Ruth Stewart was barely old enough to drive in 1966 when Jerry Allen – a dapper, smiling, well-dressed teenager – asked her to marry him in the hallway of the chapel at her sister’s wedding in Georgia.
He was flashy and charming. They were both 16 years old. She was smitten, and she said yes. They moved into a home on Chattanooga’s Southside, but their married life was never happy.
The beatings started almost immediately.
Allen hit Stewart for saying the wrong thing, cooking the wrong thing, and sometimes for no reason at all. He followed her out of the house when she ran from his blows and beat her in the streets. When she was pregnant with their first child, he got into a fight with her one day and kneed her hard in the stomach.
“You’re not going to have this child,” she remembers him saying.