October 11, 2007--"If I Told Her Once . . . "
Over coffee this morning, with a friend who we hadn’t seen for more than a year, it didn’t take very long to move from talking about medical insurance to illness, dying, and death. What can I say? He is an old friend.
And almost immediately thereafter the subject took a natural segue to the exploration of the predictable stages of a long-term marriage. Also not always a happy subject, though in all of this we sought the relief of humor—how, for example, during one stage of marriage husbands seem to become hard of hearing, especially to the tonal range of their wife’s voice.
In some cases things become even grimmer than that. So when back at home and pouring over the NY Times, I was not entirely surprised to read that New York State’s oldest inmate, an 89 year-old physician, Charles Friedgood, who was convicted of murdering his wife in 1975, was again denied parole. This in spite of the fact that he has terminal cancer and is likely to die before he has another opportunity to apply to be released. (Article linked below.)
I have a vague memory of the case and his trial. He shot his ailing wife full of Demerol, claiming he was only attempting to ease her pain, thinking she could handle the five shot he administered.
He probably could have gotten away with it except for three things—one, he signed her death certificate and had her body shipped out to the Midwest for an immediate burial; two, five weeks later he was caught at the airport heading for London with $450,000 of his wife’s cash in a suitcase—a fortune in 1975; and, three, he was absconding to Europe to meet up with his Danish nurse with whom he had fathered two children.
Recalling this lurid crime that dominated the New York tabloids, I was reminded of another wife-killer. In this case, without a Scandinavian hotty waiting in the wings, a mild-mannered Connecticut doctor, again a doctor, was convicted of stabbing his wife to death. He insisted that he had nothing to do with it; and though he could have received a much-reduced sentence if he had admitted his guilt, he refused to do so decade after decade and thus served his full sentence, 35 years.
When he was released, I sought to interview him on a radio talk show I hosted on WRVR. Amazingly, he agreed. It was his first interview after being convicted; but since he had become involved in prison-reform work he was willing to appear. For the first 25 minutes he described his experiences in jail and his ideas about how to improve the lot of prisoners and to make the system of incarceration more effective so as to reduce recidivism. Good things of that sort.
But I had other things in mind, and so near the end of our time, I popped the question, “Why,” I asked, “did you kill you wife?”
He peered at me across the table with a look that could kill. After a moment of silence which felt like half an hour, he leaned toward me aggressively and in the most-threatening of voices said, “If I told her once, I told her a thousand times--don’t squeeze the toothpaste in the middle of the tube.”
That was it. The last stage.
And almost immediately thereafter the subject took a natural segue to the exploration of the predictable stages of a long-term marriage. Also not always a happy subject, though in all of this we sought the relief of humor—how, for example, during one stage of marriage husbands seem to become hard of hearing, especially to the tonal range of their wife’s voice.
In some cases things become even grimmer than that. So when back at home and pouring over the NY Times, I was not entirely surprised to read that New York State’s oldest inmate, an 89 year-old physician, Charles Friedgood, who was convicted of murdering his wife in 1975, was again denied parole. This in spite of the fact that he has terminal cancer and is likely to die before he has another opportunity to apply to be released. (Article linked below.)
I have a vague memory of the case and his trial. He shot his ailing wife full of Demerol, claiming he was only attempting to ease her pain, thinking she could handle the five shot he administered.
He probably could have gotten away with it except for three things—one, he signed her death certificate and had her body shipped out to the Midwest for an immediate burial; two, five weeks later he was caught at the airport heading for London with $450,000 of his wife’s cash in a suitcase—a fortune in 1975; and, three, he was absconding to Europe to meet up with his Danish nurse with whom he had fathered two children.
Recalling this lurid crime that dominated the New York tabloids, I was reminded of another wife-killer. In this case, without a Scandinavian hotty waiting in the wings, a mild-mannered Connecticut doctor, again a doctor, was convicted of stabbing his wife to death. He insisted that he had nothing to do with it; and though he could have received a much-reduced sentence if he had admitted his guilt, he refused to do so decade after decade and thus served his full sentence, 35 years.
When he was released, I sought to interview him on a radio talk show I hosted on WRVR. Amazingly, he agreed. It was his first interview after being convicted; but since he had become involved in prison-reform work he was willing to appear. For the first 25 minutes he described his experiences in jail and his ideas about how to improve the lot of prisoners and to make the system of incarceration more effective so as to reduce recidivism. Good things of that sort.
But I had other things in mind, and so near the end of our time, I popped the question, “Why,” I asked, “did you kill you wife?”
He peered at me across the table with a look that could kill. After a moment of silence which felt like half an hour, he leaned toward me aggressively and in the most-threatening of voices said, “If I told her once, I told her a thousand times--don’t squeeze the toothpaste in the middle of the tube.”
That was it. The last stage.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
11:46 AM
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