How does a mother lose custody of her child to a man the courts know has beaten her? In Eastern Jackson County, it’s not that hard

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Part One of Two

The first time Joseph Zaroor assaulted Christy DiMaggio was the same weekend she became pregnant with their child.

They were in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It was 2008. Zaroor and DiMaggio had met through a mutual friend at the Lake of the Ozarks, where Zaroor lived at the time. DiMaggio was living in Lee’s Summit. The two struck up a casual, long-distance romance. Three months into the relationship, Zaroor suggested that DiMaggio fly to Jackson Hole to meet him on a group motorcycle trip he was taking. They would stay there together for the weekend, take in the mountain scenery, then return together to Missouri, she on the back of his bike.

“I have pictures from that day of all of us having fun on the river,” DiMaggio says. “We went white-water rafting with friends. It was freezing cold and raining on the river. We were drinking. Everybody was having a good time. Then, at some point, Joe drank too much, and he got aggressive and belligerent. He’s not a happy drunk.”

When DiMaggio and Zaroor returned to the Snow King Resort, DiMaggio says, he accused her of sleeping with another man. Then he locked her out of the hotel room. DiMaggio went to the front desk to get another key, then re-entered the room. Zaroor continued to scream at her. When a text alert went off on DiMaggio’s flip phone, Zaroor broke it in half. Then, according to a Jackson police report, Zaroor punched DiMaggio on the side of her head with a closed fist. As she attempted to flee the room, Zaroor — 6 feet 2 inches and 190 pounds — pulled her by the back of her sweater and threw her onto the bed.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he told DiMaggio, according to her account in the police report.

Though DiMaggio did not report it to Jackson police at the time — she told them that Zaroor had “held her down with his body weight on top of her” — she now says Zaroor sexually assaulted her that night.

“I’d never been put in a situation like that,” she says. “I was scared to death. He pinned me down on the bed and sexually assaulted me. I fought him a little, but I also complied with it. I thought he might kill me. I suddenly realized I knew nothing about this person. I’d known him three months.”

Afterward, DiMaggio wrested free and bolted for the door, where she began screaming for help. She ran to the lobby and called 911. By the time she returned to the room with police, Zaroor had gathered his belongings and fled through a window. The police put a boot on Zaroor’s motorcycle, and the hotel gave DiMaggio a different room to sleep in. She booked a flight to Missouri that night. The next day, Zaroor returned to the hotel and met with police, giving a statement that DiMaggio had instigated the fight.

“It was basically his word against mine,” DiMaggio says. “I didn’t want to do the whole rape-kit thing like you see on TV. I was like, ‘OK, that was very scary, that guy is a piece of shit, but I just want to put it behind me and move on.’ I didn’t want to press charges. I didn’t want to fly back to Wyoming and deal with all of that. I just wanted to put it in the past and forget about it.”

Back in Missouri, DiMaggio filed for a restraining order against Zaroor. Before it was granted, though, she learned that she was pregnant. She contacted Zaroor to inform him. He asked her to forgive him, she says, and begged that she not terminate the pregnancy.

“He said Jackson Hole was an isolated incident, that it’ll never happen again,” she says. “He accepted responsibility for it, although he did try to place some of the blame on me. But, overall, he was convincing and seemed sincere. I didn’t know what to do. I knew my life was going to change no matter what direction I took. Ultimately, I stayed with him and gave him another chance. And then another, and then many, many more.”

They resumed their relationship, but the fighting continued. Before their son, Nick, was born, the Lee’s Summit Police Department was called to disturbances involving DiMaggio and Zaroor on four occasions.

In October 2008, DiMaggio accused Zaroor of stealing her debit card and making purchases with it. In January 2009 — by which point the two had gotten engaged, one of three times that DiMaggio says they agreed to marry — Zaroor called the police and accused DiMaggio of slapping him in the face. March 18, 2009, DiMaggio told responding officers that Zaroor had repeatedly spit on her, thrown a glass of ice water in her face and threatened to, according to the police report, “cut the baby out of me and watch me die.”

In the midst of another fight, a month after Nick was born, Zaroor went to DiMaggio’s residence to retrieve his jet-ski trailer and ripped the frame off her garage door. When the police arrived, DiMaggio asked an officer why they kept letting Zaroor get away with his bad behavior. The officer responded by asking DiMaggio why she continued taking Zaroor back, given that “his past behavior will only predict his future behavior.”

In the report, the officer went on: “I asked Christy what services I can get her to keep her from taking the suspect back. She had no response for me.”

MaryAnne Metheny is the CEO of Hope House, the largest domestic-violence shelter in Missouri. She has seen similar patterns of behavior in the 22 years she has been with the organization.

“Just because somebody experiences a situation where police are called — or several situations where police are called — doesn’t mean they’re going to automatically leave an abusive relationship,” Metheny says. “There are lots of reasons why people don’t leave: the fear factor, the guy promises to change, the woman has no money or no other options to take care of the children. It takes an average of seven times for a person to leave an abusive relationship before they leave for good.”

In September 2009, DiMaggio and Zaroor again reunited, and soon police arrived at the home they had moved into together. DiMaggio told them that Zaroor had kicked in a door, spit in her face and pushed her down a flight of stairs. The responding officer observed a door that had been split and cracked, and redness on DiMaggio’s neck and throat and the tops of her feet. Zaroor was arrested for domestic-violence assault. Nick was present in the house at the time.

A few months later, Zaroor, who owned a hail-repair business, moved to El Paso, Texas, for a job. The night before Zaroor left, he threw a brick through the window of their house. The police returned. This time, they administered a domestic-violence screening test to DiMaggio, who answered “yes” to seven of its 11 questions. The LSPD officer contacted a Hope House representative, who suggested that DiMaggio come in and file an emergency order for custody of Nick. She agreed.

Over the next few years, DiMaggio says, she found Hope House to be a source of strength and healing. Records indicate that she sought help there 10 times from 2009 through 2013. But it was a Hope House referral that led her to another man who would victimize her — the lawyer representing her in the custody battle for Nick.

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DiMaggio is now 40 years old, with dark hair and a style that communicates a beauty-conscious suburban mom. (She’s a licensed medical esthetician.) Her Lee’s Summit home, where she lives alone, is clean and cookie-cutter. When I visited in October, a Pandora station — which seemed to be based on Dave Matthews Band — was playing softly in the background. DiMaggio showed me the bedroom where Nick sleeps every other weekend. He’s 6 years old and keen on astronauts; outer-space-related toys and posters filled the room.

The only thing disrupting the suburban tranquility of the home was the dining-room table, on which were stacked several dozen binders, folders and Bankers Boxes filled with tens of thousands of pages of medical records, police reports and court documents. All relate to DiMaggio’s various legal struggles.

DiMaggio has four children by three men — one with her high school sweetheart; two with her first husband, an IT consultant named Stephen Pickell; and Nick. DiMaggio and Pickell married in 1999 and divorced in 2005. They remain close, and Pickell has sporadically supported DiMaggio financially since their divorce. He estimates that he has spent $60,000 on DiMaggio’s legal bills.

“Christy has been raising kids since she was 19 years old,” Pickell told me. “When we got divorced, I think she wanted to live her life a little and have her time, have some fun, have some new adventures. Obviously, she made some bad decisions regarding some of the men she decided to bring into her life. That’s really been the only source of tension in our relationship since the divorce. Because I didn’t want my kids around that kind of behavior.”

DiMaggio and Pickell’s two children were present for Zaroor’s domestic-assault arrest in 2009. After that, Pickell added what he calls a “no Joe” clause to their divorce agreement.

“When all that started up, I got a PI to investigate him [Zaroor], and he immediately dug up a half-dozen police-report incidents on him,” Pickell said. “So I had my attorney file a clause in my visitation schedule to where if she had the kids, Joe couldn’t be around.”

Examining DiMaggio’s past, I came across a report in which DiMaggio had called the police on Pickell around the time they were divorcing. No charges were filed, and the report seemed to suggest that DiMaggio had attempted to turn a playful accident — Pickell’s tapping one of their children on the head with a soft toy — into an attempt to discredit Pickell as a father in light of a looming divorce proceeding. I asked Pickell whether he thought the events of that evening called into question the veracity of DiMaggio’s claims in subsequent incidents.

“Bottom line is, most divorces aren’t totally clean deals,” he said. “People act out — they get upset. We had a period where we weren’t getting along, and then we split up. But a year later, we were friendly again and going on family vacations together with our kids.”

Pickell paused. “I might be more likely to entertain the idea of Christy as this manipulative person who is faking being a victim if Joe didn’t have a documented history of beating the crap out of not just Christy but also several other women.”

One of the binders on DiMaggio’s dining table contains every known police report involving Joe Zaroor over the past 13 years. The binder is black and 4 inches thick; it holds more than 1,000 pages.

Zaroor declined to comment on his history of domestic violence. Of the custody battle with DiMaggio, he says, “It has never been about custody with her [DiMaggio]. It’s only about money.” He adds that DiMaggio has a “strong desire to seek attention.”

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But Zaroor’s pattern of violent behavior emerges quickly. Zaroor and his first wife, Amy, share a cops-and-courts history that is remarkably similar to his with DiMaggio. Amy is now a lawyer in St. Louis. She did not respond to requests for comment.

The first incident involving Zaroor and Amy, in 2002, reads like crime fiction: Camden County sheriff’s deputies are called to a Lake of the Ozarks home. They meet Amy outside and find that her eye is bruised. Blood is spattered throughout the house. One man is unconscious on the floor. Zaroor is discovered in a bedroom doorway holding a Rossi .357-caliber revolver, cocked and loaded with six rounds. Zaroor tells police that he and the unconscious man, a friend, got into a fight after the friend punched Amy; Zaroor adds that he eventually beat the man in the face with the gun. Neither man ended up filing charges.

One year later, in 2003, Amy and Zaroor, now married, got into an altercation after a Toys for Tots holiday party. She made a voluntary statement to the Camden County Sheriff’s Office that, after an argument about their dog, Zaroor “threw me off the bed, choking me.” Her statement goes on: “Once on the floor he punched and kicked my stomach, legs, and throat. After being temporarily unconscious I called my parents when Joe came in and called me a ‘fucking tattle tail’ [sic]. At this point I let him know Mom and Dad were on their way and he left our house.”

Zaroor’s version of events, as recorded by police, was that Amy had started the fight, and when he tried to leave the house, she grabbed him, at which point he pushed her away. He added that Amy had stopped taking medication that a psychiatrist had recently prescribed for her. Amy ultimately declined to press charges.

Amy did, however, file for a restraining order against Zaroor not long after the Toys for Tots fight. She called police twice to report that he had violated the order by calling her repeatedly and sending harassing e-mails.

By 2006, Amy and Zaroor had reunited. The honeymoon did not last.

One night, Amy returned home around midnight. She told police that Zaroor called her a “whore” and accused her of cheating on him. According to the police report, Zaroor threw her on the bed and grabbed her around the neck. When Amy tried to call her mother, Zaroor took her cellphone and broke it in half. He then fled in his truck. Their 11-month-old child was in the room during the fight.

Amy told Camden County deputies that she was unsure whether she wanted to file charges. The next day, a deputy checked back in with her. According to his report, Amy “advised that she did not want to pursue any charges against her husband, Joseph. She went on to say that her and Joseph had made up and everything had been great between them today.”

The next month, Zaroor was arrested for domestic assault in the third degree after a confrontation that gave Amy a black eye, bruises and scratches on her body. Zaroor claimed that he had thrown her sunglasses at a wall, and they had bounced off and struck her eye. He received two years’ probation for the assault.

Child-custody issues arose. Zaroor was given every-other-weekend rights to the child. But in late 2006, Amy called the police to report that Zaroor was refusing to bring their son back at the appointed time. She made similar complaints to the police over the next few years. These were often rebutted by Zaroor, who would tell police that it was, in fact, Amy who was withholding the child from him. In a written statement, Amy told police: “Joe has told me if I don’t agree to what he wants for visitation he will ‘get me’ and I ‘don’t know what I have coming.'”

In 2007, Amy’s new boyfriend, a man named Ray, received, according to a statement he gave police, “10 harassing texts and two phone messages where Joe explains what Joe is going to do to ruin his [Ray’s] name in the community and that … Joe will make his [Ray’s] life a nightmare.” Records also show that Amy told police that Zaroor sent her a text message that read, “You are being judged by God and Having the Ring of Jesus Fire.” Camden County deputies visited Zaroor; he told them that he would stop sending messages.

The next of the Zaroor girlfriends in DiMaggio’s files is named Dona.

December 2007: Dona says in a written statement that Zaroor threw her on a bed, choked her unconscious and struck her on the left side of the face, leaving a black eye. “A bruise can be clearly seen above the left eye. She states that he is mentally and physically abusive,” a police report notes. Dona further states that on November 29, 2007, Joe shattered every window in her car and let out the air in its tires.

A January 2008 sheriff’s report recalls DiMaggio’s Jackson Hole story: “[Dona] says Zaroor grabbed her by the neck and threw her up against the wall. He then dragged her to the couch and sat on top of her as he hit her in the left ear area. She states he also choked her during this incident. [Dona] said he stopped and they started getting along once again. She stated she later apologized to him.” Zaroor was later arrested for domestic assault for this episode.

Today, Zaroor owns a car-and-motorcycle body shop called Bad Apple Customs in Eldon, Missouri. He’s married to a woman named Jeanette. They, too, have had problems, according to records.

In June 2013, Jeanette accused Zaroor of hitting her in the face while they were drinking at a Lake of the Ozarks bar called Shorty Pants. Five months later, police arrived at their home during a drunken fight. At one point, either Zaroor or Jeanette threw Jeanette’s child’s piggy bank into the driveway, smashing it. Nick was present at the time. Jeanette informed police that there were two handguns on the premises — a violation of Zaroor’s probation for a 2012 assault in Arizona — and gave the police permission to take them from the house. The next day, Jeanette claimed the guns as her own and retrieved them from the Sheriff’s Office.

One week later, a Camden County deputy called the Division of Family Services and shared concerns about Jeanette and any children living in the home, citing reports of Zaroor’s violent nature and the possibility that there were weapons in the home. And in August 2014, Jeanette’s ex-husband, Matt O’Neill, filed an emergency motion to modify the custody arrangement of his and Jeanette’s two children, noting the “domestic violence and lack of tranquility” in the Zaroors’ house. O’Neill’s attorney (Christopher Rohrer, of the Lake of the Ozarks) noted in the motion that Zaroor, “despite being on probation, continues to drink and be involved in violent exchanges.” (O’Neill declined to comment for this story, due to pending litigation.)

In September 2014, Judge Bruce Colyer agreed that Zaroor should not be allowed near O’Neill and Jeanette’s children: “Given Mr. Zaroor’s significant history of violence, the ongoing discourse between her [Jeanette] and Mr. Zaroor, the continued present and unlawful conduct exhibited by Mr. Zaroor, and Mr. Zaroor’s habitual abuse of alcohol, it is in the best interest of the children that they have no contact with Mr. Zaroor.”

DiMaggio knew little of Zaroor’s history in 2010, when she decided to move away with him and Nick to seek a fresh start. They relocated to Chandler, Arizona, where Zaroor planned to work on his hail-repair business and where DiMaggio would seek a beauty-school license.

Things didn’t improve for them in the Southwest.

Over the next two years, the couple moved several more times, within Arizona and also to Missouri and back again. Along the way, more police reports, arrests, convictions, probation and lawsuits.

In August 2012, after Zaroor was arrested and charged with assaulting DiMaggio in Sedona, an Arizona judge awarded DiMaggio temporary custody of Nick. Zaroor was allowed unsupervised visits with Nick every other weekend, but by then, Zaroor had moved back to Missouri. DiMaggio says Zaroor flew to Arizona a few times for visits. Zaroor then offered DiMaggio a deal, she says: If she moved back to Missouri — where Zaroor could visit Nick without having to get on a plane — he would agree to honor the custody arrangement in Arizona, which included child support of $1,600 a month. Zaroor would also pay her $5,000 in relocation expenses.

DiMaggio and Nick were living at the time with one of DiMaggio’s friends in Arizona. She agreed to dismiss the Arizona custody agreement and return to Missouri.

“All my friends were in Missouri, all my family,” DiMaggio says. “I wanted to come back home. So I signed the papers. I got a moving truck, Nick and I come back to Missouri.”

Zaroor told DiMaggio and the courts that he had made an offer on a house in Lee’s Summit. But when DiMaggio arrived in Missouri, Zaroor told her that he was now living at the Lake of the Ozarks with a girlfriend. He had rescinded his offer on the house. DiMaggio also learned that Zaroor’s attorney, Kelli Wulff, had filed a motion to quash DiMaggio’s stipulations to amend the Missouri plan.

“In a week and a half, he now lives three hours away,” DiMaggio says. “So Joe’s first weekend with Nick in Missouri comes up, and I ask for the address of this house at the lake, and he gives me an address that is nonexistent, according to the police department there. So I didn’t let him have Nick.”

DiMaggio then filed a motion to dismiss the Missouri stipulation, after which she went back to Arizona with Nick. She stayed there for a month.

Outside a hearing in Yavapai County, Arizona, on Zaroor’s assault charge, Wulff had DiMaggio served with a subpoena to appear in Jackson County, Missouri, based on a claim that DiMaggio had denied Zaroor’s parenting time. The motion stated that because Zaroor had residential custody in Missouri, Zaroor should be able to have Nick wherever he decided to live.

As a Missouri judge who ruled on one of these cases later put it: “What a mess.”

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It was clearly time for DiMaggio to hire legal counsel in Missouri. She called Hope House and asked for advice. She was referred to a lawyer in Blue Springs named Michael Spiegel.

“After I got the subpoena, I talked to Michael, and he basically said, ‘Come back and fight this in Missouri,'” DiMaggio says. “So I came back to Missouri and brought my big suitcase of files to his office, and he starts looking through everything. And soon he’s salivating at the chance to take the case. He saw how much money Joe was capable of earning with his business, and he saw all Joe’s convictions. He saw Joe had pled guilty to crimes. He was excited.”

DiMaggio says, and e-mails between her and Spiegel confirm, that Spiegel’s strategy was to first get a change of judge. The case was initially in front of Commissioner Sherrill Rosen. Spiegel successfully got the case moved to Judge James Kanatzar’s court. Spiegel had worked under Kanatzar in the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office in the mid-2000s, when Kanatzar was the county prosecutor.

DiMaggio says another component of Spiegel’s legal strategy was to get a friend of his, Jennifer Oswald Brown, appointed as guardian ad litem for Nick. (Guardians ad litem are court-appointed advocates who represent the best interests of a child.) Brown was not on the list of approved GALs in Jackson County at the time — she previously had been — but Spiegel told Kanatzar that she had agreed to take this particular case, and Kanatzar signed off on it.

“You gotta understand, I’d been through years of hell with Joe,” DiMaggio says. “And now I’ve got a lawyer who’s saying he’s going to take care of all my problems. And pretty quickly, he’s got the case in front of a judge he’s known for years. He’s got his friend appointed as GAL. He also sent me over a similar case he had won where Jennifer [Oswald Brown] was the GAL, to sort of show me that he had done this before. I mean, the guy was like my savior.”

(A Jackson County spokeswoman says, “Judge Kanatzar does not have a personal or social relationship with Mr. Spiegel.”)

Almost immediately after DiMaggio retained Spiegel as her lawyer, e-mails reviewed by The Pitch show, Spiegel began sending her intimate messages unrelated to her case.

January 4, 2013 (two days after DiMaggio formally hired Spiegel as her attorney), 12:28 a.m., Spiegel to DiMaggio: “I’m bored to death nothin on tv not tired n nothin to do.”

January 6, 10 p.m., Spiegel to DiMaggio: “U feeling all better, what wad wrong? Did ur boyfriend make it to town?” Later that night, Spiegel to DiMaggio: “U need out n have sum fun.”

On January 17, they had sex, DiMaggio alleges in a legal malpractice complaint that she later filed against Spiegel. They continued their sexual affair for several months, she says. Other e-mails reviewed by The Pitch appear to strongly support DiMaggio’s claims.

In February, DiMaggio to Spiegel: “Wakey wakey eggs and bakey….Nakey 🙂 Hope you have a fabulous day saving the world. You’re my hero! xoxo. lol!”

February 22, afternoon, Spiegel to DiMaggio: “I need a hug n no one is here.”

February 23, 10:18 a.m., Spiegel to DiMaggio: “I want to c u.”

Through his attorney, Jim Morrow, Spiegel declined to comment. “This is a pending legal matter, and I don’t believe it’s appropriate to do so [comment],” Morrow tells The Pitch.

Lynne Bratcher is representing DiMaggio in two separate claims against Spiegel: the aforementioned legal malpractice case and a bar complaint.

“It’s not only that he [Spiegel] had an affair with his client, which is forbidden under Missouri law,” Bratcher tells The Pitch. “He also met Christy through Hope House, a battered-women’s shelter full of women in just about the most vulnerable position you can be in. That’s what’s so repugnant to me about this. And Christy’s story is consistent, and so is her documentation.”

In May, DiMaggio says, she told Spiegel that she felt their relationship was inappropriate, and it should return to a purely attorney-client one. She says after that, Spiegel “checked out” in terms of working on her case. She says Brown, the GAL, also became less sympathetic to her point of view and concerns around this time.

In August, Spiegel dropped DiMaggio as a client.

In December, Kanatzar awarded sole legal and physical custody of Nick to Zaroor.

♦

Read part two of this story here.