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NORTON - In life, Elizabeth Cann was, by all accounts, a quiet and unassuming woman, happy in her church and devoted to her family.

In death, though, she has been portrayed as a long-suffering victim, amid media reports and friends' recollections of her unhappy eight-year relationship with Robert McDermott, the man who fatally shot Cann and wounded two of her daughters last weekend.

That led one person who knew Beth Cann to contact a reporter on Wednesday to share her memories. The woman - a neighbor who lived near Cann in the Grove section of Norton - did not want her name to be used.

"It seemed like a lot of people (in the neighborhood) really didn't know them," this neighbor said. "I know how nice they were."

The woman said she is as shocked as everyone else by what happened. "We knew he was crazy," she said of McDermott. "But we never thought he'd go to these extremes."

Still, the neighbor said she wanted to make sure people knew Cann as more than the victim of a terrible crime.

"She was a very smart woman," the neighbor said. "She was very, very nice, very quiet. Kept to herself. But she was very nice."

For this neighbor, as for so many other people who knew Beth Cann, that made it all the more inexplicable that she would be with a man like Bob McDermott.

"What was she doing with him?" she wondered. "We honestly didn't know."

McDermott was "a psycho," the woman said, adding he constantly tried to create trouble in the neighborhood.

"He wasn't right in the head," she said, speculating that he suffered from mental illness.

"It was well known that he was abusing Beth," the neighbor said.

She also said she witnessed McDermott bring Brittany Cann, one of the wounded daughters, to tears on more than one occasion.

However, the woman stressed that Beth Cann did not passively accept McDermott's abuse. "She did try to break it off," she said, but added McDermott kept forcing himself back into her life.

As far as the neighbor could tell, McDermott had no regular job. In an affidavit, Cann said he began receiving workers' compensation after an injury in late 2003 - and so he was around quite a bit.

The neighbor said she and her husband often saw McDermott walking the Canns' dog, Freedom, around the field behind their home.

The neighbor had gone to the Cann house shortly after police arrived to offer to take care of Freedom, not knowing the dog had also been killed in the attack.

Indeed, she fears that McDermott's relationship with Freedom explains why the dog did not bark when McDermott broke into the house to assault the Canns over the weekend.

And, she said, that makes all the more heartbreaking that McDermott shot Freedom to death during the attack on Beth Cann and her daughters, "because he was the one you'd see most often" walking the dog.

Just last week, the neighbor said, Beth Cann had called her to explain that she had changed her phone number and the locks on her house because she had broken up with McDermott for good. She spoke calmly, the neighbor recalled, and seemed almost embarrassed by the whole ordeal.

The neighbor said she thought McDermott blamed the girls for making Beth Cann decide to kick him out two weeks ago.

"It's been crazy these past few weeks" since McDermott left, Brittany had told her.

And yet only last week, and despite the recent steps Cann took to rid her family of McDermott, the woman said she and other neighbors saw him at the house trying to fix a car in the driveway.

The family member the neighbor knew best was 12-year-old Brittany, who remains in critical condition with her sister, Danielle, 15, in Hasbro Children's Hospital.

"She's so nice and so friendly, so outgoing," the woman said. "She's a busy bee."

Throughout the summer, Brittany would come over to the home of the neighbor, who has a 3-year-old child and an eight-month-old infant, and serve as a mother's helper for an hour or so. She was at their home last Thursday, a week ago today.

"She was a huge help," the neighbor said.

Brittany would play with the 3-year-old and the family dog, a German shepherd, keeping them occupied so the neighbor could get some work done around the house.

The neighbor said Brittany loves animals and adored Freedom, a small mixed-breed dog named after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Recently, she said, the family had also adopted a kitten, and Brittany happily told her stories about how well the dog and the cat got along.

The neighbor often saw Brittany playing with Freedom in the large field behind the family's house. The woman said that's what Brittany was doing the last time she saw her, on Saturday afternoon.

Brittany excitedly had told her neighbors that she was going to the Rascal Flatts concert that night at the nearby Tweeter Center.

The neighbor said she knew less of Cann's other daughters, Danielle and Amanda, 17, who was away at the time of the attack, but described them as sweet, helpful girls. When she was away, they looked after her cats.

Now, the neighbor is praying that Danielle and Brittany will recover from their wounds, and that the family will have the strength to get through their ordeal.

And her thoughts keep returning to Beth Cann.

"It's still shocking," she said.

She remembers small kindnesses, such as when Beth offered to help during the neighbor's pregnancy.

And she remembers looking across the field and seeing Beth smiling and waving a shy hello as she tended to her beautiful garden and the flowers all around the house on Reservoir Street.

"I can't imagine not seeing Beth, not hearing her voice," the woman said, her voice breaking slightly.

But, she said, Beth Cann still leaves a wonderful legacy.

"She was a great mother," the neighbor said. "She left this world better because she raised three fantastic girls."