Hunched over in a field across the street, Richard Ellerbee toiled, shoveling clumps of dirt over his shoulder. She glanced past him to the nearby police station in this rural Piedmont town of 2,000. She spotted one of the department's nine officers just beyond the station's front door.

Cockerham-Ellerbee rang the station: He's back, she whispered. He was once again violating the judge's order to stay away. Police didn't catch Ellerbee that day. Cockerham-Ellerbee repeatedly reported her husband's threats during the summer and fall of 2002. He never spent a night in jail.

She didn't know what he was up to with the shovel until he called days later to explain: He was digging graves to bury her and the children.

Ellerbee delivered on his threat in November 2002. He broke into their home and fatally stabbed his teenage stepdaughter, Candice Cockerham. He left Cockerham-Ellerbee for dead, too, slicing open her neck with a shard of glass.

Ellerbee escaped to New Jersey where, days later, he killed himself.

The lesson of that day haunts Cockerham-Ellerbee: The protective order designed to keep Ellerbee away from her family was merely a sheet of paper. The promises of police to arrest him came up empty.

Cockerham-Ellerbee wants the protective order to mean something to police. She has been given permission by the state Court of Appeals to try. In an unprecedented lawsuit being followed by domestic violence advocates across the state, Cockerham-Ellerbee is blaming her hometown police department -- officers to whom she once sold coffee at a local market -- for broken promises that cost her daughter's life and shattered her own.

If she prevails, Cockerham-Ellerbee's case will likely force officers in North Carolina to more vigilantly monitor abusers ordered to stay away from their partners.

"We cannot expect victims to do things by the book and not expect law enforcement to do the same," said Peter Romary, a Greenville lawyer who specializes in domestic violence cases. "Everybody has a role to play. Here you've got a [domestic violence] victim do everything right and it wasn't enough because others didn't help her."

Judges and juries in other states have been asked the same question Cockerham-Ellerbee poses: If police fail to vigilantly enforce a protective order, can they be liable for what happens to a victim? Cockerham-Ellerbee's case is the first expected to solicit an answer in North Carolina courts. She hopes a Yadkin County jury will hear her case within a year.

Such a fight, Cockerham-Ellerbee said, is the only way to salvage any good from the tragedy of her daughter's death.

"I can't muster the thought of thinking I didn't do all I could have done," she said. "I can't get past the anger that if the officers would have done what they said they were going to do, she would still be here."

A slow boil

Richard Ellerbee began his relationship with Cockerham-Ellerbee by triggering the breakup of her first marriage. She married young and was rearing Candice in Patterson, N.J., when Richard Ellerbee, a family friend, told her that her husband was unfaithful. She packed up Candice, then 5, and moved south in 1990 to reunite with relatives in her native Jonesville.

Richard Ellerbee followed. For a while, she shunned his advances. He persisted, and she eventually felt herself drawn to what she thought was stability, sureness. They had a boy, Rashieq, in 1996; they married shortly before another son, Dominiq, arrived in 2002.

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