Games of Madness: Self-Defense

A man explaining to a police officer the dire situation that caused him to kill his wife in self-defense.

Officer, before you begin trying to wear me down in attempt to get a full, pathetic confession, allow me to save you some time and just tell you what happened.  Yes, I killed Charlene, and yes, I realize that I am a man, and she is a woman, but it was entirely in self-defense.  She came at me with a kitchen knife officer;what was I supposed to do?  I have a permit for the gun I used and the situation demanded its use.  Maybe I should start from the beginning; it should help me collect my thoughts.  About two years ago my wife found me on the phone with a woman that I met at the bar that weekend.  She never seemed to go through a phase of hurt; she went turned immediately to rage.  I had no sexual intentions with the woman, I never would have betrayed my vows to Charlene, but never the less this idea of an adulterer husband festered in her mind.  I am sorry to say that it happened again twice, with increasingly incriminating situations, and all three times were with different women.  I never did cheat on my wife, not those times or any other; I have been faithful as any man can be.  Things got worse and worse, she began blaming me for everything, and I do mean everything.  I was suddenly the worst person on this planet.

Then one day, she went too far.  There was an article in the paper about a woman who had been found dead behind her apartment.  You know of this I’m sure, I believe it was you, Officer Kenton, who was the first officer on scene.  Stuffed, not in a dumpster, but underneath it in a garbage bag; she was flattened and disfigured beyond recognition.  But, when she was identified, it turned out to be none other than the woman my wife first caught me on the phone with.  After sever remarks about how the b***h got what was coming to her, she looked right at me and said, “I’ll bet you caused this.  Maybe she had a boyfriend or husband that found out what you two did.”  She only meant to hurt me, it was no serious accusation.  Besides officer, if I am correct, the killer has been caught convicted, and sentenced to death row, and his lethal injection was carried through earlier this week.  Anyhow, months passed and things did not change.  Then, another article in the newspaper; this time it was a woman found in a pool.  The pool had been closed for winter, and when the cover was pulled back there was a decomposing corpse found in the few feet of water at the bottom of the pool.  This time, the woman was identified as the second person my wife caught me supposedly cheating on her with.  I know this looks bad for my wife officer, I know that this seems to incriminate her, but please let me finish, I can prove to you that she is not the killer.

My wife’s rage finally began to decline after about a year and a half after the first incident, and she entered a more depressed stage.  Other than a sense of lifelessness in her, she also seemed to be a bit skittish; she jumped at just about anything: a door slam, a drawer open, when I walked up to her from behind.  When the third body was found last month and was quickly dismissed as another of the killer’s victims, my wife grew even stranger.  The third woman that she caught me with had been found dead, and everything seemed to point to her.  She had the motive and she had changed so much, as guilt can do to a person.

The night that she died she came at me with the knife, and more accusations.  She began tying these things together in her head; she believed that for those three women to all be dead, and no others was too big of a coincidence for me to not have a hand in it.  Her rage was back, her accusations entirely serious, and she intended to kill me that night.  So I ran to my drawer and she followed with the knife, and I shot her before she reached me, right through her forehead.  I didn’t want to kill her, but I knew that if she lived my life would be threatened.  Don’t get me wrong, she couldn’t have gotten me with that knife, she is no fighter.  No I was more worried about this testimony coming to light before the execution of the man caught for these crimes.  But now that he’s dead, as is my wife who was clearly killed in self-defense, I don’t have to worry about finding myself being administered the lethal injection.  So glad you agreed that we could have this chat off the record, Officer.