Mom ‘Overwhelmed’ By Plight: Salisbury Family Struggles After Escape (The Boston Herald)

By Dave Wedge
Originally published by the Boston Herald, June 17, 2001

A Salisbury woman who fled the iron-fisted rule of her husband last week with her six children after 17 years of alleged abuse and domestic imprisonment is desperately trying to land on her feet, a family friend said yesterday.

“She’s overwhelmed, to say the least,” one friend of Christine McMullen said.

McMullen, 36, has no driver’s license, no home, virtually no job skills and is dealing with a gamut of emotions, all the while trying to assure her children, ages 8 to 17, that everything will work out.

“She’s trying to get her life back together,” the friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said. “She left with six kids and they left with nothing. She needs to get back on her feet.”

Police say her husband, 37-year-old Patrick McMullen, inflicted a nearly two-decade reign of terror on his family, keeping them locked in a makeshift compound in a closed Route 1 nightclub and doling out endless physical, sexual and emotional abuse. He is being held on $105,000 cash bail and faces a host of rape, assault and weapons charges.

While the Department of Social Services investigated the family in 1995 in Merrimac, it wasn’t until last month when McMullen fled with her children that the horrific allegations surfaced.

DSS spokeswoman Carol Yelverton said the agency was called in 1995 because the family, which home schools its children, hadn’t filed an education plan with the state. Social workers investigated but “no one ever raised abuse as an issue,” Yelverton said.

“The children looked fine. They did not appear frightened. They were clean and playing,” she said. “What’s terrifically sad here … is that she never came forward with this information. It is a heinous example of the terror and intimidation that domestic violence victims suffer.

“This could have been prevented. We could have gone in in 1995 but we weren’t able to because of this wall of silence.”

Christine McMullen, with help from an Exeter, N.H., Mormon church she attended, was able to take the children out of the house of horrors May 8, and DSS and police stepped in. The children are now living with various relatives but the family is having trouble finding an apartment, the friend said. DSS has a team of domestic violence specialists working with the family.

“You want to help the woman gather all the resources—emotionally and financially—to make the best possible decisions for her children and herself,” Yelverton said. “We’re here to help them.”

The friend compared McMullen’s situation to that of a person who flees a “high-control cult.”

“I can’t imagine what she’s going through,” the friend said. `”She’s been under a controlled situation for so long.”

The friend, who has known the family for several years, recalled Patrick McMullen as a “shoot-from-the-hip, wheeler-dealer type” who ran impromptu flea markets to make money.

“He was likable enough but he never wanted anything to do with paperwork. He didn’t want any paper trails, which we now understand,” the friend said. “I didn’t realize how bad the situation was.”