Shanna Hogan

As a child growing up in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Erin Heavilin was an animal lover with a talent for taming horses no one else could tame. She met her future husband, Jon Corwin, in the fifth grade. When they started dating on Erin’s 16th birthday, Jon, one year her senior, asked her parents’ permission first. As they fell in love, she wrote him poems.

The two were an all-American couple with a fairy tale romance. When Jon joined the Marines and the couple married young in November 2012, their future looked promising.

But when they moved to Jon’s Marine base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., in September 2013, they would meet a monster disguised as a friend.