Strange, tragic story

There has been a local news story going on here for the past three weeks. If you want to read all the articles (and there are a lot), go here. Be warned, it is not a pleasant story and does not have a happy ending.

Basically, it's the story of a missing woman, her husband and all the bizarre occurances of the past three weeks. Some of the highlights - if you can call them that - include:

• an uncooperative husband who reports his wife missing after she's been gone for five days
• a media circus that the husband played to
• a dismembered body, part of which was found in the couple's garage
• a statewide manhunt for the husband
• the capture of the husband after a night of freezing temperatures when he was wearing no coat or shoes
• the confession of the husband to killing his wife (while his children were in the house, asleep) and cutting up her body (at his family's machine shop)

There are many, many more crazy details to this story. It has absolutely dominated the local news here ever since the story broke, on February 16th, I believe. All the big excitement of the discovery of the body and the subsequent manhunt and capture happened this past weekend and we have been glued to the TV.

Jeff and I (like most of the rest of the area) would discuss the recent developments almost every day, disecting the TV and newspaper reports. Jeff even called me several times today as news was breaking to talk about it. He thought the husband was guilty right from the beginning. I was hoping he was not, as his original story was plausible to me - his wife travelled a great deal for business and he said they argued about it and then she left the house and he hadn't seen her since. I thought she was dead, but that she had a car accident (we had some bad weather around the time she disappeared) or that she met up with some third person who did her in.

This all happened only a few miles from where we live. What gives me the creeps is that it's very possible that we could have easily crossed paths (it was mentioned in the paper that he would shop at the same grocery store that I shop at). And I feel so very sorry for their children who have lost their mother at the hands of their father.