4 People Who Went Nuts When Their Partners Cheated
When you learn your spouse cheated on you, you see red. The law may recognize this, saying that if you kill a spouse’s lover, maybe that’s not murder after all but some lesser crime. For half a century, Texas went further, outright saying that “homicide is justifiable when committed by the husband upon one taken in the act of adultery with the wife.”
Texas eventually got rid of that loophole because it was a little too lawless for the legal code, even by Texas standards. Meanwhile, the world overall continues to respond to infidelity in ways that don’t quite qualify as reasonable.
A Husband Demanded His Donated Kidney Back
Richard Batista’s wife Dawnell cheated on him, said Richard Batista. According to Dawnwell, however, he’d cheated on her, and had also beaten her, a claim that another ex of his backed up. Both of them wanted a divorce, and this ushered in that time-honored ceremony known as the division of assets. Richard declared one unusual item to be an asset up for dispute: his kidney.
He called it his kidney, because it had sat in his body until four years before the breakup, in 2001. That year, he donated it to Dawnell, at which point doctors would find it convenient to call it her kidney. Whether it was his kidney or her kidney, claimed Richard, the way he’d passed it along during the marriage meant it was a shared assert, and he wanted it back.
There was never any chance of a court agreeing to carve the organ out of Dawnwell and hand it back to Richard to get surgically reinserted. But Richard (who happened to be a surgeon himself) offered another option. He hoped to get it valued at $1 million so his wife would now have to pay him that amount during the divorce. A court considered the matter and said no, that was crazy, they were turning down his request, and also, he’d possibly broken the law by coming up with the idea.
A Detroit Man Kept His Wife in a Freezer for Four Years
In 1985, Leonard Tyburski realized his wife Dorothy was having an affair. The other man was Craig Albright, who happened to be living in the house with them for the simple reason that Craig was also dating Kelly, the couple’s 18-year-old daughter. When Leonard confronted Dorothy with his suspicions, she admitted the truth, and then started throwing stuff at him in the kitchen, including knives — or at least, that’s what he would claim years later. While this sounds like a scene invented by a defendant to paint himself as the victim, the couple’s daughters would testify that this was typical Dorothy behavior.
They wound up in the basement, where Leonard slammed her head against a metal post 11 times, which is a few times more than is necessary for merely incapacitating an opponent. He would later claim that at the end of this fight, he pushed her away and she happened to fall backwards right into a chest freezer set up in the basement. Later, more credibly, he’d say he “thrust her in the freezer, or flung her in would be a better word.” Leonard told his daughters that Dorothy had abandoned them, and he filed a missing persons report on her.
Years passed. Kelly would have nightmares that featured her mom, stiff in place and unable to move. In 1989, these nightmares inspired her to think about that freezer in the basement. It remained sealed shut because (claimed Leonard) they’d lost the key. That didn’t make much sense. Why hadn’t Leonard broken the lock open at some point to use the appliance again?
Craig, still in touch though no longer dating either of the Tyburski women, suggested breaking into the freezer herself and taking a look. So, one day, Kelly snapped open the lock with a screwdriver and saw what she’d intuited might be there: her mother’s folded-up body, preserved and barefoot, lying over a layer of frozen hamburger and kielbasa.
A court sentenced Leonard to 20-to-40 years. Five years into this sentence, his daughters successfully petitioned for the sentence to be reduced. He was “a good father,” they said.
One Wife Cut Off Her Husband’s Penis... Twice
Speaking of chopped kielbasa, when a man cheats, there’s a worryingly common consensus about the correct response:
@xtinatotx
Only occasionally do wives make good on this promise. The most famous angry penis amputation surely came courtesy of Lorena Bobbit in 1993, and that case didn’t have anything to do with cheating. In 2015, however, from Shangqiu in China, we got the following story of a wife who found her husband had been carrying out some extramarital activity when she looked at his phone and saw an email he’d typed up. Feng, 30, responded by approaching the husband in bed and snipping off his penis with scissors while he was sleeping.
Fan Lung, the husband, now went to a hospital half-cocked to get the organ reattached. Much like with the Bobbit case, the attachment was successful — at first. But the hospital did not monitor the man carefully, and the next they heard of him was when they responded to reports of a man, naked, attacking a woman outside their building.
Fan was not merely taking revenge on his wife for the earlier severance. Instead, Feng had come to the hospital, entered his room, cut the penis off a second time, and threw it out of an opened window. Fan left the building, either in a failed attempt at penis retrieval or in pursuit of Feng. Either way, he did not find the defenestrated member and turned his fury upon Fan.
Police took Fan into custody. Hospital staff tried to find the detached penis, but they did not succeed. Presumably, some stray cat found it and ate it.
A Soldier Brought the Boyfriend’s Severed Head to His Wife’s Hospital Room
When Diane Schap told her husband Stephen that their marriage was over, he asked if there was another guy. She said no. Later, when he learned she was pregnant, he suspected there had been another guy in the picture after all, since he himself had had a vasectomy.
US Army
This was 1993, and Stephen and Diane were both in Germany, as he was an Army Sergeant stationed at a base there. The other guy, Gregory Glover, was in the army with Stephen. While Diane was in the hospital for pregnancy issues, she spoke to Gregory on the phone, then she heard him swear and get cut off, “mid-breath.” She didn’t realize it at the time, but Stephen had entered Gregory’s telephone booth and stabbed him twice.
Stephen pulled him out of the booth now and stabbed him 13 more times. This part of the altercation was witnessed by several other men on the base, who did not intervene. We imagine some of them had the skills for dealing with this sort of thing, but maybe they were curious to see how it would all turn out, or maybe they were rooting for Stephen. They watched as he sawed through Gregory’s neck and kicked the head free of the body. Then Stephen retrieved the head, held it up for the assembled men, and said, “This is what you get for adultery.”
Stephen now put the head it a duffle bag. A duffle bag labeled HEAD — seriously.
His next stop was the hospital. He went to Diane’s room, took the head out of the bag and pressed it against her face. “Look, Diane, Glover’s here!” he said. “He’ll sleep with you every night now. Only, you won’t sleep because all you’ll see is this.” Doctors, cautious, entered the room and let Stephen explain himself to them as they waited for military police to arrive.
Stephen pleaded not guilty, saying the crime was not premeditated. Diane said his words to her did not back this up — “I studied this, I planned this, I calculated this,” he’d said. He received a life sentence initially, but this was knocked down to 45 years after a bit, when he went a little while without sawing off anyone else’s head.
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