his sister) last rites.”

Billiter has two other twin boys, and at one point, one of her sons was hit repeatedly by her abuser, leaving a hand mark on his face. They were living in Arizona at the time, and Child Protective Services was called, and Billiter thought someone would finally help.

The claim was marked as “unsubstantiated” because Billiter’s abuser signed papers telling CPS that his family didn’t need help.

“Are my twins, at 5 years old, going to say anything against their dad? … No, they’re not,” Billiter said. “When I got kicked in my second trimester in the stomach, and he picked me up on my neck until I passed out? I came to with blood (on me) and my sons standing over me. And when one of them ran to the neighbor’s house, their dad picked them up like a bag of trash and said, ‘We don’t tell anybody about this.’”

Billiter and her children were abused by her former husband until she was able to leave in 2004.

Billiter is Roman Catholic, and when she was finally able to leave her abuser, her abuse was so well documented with the church that she was able to receive an annulment, which is incredibly rare in Catholicism.

Billiter’s first marriage wasn’t her only experience with abuse. Her second marriage was abusive, as well.

Billiter joked that she married a cowboy with a gun because she thought he would protect her; however, she was unaware of his undiagnosed mental health issues.

She was able to share her experience as a survivor, but many of those in attendance were there to mourn their loved ones who did not survive their abusers.

A large group of family members joined the march to memorialize Angela Marie Elizondo, a Cheyenne woman who was killed in 2019.

“She worked in the hospital, she worked as a waitress, she volunteered for Meals on Wheels, she helped the homeless,” Angela’s mother, Cecilia Elizondo, told the crowd. “... We are very proud of our daughter.”

Cecilia was supported by her husband and Angela’s father, Ricardo Elizondo, as she briefly spoke with the group about her daughter.

Elizabeth Juarez also shared the story of her daughter, Victoria Juarez, who was killed and found in the basement of Anong’s Thai Cuisine in south Cheyenne.

At the time of Victoria’s death, she left behind a 2½-year-old boy; the man that killed Victoria was not her son’s father. Elizabeth originally didn’t want him to call her mom, because she didn’t want to erase her daughter, she told the crowd. It wasn’t until years later, when she and her grandson talked about it that she felt OK being called Mom.

“He told me, ‘I got a mom up in heaven, and I got a mom right here,’” Elizabeth told the crowd.

According to the Wyoming Department of Health, 33.9% of women and 30.5% of men in the state experience intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner sexual violence and/or intimate partner stalking in their lifetimes.

According to Billiter, it’s important to share these stories to support each other, and help alleviate the guilt and shame that abuse can cause.

“A young woman came up to me, and she lost her cousin, and she said, ‘You know, I heard that you know, I heard you still carry the shame that you picked a bad one,’” Billiter told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. “She said, ‘It’s not your shame to carry you didn’t pick a bad one. He picked a good one.’”

For Billiter, hearing that it wasn’t her fault from another woman who had lost someone to abuse was freeing.

“He sought me out because I was good, and there was something so freeing about that,” Billiter said. “Because this entire time I thought there was something so fundamentally wrong with me for my choices and how it impacted my children. I’ve never thought that he saw something in me that he could manipulate and control and coerce, and eventually abuse and try to destroy, until I left in the middle of the night with my three children.”

Telling stories like these is about breaking cycles of abuse, Billiter said.

A display of the victims’ silhouettes and a brief account of their death were set up at the library, and will remain there for the rest of the week, according to a news release. This display will be available for public viewing, along with proclamations from Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins about ending violence against women.

The display includes the stories of Victoria Elizabeth Juarez, Teresa Zimmermen, Crystal Town, Janessa Rae Spencer, Robin Munis, Ashley May Craig, Angela Elizondo, Kary McKinny, Lynne Poole, and a silhouette honoring the missing and murdered indigenous women of Wyoming.

The march and the presentation on Violence Against Women are some of the activities hosted by the Zonta Club of Cheyenne during the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, which runs from Nov. 25 through Dec 10, according to the news release.

The initiative was started by the Women’s Global Leadership Institute at Rutgers University in 1991, and is recognized by activists around the world as a time to raise awareness in their communities and to call for the elimination of all types of gender-based violence, according to the release. More than 6,000 organizations from 187 countries have participated in the campaign.