Lisette Johnson

0:00Speaker 1:Before we begin, the stories told in this podcast may be difficult for some to hear. Many discuss sexual assault, domestic violence, and suicide. Please take care while listening. I can't remember when I first set up the Google Alert for murder-suicide. It was at least 10 years ago. But ever since, once a week, I get an email compiling news articles from across the U.S. that mention the term. Sometimes I have to prep myself to open them, because they're heavy. Lists of immense tragedies, each one reduced to a quick headline and an image. Something about the way these stories are usually framed really bothers me. The headlines are almost always written in this passive voice, family found dead, as if the violence just happened to everyone equally. It's always, couple dies in murder-suicide, not A man kills his wife and then himself, which is by and large how these crimes actually go. These types of stories don't usually get much media attention. There's no killer on the loose. The drama is over. There's nowhere for the story to go.

1:13Speaker 1:This past spring, though, a murder-suicide broke through to the national consciousness because this time the people involved were well-known and respected. People with power. Now to the horrific scene inside a home in Virginia.

1:30Speaker 2:Fairfax County police say that former Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife and himself in what appears to be a murder-suicide.

1:40Speaker 1:A one-time rising political star, his wife, Dr.

1:43Speaker 2:Serena Fairfax, a dentist also known in this community.

1:47Speaker 3:Horrible news for the family, certainly a traumatic event for those children to live through.

1:52Speaker 1:On April 16th, 2026, The former Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Justin Fairfax, killed his wife, Serena, and then himself in their home. Their two teenage children were in the house at the time.

2:06Speaker 3:It came flooding back to me. And it was like I was right there, in there with them. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, blessing, Whatever you call it. Because by all rights, I should be dead.

2:31Speaker 1:As soon as I heard about Justin Fairfax killing his wife Serena, I thought of Lizette Johnson, a woman I first interviewed more than a decade ago when I was just starting to cover domestic violence. Because Lizette had been the target of a murder-suicide, shot four times by her husband before he turned the gun on himself. A local TV station ran a story, Headlining it, man dies after domestic shooting in Chesterfield. As if no one had pulled the trigger. As if Lisette wasn't even in the room.

3:06Speaker 1:That would have been the.

3:07Speaker 2:End of it.

3:07Speaker 1:Her life flattened into a sentence that didn't even include her. Except she survived.

3:14Speaker 3:This is more common than we know. What's uncommon is that the woman lives to tell about it. And that's the only reason I speak out. Because if someone hears some part of my story and thinks, well, I don't know, but maybe I need to be thinking about this in a different way, my work is done.

3:45Speaker 1:I'm Melissa Jeltsin, and this is What Happened to Her. Today, Lizette Johnson's story is because she's one of the few women in those Google Alert emails who got to tell it herself. When I first spoke to Lisette in 2014, what she told me challenged some of the basic assumptions I had about domestic violence. I'd had this idea that men who try to kill their partners work up to it, that the physical violence escalates, gets worse and worse, until finally they do something lethal. But For Lizette, that wasn't the case.

4:24Speaker 3:The misnomer is that physical violence might start with a pinch, a hair pull, then it's a slap, then it's a punch, then it's a kick, then they shoot you. That's not how it happens. And in my situation, the lack of physical violence convinced me that I wasn't being abused. Because here I am, I'm this accomplished person, I have this great social network I go out with my friends. I'm not some cowering, weak, whimpering woman in the corner.

5:01Speaker 1:From the outside, Lisette's marriage looked unremarkable. She and her husband had been together for nine years before getting married and then spent a decade plus raising their two kids, a boy and a girl, in a nice home in Richmond, Virginia. Inside, Lisette knew she wasn't happy. At times, her husband was cruel to her, and she worried about what her kids were absorbing, what they'd come to think was normal. But she didn't recognize what was happening as abuse. He wasn't hitting her.

5:32Speaker 3:It was little pics. Why are you wearing that? I don't know. I liked it. I put it on. How can you go to the grocery store without makeup? He was very... manipulative about any argument we had. And, you know, couples disagree. I mean, that's, you know, that's going to happen. You've got two different people, two different upbringings, whatever. But he would say, I never said that. You're imagining that. You're crazy. I don't know where you get these things.

6:13Speaker 3:To something we had just had a conversation about earlier in the day. For instance, here's another one. I'd be sick. I mean, literally throwing up in the bathroom, sick. Because I would say, hey, I can't get out of the bathroom. Could you please make sure the kids are in bed or whatever? And he'd say, you're not sick. You're faking it just so you don't have to take care of the kids. After a while, it sort of whittled away. It was a I say it's, you know, you have that drip down in your basement. You go, yeah, I need to call a plumber. I really need to do something about that. But you never think it's going to get to flooding your basement. And then you go down, you see some water on the floor, and you're like, yeah, I got to call a plumber. Then you go about life. Well, at one point, when you go down in the basement, you're engulfed by water, and you can't get out. And that's exactly what it felt like. Everything culminated. It just built and built and built and built. It's easy to look back and the picture is so clear. But when you're in it and you're day to day, and I think by design, our biology helps us kind of forget

7:39Speaker 3:about pain very quickly.

7:41Speaker 1:Over the years, Lizette had thought about leaving, but she was scared of what her husband might do, and she had reason to be. In 2000, 12 years into the marriage, she had told him honestly how she felt.

7:54Speaker 3:I said, you know, you don't say nice things to me. You kind of don't treat me nice. I don't think it's healthy for kids to observe this, because that's what they'll learn how to treat people. And, you know, if you keep treating me this way, I'm going to leave you. And he was as calm as somebody saying, hey, I'm going to go get the mail. And he said, almost under his breath, but clearly, if you try and mess with my life, I'll put a bullet through your head.

8:28Speaker 3:I was like, this isn't safe. I need to get my kids out.

8:32Speaker 1:Lizette was spooked. She called a divorce attorney.

8:36Speaker 3:And just talking to him on the phone, said, this is what's going on. And he said, pack up your kids, lock up your business, and move to your parents' house in Colorado. What awful advice. I had 14 employees. How was I going to lock up my business, which was also how I was taking care of the kids' needs and their insurance and, you know, all of the things. Plus the fact that I probably would have been charged with kidnapping the kids. So I just was like, well, that's impossible. And felt very defeated and just sort of went on about my life. And I remember sitting in a chair and I made a video to my children in case I wasn't there to tell them how much I loved them. It's a lot to think that that's where I was thinking.

9:34Speaker 1:So you were right to be that fearful, right?

9:39Speaker 3:Yeah.

9:40Speaker 1:You knew on some level.

9:44Speaker 3:I knew on some level. Actually, I knew on a level that I had sent an email to a friend I'd had since middle school. And I say, you know, we just had this conversation. This is what he said. Of course, I don't think he meant it, which I knew that he probably did. I said, I want you to keep this email so that if something happens to me, you'll have it.

10:16Speaker 1:At that point, did you identify as being in an abusive relationship?

10:21Speaker 3:I did not. Again, there is this level of disbelief that someone who you've had children with, who you've, you know, had, who has these lifelong relationships with people who really admire him and think highly of him, you know, who's had a job at the same place for, you know, years and years, that this individual... is capable of something like this, no matter what they say. So, you know, yeah, I trusted him.

11:10Speaker 1:After Lizette's admission to her husband about wanting to leave and his threat in response... She carried on with family responsibilities, carried on with the kids, a demanding job, caught up in the minutiae of a busy life. Somehow, nearly a decade went by. But in 2009, something shifted. The facade Lisette held up, the story she had been telling herself that things were manageable, that she was holding it together. It was all cracking. She fell into a deep depression and sought the help of a new therapist.

11:46Speaker 3:I remember one thing specifically that he said. I said, you know, he really just tolerates this behavior of mine. And he just sat back and he said, well, you know, tolerates is an interesting word. You know, tolerates is you have something in your shoe and it's grinding and uncomfortable. That's tolerates. That there isn't really anything wrong. any space in a relationship to have something painful. And I was like, oh, okay. And then he would gently, when I would give him a scenario of what happened, he would gently say, you know, oh, well, this is how it could have gone down. And then I started to recognize, wow, okay, this is as warped as I think it is. I always thought people got divorced because they didn't love each other anymore. I honestly thought that. And I thought, well, I still love him.

12:46Speaker 3:I just don't love what he's doing to me and to our children and to our life. And that is a separation that took 21 years to figure out. I can love the person, but not love their actions. Once I started detaching, if you will, from that relationship, I was able to see a lot more clearly.

13:15Speaker 1:By the summer of 2009, Lisette recognized her marriage was profoundly broken and that she needed to get out. In July, she told her husband that she wanted to separate. He said he'd move out, and he made plans to give her space, plans that never seemed to go anywhere.

13:34Speaker 3:He would say, oh, I'm going to sail a boat down from, you know, Massachusetts down to Florida. I'll be gone all summer. He never left. And then he was, I'm going to take a trip to Europe. Never left. It's just one thing after another, after another. Oh, I'm going to retire from my job and go on an extensive trip. Never retired, never left. And so as the summer went on, I had asked him in July, as the summer went on, he tried several efforts to reconcile.

14:09Speaker 1:In August, he asked her if she'd give it one more shot and go away with him for the weekend.

14:15Speaker 3:He said, we just need a break. We just need some time together. And I said, I'm not planning anything. You figure out who's taking care of the kids. You figure out who's taking care of the pets. You plan everything. I'll just pack a bag. And I told my sister we're going to go away this weekend. And she said, very gently but very firmly, can you connect to Wi-Fi? I want to send you this article I read. I get on the computer, again, because this is pre-cell phone email access, and she sends me the cycle of violence article.

15:02Speaker 1:Lisette found herself looking at a picture of a wheel developed by psychologist Lenore Walker in 1979 that maps how abuse tends to move through four repeating phases. It starts with tension building, the walking on eggshells, the sense of dread, waiting for something to break. Then comes the explosion, the incident itself. After that, what Walker called the honeymoon phase, apologies, warmth, kindness, and then calm, a period where things feel almost normal again, where it's easy to believe the worst is over. And then the wheel turns again.

15:47Speaker 3:So I look at the cycle of violence and she said, I think you're in the honeymoon cycle. And we don't use that chart very much anymore in domestic violence advocacy, but it resonated with me I thought, oh, yes, this is what's been going on my whole marriage. We have this build-up, build-up, build-up, escalation, blow-up, de-escalation, honeymoon. So I made the decision not to go on the trip. And he begged me. He was the only time, not the first time, the only time I'd ever see him cry As he was crying and begging me, and I don't understand this. You were all set to go. I did everything you told me to do. And as he was barraging me with this emotional plea, I just had to stand my ground. And I can tell you that I didn't stand my ground very often with him. But I felt like if I went back, I'd never get out again.

17:02Speaker 3:if I went back to the thinking that everything's going to be okay. And I knew everything wasn't going to be okay.

17:08Speaker 1:A few weeks later, after a period of relative calm, Lisette spotted her husband loading bullets into a gun.

17:15Speaker 3:He'd been sleeping in the guest room. The master bedroom was perpendicular to the guest room. And I looked right in, and he was putting bullets in a gun. And I was like, what are you doing? My initial thought was, he's going to kill himself. but I think I caught him by surprise so much that he just was like, oh, oh, oh, oh, you know, and he's like, you don't understand what you saw. You don't understand what you saw.

17:41Speaker 1:Lizette's husband was a hunter. She knew he kept firearms, but a loaded gun in the house, that was different. She told him he needed to remove them all, and he said he did. By this point, she'd hired a new divorce attorney. When she told him what she'd seen, he expressed concern, and told her to call 911 if anything else happened. It wasn't safe, and she knew it. She'd decided to get out. She just wanted to get through the weekend first.

18:11Speaker 3:But it was my son's birthday party. And I did not want to have the memory of my husband and I having this big knock-down, drag-out fight. And, you know, we're getting divorced at my son's birthday party. So we had a bunch of kids that Saturday, took them to see Toy Story, double feature, and then came back and grilled hot dogs on the grill. And, you know, we all sat around like a bonfire and the moon was rising and they were telling scary stories. And thank God it wasn't a sleepover. Their parents picked them up. And I cannot imagine what those parents must have thought the next day when they saw the news.

19:08Speaker 1:Do you want to talk about what happened that Sunday? You don't need to.

19:11Speaker 4:I have that information, so you don't need to say it again. But if you want to just, I think it's, you know, this is an experience that very few people have had, if you want to share.

19:22Speaker 3:No, I think it's important for people because... Again, one would think, oh, it's this fight or this, um, so, so the night before he was very, very quiet. That morning was a Sunday morning and I said, I'm, going to church. And his comment, and this is really indicative of this kind of person, you need to choose who's more important, God or your family. Like, he meant God or him. I just, like, brushed it off, and I said, look, you know, I'm going to church. And he said, well, I'm going to my sister's. I'm going to move to my sister's today. And I was like, okay, well, do you mind? Because he wanted me to stay home. And I said, do you mind just wait till the kids wake up and then, you know, you can go to your sister's and I'll be home. When I got home and I walked upstairs and he was sitting on the guest room bed, just staring into the closet. And I was like, what's wrong? I was like, what's up? I thought you were going to your sister's. He's like, you know what's wrong. And I was like, you know, this is happening. He said, please lay down on the bed with me. I said, this is where, no, that moment

20:51Speaker 3:has passed. There is no laying down together anymore. And I went in the master bedroom. I grabbed my computer. I was looking at a couple of emails and he walked back in. As he was coming down the hall, I put the computer down and I was sitting in a chair in the corner. And he had his hand. under a little white hand towel. And it looked like for a split second, for a millisecond, I thought, he's just screwing with me. But then everything kind of came together and he immediately stood up as he was shooting me.

21:31Speaker 3:And he was between me and the door. So I had to run past him, which I don't remember any of that. And I remember screaming to the kids, get out of the house, get out of the house, call 911, get out of the house and call 911. So my daughter sent, and I didn't know this then. I know this now. My daughter sent my son to a neighbor's house to call 911 because he had disabled their landline. And she came up to see what was happening because they were in the, basement area as I was running away.

22:12Speaker 3:And I heard a final shot. I knew I couldn't turn around to see who he shot. Because if it was her, then he would shoot me too. Again.

22:28Speaker 1:That final shot Lizette heard was her husband killing himself. Her son and daughter were safe. But Lizette had been hit four times. And was in very serious condition.

22:40Speaker 3:And I almost died. I mean, I was, the surgeon said, like, we were losing you. And the surgeon told me, I cannot go out and tell those two children their father has just died and their mother died too. Which was very, very kind of her to say, but also very sobering that this wasn't just, you get shot, you, you know, a week later you're fine and everything's a-okay. I mean, I have, have had repercussions for 16 years from it.

23:16Speaker 1:In the years that followed, she found her way to advocacy work, domestic violence, gun violence, and eventually to telling her own story.

23:26Speaker 3:As you might imagine, um, I was re-traumatized every time, but I also felt like I was at least taking some part of my story to do something good with it, if that makes sense, to help others have some awareness of what was happening with their partners. Because sort of when you're in it, you can't see the forest for the trees. And I felt like I was equipping them with both empowerment to make some changes in their lives, but also encouragement that they could do it.

24:03Speaker 1:Lizette survived the attempt on her life, but survival from the trappings of decades of abuse and subsequent trauma for her and her children is a lifelong journey. Of this experience, Lizette has said, quote, there is no mastery over trauma and PTSD after violence, no arrival at the day when it is left squarely behind. She has found support in her life, for herself and her children. Her advocacy work has given her purpose, but even that has had to shift to keep her healthy.

24:39Speaker 3:After about 10 years in the domestic violence advocacy arena, I really did have to step away for my own well-being.

24:49Speaker 1:And still, life and the work of survival continues.

24:53Speaker 3:I did a lot of work for PTSD. But yeah, I'm back in my life now. And I'm happy to say, with lots of therapy, my kids have a pretty normal life too. They're not, I never think that they're out of the woods because like me, anything can trigger them. Anything. One time I asked my kids, I was like, you know, what do you think your life would have been like had your dad lived? Had this not happened? And my daughter, I was surprised because she's pretty quiet about everything, actually said, I think would have been infinitely worse. Worse than seeing your father kill himself. Worse than seeing your father shoot me.

25:40Speaker 3:Worse than the trauma and experiences that you've had to go through. Infinitely worse had he been involved in their lives.

26:03Speaker 1:Lizette's story stayed with me. When I heard about Serena Fairfax this past spring, I thought, I know this story. Serena was a dentist in Virginia, a mother of two. Like Lizette, she had spent years trying to hold her marriage together, and when she finally decided to leave, she found that leaving was not simple. Her husband was Justin Fairfax, once the lieutenant governor of Virginia, the second highest office in the state. Prominent, well-liked, considered a rising star in Democratic politics until he faced allegations of sexual assault, which he denied. His career never recovered, and in the years that followed, he began to fall apart. Serena had filed for divorce. The Virginia law requires couples with children to be separated for a full year before a divorce can be granted. In court documents, she described his deteriorating mental state, drinking daily, a handgun purchased with money meant for their kids' horseback riding lessons. The judge overseeing the divorce was alarmed enough to put it in writing. Justin's quote, Isolation, drinking, and lack of participation in family life are manifestations of

27:27Speaker 1:what seems to be a sense of fatalism and hopelessness. That same judge ordered Justin out of the family home. He never left. On April 16th, two weeks before his deadline to go, he shot and killed Serena in their home and then turned the gun on himself. Their two teenage children were at home. Their son called 911 just as Lisette's son had 17 years earlier. In the days after, a familiar question appeared in the comment section of articles about the murder-suicide. If things were so bad, why didn't she just leave? I wanted to know from Lisette, with so many parallels to her own story, what she made of this reaction and the tragedy more broadly.

28:16Speaker 3:I was horrified to see the comments. Well, she should have left. If she'd known he was dangerous or if he'd threatened these things, she should have just taken the kids and moved out. Well, she was trying to leave. And I know for me, as a protective mother, you don't throw your kids to the wolves. And the wolf could be your husband or partner. So she was trying to provide stability for the kids in their home which had been their home for a while. And she had gone through all the channels she was supposed to. But our family justice system does not recognize protective mothers. And most verbal, highly controlling, psychologically abusive marriages and relationships, police, they'll say, you know. domestic violence calls were never made.

29:19Speaker 3:Because what are you going to say? Oh, he's calling me names again? You know, he's threatening that he's not going to give me the grocery money if I don't have sex with him? Like, you know, what are you going to say? So many people are trying to face their own reality. And I think that was where Serena may have been. Like, she just wanted to get out of the relationship. She just wanted to divorce a man. This shouldn't be that hard. She shouldn't have to go to court and make a judge tell him, you have to be out. And this has prompted conversations on what separation and divorce looks like, specifically in the state of Virginia.

30:10Speaker 3:Because again, if you have to stay separated for a year and that individual won't move out, there's no physical evidence of violence, where does that leave somebody? It did not surprise me as things came out that Justin had a drinking problem. He had at one time threatened to take his life. And that can be very manipulative. Many women are with their abusive partners because every time they try and leave, he's like, I'll kill myself. I'll kill myself.

30:46Speaker 3:And he may. He may kill himself and her. Or he's just trying to use that empathy.

30:56Speaker 1:Here's one more thing connecting these two cases. The gun. In 2009, Lizette saw her husband loading one and told him to get every firearm out of the house. He said he did, but he kept a handgun back. Serena's case had more warning, and more of it on the record. The judge in the divorce knew Justin had bought a handgun in 2022 with money that had been set aside for the kid's horseback riding lessons. He knew that at one point, Justin had left the house with that gun and a suitcase of clothes, and turned up in a public park in the middle of what the judge called an adverse psychological event. And still, nothing was done to put distance between Justin and that gun while the divorce played out. Here's the horrible irony. Justin Fairfax was a gun control advocate. Six years before he used a gun to kill his wife, he cast the tie-breaking vote that gave Virginia its red flag law. the one that lets a court temporarily take firearms from a person found to be a danger to himself or others. The exact tool built for a moment like this. He helped write it into law. And yet, no one used it.

32:08Speaker 3:You're a family court judge. You should be intimately familiar with red flag laws. The extreme risk protective order should have been executed. Then the House. Kind of swept for the gun, and he should have been escorted out with a bag. It strikes me, if you leave a major corporation, I go in today, Friday noon, and I say, I like to put in my notice. Guess what? They call security. They take you to your desk. They watch you empty out your desk. you hand in your keys and your laptop and whatever other equipment you have, and you are escorted out the door. Why was Justin Fairfax allowed to go home with the knowledge that he had a gun and have essentially two more weeks before he had to leave the home after he's been on notice for however long, somewhere along the line, I pretty sure Serena knew that she was not safe. I don't know that for fact, but I suspect that Justin had said, I'm not leaving this house and made other either nuanced suggestions or out and out threats that he would kill her before he would do that. I don't know, but I suspect that was the case.

33:44Speaker 1:According to the Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence in America, there are nine murder-suicides in the United States every week. Nearly two-thirds involve intimate partners, and in 99% of those, the victim is a woman. 87% involve a firearm.

34:05Speaker 3:There is this sense that this doesn't happen to attorneys or medical professionals or professionals of any sort. And for many professional women that both traps them in their own disbelief that this could happen to them, but also they're trying to maintain a professional relationship with their clients or patients or whatever. So they're not as apt to be as assertive about this is what's happening in my household. We lived in a, I'd say, upper middle class neighborhood bordering a neighborhood that in the Richmond area, this is high dollar, millions of dollars for houses. Everyone was shocked it happened in our neighborhood. It can happen anywhere. And indeed, if you look at past cases, very many are with professionals.

35:19Speaker 3:I think it's just harder for women who do have a standing professionally in society or whatever to come to terms that, yes, this is happening to me too. And we assume that, oh, if a woman is in an abusive relationship, she probably had a childhood that included abuse. Not my case. Not most cases. Yes. that can be a precursor only because someone is a little bit desensitized and doesn't really know what a healthy relationship looks like. In my case, it was a long-term whittling down drip campaign.

36:03Speaker 3:And my guess is even when they were in Richmond and Justin Fairfax was serving as Lieutenant Governor, that there were some issues. But because of his political standing, his run for re-election, she had to keep it quiet.

36:27Speaker 1:Yeah, you would imagine there'd be a lot of pressure on not doing anything to damage his reputation. So whether or not she did identify that there was abuse going on, it's one thing to say you want to divorce someone because you don't want to be their partner. It's another thing to accuse them of being abusive towards you.

36:50Speaker 3:Exactly. And I was never, I wasn't saying he's abusing me or this is why I want to separate. I just wanted the divorce. It didn't matter why. I just wanted to get out. And I suspect she did too.

37:07Speaker 1:For the Fairfax kids who are just starting this as their new reality, is there anything that you would you would say after witnessing how your kids have been able to heal and, you know, obviously it's a, it's a process.

37:24Speaker 3:Well, one big difference, and this is where I, every bit of me wants to reach out to those kids and say, your mom loved you so much. She would have done anything for you. And then part of me is like, but I'm here. And how unfair that might feel to them that some women survive and their mom didn't. But I would say that they can hold on to that, that she was willing to go to anything, any length to protect them and that she loved them. I have no question in my mind that all the tiptoeing and tightrope walking were for them.

38:17Speaker 1:Is there anything else that I didn't, that we didn't touch on that you want to say?

38:22Speaker 3:So our focus really needs to be on whether it's a former Lieutenant governor, whether it is a, you know, guy who's unemployed, whoever it is, we really need to start focusing on Detaining and monitoring the perpetrators. And if Justin Fairfax had been monitored, if he had been made to leave the house that day and been monitored, and people say, well, he has rights, he has rights. Well, okay. His children and wife had rights, but they didn't get to exercise them. Only he did.

39:13Speaker 1:Thank you for all that you've shared. It's been even me knowing your story. I'm just completely floored by it and your ability to talk about it. It's incredible.

39:25Speaker 3:Well, thank you for that. And really, thank you again for the attention that you're giving this. I hope that we don't forget until the next high profile murder suicide happens.

39:45Speaker 1:What happened to her is hosted, reported and written by me, Melissa Jeltsin. Additional writing and story editing by Marissa Brown. Editing, sound design, and mixing by Evan Tyer. Original music by Aaron Kaufman. Executive producers are Jason English, Lauren Hanson, Ryan Murdoch, and Melissa Jeltsin. If you have a story you think we should look into or just something to say, you can reach us at whathappenedtoherpodcast at gmail.com. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline at thehotline.org or call them at 800-799-SAFE for free confidential support 24 hours a day. Thank you so much for listening.