John Buttram of Kalispell has the difficult task of examining some of the most disturbing Montana murder cases. Those are the ones in which the victims and offenders are loved ones, spouses or family members — what the state of Montana calls “intimate partner homicide.”

It’s Buttram’s job to think about what drives the murderer to act in these cases.

“It’s ugly work,” he said. “I mean, the things you’re dealing with, the things you hear.”

He’s part of a little-known state commission that reviews domestic murder cases. 

The group has a long name: The Montana Domestic Violence Fatality Review Commission. It was established in 2003 by the Legislature to examine and expose potential weaknesses in the web of public services that serve people before and after a homicide.

The commission is made up of around 20 volunteers, including lawyers, judges, a state legislator and law enforcement officials. There’s a victim specialist from the FBI and an administrator in the state Child and Family Services Division. All of them represent entities that might come in contact with a family in these situations.

Buttram is the only member from the Flathead Valley. As a licensed counselor in Kalispell, he has worked for three decades in the mental health field, often with criminals.

“Having worked with violent offenders for almost 30 years, I’m the kind of guy who can sometimes explain or have aspects that people sometimes don’t understand,” he said.

The commission’s job is to take a deep look at individual homicide cases from across the state that make up the most extreme form of domestic abuse. Commission members hand-pick two cases each year that have gone through the legal process and have varying situations. 

A few years ago, the group took a case that involved someone who used a hired killer to murder a loved one. The situations vary, but their goal is to expose the problems that haunted the offenders. That process often reveals common traits.

Each investigation takes months of research and culminates with visits to the community where it happened. Commission members interview law enforcement, judges and public workers to paint a picture of the family’s life. They try to piece together the series of events that led to murder and find out what went wrong. At the end, they shred all of their notes and retain a set of recommendations.

Matt Dale is the executive director of the Office of Victim Services, which operates under the state attorney general. He manages the commission as its link to the state government. He said that by looking at just a couple cases each year rather than a large data set, they can identify gaps in the system when trends occur among different situations.

“We describe our approach as being an inch wide and a mile deep,” he said.

Now in his 11th year with the commission, Buttram said that there is a common trend among intimate partner homicides. 

Most of them are perpetrated by men against women. In a vast majority of those cases, a gun is used as the weapon. He pointed out that mental illness often is not a contributing factor.

The most stark trend, according to Buttram, is a clear history of domestic abuse.

“It’s about power and control,” he said. “It isn’t about having a bad temper. These are people who have gotten to the point of homicide, but that isn’t the first incident of abuse or violence. It never is.”

And that’s a key area of improvement in Buttram’s view. He wants to see those patterns of domestic abuse handled in real time before they reach the point of murder. He said that over his professional career, he has seen a lot more attention brought to low-level domestic offenses, but there are still improvements to be made.

This is especially true in the Flathead Valley, an area that has seen recent killings at the hands of family members. There was the 2013 murder of Cody Johnson, who was pushed over a Glacier Park cliff by his recent bride, Jordan Linn Graham. In February this year, police arrested Brandon Newberry in Evergreen for the alleged murder of his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son. Last month, a woman shot her husband outside a Kalispell home before turning the gun on herself.

“My understanding is we’ve long been a hotbed of domestic violence homicide,” Buttram said. “In fact, most of the homicides that have occurred in the valley in the last 10 or 15 years have been domestic abuse homicides. Peoples don’t realize that.”

According to state data, 15 intimate partner homicides have been logged in Northwest Montana since 2000. More than a third of them occurred in Libby. 

The output of the commission’s work is a biennial set of recommendations for law enforcement, lawmakers and other services like child protection. The most recent report, released in 2013, focuses on expanding training and services for Native American reservations and children. In March, the Montana Board of Crime Control gave the commission its 2015 Program Highlight Award for its work.

Dale said that the results that stem from these recommendations can be small changes, such as restricting access to victims by domestic abusers after an arrest. But they also have played a role in statewide efforts such as Hope Cards, a program that began on the Crow Reservation. 

A Hope Card is state-issued documentation of a permanent protection order that can be honored across law enforcement jurisdictions. Dale said that the commission’s recommendation helped support the statewide implementation of the cards by former Attorney General Mike McGrath.

In general, Dale added, the recommendations have been carried by the state office.

“When a recommendation requires legislative action, legislative approval, then the AG’s office has been supportive and backed each of those legislative changes,” Dale said.

Buttram said that his personal recommendation would be a greater focus on domestic abusers at the local level, especially in families with children. By identifying those patterns that pop up in each case the commission reviews, he said he believes that a cycle of abuse can be stopped before it leads to murder.

It’s not so much an enforcement problem as a perception problem, according to Buttram. Enforcement reflects cultural views, and domestic violence shouldn’t be viewed as just a family problem.

“There are a lot of reasons why these kinds of incidents at the lower level are treated the way they are,” he said. “But again, these are people who are doing most of the killings in our valley. So there is this disconnect.”

Reporter Matt Hudson may be reached at 758-4459 or by email at mhudson@dailyinterlake.com.