Opinion

Sentenced to wife

Was she a battered wife — or cold-blooded killer?

In 2008, Barbara Sheehan pumped 11 bullets from two guns into her retired NYPD sergeant husband’s body at their Howard Beach home. She was arrested for murder, but the trial uncovered years of sadistic and inhuman abuse perpetrated by her husband, Raymond, who beat her as passionately as he engaged in deviant sex.

In the end, Barbara was acquitted of the crime.

Now Barbara and her two children, Jennifer and Raymond, are putting out her closing arguments, a tale of a cruel household meant to sway anyone who still questions her defense of battered-wife syndrome.

“It never crossed my mind that Mom would kill him, but it is the best thing that could have happened,” son Raymond says. “The only choice she had was death — and very possibly not only her own.”

Raymond was so fearful of his monstrous father that he only attended his wake “to make sure he was really dead,” he writes.

Narrated through interviews with Barbara, the book says it was a house of horrors that ultimately led a “good Catholic girl” to kill.

INSTANT ATTRACTION

Barbara was only 17 when she met Raymond at a reception celebrating his brother’s recent ordainment as priest of her parish, Our Lady of Grace in Queens.

Raymond — three years older, attending college at John Jay — who captured her attention. He was the life of the party, enthralling guests with his wit. They exchanged some innocent flirtations and when he asked her to dance to Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You,” she was smitten.

The next day Raymond called: “Hi, Barbara,” he said, “It’s Ray. Danny Sheehan’s brother. Or should I say Father Danny’s brother?”

He peppered her with questions: What movies did she like? What did she do in her spare time? What did she want to do with her life? And then he asked her if she had a boyfriend.

Weeks went by, and he continued calling (always with the detective-like questions) until he finally asked her out on a date.

They went out for Italian food and Raymond, always the gentleman, paid for the meal, stood when she excused herself and never made a pass.

But day after day, the calls became more frequent. He phoned every hour and grilled Barbara about her whereabouts. Finally, Barbara, fed up with his controlling, broke it off.

Three years later, after Barbara had taken clerk job in Manhattan, she ran into an old friend at a funeral at Our Lady of Grace. There, she spied a tall, handsome police officer fumbling with his radio.

Raymond recognized her, too. Bantering with her about old times, he still seemed enamored with her. She wondered why she had ever broken up with him.

“I think in my own way I was trying to show interest, but I see how I came too fast out of the gate. Guns, blazing, if you know what I mean,” he joked.

EARLY WARNINGS

Though he had moments of good humor and could be fun (she later called this “vacation Ray”), warning signs emerged almost immediately.

He lost his temper when he drove and nearly killed them both; his mother, an angry woman, often berated and belittled him; and he admitted to torturing kittens in his youth. All of this was ignored.

But Barbara became concerned by Raymond’s lack of sex drive. He was beyond disinterested, recoiling from intimacy. They hardly kissed.

One night, Barbara, who had already lost her virginity (a scandal in the eyes of her Catholic community), tried to seduce her boyfriend. His reaction was sinister. He rejected her but started to service himself, saying with vitriol, “Maybe my mother is right and you are not the marrying type.”

When Barbara began to cry, he softened, holding her and said, “What says ‘You are the marrying type’ better than ‘Let’s get married’?”

Despite it all, Barbara said yes. The two were married by Raymond’s brother Danny on Oct. 9, 1983.

They didn’t consummate their marriage that night because Raymond was too tired. The next day, they boarded a Pan Am flight to Hawaii, where the honeymoon was largely sexless save for two awkward and unfulfilling nights.

Despite her doubts, they moved forward, bought a house in Howard Beach and had two children.

But Raymond was hardly ever home, and when he was, he remained distant. Unless she made a minor grocery mistake, then he would take to calling her a “fatty” or a “f – – – ing idiot” while pointing a finger at her in the shape of a gun.

One day, he waved a real gun (one of the four he kept in the house) in her face.

“Don’t shoot me!” she cried.

Immediately he seemed to snap out of a haze and hugged her, apologizing profusely.

THE MONSTER EMERGES

Barbara desperately hoped that once Raymond got what he was after — a job promotion, children, a great house — that he would mellow.

But Raymond’s true brutality ballooned once he was made sergeant.

He brought home videotapes and photos from crime scenes and made Barbara watch. One was so gruesome that she gagged.

While she watched, he began to insinuate that he knew how to orchestrate the perfect killing. “I have seen so many murders that I could probably shoot you and make it look like a stranger did it,” he said, chuckling. “Oh, just kidding.”

When she later approached him about this comment, he threw a pot of boiling-hot red spaghetti sauce at her, scalding her body and requiring an emergency trip to the hospital. Her 8-year-old son Raymond saw everything.

One day, when older sister Jennifer was around 10, she was walking down the block with her friend Christine.

“My parents were fighting and I was almost afraid he was going to hit her,” Christine said.

“Your father doesn’t hit your mother?” Jennifer asked incredulously.

“No!” she replied.

It was then she realized that these nightly beatings were not normal. Yet, both children never told their friends or went to authorities for help. They, too, were scared for their mother’s life.

By their 10th year of marriage, Barbara was a virtual slave. She could not call the cops, Raymond explained to her almost nightly now, because he was one of them.

Many people — including the prosecutors on her case — would ask over and over: Why didn’t she just leave?

The combination of physical and psychological abuse, coupled with the fact that he worked in law enforcement, proved too terrifying to overcome. Raymond gave Barbara a daily play-by-play about how he would kill her grandfather and their children if she ever left or told authorities about him. He began using the children as collateral. “I want you to remember that I am here with your children alone,” he would often repeat.

Sometimes, during a bad beating and drinking too much, Raymond would curl up into a fetal position, crying “Mama, Mama.”

“I love you, Mama,” he said one night. “Please, not the belt, Mama.”

Barbara didn’t know what to do, so she held him in her arms and soothed him like a child as he fell asleep sucking his thumb.

Though the couple stopped having sex, sometimes Raymond would force her into his twisted sex fantasies.

One evening, he whimpered, “Change me, Mommy. I made a mess on myself, Mommy. I need a spanking.”

Later, he started cross-dressing, wearing a metallic blue bra and underwear with a blue police cap that said “Hottie Police.” “Say ‘Officer Sheehan, you are hot,’ ” he ordered.

She did as she was told.

THE LAST STRAW

A year after 9/11, Raymond retired from the NYPD and took a job in the security business, while Barbara worked as a school secretary.

Around this time, Raymond mostly left her alone, as he became more obsessed with his infantilism fetish that he could pursue on the internet. Until she announced that she was going to leave him, that is.

He grabbed her by the throat and strangled her to near-death.

“I know how to chop you up into little pieces so nobody will be the wiser,” he said. “First your daddy, then the kiddies, then you, then me. A blaze of glory.”

Barbara decided to stockpile money, make copies of her passport and get a copy of the car keys just in case she needed to escape quickly — which was revealed during her trial.

In 2007, he nearly killed her during a family vacation in Jamaica. He no longer was concerned about any obvious physical damage. Angry that Barbara had let him oversleep, he grabbed her by the nape and slammed her head repeatedly into a cinderblock wall.

As blood gushed down her face, he said cheerily, “Let’s get you cleaned up and go to dinner.”

She had to be rushed to the hospital — telling their friends and son that she had “slipped and fallen in the shower.”

But it all would culminate a year later in February 2008, when Raymond had booked a trip to Florida — a trip, Barbara feared, that would be her last.

His plan, as he told her, was to kill her, bury her there and then make up a story about how she left him.

She wouldn’t go, she told him. But Raymond wasn’t one to take no for an answer, so he punched her in the face, sending her to the hospital yet again for being “clumsy.”

On the morning of Feb. 18, just before their departure, he pointed a gun at her and ordered her to go. He then threw her outside in her pajamas, insisting he wouldn’t let her back inside unless she agreed to go.

She made a mad dash and hid outside of the house in the snow. But she couldn’t escape this way in only pajamas and with none of the escape measures she had so carefully accrued.

So she came up with a plan. She told him she would go with him to Florida.

Almost instantly, his mood improved. As he took a shower, Barbara gathered her things and headed out to the car to make a run for it.

When she was about six minutes away, she realized she had forgotten her money. She had to go back.

THE FINAL MOMENTS

As she tiptoed into her bedroom, she noticed that the bedroom door was open. According to the book, when she entered the room, Raymond reached for his gun that he left on the bathroom sink.

It was then that she spotted it — his small .38 that he normally had strapped to his ankle was right next to her in the bedroom. “Going somewhere?” he asked, aiming his Glock at her forehead. “You’re dead.”

She fired. In the book, she says that she was almost surprised to hear that the blasts came from her own gun.

But what happened next, entirely glossed over in the book, is the primary reason why Barbara’s case went to trial. As he writhed on the floor — screaming, she says, “I’m going to kill you” — Barbara grabbed his Glock and pumped more shots into Raymond’s dying body.

Because of this second gun, Barbara, though acquitted of murder, was found guilty of gun possession, which carries a sentence of five years in prison. Jurors said it was because she had fired after Raymond no longer posed a threat.

She now lives with her son in the same horror house where she underwent years of torture and eventually ended her abuser’s life. For many, she’s a symbol of a battered woman pushed to the edge.

“She seems to feel safe now — she doesn’t have to worry about pleasing him all the time,” her daughter writes. “Now her laughter is beginning to return and she smiles again.”