Murder Suspect Abused Past Girlfriends Three Spokane Women Filed For Protection From Post Falls Man Accused In Shooting

A Post Falls man - accused of stalking and gunning down the latest woman to date him - abused and threatened to kill at least three former girlfriends in Spokane, court records state.

Spokane County detectives are convinced Stephen A. Cherry stabbed one of the women several times in the chest and stomach outside her Spokane Valley home in 1988.

To this day, Janice Butler remains terrified of Cherry, who was never charged in the attack because prosecutors said there wasn’t enough evidence, said sheriff’s Detective Mark Henderson.

“There was quite an extensive investigation done,” said Henderson, who handled the case. “We felt there was probable cause and that he should have been charged.”

Butler calls from time to time to check up on the 46-year-old man, Henderson said.

Cherry is now accused of shooting Susan Foutz of Hauser Lake, Idaho, to death with a 30.06 rifle last Sunday.

The former truck driver is charged with first-degree murder, aggravated assault and aggravated battery. He is currently in serious condition at Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur d’Alene, recovering from a wound he sustained when he shot himself in the chest outside Foutz’s house.

Butler and two other Spokane women, who dated Cherry between 1988 and 1993, asked judges for protection against him, according to records filed in Spokane County Superior Court.

Spokane’s Pauline Fissler said Tuesday her former boyfriend should have been stopped a long time ago.

Police in both Spokane and Kootenai counties were well aware of his violent tendencies, Fissler said.

“That girl should be alive today,” she said of Foutz. “I’m furious.”

In July 1988, Butler got a court order banning Cherry from contacting her.

“He seemed to be of fairly stable mind until I told him that I never wanted to see him again,” Butler wrote in her request. “Then he became very angry and proceeded to call me a whore and said he should slit my throat.

” … He has repeatedly told me that no one takes 12 years of his life and gets away with it and that I would pay for it. If he had to go down, I would go down with him since he didn’t have anything to lose.”

Five months later, someone attacked Butler outside her Spokane Valley apartment, stabbing her several times with a knife. She survived the 5:30 a.m. attack.

Henderson said Cherry was always the top suspect in the assault, although Butler never saw her attacker.

Detectives tried several times to bolster their case against him, Henderson said, but the statute of limitations ran out last year without charges being filed.

Henderson said the case still bothers him, especially in light of the pending murder charge against Cherry.

“You try to be proactive and prevent something more from happening,” Henderson said. “But sometimes the law won’t let you do anything.”

Fissler obtained a protection order against Cherry in 1990.

She claimed in her petition that Cherry pulled her hair, poured beer in her face, called her “terrible names” and caused $10,000 damage to the inside of her house with a knife and a baseball bat. She said Cherry ran amok because she attended a wedding without him.

“My daughters and I are extremely fearful of our lives,” Fissler wrote in her request. “He is a multiplepersonality psycho, extremely dangerous, deranged man.”

The woman said Tuesday she once carried a gun to protect herself and her two daughters from Cherry, whom she described “as a super-happy family man” who later turned “animalistic.”

“I would have shot him on sight, and he knew it,” Fissler said. “It’s been years, and this is still with us.”

Cherry filed for protection against Fissler as well. He wrote in his request the woman entered his house without permission, up-ended tables and threw potted plants across rooms.

“She is a very scary person when she flies off the handle,” Cherry wrote.

A judge granted a mutual order that prohibited either of them from contacting the other, which astounded Fissler.

Wanda Lee Havlatka petitioned for an order of protection against Cherry in 1993.

“I have been with Steve for one year and he has threatened to shoot me three times,” Havlatka wrote. “He always starts crying and says he’s sorry, and I forgive Steve, but Steve keeps doing it over and over and over.”

Havlatka claimed Cherry once snuffed out a cigarette on her forehead and dumped her on a rural road because she refused to have sex with him.

Cherry filed for an order of protection from Havlatka that year, claiming she hit him and put holes in the walls of his house.

In an affidavit supporting his request, Cherry accused Henderson of having a vendetta against him and helping Havlatka ransack his house one day in 1993.

“There is a long-standing history between myself and Detective Henderson, which I believe to be harassing on the part of the detective,” Cherry wrote in the affidavit.

Last week, Foutz, 42, pleaded with a Kootenai County judge to protect her from Cherry.

Judge Barry Watson jailed Cherry on a trespassing charge, but the man paid $150 bond and went free.

Idaho authorities believe he took a rifle to Foutz’s home about 6:15 a.m. Sunday and opened fire as the mother of two and her new boyfriend, Charles Babb, left the house.

Foutz died at the scene. Babb, 39, of Rathdrum, was wounded and is recovering at Kootenai Medical Center.

, DataTimes