A US woman cut off
her husband’s penís because she “wanted him to stop hurting her” with it, and
was enraged that she thought he had another woman, her lawyer said Wednesday.
Catherine
Kieu Becker planted audio devices to try to catch him having sex with a lover,
but they failed to find any evidence — although the bugs did record the night
she “took away his manhood,” tossing it into the garbage.
Kieu, 50,
is accused of drugging her estranged 60-year-old husband’s dinner then tying
him to a bed and cutting off his penís, at their home in Garden Grove,
southeast of Los Angeles, in 2011.
“This is
a case about a husband wanting to seek a divorce from his wife and her
unwillingness to accept it,” prosecutor John Christl said at the start of her
trial. “By refusing to accept it, she committed a vicious act.
“She took
away his manhood,” he said, calling Kieu a “very controlling, manipulative
woman… who knew exactly what she was doing.”
The
prosecutor said audio bugs recorded the events of July 11, 2011, when she mixed
the insomnia drug Zolpidem into a bowl of tofu soup.
“You can
hear him saying, ‘Oh, it’s good’,” Christl said. “You can also hear him saying,
‘It’s a little salty’,” before going to bed early, at about 8:10 pm. When he
was asleep she used ropes to tie him to the bed.
When he
woke, she told him “You deserve it” three times, and then “slices off his penís
with one motion of the knife,” Christl said. “She then walks into the kitchen,
takes the severed penís and puts it in the garbage disposal.”
Her
lawyer Frank Bittar said Kieu had suffered a “lifetime of trauma” beginning
with her childhood in civil war-torn Vietnam, and including being raped by an
older brother repeatedly when she was six years old.
After
moving to California she got married for a first time in 1984, but agreed to an
“amicable” divorce in 1997.
“She’s
not jealous and she’s not wicked and she’s not a black widow,” Bittar insisted.
She
married her second husband — whose identity has not been revealed — in December
2009. He was “hyper-sexual,” using erectile dysfunction drugs and forcing her
into “painful” sexual positions, the attorney said.
“You’re
going to learn that in Catherine’s mind, she severed his penís because she
wanted him to stop hurting her with his penís,” he said in his trial opening
statement.
If
convicted, Kieu faces up to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Source: AFP
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