Marilee Strong's Erased: Missing and Murdered Women
Our special guest this week is Marilee Strong, expert on men who murder their wives...not in crimes of passion, but in detached cold blood because their wives -- and even children-- have become inconvenient.
Ms Strong's research, coupled with her exceptional journalistic skills, make her one of the most respected experts on this "alternative to divorce."
Here is a sample of the cases Strong will discuss:
All of the women listed below are dead or presumed to be dead. All were murdered or are believed by authorities to have been murdered by a husband or a boyfriend, falling victim precisely because of their physical and emotional vulnerability to their killer. All “went missing†under mysterious circumstances, but none of these women was ever truly lost. They didn’t wander off, run away from home, suffer amnesia and forget where they belonged. They were deliberately “disappeared†by someone who had good reason to try to make sure they would never be found, someone who wanted to erase them from the face of the earth. Some are found, some never have the dignity of a an actual burial. Though the media has sometimes complained about excessive coverage of supposedly "young white missing women," these cases have received very little coverage beyond their immediate communities and the victims match no profile of ethnicity, age, or race.
• Hattie Bergeler, called "Fern" by friends and family, was found floating in the bay near her Florida home in August 2002 with a bed sheet wrapped around her head and cinderblocks tied to her neck and ankles. Her multimillionaire husband, Donald Moringiello, a retired aerospace engineer, claimed the two had lost sight of each other while driving in separate cars to visit his children. But he had still not reported her missing by the time her remains were identified—a month after he claimed to have lost her in traffic. Despite a wealth of physical evidence—the sheet, rope, cinderblocks, and the gun used to kill Fern, also fished from the water behind their Fort Myers Beach home, were all tied to her husband, and cleaned up blood was found in the house—it took two trials to convict him of second-degree murder. A man of Moringiello’s intelligence and character would not have made so many stupid mistakes, his attorney had argued.
• Isabel Rodriguez,
39, vanished in November 2001 two weeks after seeking a protective
order against her estranged husband, Jesus, whom she said threatened to
kill her if she was awarded any money from him in their divorce. In the
days before her disappearance, her husband ordered 10 truckloads of
dirt and gravel delivered to his five-acre farm on the outskirts of
the Florida Everglades. On the day she went missing, a witness saw a
fire burning for hours on the property. Jesus had told all his
farmhands not to come to work that day, explaining to one that he was
planning a Santeria “cleansing†ritual on the property. Police believe
he killed his wife that day, burned her corpse on the farm, and
scattered the ashes under the dirt and gravel. He claims she returned
to her native Honduras, abandoning their two children, but there is no
record of her leaving the U.S. or entering Honduras. Not long after his
wife disappeared he began seeing another woman who looks uncannily like
his missing wife, whose name even happens to be Isabel.
Prosecutors are still preparing for a third trial after two previous efforts ended in mistrial.
• Kristine Kupka, was just two months away from graduating with a degree in philosophy from Baruch 
College in New York City when she vanished without a trace in 1998.
It
turned out that she was also five-months pregnant. The father of the
child was one of her professors, Darshanand “Rudy†Persaud, who had
been dating her, but concealed the important fact that he was married,
not single. He only revealed this after she told him she had became
pregnant. He was so adamant that she get rid of the baby that she began
to fear he might hurt her. Kupka left her apartment with Persaud on the
day she disappeared. While he admits seeing her that day he denies
harming her or having any knowledge of her whereabouts and no charges
have ever been brought against him or anyone else. She is still listed
as missing. Rudy Persaud is a free man.
•
Lisa Tu of Potomac, Maryland, a 42-year-old Chinese immigrant caring
for two teenagers and her elderly mother, disappeared in 1988. Tu’s
common-law husband, Gregory, a Washington, D.C. res
taurant
manager heavily in-debt from business failures and gambling losses,
said she never returned from a trip to San Francisco to visit a sick
friend. But police believe he killed her as she slept on their couch
then attempted to assume a new identity, traveling to Las Vegas,
forging checks under her name, stealing from her son’s college fund,
and enjoying the services of prostitutes.
A first-degree murder
conviction was overturned when an appeals court ruled that evidence
seized from his Las Vegas hotel room was improperly admitted. In the
retrial, he was found guilty of second-degree murder. Lisa Tu has never been found.
• Pegye Bechler, a physical therapist and mother of three, disappeared in 1997 while boating off the Southern California coast with her husband to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary and her 38th birthday. Eric Bechler claimed she was piloting a rented speedboat and towing him on a boogie board when she was washed overboard by a rogue wave. Although Pegye was an expert swimmer who completed in triathalons, he claimed she never surfaced and no sign of her has ever been found. After sobbing for the cameras about his devastating loss, Bechler took up with another woman just three months after his wife’s disappearance, an actress and lingerie model who agreed to wear a wire for police. Recorded describing how he bashed his wife over the head with a barbell then attached the weights to her body and dumped her at sea, he was convicted of first-degree murder.
• Lisa Thomas’ rocky marriage turned strangely amicable in the summer of 1996 when she and her husband of eight years finally agreed to divorce. Then she vanished on the same weekend she planned to begin looking for her own place to live. Her husband, Bryce, seemed remarkably nonchalant about the fact that his wife was missing and refused to allow police into their Bakersfield, California apartment. Lisa’s frantic twin sister, Theresa Seabolt, broke in and found the underside of the couple’s mattress soaked in blood. Only then did Lisa’s husband move into action, setting up a tip line and pleading for the public’s help in finding his wife. Although Lisa’s body was never found, a jury convicted her husband of second-degree murder. But the verdict was almost immediately thrown into question when one of the jurors accused fellow panelists of not following the judge’s instructions. Facing the possibility of a new trial, Bryce Thomas attempted to hire a hit man from his jail cell (who was actually a sheriff’s investigator) to eliminate his wife’s twin, the woman he believed responsible for putting him behind bars. Dictating a scenario identical to the one he carried out against his wife—presumably in the hope that it would appear the same person killed both sisters, he asked the purported hit man to kill his sister-in-law in her sleep then make her body disappear, leaving just a little trail of blood “because that’s similar to what happened to the one I’m accused of murdering.†Ultimately, the trial judge allowed the conviction for killing his wife to stand, and handed down a sentence of 15-years-to-life. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to another 12 years for trying to arrange the murder of Theresa Seabolt.
• Jami Sherer, 26, mother of a 2-year-old son, disappeared in Redmond, Washington in 1990 the day after telling her husband, Steven, she wanted a divorce and was moving back in with her parents. At her husband’s insistence, she had gone to meet him one last time but never returned. Within hours of that meeting, days before her car was discovered abandoned with her packed suitcase still inside, he began telling family members that his wife was “missing.†Ten years later, still maintaining that his missing wife was alive somewhere as a jury found him guilty of murder, he lashed out at his wife’s family: “When Jami does turn up, you can all rot in hell!â€
• Peggy Dianovsky, 28 at the time of her
disappearance, vanished from her suburban Chicago home in 1982, leaving
no trace of her existence even a quarter century after her
disappearance. Her husband, Robert, admitted striking her during an
argument with enough for
ce
to splatter blood on a stairway in the couple’s home. But he insisted
she packed a bag and left that night never to be seen again—without
taking her car or her three children. Twenty-two years later he was
acquitted of her murder in a bench trial, despite testimony from two of
her now grown sons, who said they witnessed their father hit their
mother and hold a knife to her throat in the hours leading up to her
disappearance. A family friend also testified that several months
before Peggy went missing, Robert Dianovsky asked him to help dispose
of his wife’s body and outlined a plan to make her killing look like
suicide. The friend declined to participate in Dianovsky’s schemes,
telling him that he would never get away with it—an incorrect
assumption, as it would turn out. Peggy Dianovsky
is listed still as a missing person and she never made any attempt to
contact her three sons. Robert Dianovsky is a free man and under the
law, is judged "not guilty" of a crime for which there are no other
suspects.
