On 'Oprah,' a Wife's Tale of Terror

Looking at Cade's face and hands, Winfrey asked her whether her idea of beauty has changed.

"No," Cade said, smiling and touching her close-cropped hair and a bandage on the back of her head. "I still wanted to look good when I came out here. It's just another beauty, that's all."

Cade said that she did not come from an abusive home but had been in an abusive relationship before she married Hargrave.

Winfrey told her audience that several weeks before Hargrave's attack, a Prince George's District Court judge dismissed a protective order Cade had obtained against Hargrave. The audience gasped.

The judge later said the dismissal was the result of a clerical error, Winfrey said in disbelief. "Shame, shame -- that's a shame," she added.

Although protective orders are designed to keep abusers away, there is no consensus on whether they are effective.

Winfrey played the audiotape of a court hearing in which the judge, Richard A. Palumbo, is sarcastic, talks over Cade and dismisses her protective order.

"I think that's awful, don't you?" Winfrey asked audience members, who responded, "Yes!"

"We invited Judge Palumbo to be here or provide a statement, and you can see he ain't here," Winfrey said, prompting a big laugh from the crowd.

Since shortly after the attack on Cade, Palumbo has not been hearing cases. Maryland's judicial commission recently filed misconduct charges against him in connection with his treatment of women in domestic violence cases and with some traffic incidents in which he allegedly misused his position as a judge.

At Hargrave's trial, prosecutors played a surveillance video from the T-Mobile store of Cade actually on fire. Winfrey showed it as well.

And Cade described what she remembered from that morning: Hargrave came into the store, and when she saw him, she told him she'd be with him in a minute. He then walked up to her and poured gasoline on her from a Sprite bottle.