We're not sure which would be more emotionally scarring to a child, seeing your father murder your mother or realizing that your father is Steve Buscemi in drag.
They were farm folk. She didn’t know how they would handle news that the man she had lived with for years — her high school sweetheart and the father of her two children — had begun dressing as a woman.
But she knew they had to know. So one day last winter, she gathered the bunch, told them the deal and kept it simple.
“She told us she had to try to make it work for the kids,” her sister, Angie Bublitz, said by telephone from Iowa. “Beyond that, we didn’t know what was going on down there.”
It wasn’t good. Finally, on the night of July 14, the tensions and raging emotions running through the Belton home erupted in two gunshots.
The couple’s 18-year-old daughter ran into the kitchen and found her mother dead on the floor. Her father, wearing women’s clothing, sat on the floor, smoking a cigarette.
Michael Adams Jr., 37, was charged with second-degree murder. His preliminary hearing is set for Aug. 27.
Hartwig’s parents declined to talk about Adams. Her father, Dennis Hartwig, said: “A big part of our life has been ripped from us. We will never be able to understand what happened.”
Transgender issues, such as cross dressing, often perplex people. But this case surprised even the experts.
Cross dressing, they said, seldom leads to violence. If it does happen, “it’s usually the cross dresser that gets killed,” said Helen Friedman, a clinical psychologist and professor at the St. Louis University School of Medicine.
And then there’s this irony: Adams was in the midst of a formal transition from male to female. He dressed as a woman. Took hormones to change his body. And went by a new name — Mischelle.
But when Amber Hartwig told him she was leaving, he seemingly bounced back to the role of the scorned and desperate man.
Experts hope this case gives no one the idea that cross dressers are predisposed to violence or abuse.
Some male cross dressers simply have a “female side” they wish to express but have no desire to make a physical change. In transgender cases such as Adams’, the person feels more female than male. Cross dressing eases the anxiety of being trapped in the wrong body. These are the ones who sometimes seek a full “gender transition” through hormone therapy and surgery.
Randi Kaufman, a Cambridge, Mass., psychologist, said males who cross dress typically began doing so in childhood or early adolescence. Some resist the urge, sometimes forever.
Does this mean that the victim was a lesbian?
“It is not uncommon to stay ‘in the closet’ because they fear social judgment,” Kaufman said. “They feel shame and worry that no woman, or man, will want to be in a romantic relationship with them.”
A cross dresser may go through periods known as “splurge and purge,” in which he buys a lot of women’s clothes and later throws them all away, fearing that his wife will find the items and think he is having an affair.
But while the idea of another woman would be shocking and upsetting to a mate, learning that a spouse wants to become a woman is usually an even bigger shock, Kaufman said.
“Some couples stay together, but many do not.”
When Adams came out, Hartwig tried to keep things as normal as possible for the children and to make the best of it because, Bublitz said, “that’s just how she’d always been.”
Hartwig worked in the optical department of a Wal-Mart. Adams was a carpenter. Their daughter graduated this spring from Belton High School. Their son is 10.
Hartwig, 36, was soft-spoken and a favorite of neighborhood kids, who would gather around her car when she got home from work. She was often seen at her son’s school.
“She had her flower beds and she worked in the garden around back,” said neighbor Sheela Martin.
Family and neighbors knew the past few months had been terribly hard for Hartwig. She felt that her family was falling apart and that she was powerless to do anything about it.
“She wanted him to find help,” said her mother, Linda Hartwig.
Days before the shooting, Martin said she had talked with Adams, who had told her earlier that he was taking hormones.
On this day, he was dressed as a woman, and his hair hung shoulder length.
Martin asked him if he had thought about what he was doing.
“He told me he had … and then he started crying,” Martin recalled. “He said, ‘I didn’t know it would be this hard.’ ”
The Hartwigs said Amber had it harder.
“All she wanted all along was to keep things normal for her kids,” Bublitz said. “Staying there was probably not something I could do.
“But that was Amber. She stayed as long as she could. Then it was too late.”
By the night of July 14, police said, the couple had been arguing for some time.
According to court documents, the family had made a trip to a Belton grocery. On the way home, Adams tried to jump out of the car but was restrained by his daughter.
That incident perhaps pushed Hartwig to her limit.
After arriving home, she told her son and daughter to pack, that she was leaving and taking them with her.
As they gathered their things, they were startled by the two gunshots.
Police think Adams shot Hartwig in the head with a .45-caliber handgun and then inflicted a superficial bullet wound to his upper chest.
In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Adams kept saying he wanted to die.
Later, during questioning by a detective, he said he did not know what happened. Nor, he said, did he know where he lived or the names of his children.
Recently in Nora Springs, Iowa, Dennis and Linda Hartwig hosted a celebration of life for their daughter. Friends drove up from Belton to pay respect to the person kids said was the nicest woman on the block.
And to the farm girl who never stopped tending her garden.
“Amber is home now,” her father said.
Courtesy of the Kansas City Star
Tags: Crimes, Crossdressing