Steve Nunn: the Politician and Husband From Hell

     If you think all politicians are above average spouses and parents, think again. Although they pretend to be better than the rest of us, some of them are hypocrites and thieves, and even dangerous. Take Steve Nunn, a state legislator from Kentucky who was a lousy husband, a raging hypocrite and dangerous.

     Steven Nunn was 15 when his father, Louie B. Nunn, became Kentucky's 52nd governor in 1967. A Republican, Mr. Nunn was re-elected to a second term but in 1973 lost his bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Six years later he ran for governor again, but lost. His career in elected politics was over.

     In 1974, Steve, hoping to follow in his father's footsteps, enrolled in law school but dropped out. He got married and over the next five years had three children. In 1990, at age 38, he ran for the Kentucky state house of representatives and won.

     Steve's father, a hard-driven narcissist and BS artist who enjoyed subjecting his kid to ridicule, refused to be impressed with his son's election to state office. Like his father, Steve was a lousy husband who regularly cheated on his wife. In 1994 she divorced him. (In state politics, being a rotten husband is not usually a liability because most people have no idea who represents them locally.) Two years later Steve's mother Beula, after 42 years of marriage to Louie B., sought a restraining order against the abusive ex-governor. Steve confronted his father over this and the two men came to blows. After that they stopped speaking to each other. Shortly after the father and son stopped talking to each other, Beula divorced Louie B. Nunn.

     Steve Nunn, in his third term as a state legislator married Tracey Damron, a former flight attendant and daughter of a wealthy Kentucky coal magnate. A social butterfly who sparkled at fundraisers and social events, Tracey became the perfect politician's wife. Two years later, in 1998, Steve co-sponsored a bill that imposed the death sentence on convicted killers who murdered women who had taken out restraining orders against them. The bill became Kentucky law.  

       In 2002, after Tracey Nunn engineered a father-son reconciliation, she and Steve moved into the ex-governor's Pin Oak Farms mansion near Versailles, Kentucky. But a year later the 51-year-old's political career took a bad turn. In a bid for the governorship, Steve lost badly in the Republican primary. And on January 29, 2004 his father, at age 81, died of a heart attack. Although Steve didn't have a healthy relationship with his father, the old man's death devastated him. The wheels of Steve's political career came off in 2006 when he lost his legislative seat to an unknown challenger.

     Following the death of his father Steve Nunn started drinking heavily, patronizing prostitutes and behaving irrationally. He also became, like his father, an abusive husband. Tracey divorced him in 2006. The following year the 55-year-old political had-been met 20-year-old Amanda Ross, the daughter of a recently deceased public financier. After two months of dating Steve moved into her Lexington, Kentucky apartment. In 2008 they were engaged to be married.

     Through his engagement to Amanda Ross Steve landed the cabinet-level job of heading up a state agency that oversaw a variety of welfare programs, include those dealing with spousal abuse.

     Although Steve was back on his feet career-wise, he was still emotionally unstable and drinking too much. His paranoia led him to suspect that Amanda was cheating on him. On February 17, 2009, in the midst of an argument in Ross' apartment, Nunn hit Amanda. The next day she petitioned the court for an emergency protection order which a judge quickly granted. Under the restraining order Mr. Nunn could have no contact with Amanda for a period of a year. Within 48 hours of the judge's ruling he had no choice but to resign his cushy, high-paid government job.

     Convinced that Amanda Ross had intentionally sabotaged his career, Steve Nunn became obsessed with revenge. To embarrass and humiliate his former fiancee he showed his friends nude photographs he had taken of her. He began to stalk her.

     On September 11, 2009, as Amanda Ross left her apartment on her way to work, Steve Nunn shot her to death. While no one witnessed the murder, homicide investigators immediately suspected him. Later that day police officers found him hiding in a cemetery. He had scratched his wrists in a phony suicide attempt.

     Charged with first-degree murder, Nunn, to avoid the death penalty mandated by his own legislation, pleaded guilty in 2011 in exchange for a sentence of life without parole.

     Members of Amanda Ross' family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Steven Nunn in 2012. Two years later the civil case jury found him responsible for Ross' death and awarded the plaintiffs $24 million.

     In February 2014 Steve Nunn petitioned Fayette County Judge Pamula Goodwine to have his guilty plea withdrawn. He said his defense attorney, Warren Scoville, had given him bad advice. Following the October 2014 hearing on the motion, Judge Goodwine denied Nunn's plea withdrawal request.