"A Live-In Love Triangle Ends in a Beating Death"

New York Times

The following horror was in the news today with the word "polyamorous" attached. As with couples, an okay-looking front can hide abuse, brainwashing, and murder.

A Live-In Love Triangle Ends in a Beating Death

By Sarah Maslin Nir

There were family outings at the beach, homemade pizza nights, a wintry day spent making a dreadlocked snowman — evidence of a secret life in Queens that seemed happy, if unconventional.

But there were troubling signs, glimpsed by her friends in Harlem where she still kept her old apartment, that Sheryl Outerbridge’s other life was quietly destroying her. She would return to Manhattan with burn marks and broken bones, her body tortured — her soul, too.

Sheryl Outerbridge, left, at Rockaway Beach, Queens, in
happier days with Malik and Devonnee Wilkerson, who are
under arrest in connection with her beating death last week.

...Little by little their story unraveled. The husband and wife who bundled her battered body into a 2001 Chrysler Town and Country were no serendipitous passers-by; they had been living with Ms. Outerbridge in a polyamorous — and, friends said, brutal and controlling — relationship that, law enforcement officials contend, ended when the couple beat Ms. Outerbridge to death.

Ms. Outerbridge, a 38-year-old mother of three, was buried on Wednesday in New Jersey, hours after her funeral service in Harlem. One of the suspects in her death, Devonnee Wilkerson, was arrested and charged with kidnapping and assault; her husband, Malik Wilkerson, was in custody in Pittsburgh and awaiting extradition to New York, the police said.

In a statement to the police, Ms. Wilkerson explained what precipitated the violent act. Ms. Outerbridge, she said, violated a cardinal rule of their relationship by getting a tattoo for her birthday: it said “Bish Baby,” Ms. Wilkerson’s pet name for her husband.

“There are boundaries not to cross,” Ms. Wilkerson told the police....

Ms. Outerbridge grew up a voracious reader, but struggled in school, her home life disrupted by the vicious men her mother brought home, her sister Crystal Outerbridge said. The men, she said, pulled their mother into drinking and drugs, beatings and her eventual death from complications of AIDS.

Sheryl Outerbridge persevered, getting a general equivalency diploma and a job as a bank teller.... But even as she climbed upward, she seemed destined to repeat her mother’s mistakes....

...As frank as Ms. Outerbridge was about her three-way relationship, she tried to keep its brutal reality to herself, but that became increasingly difficult. She would return to her Harlem apartment with black eyes, a split lip, “a small map of Texas on her cheek, like somebody took the cigarette and dragged it up her face,” Ms. Irving said....

The whole article (Dec. 12, 2014).

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