As frank as Ms. Outerbridge was about her three-way relationship, she tried to keep its brutal reality to herself, but that became increasingly difficult. She would return to her Harlem apartment with black eyes, a split lip, “a small map of Texas on her cheek, like somebody took the cigarette and dragged it up her face,” Ms. Irving said.

Last month, Ms. Outerbridge told another friend, Tasheka Neal, 31, that Mr. Wilkerson had broken her jaw. She suggested that the love triangle was lopsided — she indicated to her friends that her true relationship was with the man, and that his wife simply capitulated to his will.

Her forays to Harlem and her pet cat there never lasted long. “When she would come home, they would come and show up and knock on her door,” said Ms. Irving, referring to the Wilkersons. They would order Ms. Outerbridge back to Queens.

On Monday, Dec. 2, Ms. Outerbridge fled the Wilkersons, and they wanted her back. Mr. Wilkerson began calling many of Ms. Outerbridge’s friends, his voice breaking with rage when they answered. He told them he suspected she was with other men.

According to a transcript of statements Ms. Wilkerson made to the police, the Wilkersons drove around Queens in the Town and Country, searching for Ms. Outerbridge in the dark of Tuesday morning. They found her at a train station in Jamaica, and forcefully took her to their home in Queens.

Her clothes came off. Visible, on her buttock, was the new tattoo she had gotten for her birthday in late October. “She should have never gotten that tattoo, because I am his wife and that kind of tattoo is reserved for me,” Ms. Wilkerson told the police.

The couple beat Ms. Outerbridge in turns, first pummeling her temples, then battering her legs with the paint roller, still lying in the house. Her pleas for help were accompanied by calls of “Daddy,” Ms. Wilkerson’s pet name for her husband, enraging his wife further.

“I snapped again,” she told detectives. “That was another boundary not to cross.”

Ms. Wilkerson told the police she threw a beer bottle at Ms. Outerbridge’s head, and jabbed a lit cigarette into her skin. Then they beat her some more, using fists and a hammer, and left her close to death on the floor.

The next morning, Ms. Wilkerson said, she and another man took Ms. Outerbridge to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The other man, who has not been identified, was said to be cooperating with the police.

At her memorial service at the Unity Funeral Chapels in Harlem, guests could not help questioning Ms. Outerbridge’s lifestyle, and a fraying society.

“Initially she thought she was in control and this is one big party,” Crystal Outerbridge said on Wednesday. “My sister loved the fantasy; she didn’t want to see the reality behind it, the reality that she was with a predator with a smiling face.”

Based on Mr. Wilkerson’s phone calls the night before the killing, some speculated that he might have been crazed by the prospect of her seeing other men.

But his wife’s fury had a different root.

Toward the end of her questioning by detectives, Ms. Wilkerson admitted something she had kept to herself to that point.

“I know,” she said, “Malik had fallen in love with Sheryl.”

Tommy Sotomayor Says:

Guys, Please understand that this happened back in 2011 but this is going on all over the US today, where black women are being raised in fatherless homes to mothers who never want to grow up and only use the kids are their next pay day.  This girl had no chance in life and we cant keep acting like this is OK!

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