Beverly Marsh and Tom Rogan

Beverly Marsh and Tom Rogan's marriage is a harrowing cycle of domestic abuse, psychological manipulation, and coercive control that spans four years, from their meeting in a Chicago singles bar to Beverly's violent escape on the night of May 28th, 1985. Tom, a public relations executive at King & Landry, is drawn to Beverly not only for her striking red hair and talent as a fashion designer but for a vulnerability he detects—a weakness he reads as a signal that she can be dominated. He moves with predatory speed, recognizing in her the same patterns of submission that her father, Al Marsh, had instilled during her childhood in Derry. The relationship is built on a foundation of calculated cruelty: Tom's first act of physical violence occurs in a parking lot after a movie, when he slaps her across the face for smoking, then forces her to apologize and promise never to do it again without his permission. This establishes the template for their entire marriage—a regime of beatings, humiliation, and sexual coercion that Tom calls "whuppins," a term inherited from his own abusive mother. Beverly, in turn, accepts this treatment because it feels familiar; she has married a man who, like her father, "worries" about her, and whose violence she has learned to interpret as a perverse form of love. The relationship's turning point comes when Mike Hanlon calls to summon Beverly back to Derry. Tom, enraged by her defiance and her smoking, attacks her with a leather belt. For the first time, Beverly fights back, throwing cosmetics, tipping a vanity table onto him, and finally striking him across the mouth and groin with the belt. She flees the house barefoot, bleeding, and laughing with a wild exhilaration, leaving Tom behind. Tom, obsessed with revenge, tracks her to Derry by beating the information out of her friend Kay McCall, then purchases a car and drives to Maine, intending to force Beverly to eat a carton of cigarettes as punishment. He is ultimately killed in the sewers beneath Derry, his body never found, a casualty of the same supernatural evil that had drawn Beverly back to her hometown.