Louisville, where we introduce you to the people, places and things that make up Kentucky's largest city.

This week, we take a closer look at the legacy of Mary Byron.

Mary Byron was a 21 year old Louisville woman who was killed by her estranged ex-boyfriend in 1993.

Since then, her family has been advocates for survivors of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence, or IPV, with a goal to save others from their daughter's tragic fate.

The Mary Byron Project was founded in 2000, supporting these efforts in multiple ways, including the creation of the now National Vine System.

And just this year, the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law announced the creation of the Mary Byron Center and Endowed Chair in Intimate Partner Violence, becoming the first university based program to integrate IPV education while also serving those impacted by violence.

[MUSIC] We'll sit down with the dean of the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville and the founding executive director of the Mary Byron Project to learn more about this latest development.

But first, we take a closer look at the legacy of Mary Byron.

[MUSIC] It was the evening of December 6th, 1993, Mary Byron's 21st birthday.

She was leaving her job at Mall Saint Matthews, sitting in her car waiting for it to warm up when her estranged boyfriend approached her with a gun and fired shots at close range, killing her.

Donovan Harris had been released from jail a month earlier after serving time for rape, assault and stalking her earlier that year.

Although Mary's family had asked the jail staff to notify them when he was released, they were not notified and Mary had no idea she was in danger.

Mary's parents vowed to make sure Mary's fate didn't happen to other victims, and they were instrumental in the development of a system to notify victims when their offender was released.

It's called Vine Victim Information and Notification every day, and it was implemented in Jefferson County one year after Mary's death.

>> The inmates you registered for has been released to home incarceration.

>> In 1996, the Kentucky Department of Corrections implemented the first ever statewide victim notification system.

Today, the Vine System, now owned and operated by Equifax, is used by millions of people across 47 states.

In fact, last year, the vine system sent 800 million notifications across the United States.

[MUSIC] Now, another step in the Byron's family mission to eliminate intimate partner violence of all kinds.

A partnership with the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville.

>> The University of Louisville is proud to establish the Mary Byron Endowed Chair of Intimate Partner Violence at the Brandeis School of Law.

Intimate partner violence and sexual assault are not private matters.

They are public safety issues, public health issues, legal issues, and moral issues that touch every community.

>> This is personal to me.

I am a registered recipient of the victim notification system.

[MUSIC] As someone who has been a fortunate survivor of a violent crime, to get those notifications, my email box by mail provides me with assurances and some level of comfort knowing where the perpetrator of that crime is.

>> The Mary Byron Center will be focused on education and developing innovative solutions to break the cycles of violence, deter abusers, and assist victims, all in the name of Mary Byron's legacy.

Well, Marsha Roth is the founding executive director of The Mary Byron Project, and Dean Melanie Jacobs is the dean of the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law, where the Mary Byron Center and Endowed Chair will be.

Thank you both for being here.

We just heard a little bit of the background of Mary Byron's tragic story.

Marsha, I want to start with you and explain how the Mary Byron Project came to be from that tragic event.

>> Mary Byron's murder just awakened this community, that there was a system fault, that people who were worried because someone was released from jail might harm them, or, as in Mary Byron's case, murder them.

People who aren't really very well aware of criminal justice think, well, the person's in jail, even pretrial, and I'm safe.

But we know that domestic violence victims in particular, are at risk.

The perpetrator blames them for being in jail.

The bank robber doesn't blame the bank teller, but the perpetrator says if she hadn't alerted the police, I would be out.

And when I get out, I'm going to finish the job.

And that's what happened in Mary Byron's case.

And this community awakened and said, you mean we're not safe?

If someone is in jail, why aren't we doing something about this?

So over a period of a lot of self concern and a lot of introspection, we realized that there was no other place that was doing anything about alerting victim victims.

And so we could do it ourselves.

And so a system called Vine Victim Information and Notification every day grew up because of Mary Byron's murder in 2000, the company that started vine came to Mary's parents and said, we would not have a company were it not for your tragedy and we want to give something back.

So they gave the Byron's money to start a not for profit in their daughter's name, which became the Mary Byron Project.

And they said, you do whatever you think needs to be done to again, address issues that are not being addressed.

We're very lucky in this community that we have a wonderful shelter and victim services, but what else could we be doing?

And they put me on the board and I became the executive director.

And that's how the Mary Byron Project came to be.

So for 25 years, we looked to see what was being done in other communities that filled that niche, that that was a system solution to really making a huge difference.

And other communities came forward and said to her, to us, we're doing this and we're doing this, and we have research that shows that it's effective.

So we thought, you know, if that could happen in Kansas City or in Chicago, think about what it could happen, what could happen throughout the country, the way vine did in saving lives and making victims and their families safe and holding perpetrators accountable.

Yeah.

Well, then 25 years later, you start to think maybe there's something else we could be doing to really make system change, because intimate partner violence is not a crime that just happens to the victim and their families.

It happens to all of us.

It affects our insurance rates.

It affects our medical bills.

What could we be doing?

And the board said and noodled this over for a year, and we came up with an idea that it really needed to be a change.

That was done through post-secondary education.

And if people in all professions understood the dynamics, can you imagine what that would mean when a victim told her, doctor told her lawyer told her veterinarian that this is what's happening to me.

And that professional gave informed understanding and advice.

And so that is how we started.

And we found a partner beyond our wildest dreams in the University of Louisville and the Brandeis School of Law.

>> And that brings us to you, Dean Jacobs.

Tell me about your background.

This is this is a topic that is ingrained in you from your background and also how you learned of the Mary Byron Project.

>> So as a law student back in the early 1990s in Boston, at Boston University, we started a battered women's advocacy project.

And if you think just about that language, right, that was the language of the 70s and 80s, when people were first learning about domestic violence and learning about battered women, battered wives and so forth.

Sarah Buel, who's one of the real leading voices in efforts to raise awareness around domestic violence and to curtail domestic violence, was herself a battered woman, heard her words who went to Harvard Law School and started a battered women's advocacy project.

So a group of us went across the river to get the training.

We started a program at BU, and in my second and third year of law school, I was supervising 150 students, helping place them in local district courts to work with victims who were filing for a protective order.

We weren't providing legal representation, but we were providing support.

When women needed to speak with a judge, we learned about safety planning.

We learned about the importance, as Marsha was describing, of making sure that if someone got a protective order, that they also had a safety plan, because we know that the most violent time, the most dangerous time for a woman is after the arrest of her batterer.

So when I went in to practice and I practiced family law and I've been a family law scholar, I continued to represent victims and survivors of domestic violence for many years.

This has always been top of mind.

As a family law professor, I would bring in the director of a local shelter to talk with our students about warning signs, to talk about safety planning.

So I became the dean in July of 2022 at the Brandeis School of Law, and just a few months later heard about the Mary Byron Project.

And when I met with Marsha and Phyllis, who had been the chair of the board, they wanted to talk with me about what options the project could have going forward.

And I think they were pleasantly surprised that this was an area where I had some deep knowledge and deep roots.

It wasn't just the first time I was hearing about this, right?

So I mentioned being a family law professor, and I mentioned the term battered women.

That really was coined in the 70s.

So here we are in 2026, 50 some odd years we've been talking about domestic violence, intimate partner violence.

And yet statistics still show that 1 in 3 women are subjected to domestic violence.

Not much has changed.

We are more aware of the problem and we provide better services in terms of filing for a protective order or being able to prosecute certain marital crimes, but we haven't done enough to prevent domestic violence.

We haven't really tackled how to disrupt this cycle.

And the goal of the Mary Byron Center and having a Mary Byron chair is to think in a really new way, in an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, transformative way, so that 50 years from now, we can talk about how we reduced domestic violence rather than just naming it.

>> Yeah.

It is.

We've come a long way.

But you're right, there's still a lot to be done in this area.

So explain what this exactly means.

Having an endowed chair and the Mary Byron Center, what will that look like and what does that include?

>> So having the Mary Byron Endowed Chair, and we anticipate having that person start fall of 2027, we'll start interviewing this coming fall.

The chair will be responsible for helping to infuse our entire law school curriculum with some aspect of domestic violence, some type of education around domestic violence, warning signs, prevention, and so forth.

As Marsha mentioned, the goal is that every professional would be able to understand signs of violence, to offer some service, compassion, intervention, and so forth.

So we'll start local.

We'll start within the law school, but the chair will do more than that, not only work with the law school, but work with all the ten other academic units at the University of Louisville to think about how we can tailor some curricular aspect to ensure that all future professionals are learning more about domestic violence and intimate partner violence.

More warning signs.

But think about the fact that we also would be educating future perpetrators.

And what is it that we can do through that educational enterprise to prevent those individuals from becoming perpetrators?

So to me, it's really looking at both sides.

How are we providing more support to to victims and survivors, but what are we doing to prevent it in the first place?

>> Yeah.

So what does this center look like?

This will encapsulate the Mary Byron project, is that right?

>> We will be.

The Mary Byron Project will transform itself, as I think I said earlier, because.

So the center isn't an actual bricks and mortar.

The center is basically the center of the university saying this is a crime that everybody needs to know about.

And there's a term that I heard from a dean of a social work school at the University of Pennsylvania that I had not heard before, but it said everything to me because if a survivor or a victim who's in the middle of abuse at home, but shares with her Doctor who, this this was something that a victim had told me about the doctor who delivered her in eastern Kentucky after her husband tried to strangle her and left fingerprints on her neck.

And she couldn't speak because he affected her vocal cords.

She went to her family doctor who she said, I loved and knew everything about me, and by the time I went to him, she said, you could see the fingerprints on my neck.

And he said to me, what happened to you?

And she said, my perpetrator had told me that this was my fault and that it was so shameful and that I was the one to blame.

So I looked at this man who had known me since I was a minute old, and I said I was in a car accident.

She said he could see the fingerprints, and he said, well, okay.

He said, well, here's some medication that you can take to open up your vocal cords.

And she said, that's when I knew that my perpetrator was right.

It really was my fault.

And the dean of this social work school at the University of Pennsylvania said to me, what that is called is institutional betrayal, that when someone trusts an institution to disclose something that's happening that is harmful to her and that professional, that institution proceeds to really reinforce what the perpetrator has been saying to her all these years.

That causes all kinds of psychological and physical and horrible things that will happen to her continuously.

So when I said that to Dean Jacobs, that we what we want to do is stop institutional betrayal, and she got it.

And the University of Louisville president got it.

That meant we really had found ourselves a purpose for the Mary Byron Project that would become institutionalized and, and embedded in every school at the University of Louisville.

And that's what the Mary Byron Center will do.

>> As Marsha mentioned, for now, we don't have a brick and mortar center, but one person cannot do this alone.

So in addition to having a faculty member who would be the chair, who will assist on the law school effort to revise the curriculum, the goal is to have a full time staff person who will help the chair and interface with many other academic units on campus.

The University of Louisville has some existing programs around support for domestic violence survivors, but what can we do by truly coming together?

We have a wonderful university that leads in the health space that is has a fabulous law school, of course, that provides a lot of community support.

So having someone who can really help bridge all of those programs and make sure that our efforts are coordinated, that's really at the crux of the center.

And then, of course, we're hopeful that because we are doing the innovative work that we aspire to in this space, that we will host an annual conference bringing together leaders from around the country, potentially around the globe.

But we'll start local with a national conference so that we can share good ideas.

Much like Marsha described that the Mary Byron Project had done historically, we can share ideas of how to really think about our curricula in new ways, to, again, provide more support and more prevention of domestic violence.

>> Yeah, it does sound like a continuation, obviously, of the Mary Byron Project and, and the fact that you all were able to do such innovative work with the vine system and creating something that is now used all across the country and has potentially saved countless lives already.

And now this feels like a new chapter in that same, same vein of just thinking outside the box.

A little bit of new ways to tackle this.

>> So Justice Brandeis is the father of interdisciplinary briefs.

Some people have are familiar with the Brandeis brief.

So before he joined the Supreme Court and he was a practicing attorney, he was really the first person who provided a brief to the Supreme Court that did not contain only legal argument.

It included much data, sociological information, and so forth.

We actually have a copy of that brief at the law school, so it's exciting for me.

You can tell I'm a law school wonk when I say that, but because we are at the school that's named for the founder, really of an interdisciplinary approach, I think it's so appropriate that the Mary Byron Project, that the chair and center moved to the Brandeis School of Law, where we can continue that type of innovative, transdisciplinary approach.

So I'm excited for what the future holds, even though I can't tell you exactly what we'll do, because we need to bring on the chair and the leader of the center.

But what I can tell you is that it won't be business as usual.

We really want to do things differently so that we can have a positive impact in this space and come back in 20 years and say, okay, it's not 1 in 3 individuals who are affected by domestic violence.

We've been able to significantly reduce that.

>> It is a national epidemic.

Yes, but talk about some of the statistics just here in Kentucky.

>> So while the center for Disease Control suggests that 1 in 3 women are affected by domestic violence nationally, the current the most current information that we saw from 2024 here in Kentucky suggests that 44% of women here in Kentucky have been subjected to domestic violence, and that is just an alarming statistic.

And usually we know that these are underreported.

So a 44% is the reported number of individuals who've been affected.

We can presume that it's higher.

And that again should really be of concern to everyone.

This isn't a law school issue.

This isn't a university issue.

This is everybody's issue.

As Marsha said, that this is something that affects children when they're going to school and they were listening or observed an awful physical altercation between their parents the night before.

The.

This has to do with our economy and individuals who are unable to go to work because they are injured and unable to do so, or because their abuser is at the same workplace.

And that becomes an issue.

So all of us really need to be better educated about this, but think about ways that we can stop it.

>> I know you can't predict the future, as you mentioned, but what is your vision for what this will become?

And I know much like vine, a model possibly for other communities and other universities.

>> That definitely is the hope that because we are thinking of ways in which to change education, and I don't mean that every class is somehow the entire focus is on domestic violence.

I don't mean that.

But there can be better training for future physicians and future nurses and future dentists around signs of domestic abuse.

And that's something that's already happening, but there's no reason that we can't do it a little bit better.

What can we do, whether it's more training in the College of Business, the College of Engineering, we are talking about vine.

This is an interesting time where everyone has a computer in their hand.

We see the development of all kinds of apps.

What role potentially could AI play in identifying some of these traits and providing an alert or a warning?

So that's why I say I can't predict the future, but I do think that enhanced technology and greater awareness of these tools could lead to the next big thing.

>> We feel this is the beginning.

This is the the seed that is going to grow into some beautiful trees.

And we would love to come back in a few years and tell you what those trees have produced.

>> Sounds good.

>> Just very grateful for the opportunity to share a little bit more about the chair and the center and the vision.

I mentioned lots of partnerships on campus, but I would feel remiss not to share that.

There are, I anticipate, will be many opportunities to partner within the community.

So, for example, the center for Women and Families will be a wonderful partner.

The office for women will be a wonderful partner.

So I think it makes sense that we're doing this here in Louisville, where we have some vibrant leadership around these issues, and I think we can do something very impactful.

>> You can watch and share this episode anytime at ket.org/insidelouisville.

And if you or anyone you know needs immediate help, there's a domestic violence hotline in our city.

It's a 24 hour crisis line.

The number is 844.

Be safe.

One, that's (844) 237-2331.

You can learn more about the Mary Byron Project and the new center at U of L. When you follow us on social media, you can find us on Instagram at KETN LOU.

Thanks for spending a little time getting to know Louisville.

I hope we'll see you here next time.

Until then, make it a great week.