The scar that I have here on my forehead...
it doesn't bother me to have to see it.
It reminds me that I survived.
I had thought once about getting it removed,
but I decided against it, because I want to continue to
remind myself to never go back.
It also reminds me of my purpose now.
That was a bad period in my life,
but I overcame, and I survived that time.
♪♪
When I heard what the truth really was,
it was sickening.
He was a serial predator.
This very easily could have been me,
and I think that's what's so hard for me is because
I've seen the end of a gun with... in his hand.
When I found out he was dead,
it was, for me, a sign of freedom
after all those years,
and I'm glad that he can't hurt anyone else any longer.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
[knock at door] [creaking]
[banging on door]
[creaking]
[water dripping]
[banging on door] [creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
Stafford and I met by mistake.
A friend of mine was friends with his best friend.
They wanted to go out, and so they brought us along
as a wingman, I guess.
So, what's your story?
So we end up, you know, just chatting,
having general conversation, and realized, like,
we had a lot in common.
I liked his sense of humor.
He made me laugh.
We both loved music... At the time,
I was 20, he was 27.
He told me he was going through
a divorce, and they had two children.
He was a mechanic, so he... you know, he was self-employed.
He worked on cars, and he had his own garage.
You know, maybe we can do this again.
You know, without the two of them.
SONJA: He asked me if I wanted to go out, and I was like, sure.
And then from there, we just kind of started
seeing each other, you know, more on a regular basis.
And at some point, I fell in love.
Perfect.
[glasses clink]
SONJA: I was young. I was naive.
I was trusting
and never in a million years thinking
that someone would actually want to hurt me.
You know, someone that says that
they love me would want to hurt me.
♪♪
When we met, he was living with, um,
one of his family members.
I went to the house one night.
He was downstairs in the basement washing clothes,
and I was upstairs in his room,
and I was laying across the bed watching TV,
and his mother comes to the door, and she says,
"You need to leave him alone so he can be with his family."
And it... I was totally taken aback.
Um...
Okay?
SONJA: Why would you say that to me?
It just came out of left field.
The only thing I could think was because the divorce still
hadn't gone through, so I was okay.
Well, maybe she just wants him to be back with the wife.
So by the time I get to the front door,
he's coming back up the stairs.
AS STAFFORD: Sonja! Sonja, wait.
What's up? Why are you leaving?
It's clear I'm not welcome here.
What do you mean?
Your mom doesn't want me here. I'm gonna leave.
Just give me a minute. Don't go.
SONJA: He tells me to wait.
[music climbing]
Mom, what the hell is wrong with you?
And I could hear him yelling at her.
You've got no damn right talking to my friend...
He proceeded to continue to kind of curse her
and tell her off.
Get the hell out of here
any mind your own damn business.
He comes back, and I was like, okay, that's a little weird.
Do you always talk to your mom like that?
Yeah. So what?
I wasn't raised like that,
that you curse at your parents.
I appreciated him standing up for me, but at the same time,
I didn't like the fact that he, um,
cursed and yelled at his mother the way that he did.
That was disrespectful to me.
♪♪
About a year into the relationship,
we moved in together.
And that's when things started to get interesting.
Listen, now that we're serious, you know,
there's something I should probably tell you about.
About what?
One time, um, Stafford and I were having this conversation.
We're just sitting, talking.
And he told me about this incident
that happened years ago.
When I was younger, I had an incident with the police.
There was a body that was found,
a man's body, in the back of a car.
Um, and the person had been burnt, and the police
came to him, because he knew the person.
What? What happened?
They questioned him. They had arrested him,
but found that there was no evidence against him.
And the case just kind of went away.
I just wanted you to know the truth
in case, you know, you hear from someone else.
I need to let you know just FYI, if it ever comes up,
I'm telling you, I didn't do it.
For me, it was like, "Wow, that was...
Dang, that's messed up."
Like this was a traumatic experience in his life,
that it was something that he was blamed for
that he didn't do.
I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought it up.
Looking back now, when I think about it,
it makes me almost sick to my stomach.
Years later, I learned that the story was a total lie.
It was a, um, young lady that was
found burned in the back of a car.
And not only was a girl, it was a 17-year-old girl,
and it was his girlfriend at the time.
They thought that he did it, because he was
the last person she was with.
She had told him she was pregnant,
and no one ever saw her after that.
So it was totally not
what he told me that it was.
I never would have thought in a million years
that he would be capable of any of this.
If I would have ever thought that,
I would have never stayed.
We had a New Year's Eve party at
our house and had some friends and family over.
At the end of the evening,
we had to take one of my cousins home.
And so on the way, Stafford was going a different
route than what I normally went to the... to the house.
What are you doing?
And so I asked him, you know, "How come you're going this way?
How come you don't go that way?"
And he just kind of snapped at me.
Don't tell me how to drive!
And told me, "Well, I'm going the way I want to go,
you know, don't question me."
You got a problem with that?
I didn't understand...
Why are you getting so upset
over a simple question?
I just said, "Okay,"
and I sat there quiet for the rest of the trip.
And so we get back home, and he starts back up with me.
I don't need you telling me what to do.
You got that?
About, "Don't question me."
And it turns into this big blown out argument.
I said I'm sorry!
Then why do you keep doing it?
Leave me alone!
Before I knew it, he pushed me down on the bed.
He was on top of me.
His face went...
I don't know if blank is the word.
I didn't recognize him.
It was like Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I was scared.
Before I knew it, he head-butted me,
Split my forehead open.
I was crying, and I'm just, you know,
kind of hysterical, because I just I couldn't believe what
has just happened, and I go in the bathroom.
I cleaned myself up and come back into the room,
and he looks at me,
and he was... immediately started apologizing.
I can't believe that happened.
It was a complete accident.
"Oh, my gosh, baby, I'm so sorry.
"I'm so sorry. Um, I won't do that again.
Forgive me. Forgive me."
I was so shocked.
Like, how could you do this to me?
And he just kept apologizing.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
I won't ever do that to you again, I swear.
I forgave him.
We're just gonna pretend like this didn't happen,
and we're just gonna move on,
and this can't ever happen again.
It's okay. It's okay.
The scar that I have here on my forehead is from, uh,
when Stafford head-butted me.
I have a everlasting reminder
of the first act of violence.
♪♪
I can see the... the rage,
the, um, the anger.
It's something I never want to see again.
To all outside appearances,
we were a great couple.
We had a good relationship.
We joked, and we had a great time.
Inward, we were a mess.
Everything was a farce.
It was dysfunctional on the inside.
Unhappy
on the inside, but...
you wouldn't have known it from the outside.
His erratic work hours really bothered me.
The hours got longer and longer.
It might be 11 o'clock when he came home.
It might be one o'clock in the morning when he came home.
There would be nights when he wouldn't come home.
I'm awake.
SONJA: It bothered me.
I would question, Why do you have to work so late?
"I don't never know when you're coming home.
"People close their garages and go home to their families.
Why are you any different?"
What are you doing all day and night?
What do you mean, what am I doing?
I'm working.
He would say, "I got this car to do.
"I got that car to do. I'm still working on this.
"And then I got to go over there,
and I gotta check out this person's car."
He was a self-employed person.
Um, he was a business owner.
So there was always a... A reason.
I'm trying to run a business.
I'm sorry.
I just want you home more.
Stafford was my first real adult relationship that I had.
I believed what he said.
As time went on, it became normal that, "No, he's not here.
He's still... He's still at the garage."
That became my saying... "He's still at the garage."
This is the journal that I used to keep.
Thursday, February the 14th, 2002.
"What a lovely Valentine's Day.
"Yeah, right.
"Stafford didn't come home last night.
"Of course I was calling and calling, but no answer.
"It's a terrible feeling to not know where someone is
and to be very worried about them when they don't show up."
This particular Valentine's,
I was waiting for him.
He was supposed to have been coming home,
but he never made it.
Next morning comes, now I'm just mad.
You never came home. Never heard from you.
Where were you?
You want to tell me where you've been at all night long?
He told me that his aunt was in
the hospital and said that he was at the hospital.
I was uncertain if he was really telling the truth.
Why are you being like this?
SONJA: But that was one of those times when he, um,
flipped that conversation around on me,
and, um, told me basically that I was selfish for wanting him
to be there when he was there
taking care of his family and checking on his family.
I think if you weren't so wrapped up in yourself,
you wouldn't get so upset over nothing.
I became the bad person.
I became what was wrong with us.
And I had to find a way to
change my behavior so that these things don't happen.
I'm sorry.
If I would take his feelings into more consideration,
then we would be fine.
He convinced me that I was wrong
and that I couldn't see past what I wanted.
Tuesday, February the 19th...
"We finally made up.
"I have finally come to the realization that
"I let my emotions get the best of me.
"I couldn't or wouldn't see past my feelings
to see that he was there for his aunt."
Looking at it now,
I can see that he had convinced me
that it was my fault, that I'm too sensitive,
um, and that I let my emotions fog me.
And so my thoughts became what he told me
that they were, not what I thought that they were.
Was the beginning of him
starting to mentally control me.
He started, like, blaming me for his behavior.
I remember
one night, it was about one or two in the morning,
and we were sleeping.
He gets up,
doesn't say a word to me, slams the door.
When he slammed the door, like, everything shook.
It woke me up.
And I was like, what in the world?
So I immediately called him.
I said, "What is wrong with you?"
Stafford? What happened? Where'd you go?
SONJA: He was like, "You know what you did."
I didn't do anything.
I was like, "What are you talking about?
What did I do?"
He said that I rolled over,
I got on top of him,
and said another man's name.
Stafford. I swear, there's no one else.
"Whose name were you saying in your sleep?
You gotta be seeing somebody. Who is it? Who is it?"
Please, just come home... I swear,
whatever I said, I didn't mean it.
It was just baffling to me.
Just made no sense.
I'm not seeing anybody else,
but all I had to go off of is what he told me.
I started questioning myself.
Maybe there's something there, and I'm just not aware of it,
and it's coming out in my sleep.
I was like, I think... I think something's wrong with me.
I need help, something is wrong with me.
Stafford?
Now I understand that what he was doing at that time
is gaslighting.
He was manipulating my mind
to have me doubting my own sanity,
and it kept happening over and over and over again.
There's questions that I have still to this day
that I will never know the answer to.
There are parts of my life that I don't know what was real
and what wasn't, and, you know,
I just have to live with the fact that I'll never know.
October 28th of '02.
"I'm doing things in my sleep I can't explain.
"Unfortunately, I can't remember any of it.
I have got to fix this, and soon."
November the 22nd.
"This is happening again.
"Me talking in my sleep and doing
"things and having no recollection of it."
"Stafford left at 4 a.m. this morning,
"stormed out... God, what is wrong with me?
I just don't understand, and it frightens me."
Even though it was me that wrote it,
because I'm not this person any longer,
I look at it now, and...
I feel sorry for her.
All I can do is shake my head, because...
I can just see the pattern, the...
the manipulative pattern...
to make sure that
I stayed where he needed me to be, in his control.
SONJA: When we first started dating,
the story was that he was separated, and that
he and the wife were going through a divorce.
- [phone ringing] - Stafford called me one day.
He hurt his hand while he was working,
and he had to go to the emergency room.
I said, "Well, where are you?
I'm gonna come up there." "No, don't come up here."
I went anyway.
So I get there, and he was with his wife.
They are sitting in the waiting area waiting to
be discharged.
And so I sat down directly across from them.
He didn't say anything to me.
He just looked at me like he had never seen me before.
And I'm looking at him like... I said, "Hello."
He didn't say anything.
And she's just looking at me... The look on his face
was like he was afraid to say anything.
It was strange.
I wanted to see what he was going to say.
And so I sat there, and I'm just looking at the both of them,
very nice, very calm. Never said another word.
One of my thoughts was, "I think they're still together."
That just kept playing over and over my head.
You said you can't stand her.
Okay, what is really going on?
WOMAN: Stafford Shaw, we're ready for you.
SONJA: And they called his name
to give him his discharge papers.
He goes up, and they proceed to leave out.
So I walked out after.
And I called his name, and I said, "Stafford!"
And he turned around.
I said, "Are you really gonna act
like you don't know who I am?"
And he was like, "Sonja, go home."
I said, "What is going on?"
He was like, "Sonja, go home."
And I was like, I don't believe this.
So I get my car, I go home.
I get to the house, I take everything that he owned,
and I put it in a pile next to the door.
So I'm like, I'm not... I'm not gonna deal with this.
[door creaks open]
He gets to the house.
What's all this about?
What do you think it is?
My question was, "Well, are you all still together?"
"We're not still together, you know I can't stand her."
I thought you said you were getting a divorce.
And he said because the divorce hadn't gone through,
he was still under the wife's insurance.
So he had to call her to bring the insurance cards.
So why is it such a big secret then?
I remember telling him, "Why were you hiding
"her being there?
All you had to do was tell me that she was there."
I'm sorry.
I should have handled it better.
I was in total denial about everything.
One morning, it was early, it was probably about seven...
Seven o'clock, eight o'clock in the morning,
and the doorbell rings, and he went to the door.
And I could hear him saying, "What are you doing here?"
When I looked out the front window, it was his wife.
And she said, "Oh, this is your nighttime job?"
And I stood there, and I was like, "Nighttime job?
What is she talking about? What nighttime job?"
He made her leave.
When he came back in the room,
the first thing I asked him was, "What is she doing here?"
So she's coming to our house now?
SONJA: He didn't seem the least bit surprised that
she was there, and he brushed it off.
He was like, "I'll talk to her.
I'll make sure... I'll make sure she doesn't come back."
It was like, okay, you know, wheels are now starting to turn.
There is a reason that this woman came looking for you.
I thought you two hated each other.
We do!
And if you two don't get along,
why does she care about where you are?
I don't know what she's after. She's crazy.
We were arguing,
and he spit out that he was divorced.
Wait, what?
And I said, "You're divorced?
When did this happen? How come you didn't tell me?"
He was like, "What? I'm finally divorced now.
We can finally be together."
He told me what I wanted to hear.
She never did show up, you know, at the house again.
But what she said always kind of stayed in the back of
my mind... what did that mean?
We had an engagement party, and it was just full speed
ahead with the wedding plans, because now we can be together.
And then one day, we had another argument.
He tells me, "I'm not divorced."
You told me the divorce was final.
SONJA: He sat there on the edge of the bed,
and he started just crying and babbling about us
and his family,
and he started saying that he wanted to die.
"I just want to die."
I'm sorry. I just can't do this anymore.
He had a gun in the house. It came out.
And he had loaded one bullet in the gun.
He took the gun, he put it up to his head.
Put it to his temple.
And I was like, "Stafford, stop, Stop it."
You don't want to do this.
Begging him and telling him, you know,
put the gun down, put the gun down.
And he click... Pulled the trigger.
[click]
After it clicked,
I just kept saying, "Stop, please stop.
"Just put it down.
You want to live. You don't want to die."
It's gonna be okay.
And he was like, "Yes, I do."
Yes, I do." Cocked the gun back again.
[suspenseful music]
And put it up one more time.
Pulled the trigger, and it clicked.
[clicking noise]
[screams] Stafford!
I was petrified, and I told him again, Stop it, Stafford!
"Stop it!"
Put the gun up again.
And this time,
when he pulled the trigger,
he pointed it at me.
SONJA: I couldn't believe that we were at this point.
This is not happening right now.
This cannot be happening.
And I ran down the hall,
and the gun went off.
I was like, oh, my God.
I came back down the hall
and I peeked in the room, and he was
still sitting there on the side of the bed,
and I looked up in the ceiling right above my head,
and the bullet was lodged in the ceiling, and I said,
"You tried to shoot me!"
You almost killed me.
What the hell is wrong with you?
SONJA: And he just sat there, crying.
[sobbing noises]
I ran over to him, and I hugged him, and I comforted him.
It's okay.
SONJA: The crying spells were an act.
It was part of his manipulation.
Part of keeping me there.
I went from the victim to now rescuing him,
and we sat there. We talked.
Trying to figure out what was going on with him.
Why are you doing all of this?
He was very good at the manipulation factor.
And so he knew the things that he needed
to do to kind of reel me back in.
I had never been to his garage.
He would describe to me how it looked,
and I just had a mental picture in my mind
of the way it looked.
But I had never been there.
One particular time,
the wife had taken the boys, his children, somewhere.
He heard that she had moved out of town,
and he didn't know where they were.
And I was like, "Well, you know what?
I'm gonna see if I can find them."
And so I started getting on
the internet and, like, doing searches and stuff.
His thing was that he didn't know where the kids were.
So my whole reasoning behind it was to find out
where the kids were,
you know, because that would make him happy.
And, um, I pulled her name up, and when I pulled her name up,
I found an address.
So I drove there.
When I drove by the house, I saw a garage,
and I'm looking at the garage and remembering
how he told me that the garage looked,
the mental picture that I had,
it's right here in front of me.
This is the garage.
That was when
the big lightbulb came on.
They were together.
He was probably going back and forth between
both places and still... being there with her.
I felt deceived.
I had been deceived.
So I parked at the end of the street, and I sat
and just waited to see if I saw anybody
go in or out of the house for a little while.
I didn't see anything, but I knew enough
to know that he was living a double life.
Two families, two lives, two households.
I was the other woman.
So that evening,
I had taken everything, everything that he owned,
and put it by the front door.
When he came home, he says, "What is all this?"
What's going on?
I know where you've been going.
And I told him, I said, I found the garage,
and eyes got a little big.
He was surprised, but that didn't last long,
because then it got defensive.
He flipped it around to me
and said that he didn't tell me because the house was in
her name, but she didn't live there.
She owns the place. So what?
And he said, "I just rent the garage in the back."
I want to believe him,
but my gut knew something's not right, and you're really not
being truthful with me.
And so I was on this quest now for the truth.
One of the bills I paid was the cellphone bill,
and when I went to pay the phone bill,
seeing a couple of numbers repetitively.
One of the numbers that was repetitive was the wife's
phone number, and then there was another
phone number that was pretty frequent.
The calls are, like, one in the morning, really odd.
So when he was sleeping,
I picked up his phone and looked through his phone,
and I found out the name for the number,
and the name said Morgan.
I decided that I was going to
call her and find out who she was.
I was a little jittery, because I wasn't sure what to say.
Hi.
I'm sorry for calling you so late.
I never said who I was.
I just said that I was a friend,
asked her if she knew Stafford.
She said yes. She said he was her mechanic.
And I said, "Okay, thanks." Hung up the phone.
I knew that there was more to it.
She must have told him that I called... the next day,
he was very upset with me.
My stomach was in knots, because something
in me felt that something was gonna happen.
I didn't know what that something was gonna be,
but it wasn't gonna be good.
So, while in the kitchen, I went in the drawer,
and I took out this knife, and I just laid it on the counter to
protect myself.
Sonja, why are you going around calling my customers?
He gets on my face and just starts yelling at me,
about me calling his customers and, um, it's not my business.
You got no damn right calling people asking about me!
And he sees the knife sitting on the counter.
He was like, "Oh, so what you want...
You gonna try to stab me?"
And he started hitting me in my body.
He hit me in my face.
I am trying to protect, you know, my head and my face,
and he just kept hitting me, and I end up falling
onto the ground.
So he's now over top of me on the floor,
and I'm telling him to get off of me,
trying to get him off of me.
His eyes were filled with hate,
and he said, "I should stab you."
AS SONJA: Stop it! No.
He takes the knife, and he jabs it right next to my ear.
And I managed to push him off of me.
Something snapped in me mentally,
and I got mad.
I wasn't scared anymore.
I was mad.
You want to kill me?
He looked me square in my eyes.
He said, "If I had a gun, I would shoot you dead
right now,"
And I told him, I said, "I do not care."
I gained this...
strength that I hadn't had.
And then he started his crying.
He got down on his knees on the floor and begging.
AS STAFFORD: Please don't go.
And I just looked at him now.
I didn't go over to him like I normally did.
I didn't feel sorry for him anymore.
I didn't care. I was done.
May 29, 2015.
It was a Friday,
and...
I just left work, and I was going on my way to the gym.
This particular highway I was on was backed up.
I'm like, "Why is this highway backed up?"
As I got closer, I looked over, and there was a car that was
in the middle of the highway, and pretty much the whole front
was gone.
And I remember I just started praying.
I started crying,
and I got this just weird feeling
that just came over my whole body.
And I was like, "Okay, what is that?
And why am I crying?"
A few minutes later, I get a phone call,
and it's from a friend of mine, and he asked me
if I was... had seen the news, and he says,
"Staff got in an accident, and they think he's dead."
What?
SONJA: The news is saying
he had also killed two other people.
There was a girlfriend
that had been found dead.
And, I said,
was the girl Morgan?
And he said yes.
WOMAN: The man police say killed his estranged girlfriend,
Morgan Rogers, and their one-year-old daughter, Leah,
in their Chesterfield home Friday,
then hours later, killed a brother and sister in a crash
on Interstate 295 while
eluding police, a crash that also killed Shaw.
I found out that Morgan was shot... her and the baby.
Shot them while they were sleeping.
WOMAN: Chesterfield police say
phone records prove Shaw admitted he killed
Rogers and their one-year-old daughter, Leah.
This was the crash site that I saw.
I remember seeing it that day.
I remember driving past the...
The accident site, not knowing what it was.
I had witnessed
where he died
and took two other people's lives with him.
When I found out he was... dead...
I could breathe. I could finally breathe.
He was back living a double life again.
He went back to his family
but was still seeing another woman on the side.
That next day,
me and some friends
went to a vigil.
WOMAN: Through prayers and tears,
a community comes together, mourning the lives of
Morgan Rogers and her one-year-old baby, Leah,
murdered in their Chesterfield home.
I have some survivor's guilt that
I was still here.
And they weren't.
It almost felt wrong
for me to feel thankful
for still living.
And for getting out.
This very easily could have been me,
and I think that's what's so hard for me is because
I've seen the end of a gun with... in his hand.
The guilt was about me not speaking up back then and me
not saying anything to Morgan when I talked to her that day.
And if I would have said something,
if I would have told her to...
what kind of a person he really was.
He was a monster.
And I know no other word to call him than a monster.
WOMAN: While she and others remember the tragedy in this
home, Holt has this message for domestic violence victims.
Tell someone. Don't be... don't be silent,
because this is what happens when you're silent.
If I didn't leave, would that have been my fate?
If we did have children together,
would that have been our fate?
It became my personal mission
to educate other women and girls
about domestic violence, because
the only way that it gets stopped as if we educate.
Too many people are losing their lives
and have lost their lives,
and it has to stop.
I want people to hear
the signs.
It's not always easy to leave,
but you don't have to suffer in silence.
I have to keep speaking, and I have to keep pushing
and helping,
because there's too many people out there to help.