On the front page of the newspaper today was a close-up of the young husband in our county who just confessed to killing his wife. Two days ago the front page sported a similar photo with the headline, “Husband of missing woman pleads for help in finding wife.” Yesterday his face appeared under the banner, “Body of missing woman found.” So today’s headshot was no big surprise.
Except to some. The day the 29-year-old teacher did not show up at her job and her car was discovered abandoned on the parkway and her husband was the picture of distraught concern, the similarly aged students in my school commiserated with him. Not the handful of us seasoned lifers. Those of us who’ve logged four or five decades on the planet exchanged looks that said, “Oh, he’s guilty. Take it to the bank.”
Our younger classmates were stunned at our jaded reaction. What had he done to earn our suspicion, they wondered. Well, for one, he read the police a text message he had received from his wife at 6:30 that morning on his way to the gym while she was driving to work. She wished him a wonderful day and wrote how much she loved him and how he meant the world to her and signed it hugs and kisses. This after just saying goodbye at home.
Those of us who are really alive at 6:30 in the morning driving to work are not texting love notes to the spouses we’ve been with for nine years and just kissed goodbye. We’re immersed in the daily rituals of commuting, like dribbling coffee from our travel mug or trying to decide when it’s safe to put on mascara in the rear view mirror.
There were other red flags, but let’s stay with the text message because it was so obvious. He didn’t respond to the message but he saved it. And there were no others like it saved in his phone. Certainly there are couples who exchange schmoopy messages, but why save just the one? People have patterns in their communications that are easily verified. Schmoopiness does not just appear fully schmooped. But clearly it’s impossible to fake a voicemail from someone you’ve already murdered so he no doubt saw his alibi devices as limited.
On the same page as the above mess was the follow-up to a previous story about a woman in a coma as a result of being poisoned by her estranged husband while she prepared their children for school one morning. At the time of his arrest, his statement was, “I sprinkled enough cyanide in her coffee to kill her.” Meaning that the coma came as a real frustration to him? Words elude me except to say that she has since died so at the very least they can charge his ass with the maximum.
Beneath these stories in the paper was a related one reporting that femicide – the killing of a woman – by her husband or partner is a leading cause of premature death for women in the United States. Reasons cited were the accessibility of guns combined with gains made by women causing their partners to feel insecure and angry. In less modern times, that premature death statistic applied to childbirth. Why does this not feel like progress?
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