Guest Blog
Katherine De Bois
How Many Men Hire a Hitman to Kill Their Wife?
The answer for me was one. Why?
April, you quote, “The breath of life gives us our words to share our stories. May we all be brave enough to pick up the pen and write.”
And I quote, “All that is needed for the forces of evil to succeed is for enough good men to remain silent.”
How did I get here?
You probably don’t know unless you read the book, but my ex-fiance had a hitman paid to kill me. Yes, it indeed has been an unusual couple of years.
Now that I am on the other side of that debacle, as I fondly refer to it, I hope to inspire and help you survive and thrive. I think I am somewhat qualified due to what I have been through.
How did I accidentally become a writer and an advocate for empowering women?
It was by accident.
It was because an amazingly huge, unbelievable diabolical story happened in front of me, and I knew I had to put pen to paper. (Well actually polished fingernail to keyboard)
My story was public. My humiliation splashed across social media as if my story was gossip fodder, and my pain; my feelings were irrelevant. I felt personally unheard, invisible, and a public joke. My heart was breaking, and I felt alone. I had been isolated and, out of habit, dug into my cocoon of silence, further Ashamed and self-hating.
Originally I wrote the novel, ‘The Girl who Roared Quietly “, titled “What Happened to Paul Carter? “.
And I wrote it to survive. – Literally.
So, there I was writing a book and self-publishing it, just so this pesky hitman and his employer knew there was a public record of all the hows and whys in which an ordinary woman found herself in this unusual situation. The last thing I expected was that many other victims would contact me.
I was dragged out of survival mode into helping others, which was the best thing that could have happened. It took the focus of my mind from myself and brought me back out of introspective self-focus. Instead, I felt the responsibility and weight of dozens of victims, all pinning their hopes of justice on me, hoping I could dig through their various stories and filter the facts to solve what had happened. And then wishing I could use their accounts to ensure the justice system did something.
What I discovered through the process was most of us primarily want to be heard. Validated. Not dismissed and silenced. We want to feel that we are seen. This is why I feel so strongly about helping your story get printed. To the point, we will listen and write it for you.
And as I got stronger, women began asking questions. I realized that domestic violence, rape, bad relationships are so shunned and shamed that it isolates victims further. I want to talk about the uncomfortable, increase our awareness and provide you with knowledge and skills to help improve your situation.
So I wrote some books to help others like you and me.
When facing our fears and dangers, my ex-fiance paid someone to kill me; it is easy to paralyze in that fear, curl in a ball and do nothing. But this achieves nothing except perpetuating the ability for evil to happen again. Like you, I chose to stand up, put myself at risk, and say enough.
This man needs to be held to account; justice needs to be sought, past victims protected, and future victims prevented. I initially wrote to understand what had happened to my perfect world, and then the resulting book, “What happened to Paul Carter,” brought forth this plethora of other victims. The Girl Who Roared Quietly
All needed justice, all needed to be heard. And so, I was blessed to be able to involve the media. With the resulting 60 minutes interviews, newspaper front-page coverage, and podcasts, interest was garnered and more evidence—time to bring it all to the Attorney Generals’ office. From there, homeland, FBI, ICE, and local police have joined forces.
At his hands, I was emotionally and financially ruined, raped, and fled in fear of my life because of the paid hit he took out on myself and my son. During the following seven years, I went from victim to survivor to thriving and empowered, but most importantly, my goal was to empower others.
As you well know, justice is a long, slow, painful, and often quiet journey before we are allowed to roar—to hear and recognize ourselves again. During this journey to justice ( he faces sentencing on the first of many counts across many types of crimes). March of 2021, I disempowered him simply by changing the book’s title to The Girl Who Roared Quietly.
But out of this enormous experience, I have managed to write several other books,
Girl, You’re Dating a Clown,
Addicted to Love, and at present PTSD: Letters That Don’t Define Me.
I have managed to step out of the darkness into the light and see it as a blessing to use my experience to help others.
I’m currently setting up a site where women can tell their stories and have them professionally written for them because being heard is the most important part of healing. As essential as it gives peace that they were heard. Allowing testimony for victims to exist and be counted will enable them to be. It is empowering.
There is boundless freedom in loving yourself enough, and one day when that happens, you will feel light, and you will breathe again.
INTERVIEW TONIGHT!