Ordinary Nothing

Texas. Happily married couple, and two young kids. Then the model citizen of a father get arrested for sexual assault. This is a problem for them, since they don’t want to break the family apart (your husband gets arrested for sexual assault, to which he admits, and you want to preserve the family so much?! Why?!), and it’s hard to stay together when some of you are in jail, right?

So what do you do? Fake the husband’s death. The husband signed a plea, and was allowed to stay on probation out of jail. Meanwhile the wife:

spent weeks surfing the Internet, gathering information for a bizarre and grisly plot of deception. She learned how to burn a human body beyond recognition. She sought clues on ways to deceive arson investigators, and took meticulous steps to create a new identity for her husband.

The husband didn’t report to the probation officer, got jail time, and just before he was supposed to report to jail, there was a terrible car accident, leaving his body charred beyond recognition. Oh, and he had life insurance for $110,000.

Except that the body burned too perfectly, the temperature required to ruin a body so much was higher than what the rest of the car sustained. Just the area of the driver’s seat got so hot. For some reason investigators did not realize from this that he suffered from spontaneous human combustion, and that this was the cause of the accident. They in fact were even petty enough to comment on how there were no skid marks, and whine about traces of lighter fluid. Mean spirited people, aren’t they?

In the meantime, the wife, after a few months, found a new boyfriend. Which surprisingly enough looked exactly like her dead husband, only with different hair colour. I guess this was just her type, of course, since the husband was dead. Or at least that what they expected everyone to believe. The kids bought it (well, being 1 and 4 years old, they have an excuse) and so did the neighbours (Who would have thought? The sexual assault guy was not a very friendly neighbour and nobody knew him well. What a shock).

So many problems with that imperfectly executed plan, that it was bound to get discovered. And it did. At least the wife was nice, and just used the body of an old and poor women, so nobody would be offended. She’s quite a sweetheart when you get to know her, really:

Investigators said Molly Daniels told them the body was taken from a cemetery a few miles away. The body was an 81-year-old woman who had died in 2003 and was buried in an area used for people who can’t afford a burial plot or have little or no family.

”We felt because she was older; there would not be much family impact, if any,” Molly Daniels testified.

Now the only open question is whether they wanted to commit insurance fraud, or whether the fact that they didn’t leave to someplace else proves they just wanted to keep the family together. The way I see it, even if they wanted to preserve the family, it was bloody idiotic to stay in the same place, where people may still recognize the husband (I know eyeglasses worked perfectly for Clark Kent, but just dying the hair? Please…) . And if they were stupid enough for that, then they surely could have been stupid enough to stay if they were just after the money…

In any case, those are obviously weeks of on-line research that went down the drain. Just in case we need another proof that the wife isn’t that great a thinker. Or the husband either, since obviously he head a few weeks to hear about the details of the plan before it went into action.

Via The Legal Reader.

May 8th, 2005 at 21:17 EET | Categories: Legal | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.