But he understands himself better now. He's trying to control the anger inside. "I'm just going to do my best to be good."

— Dennis Romboy

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"Mom," Susan's little daughter Nicole said. "You need to call the cops."

How sad, Susan says, looking back on the life she left behind in South Carolina. "When a 3-year-old is telling you you need to call the cops. That's pathetic."

But that was the reality of her life until a year ago, when she moved to Park City with Nicole to start a new life.

Until then, there had been so much ugliness in the lives of the mother and daughter. Like the time Susan found herself barefoot and alone at the gas station with strangle marks on her neck after being beaten black-and-blue by the father of her child.

"If your God is so big, where is he now?" he yelled at her as she ran.

Like the time her abuser told a relative, "If I thought I could get away with it, I would have killed that bi---- a long time ago."

Like the time Susan watched Nicole calmly reading a Snow White book to a police officer after law enforcement had been called again.

"I'll never forget that, her reading that book," says the trim, articulate woman. "For her to think something was so normal.... That's what I was teaching her. That the way we were was OK."

Susan's parents had moved to Park City several years ago, and Susan said she was finally able to make the break. She stayed with her folks for a week and by coincidence ran into someone who donated money to a domestic violence shelter called the Peace House. She ended up living there for two months.

"Places like that save people," she says simply now.

She got a job and counseling and is enrolled in school. She is now living with her daughter in transitional housing for victims of domestic violence. Nicole talks to her dad on the phone occasionally. Susan still has a mountain of uncertainties.

"It's a big, hard thing," she starts. "I definitely don't have the answers, and some days I feel like I'm treading water.

"It's a constant question. What's best for my child? I just have to keep answering that the best that I can."

— Lucinda Dillon Kinkead

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The "Smiths" were an educated, upper-middle-class couple living on Salt Lake City's affluent east side. They had good jobs and were well-known in civic circles.

In a newspaper article, "John Smith" once stated that of his accomplishments, the thing he would point to as his life's work was his family.

A few years later he nearly beat his wife to death.