4 Wives Slain in 6 Weeks at Ft. Bragg

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — First it was Teresa Nieves, shot in the head by her husband.

Next came Jennifer Wright, mother of three, strangled in her bedroom.

Then Andrea Floyd, silenced the same day she asked for a divorce.

Then came Marilyn Griffin, who was stabbed 50 times and set on fire.

A string of wife killings, four in six weeks, all allegedly involving U.S. soldiers stationed at Ft. Bragg, has sent the Army's top brass on a distressing search for what went wrong.

On Monday, commanders said the deaths had nothing to do with the line of work--three of the four suspects are Special Forces soldiers recently back from Afghanistan. They also said the men didn't know one another.

"There's no linkage we could find," said Col. Tad Davis, garrison commander at Ft. Bragg, who called the killings "an unexpected sequence of events."

But local authorities said all the cases came with warnings.

"Each of these couples were having serious friction," said Lt. James E. Black of the Cumberland County sheriff's office. "There were definite signs."

A high-ranking army chaplain now fears there could be a "contagion" at the country's largest Army base, home to 45,000 soldiers.

"I've been in this business for more than 20 years and never seen anything like this," said Lt. Col. Glen Bloomsprom, head of the Army's family ministry office. "Maybe one of these guys heard about a murder and that put the idea in his head. You see that a lot with suicides."

Whatever the cause, the toll is steep: four Army wives dead, two highly trained soldiers lost to suicide, two others in jail and nine children without parents.

Army officials say the deaths are leading them to reexamine their domestic violence programs, which have been expanded in recent years. Already there is a host of services, from couple counseling to confidential chaplain visits to upbeat, we're-not-here-to-blame therapy sessions called "marriage enrichment seminars."

"There's so much support here," said one officer's wife who asked not to be quoted by name. "That's why this is shocking. These women must have felt so alone."

The vast Ft. Bragg military installation, located in central North Carolina, has three gas stations, nine schools, 308 miles of paved road and 55,000 personnel, including civilians. It's the heart of a larger military community that includes thousands of Army families and retirees, surplus stores, gun shops and fluttering flags just about everywhere.