Debra Carson and the Battered Woman Syndrome

Bobby Dean Hibbs, 47, had physically and emotionally abused his live-in girlfriend, Debra Carson, throughout their sixteen-month relationship, but when he called her a whore during an altercation near Allendale, Missouri, on Monday night, July 10, 1989, 28-year-old Debra had had enough. 

According to later testimony, Hibbs and Ms. Carson had been together most of the afternoon on the day of the shooting. Hibbs had been drinking and became intoxicated by nightfall. He and Debra had been hunting from a pickup truck, using a .22 rifle. Around 10:00 p.m. they got into an argument in front of the farmhouse they’d recently rented southeast of Allendale, and Hibbs accused Debra of being unfaithful. Hibbs starting choking and striking Debra, but she broke free, ran to the pickup, and retrieved the rifle. After threatening Hibbs with the gun, Debra and her eight-year-old daughter, who was with the couple when the fight broke out, started walking up the road away from him. When he came running after them, Debra told him to stop and fired a warning shot into the air, and Hibbs fell to his knees. “Don’t shoot me, please,” he allegedly said. “I love you, but you are a whore.”

“I won’t take that anymore,” Debra snapped as she opened fire with the semi-automatic rifle. One of the shots struck Hibbs in the chest, and he collapsed and rolled to the side of the road.

Debra and her daughter hopped in the pickup, and Debra drove to a neighbor’s house, from where authorities were summoned. Hibbs was lying dead at the side of the road when officers arrived. 

Debra Carson was arrested, charged with first-degree murder, but then released on $50,000 bond. While out on bail, she moved to Kansas City, where a newspaper reporter interviewed her in early August. She'd lived a hard life even before she met Hibbs, and she said her relationship with him was "punctuated by bizarre sexual and religious experiences" and that he often got drunk and beat her. She said she still loved him, though, and always would. She didn't think she should have been charged with anything other than self-defense. 

The Worth County sheriff admitted that abuse probably played a part in the shooting, because Debra had bruises around her neck and her face was swollen when she was arrested. She told the sheriff at the time that Hibbs had beaten her in a drunken rage. 

The charge against Debra was reduced to second-degree murder, and her trial began at Grant City in September 1990. The prosecutor called several witnesses, including Debra's daughter, and he got the girl to admit that she thought the keys to the pickup were in the ignition when her mother went for the rifle, presumably trying to plant the idea that Debra could have gotten the girl and fled in the vehicle instead of retrieving the weapon. On cross examination, however, the daughter corrected herself to say she didn’t think the keys were in the ignition.

When it came time for the defense to present its case, a whole parade of witnesses took the stand to testify to the abuse Debra had suffered at the hands of Bobby Hibbs. A Kansas City psychologist who conducted an in-depth evaluation of the defendant testified that Debra suffered from “battered woman syndrome” when she shot Hibbs. One of the behaviors typical of this syndrome is what the psychologist called “traumatic bonding,” in which a victim becomes thankful when the abusive person stops beating them rather than being mad at the person. Debra also testified in her own defense, repeating the story of abuse she'd told the newspaperman. 

The prosecution called two or three rebuttal witnesses to try to refute the defense’s portrayal of Hibbs as a violent man, but the jury found Debra not guilty by reason of self-defense. The case was something of a landmark decision, because it was one of the first times that the "battered woman syndrome" defense was successfully employed to get a defendant acquitted.  

The story above is condensed from a chapter in my book Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4pc3gbK.