Woman searched 'what to do if your husband is upset you are pregnant' before her murder

On November 18, the body of Jennifer Rothwell, 28, was found near a state park outside of Troy, Mich. Her own husband led police to her remains after they accused him of murder. Now, news outlets are reporting that Rothwell, who was six weeks pregnant when she was killed, had searched “what to do if your husband is upset you are pregnant” on her cell phone before she went missing.

Beau Rothwell, 28, reported his wife missing the night of November 12, claiming he hadn’t seen Jennifer since 6:20 a.m. as she was leaving for her job as a chemical engineer. Court documents show that he was seen buying bleach and other cleaning supplies that day at a local store. Police then found bleach and blood on the couple’s carpet. Beau is charged with second-degree murder and is currently being held on bond.

The motive revealed so blatantly in this case is indicative of a perhaps surprising statistic: Homicide is the second-leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S., according to a 2017 study by the Centers for Disease Control. Car accidents are the first.

A yearlong study produced by The Washington Post in 2004 looked at the killings of 1,367 pregnant women and new mothers across the country since 1990. It found that the majority of women were killed at home by their intimate partner. These murders, while less common than many other kinds of homicide, “are more frequent than most people know,” the Post reported. Part of the problem, the paper explained, was that most states do not track such crimes.

“It’s very hard to connect the dots when you don’t even see the dots,” Elaine Alpert, a public health expert at Boston University, told the paper. “It’s only just starting to be recognized that there is a trend or any commonalities between these deaths.”

Although the 2002 murder of Lacy Peterson is probably the best-known killing of a pregnant woman by her husband, a simple Google search brings up pages and pages of these crimes. At the end of September, Matthew Padzunas murdered his wife, Vanessa Palma, in Maricopa, Ariz. She had three children and was five months pregnant with a fourth. At the end of October, a man named Christian Barker, 21, shot his pregnant wife— Haylee Atagi-Barker, 22—and then killed himself at home in Kansas City, Mo. In August 2018, Chris Watts murdered his pregnant wife, Shannan, and their two daughters, in Frederick, Colo.

When asked why men would murder their pregnant wives rather than simply get a divorce, criminal profiler Pat Brown told ABC News: “Men who kill their pregnant wives are always psychopaths. ‘She’s in the way. I made a mistake and I think I will erase my mistake.’ So, he kills her and he thinks that will solve the problem.”

Pregnancy is “certainly a more dangerous moment in life,” Brown told the Post. “You are escalating people’s responsibilities and curtailing their freedoms.”