Slain woman more than a statistic

Another one. Sometimes we sit and listen to the grisly details spilling out of the cable-news anchor. We stare at the photo of a smiling woman, now dead. We consider the case against the prime suspect or “person of interest,” often a husband, boyfriend or ex-lover.

Over time, the names become as familiar as our neighbors. Laci Peterson and her unborn child, Conner, whose remains were found beside San Francisco Bay. Rachel Entwistle and her 9-month-old daughter, Lillian, shot to death in their Massachusetts home. A pregnant Lisa Underwood and her 7-year-old son, Jayden, found slain in a shallow grave near Fort Worth, Texas.

Their stories crumble together into a single drone. It happens everywhere and too often, one after the next.

On average, three women are killed by spouses or partners each day, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. But unless we know someone trapped in an abusive relationship, the stories lose their resonance.

It’s someone else’s problem. We flip the channel.

We shouldn’t. Here is a case you probably haven’t heard of, that of Gloria Estela Cantu Manzanares, 30. Just this week, a Cameron County, Texas, jury found her 31-year-old husband, Norberto Manzanares, guilty of strangling her before driving her body across the Rio Grande to Matamoros.

“I used to watch these stories on the news, and not once did I think it could happen to us,” said Mario Cantu, Gloria Estela’s brother. “It happened to other people. But not to good people like us, educated in Catholic private schools and who never wished ill on others.”

Sometimes we miss the obvious signs: shoving, slapping, shouting. But many times, there aren’t signs to miss.

I want you to know Gloria Estela’s story because she shouldn’t be forgotten, her story reduced to a cautionary tale, a domestic violence statistic. Her 70-year-old father pretends to be strong, but her death has consumed him. She was his consentida, his favorite, always calling him cariño, my love.

Each day, Mario Cantu Sr. would stop by his daughter’s Brownsville, Texas, home and play with her two boys. Gloria Estela would tell her father about words her sons had learned or something funny they’d said. Or she would talk about her kindergarten students, like the boy who would take his medication only if she gave him a kiss on the cheek.

Norberto, 4, and Alejandro, 2 – Gloria Estela’s boys – now live with her only sister, Rosa Elena. The oldest no longer cries at night or stays up watching cartoons, waiting for his mother to come home.

Authorities say they probably will never know why Manzanares killed his wife, but there is no doubt the couple had financial trouble. At the time, no one else knew, not even Gloria Estela. They had been ordered to move out of their home the day she died. She didn’t know that her home had been foreclosed or that it had been sold. Nothing had been packed, and the refrigerator, still full, held an unopened gallon of milk and her sack lunch for the day.

After killing his wife, testimony revealed, Manzanares fed the boys breakfast, wrapped his wife’s body in a blanket and loaded her into the back seat of their 1998 Chevrolet Venture. The oldest boy, 3 at the time, later told a psychologist that his mother “was sleeping.”

Once in Matamoros, Manzanares ran into a Mexican clinic shouting for help. He told doctors a fender-bender had turned deadly. One attacker, he said, held him at knifepoint while the other suffocated his wife with a black plastic bag.

He had begged for her life, he said through tears.

Back in Texas, local television stations ran with the story. It was compelling – “Texas teacher murdered in Mexico.”

Manzanares’ story, of course, never added up. First there were four carjackers, then two, later three. Doctors at Clinica San Francisco said Gloria Estela’s body was already stiff and showing signs of rigor mortis, so it wasn’t possible for her to have been dead for 10 minutes, as her husband claimed. Vendors in the area recalled no fight, and the minivan showed no signs of a fender-bender.

Manzanares will be sentenced in April on the murder conviction. Our attention, what little we have left, will turn to another victim.

There’s always another one.