Tyler Perry's Extra's Murder Confession

Thanks to the lovely concept of of double jeopardy, I can tell you this story. According to the laws in this state, I can shout from the rooftops that I murdered my husband and there isn’t a thing that any court can do about it. My only regret is that he isn’t here so that I can thank him for providing me with the perfect defense to a murder charge.

I didn’t really want my husband dead, I would have preferred to remain happily married to him. But, he cheated on me again. I might have been able to handle the affair itself, but he wanted to leave me and that, I could not allow. At my age, given the choice, I would rather be a widow than another middle aged woman who was tossed aside by a cheating husband.

I remember the very moment that it occurred to me that killing the bastard was an option. I was sitting on my front porch chain smoking and swallowing sedatives in an attempt to stop the hideous pain that had been torturing me for months. From the moment that I learned about my husband’s most recent affair, I had been in a constant state of panic.

My life literally consisted of me wringing my hands and pacing throughout my house for hours every single day of my life as I worried where my husband was and with whom he was spending his time. When he was at home, I sat there wondering where the love that he once showed so passionately had gone. Bedtime was the loneliest time of all as I laid next to my husband of 20 years. He slept with his back to me as I would lie there aching to be held, all the time knowing that I was nothing to him anymore except an obstacle keeping him from the woman that he wanted.

When I told my husband that his behavior was driving me insane, he responded, “You’re doing it to yourself. The only chance our marriage has is if you get therapy for your trust issues.” As asinine as it seems today, it was easier for me to believe that I was crazy than it was to believe that my husband didn’t love me anymore. So, I went to a psychiatrist. That’s where I got the sedatives, not to mention the anti-depressants and the mood elevators.

No matter how many pills I took, the pain never stopped. After a couple of months of psychiatrist visits, I was still as confused as I ever had been. The only thing that changed was my husband. His anger at me for existing beyond my usefulness increased and became much more evident. His daily phone calls from work had stopped long ago and when I would call him, the constant busy signal only served to strengthen my suspicions. As the truth continued to bang on my head, I began to accept it.

Accepting the truth didn’t make things any easier, especially when my husband was lying to me constantly. The constant state of panic would not abate. I prayed constantly for a brief respite from the pain that began in my gut and spread to every fiber of my body. Nothing would make it stop and I couldn’t imagine it slowing down anytime soon. The afternoon that I was sitting on my front porch wondering what in the world I could do to feel happy again, if only for a moment, was when I finally came up with a solution to my problem.

I don’t know where the idea came from, it just sort of popped into my head. But as soon as it did, my pain stopped. The sudden absence of pain convinced me that the idea was a good one. It only took about two minutes to make the decision and after that, I began planning to kill the source of my pain…my husband.

Suddenly I found myself thinking clearly for the first time in years. I perceived a resolve that I hadn’t felt in decades. For months I had barely eaten enough to keep a mouse alive and now I was ravenous. I was able to get rid of the constant suspicions because none of them mattered anymore. I had a murder to plan and that required a healthy body and a sound mind. I couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.

Once the decision to kill the man was made, the rest was easy. I immediately decided on anti-freeze as a “weapon”. That plan had a couple of hurdles to overcome but I was sure that I could make it work. First of all, I didn’t know how much anti-freeze it took to kill a man. I was afraid to look it up on my computer out of fear that the police would be able to figure that out. I didn’t know enough about computers so I figured that I had better go to a library to get the “recipe” for an anti-freeze murder. And, it probably would be a good idea if the library that I used was a good distance away from my house.

I drove to a library out in the sticks. I found out what I needed to know. Apparently, you can kill a person with one dose of anti-freeze but it had to be a good sized dose. I learned that the stuff tastes a bit like liquor so you could easily give a person a mixed drink with enough anti-freeze in it to do the job but the fool didn’t drink often enough for me to give it to him like that.

Besides, something in my mind told me that there was a difference in killing a person with one dose and doing it with a few small doses. Whether or not that makes sense, I don’t know and I don’t care. But one thing was for sure, we would be eating a lot of spicy food over the next few weeks.

On the way home from the library, I stopped at a gas station and bought a gallon of antifreeze. When I got home, I stuck it under my kitchen sink, way in the back where it wouldn’t be seen unless someone tried to clean out the cabinet and I knew that my husband wouldn’t be doing that anytime soon.

That very same day I made a mistake, I poured some of the poison in a glass of soda and gave it to my husband. He tasted the crap so I had to quickly think up some way to get rid of the drink without raising any suspicions. I dumped it down the sink and told him that I wanted to get him drunk so that he would make love to me. He bought that and drank a harmless glass of soda. I sat there wondering what to do next and I decided to make a pot of chili.

I always had to make two of whatever I made for dinner because he didn’t like onions or peppers or some other thing that I did want. So, he didn’t think a thing of the two pots of chili sitting on the stove. The poisoned pot had no onions and the other pot had plenty of them. And they were large onions so he would be sure to eat out of the right pot.

After one bowl, he complained of a bit of a stomach ache. He went and laid on the bed for a while and I did my best to comfort his cheating ass. I didn’t know what to expect. Would he croak right then and there? Would I wake up next to a dead man? Would he figure out what I was up to?

Anyway, eventually his pain went away and he decided that he needed to go to the store. I knew that he was going to call his mistress but it didn’t bother me anymore. My only fear was that he would leave before I had a chance to kill his ass. While he was gone, I decided that there wasn’t enough poison in the chili so I added a bit more. I thought to myself, “This is going to take a while.”

Well, I was wrong. That night things happened much more quickly than I had ever imagined they would happen. Although I didn’t see him do it, he must have eaten another bowl of the chili because when I came back in the house after doing some yard work, he was lying on our bed moaning in pain. I ran to his side and asked him what was wrong. He said, “My stomach is killing me!”

Under my breathe I said, “Give credit where credit is due. It isn’t your stomach that’s killing you, it’s me.” As I said that he went into a seizure that lasted for what seemed like ten minutes. From what I had read at the library, I knew that he had ingested enough of the poison to kill him unless he received medical care immediately and that wasn’t going to happen. I took the bedroom phone into the living room and waited for him to die.

As I sat in my recliner waiting for my husband to take his last breathe, I started thinking about how I was going to handle the police when they inevitably came to my house. A tiny piece of me felt guilty, not because he’d be dead soon, but because he seemed to be suffering. I dismissed that concern and went back to planning for the cops. At one point I heard him call my name so I walked slowly down the hall toward the room where my husband and I had made love so many times over the years. I started to get a bit nervous, I don’t really know why but I noticed that familiar feeling that I had been suffering before I came up with my plan.

I figured that was a good thing because I couldn’t be perfectly calm when the cops arrived. And, when I walked into my room and looked at my husband, I knew that the cops would be arriving soon. He was quite blue and obviously quite dead.

I decided to attempt CPR on him just in case the medical examiner would be able to tell if I had tried to save him. It was a hideous task but one that had to be done if I was going to get away with this plan of mine.

Then it occurred to me that the chili was still in the kitchen so I quickly poured it all down the sink and turned on the garbage disposal. I washed the hell out of every dish, pot or spoon that had touched the poison. Then I had to get rid of the poison itself so I did that by pouring the rest of it into the radiator of my car. That car hadn’t moved in months because my husband wouldn’t fix the stupid thing for me. Once again, he was making things easy for me to kill him.

As soon as I had poured the last of the antifreeze into the radiator, it occurred to me that I had better crank the engine to get the fluid to circulate a bit. As I ran around my house looking for the key, I cursed myself for not being more prepared. I guess I should have thought things through a bit more, but it was too late to worry about that now. I found the keys and hoped that the engine would turn after sitting for so long.

There wasn’t anything wrong with the engine, it was the transmission that was bad. The only thing that my husband had done to that car was start it occasionally so when I finally found the key, the engine did turn over. “Thanks honey.” I thought as it did.

I only let the car run for a moment and then I had to get rid of the empty jug. Once again, my husband made that easy for me. Too lazy to get rid of used motor oil properly, over the past few years he had just taken the old oil and poured it into old containers. Some were motor oil containers and some were antifreeze containers. I wiped the jug free of any fingerprints and then I put on a pair of gloves that came with my hair dye and took the jug into my bedroom. I had to put some one’s fingerprints on the jug and the only fingerprints that should have been on it were his So, I took his dead, cold hands and placed his prints all over the jug. Then I took the jug and tossed it under the house with the rest of the containers that he had thrown down there.

I flushed the gloves down the toilet and then I flushed it two more times for the heck of it. Next I went back into the kitchen and washed the sink again. This time I poured some bleach down the drain and then I turned the water on to wash away any trace of my actions. I quickly grabbed a clean bowl and put some of my chili in it and left it on the kitchen table as though someone had just finished eating it.

Now it was time to call the police.

My hands were shaking so badly that it took three attempts before I could dial 911. As soon as I heard the dispatcher ask, “What is your emergency?”, I began crying. It wasn’t an act, for some reason that I didn’t understand, I was sobbing uncontrollably.

“My husband is blue!”

That’s all that I could say. I said it over and over again and before I even heard a response from the dispatcher, I heard that unmistakable knock on my door that could only be the police. I dropped the phone and opened the door. “Didn’t they send an ambulance?” I shouted at the two officers standing on my front porch.

“Yes ma’am, they’re right behind us.” I was stunned. I never reported a crime, I told the lady that my husband was blue. I couldn’t believe that the cops got to my home before the ambulance. Then I recognized the officers as the same two cops who had come to my home two months before.

That day I had been the victim of domestic violence and I guess they assumed that it was happening again. It was a Monday evening when I had seen these two officers last. I had taken my husband’s credit cards out of his wallet that morning before he left for work. I did that because I didn’t want him to spend any more money on his whore. He didn’t notice that they were gone until he had already left work. I guess he was on his way to her trailer when he realized that the cards were not in his wallet.

I was sitting at my computer reading my email when my husband burst through the door and started banging his fist on my keyboard. I grabbed the kitchen phone and tried to call 911. But, as most abusers do, my husband pulled the phone out of the wall. I ran to grab the bedroom phone but he was right behind me. He ripped that phone out of the wall as well. I turned to run out of the room and he picked up the beside table and threw it at me. Since I was running away from him, it hit me in the back and I fell into the hallway wall, knocking over a half circle table full of knick-knacks that I had inherited from my grandmother.

The Friday before that happened, I had surgery to remove a tumor from one of my parathyroid glands. The wound was still fresh and in the struggle, blood had oozed from the incision. At that point, I didn’t know the blood was there and neither one of us knew I had gotten through to 911 before he ripped the kitchen phone out of the wall.

I kept running. By the time I was out the back door and almost to the end of the driveway, the cops were walking toward me to offer their help. I didn’t know that my neck was full of blood but I did know that I was bleeding from my leg and my head. One of the officers assumed that my husband had slit my throat. When he asked me if my husband had done that, I laughed without even thinking. “No sir,” I responded. “I had surgery last week. But the rest are all from him.”
I don’t think he heard me because as my husband walked out the door to face the police, the cops both tackled him to the ground and cuffed the bastard. I realized that I was still laughing and I thought that it might be considered an “inappropriate reaction”. But then again, who knows what appropriate behavior is in such a situation?

My laughter turned to tears as I began to feel the pain. I felt it in my legs, my back, my head and most of all, I felt it in my heart. They took him away and he eventually pleaded guilty to one charge of domestic violence. He was sentenced to time served as he had no one to bail him out of jail before his trial. His trailer dwelling tramp certainly didn’t have the money. And I wasn’t about to get him out so that he could see her again.

In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, my husband was continuing to set up a great defense for me to use should I be charged with murder.

While he was in jail, I had no idea if he’d ever be back and I didn’t know how I would pay the bills. Out of work due to a serious illness, I did the only thing that I knew to do. I took everything of his out to my carport and put up a huge sign at the end of the driveway that said, “Betrayed Wife Sale”. The little sale didn’t take in too much because I didn’t care what I got for his stuff. Later I found out that I had sold a few very expensive tools for less than five bucks. Also, I got five bucks a piece for every idiotic karate movie that the man had in his stupid DVD collection. All in all, I took in about three hundred bucks that day. That might have bought a few groceries, but it wouldn’t go much further than that.

The following day there was a blurb in the local newspaper that simply said, “Seen on Polk Street, sign saying, Betrayed Wife Sale”. I didn’t know about that until some local women brought the paper to show me. They all picked up a few bargains as well.

Anyway, the two familiar police officers asked where the “blue” man was. I directed them to the blue man who was lying on my bed.

“Yep, he’s gone.”, stated one of the cops. “Did he finally hit you one time too many?”

“No officer, I found him like this when I came in from gardening.”

Just then I heard the other officer requesting a “meat wagon” into a microphone on his chest. That offended me and I let him know it. “He’s not a piece of meat, he’s my husband!” Then I let the tears flow again. Once they started, I couldn’t make them stop.

I thought to myself, “What would a wife do if her husband was lying in front of her as dead as a doorknob?” At that moment I threw myself on top of the body of the man who tried to steal my life from me. Although I begged him to wake up, I prayed that he wouldn’t.

I felt quite justified in what I had done. In my mind, it was self defense. Not in the way that most people define self defense, but it made perfect sense to me. It was his life or mine and when the decision is between me and a lying cheat of a husband, it’s not even close. I win hands down.

The activity that followed is mostly a blur in my mind but I do remember bits and pieces. I remember someone asking me questions such as, “Did your husband have any illnesses that you’re aware of?” “How did he act when he came home this evening?” “Does he do drugs?”

“Yes, he does. But nothing that would kill him.” That was true. The man did smoke weed on a daily basis but that shouldn’t kill a person. He even stole MY weed a few times to smoke with his mistress.

As I watched the rescue squad zip my husband up in a body bag, my knees buckled and I fell down right there in my bedroom. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I was quite dizzy and very nauseated. The police asked me if I needed medical care and I told them that I didn’t. A few of them took some pictures of the room and before they left my house one of them asked me if I would be available should they have any questions for me. I assured them that I would and off they went.

I stood there in my living room wondering what to do next. I went into my bedroom and noticed that even though he had his pants on, the fool had soiled my sheets when he lost muscle tone. At least that’s what I figured it was. So, I changed the nasty smelling sheets and threw away the mattress pad before any of the stuff reached my mattress.

Then, I started cleaning my house. I was a bundle of nerves and I could not sit still. I went into my kitchen and dumped every kitchen drawer out on the floor. I sat there deciding what to keep and what to throw away. About ten minutes into my chore, I found a bottle of sex lotion that I had never seen before. I knew what that meant. The son of a bitch had screwed his wench in OUR bed. It could have only happened while I was visiting my daughter a few months earlier.

Now it didn’t matter what was on the mattress. I didn’t want to sleep on it again.

All by myself, I dragged the mattress out to the end of the driveway. I knew that the city came every Thursday to pick up stuff like that so I just left the mattress, box spring and frame right there on the sidewalk. Where the strength to drag all of that stuff out of my house came from, I do not know.

That night I collapsed on my couch, exhausted from all of the day’s activities. I had taken a couple sedatives after the cops left and they were starting to kick in. The last thing I remember was smiling at the thought of my husband’s mistress wondering why he hadn’t called her that evening.

I was right, the city did pick the junk bed up the next day. As I watched them load it onto their truck, I saw a car pull into my driveway. Two men in suits stepped out and walked to my door. I opened it before they had a chance to knock.

“Mrs. Cardis?”, asked the taller of the two.

“Yes sir. Can I help you?”

“I hope so. We have some questions to ask you regarding your husband’s death.”

I invited the two officers into my house and then I led them into my living room. The tall one sat on my burgundy chair and the shorter one sat on my couch. He sat right on the spot where my husband sat while he watched television.

He watched a lot of television. He had no friends, no hobbies, no interests at all unless you count women that he worked with. It seems as though the man has “dated” at least one woman from every single job he has ever had.

There was one at Franklin Electronics but he dumped her as soon as I found out about that affair. He was dumb enough to give her our number and she called one evening after we had eaten dinner. There was another one at Sears but he didn’t dump her as quickly.

I had suspected something with that affair but as usual, I had no proof. Just a nagging suspicion that something was going on. I don’t even remember what made me so chary with that one. I do remember that I knew he was screwing someone at work and that there were only two possibilities, it had to be one of the two bimbos who worked the front desk at the Sears service department, either Lori or Ellen.

I did confront him about my feelings but without a tape of him actually boning the bitch, he wasn’t going to admit to one damned thing. I even found a phone number in his pocket but when I called it, a guy answered the phone. I sort of let it go for a while and tried to get the thoughts out of my mind.

One day he and I were sitting in the living room chatting when the phone rang. It was his boss calling from the service center 40 miles away. I looked at my husband talking on the phone when I had an epiphany. That service center had a different area code than we did. I didn’t have the thought for more than a second before my mouth opened and said, “Oh! I had the wrong area code!”

The sudden deep breathe he took as he continued talking to his boss told me that I was right. As soon as he hung up I dialed the phone number that I had found only this time I dialed a different area code first.

“Hello?” said an older woman.

“Can I speak to Ellen?” I had a 50/50 chance and I guessed the right one. Ellen came to the phone. I hung up and looked at my idiot husband as he mumbled something stupid about how Ellen’s father had some land for sale.

My husband never had two nickles to rub together from the day I met him to the day he left. We couldn’t afford a piece of land in the boonies. Especially one with no house on it. He actually expected me to believe that he had this chick’s number so that we could make a land investment.

But still, he denied any wrongdoing. There was no way in hell that he was going to admit to anything unless I had caught him red handed. I figured out that he only broke off the earlier affair because he had no idea what that one said to me on the phone. He had no idea what lie to make up. Also, by now I guess he figured that if I stayed for one I would probably stay for another.

We bickered for a while and then things went back to “normal”. I didn’t discuss it and he didn’t ever buy any land.

One night he was being particularly nasty to me for no reason. He went to bed in an attempt to avoid explaining his behavior with me and quickly fell asleep. As soon as he did, I started looking for evidence. I had no idea what I was looking for but I’d know it when I saw it. I knew that there could be no other reason than an affair for his spiteful treatment of me. I picked up his keys and went out to the driveway where his work van was parked. I opened the door and found exactly what I was looking for.

He couldn’t lie away a love letter and that’s exactly what I found. The idiot didn’t even try to hide the stupid thing. He left it sitting right on top of the console.

I took the letter and walked into the house, down the hallway and into our bedroom. I turned on the light. Half asleep and still acting like a pompous ass, he shouted, “Turn off that goddamned light!”

“Uh…no. If I did you wouldn’t be able to read your whore’s little love letter that I found in the van.”

That got his attention.

He tried playing stupid and when he did, I actually argued with him. When he said that nothing was going on between the two of them, I repeated what was written in the letter. He denied it and I said, “Here, look at what she wrote!”

He took the letter and I never saw it again. His story was that he had driven 40 miles to “say Good-bye” to Ellen and she gave him the letter. Doesn’t every married man break up with his mistress in person? He admitted to “hugging her” and of course SHE touched HIS dick. He was sucking her face at the time, but it was Ellen who did the real sex stuff, my husband just sat back and let her.

My relationship with another guy saved my marriage after that affair. There was nothing but friendship between the two of us but I knew that the guy wanted me. He worked with my husband and he knew about the affair. He certainly felt no loyalty to my husband but like an idiot, I did. And the thought of competition drove my husband right back to me.

You know, there are two things that I can point to if asked, “What are the two biggest mistakes that you’ve ever made in your entire life?” The first one is that I broke up with a guy named Mike to marry my husband. The second is that I chose my husband over the guy who wanted me during his affair with Ellen.

Do you have any idea what it does to a woman to have to deal with a cheating husband? I let it happen, I take responsibility for that. But accountability isn’t my point. My point is that ever since I felt the need to fight for my marriage, I haven’t accomplished a damned thing of any import. How could I?

Being married to a cheating man is like the Viet Nam War. First of all, the cause isn‘t worth the effort. Secondly, the enemy doesn’t play by the normal rules. A cheater will suck every resource that you have and then leave you when you’re depleted of any reserve that you might have had. And as they leave, they complain that you’re too much of a burden to carry anymore.

It’s not as though I didn’t want to accomplish things. And as a single mother of three kids, I did. I went to college and graduated with honors. I could have done anything I wanted to do. If I wanted to be President, I would have at least become a Senator in the effort. Of that, I have no doubt. But my desires were always simple, all I ever wanted was a partner for life. Just someone who would always be there, no matter what else happened. I just wanted a husband. The way I was raised, that wasn’t out of the question. I never wanted to be alone and that’s what I was faced with if I let my husband leave me.

And that’s why I had two police officers sitting on my couch. I had no reason to think that they suspected me except for the fact that I was the spouse. I decided to play it pleasant.

I offered them a cup of coffee they refused it. They immediately began treating me like a suspect and I immediately asked them to arrest me or leave. I’ve watched enough Greta Van Sustern to know that I needed to shut up and “lawyer up”.

I inhaled a breathe of guilt like the one that “the deceased” had breathed when I picked up on Ellen’s area code. As I held out my arm indicating that the door was to my right, I wondered if the cops had noticed the rise and fall of my chest. I dismissed that thought as irrelevant and watched quietly as two officers in cheap suits walked out my front door.

Although retired and living in Florida, my father is an attorney so I called him immediately. He listened quietly as I told him the basics, my husband is dead and the cops seemed to be pointing the finger at me. I waited for him to ask me if I had bumped off the fool but he never did. Later I learned that in this country, only the husband/wife relationship is protected to the extent that one spouse does not have to testify against the other. The parent/child relationship has no such protection. I think I learned that from Greta as well.

Anyway, my father said that at this point, I should just keep doing what I was doing. Nothing. I should just keep my mouth shut and he would make a few calls to see if he could find me an attorney. Neither one of us knew then that we needn’t have bothered. I put the phone down and sat on my recliner. I thought to myself, “Dad will fix this.” I knew it was foolish the moment that it crossed my mind.

I love my father but he hasn’t always “fixed” things. Sometimes, as any other parent does, he did more harm than good. I know that he has always done what he thought was best and that he did what he did out of his love for his children. But his ideas were somewhat outmoded by the 70’s. His attitude toward women was still the same as it was when he was 25. But it was a time of massive social upheaval and not all parents of the day were equipped to prepare young people for the transforming roles that they would be expected to play.

I think it was the end of my sophomore year of high school when I approached my father about college. At school they were telling us to start making plans and many of my friends were doing just that. So, when I asked my father what the plan for me was, his answer flabbergasted me.
“I have three sons to put through school. If I used the money on you, it would be wasted when you end up pregnant.”

Pregnant? I was a virgin. I didn’t even have a boyfriend. I was suffering from a hideous case of unrequited love but that wouldn’t get me pregnant.

You know, there are two comments that my father made to me that I remember to this day. I remember them word for word and I find them both just as perplexing today as I did the day he made them. One of them was the comment that I just told you about and the other was the one he made when I tried to get an education all by myself. It wouldn’t have cost him a dime. He wouldn’t have had to lift a finger. As a matter of fact, the best thing that he could have done at that point was shut up and do nothing. Oh, how I wish he had.

I graduated from high school in 1976. It was a great year. The Bicentennial was a year-long party and with my high school graduation, it was a busy year. And on January 1rst of that year, the Army created a plan that allowed you to enlist 6 months before you had to show up. I was interested.

Even as a child my parents didn’t know where I was most of the time so as a 17 year old, they certainly didn’t ask any questions when I left for hours at a time. I spoke to a recruiter and he began taking me to all of the tests and physicals that were required. Like a fool I answered “Yes.” to a question on a physical that I could have just as easily said “No.” to. No one would have ever known. But I told them that I had hay fever and that bought me a battery of pulmonary tests at Great Lakes Naval Hospital.

Then I was sent to a classroom filled with recruits, mostly men. The women were glaringly outnumbered. When a nurse put a box of syringes on my desk, I thought I was supposed to take one and pass the rest down the row. But they were all for me. Then and now, needles have always been one of my biggest fears. They rank right up there with spiders and cheating husbands. I didn’t know if I could handle those needles. There were so many that I couldn’t easily count them.

The nurse knelt down next to me and started sticking those needles in my arm one at a time. I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t say, “OUCH!” and I couldn’t refuse. I was going to be a soldier. I was surrounded by men who didn’t think women should have been there in the first place. The worst thing that I could do was back out so I sat at that desk while needle after needle went into my left arm. Then, the needle monster went to my right arm and began again. I stared straight ahead in stunned shock until it was over. I was sure that I was pale. But eventually, it did stop. I felt like I would melt at the desk from weakness. I took a few breathes and recovered from the trauma I had just been through. I would rather get shot in the arm with a bullet than a hypodermic needle.

For being such a “trouper”, the recruiter took me to on a tour of the naval base. On the way back to the office, he said, “There’s only one thing left and you’ll be in the United States Army.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Your signature! The papers are at the office, you can sign them before you leave.”

I thought about my parents. For some stupid reason, I thought that I had to talk to them before I signed papers as important as the papers waiting for me back at the office.

“Let me tell my parents before I do that. They don’t know anything about this yet.” I think that surprised him.

That’s probably the only argument that the recruiter couldn’t counter. He didn’t even try.

When he dropped me off near my car I assured him that I would be back as soon as I apprised my parents of the situation. Surely they wouldn’t have a problem with my plan. After all, my father served in the 101rst Airborne Division and he always seemed rather proud of that. Of course, he was a man.

My father was the only person home when I walked in the door and actually, he was the one that I feared would have been angry had I signed those papers without discussing it with him first. So, if I told him that moment, I could get back to the recruiter’s office before it closed. He could tell Mom.

He was in the living room reading the newspaper when I walked in the house. He barely looked up from the paper as I told him what I had done and what I had planned on doing. I finished my pitch with, “And that way I can go to college. If I leave right now I can make it before the office closes.”

His composed comeback rocked my world and influenced the direction of my life in ways that I wouldn’t fully comprehend for another 10 years:

“If I thought that a daughter of mine had nothing better to do with her life than to go into the Army, I would be sorely disappointed.”

I was rather disappointed myself.

That was early February. By the end of March my virginity was a distant memory.

While I waited for my father to call me back with a plan…any plan, I wondered why the cops would have treated me the way that they did. Although I knew that this would be a coroner’s case, I didn’t think that the coroner arbitrarily checked for antifreeze. But I really didn’t know.

Then it occurred to me that the cops wouldn’t have had enough time to get any results back so certainly they didn’t know about the antifreeze yet. They couldn’t possibly have known that quickly.

So why did they treat me like that? There couldn’t have been any evidence, I didn’t leave any. Or did I? Was it a hunch? No, if it had been a hunch they still would have been friendly. At least they would have started off friendly.

There was something that I didn’t know. I pretty much figured that out. I just couldn’t figure out what it could possibly have been. That bugged me and it was a tad frightening but I had already decided that the worst case scenario was prison and although I would try to avoid it, it was a price that I was willing to pay.

I sat in my recliner and worried about what the cops had. If it wasn’t evidence or a hunch, it had to be a person. Someone said something to the cops. That had to be it.

When my husband had the affair at Sears, everyone knew about it before I did. I was literally the last person to know. Once the affair was out in the open, his co-workers would approach me and say, “I knew that it had to be something like that! You wouldn’t believe the things we heard him saying on the telephone!”

Why didn’t they tell me when they first figured it out? If they all “knew it had to be something like that”, why didn’t anybody ever give me the first heads up? Even the guy with the crush on me never told me until I figured it out by myself.

It occurred to me that I was probably not the only person to know about THIS affair. And of course, there was the whore herself to consider. I had no idea what stories she was told when the two of them tried to justify their own actions by demonizing me. In a perfect world, she would have been arrested for the murder instead of me. Then she would go away for a long, long time because a jury isn’t going to like an murdering adulteress. They were much more likely to be rather sympathetic to my cause.

Those are the types of things that I thought about as I waited for my phone to ring with the name of a good defense attorney. Then, all of a sudden, I noticed the silence and it was actually deafening for a split second. Time seemed to bend for a moment and that split second seemed to last forever but the ring of the telephone snapped me back.

I grabbed the phone from the table next to my recliner, “Hello?”

A male voice queried, “Jean Cardis?”

Thinking it was someone that my father had referred to me I said, “Speaking.”

“Mrs. Cardis, how do you feel about the accusations being levied against you by your husband’s mistress?”

Ah. That’s why the cops acted like they did. What a bitch. How did she find out he was dead? He hadn’t been gone for 24 hours yet.

I have no idea how she found out that he wasn’t coming back anytime soon. That SOB had so many secrets from me that to this day they still pop up every so often. Just a few weeks ago I found two pair of ugly ass underpants that obviously belonged to a fat chick. And his last bimbo was certainly one of those.

Looking back and considering how the trial went, I sometimes think that instead of using antifreeze, I should have gotten a gun and shot him in the head. I could have made him admit to everything he had ever done. Can you imagine how good that would have felt? Every time he told a lie I could have pumped a bullet into a different part of his legs until I made it up to his offending body parts.

Oh well, it’s too late for regrets. I chose antifreeze. If that nut Lynn Turner hadn’t just killed a second innocent man with antifreeze, I doubt they even would have checked for it. As a matter of fact, I know they wouldn’t have. It was mentioned at trial. At that moment my problem was the media. They assumed that I knew that my husband had a mistress. I decided to play stupid.

As I said before, in a perfect world, that bitch would have been convicted of killing the fool herself. And, if I had gone to the cops first and pointed the finger at her, she might have been the one on the defensive. But, that would have been stupid of me. I watched enough Cops and American Justice to know that most people screw themselves. If every single person clammed up and refused to talk to the cops, very few crimes would be prosecuted successfully. Actually, there was as much evidence against her than there was against me. I had nothing to worry about but her and her stupid mouth.

After a moment of silence, I answered the idiot on the phone.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He started to ask another question but I hung up the phone and pulled the cord out of the wall. I needed a minute to figure out how to handle the many phone calls which were bound to come in as soon as I plugged that phone back in. If one reporter could get my number, they all could.

I hadn’t planned for that particular contingency. I hadn’t planned for a few things. I never even gave the funeral a thought. But now I had to throw one together quickly. When we were in Scotland, my husband told me that he wanted to be cremated and then tossed in the River Tweed. But that was a long time ago.

I didn’t think that I wanted to honor his wishes at that point so I didn’t make any plans to go to Scotland but I did want to burn his ass. Of course, I didn’t know if that would be feasible if the coroner was going to be holding onto the body as evidence. I figured that one way or another, they would release it relatively quickly, perhaps within a week. So, I did have a few days to consider that. I sort of wished that his family would deal with all of that crap. After all, they liked him. But I was his wife and it was my job.

So, I made plans for a nice, tasteful little memorial service although I didn’t know who would be coming. He had no friends that I knew of. Of course, there were a LOT of things that I didn’t know about my husband.

At one point it occurred to me that his family had to be told. There was no love lost between me and them in the first place. Add to that the fact that the week my surgery was planned, he suddenly and unexpectedly had to go visit his mother on the other side of the continent. I was sure that there was much more involved with that little trip than he ever let on to me. I was having surgery and he was going on vacation. My guess is the timing had something to do with his whore.

I was sure of that when I dropped him off at the airport. He acted as though his whore was quite close and he didn’t want her to see him kissing me good-bye. I don’t know exactly how, but I know that his family was in on scamming me that week one way or another. None of them were known for being honest. I have to say, that dead bastard came by his dishonesty honestly.

As I sat there wondering whether or not I should call them, it occurred to me that the whore had probably already done that. I certainly didn’t owe his family anything, I had reason to dislike them that had nothing to do with their most recent collusion. There was no reason to change the way I acted now that I had offed their son and brother.

I smiled as I crossed one more annoying little chore off of my list when the unmistakable sound of police banging on my door boomed through my house. They shouted a few things but the first words I remember hearing were “search warrant” so I stood up and walked the 7 feet over to my front door and opened it. There were 3 of them at the front door and 3 more at the back door. I had 6 cops in my house at one point. I so didn’t care.

I sat on my couch and thought about it for a minute, what could they find that could possibly hurt me? Nothing. If there was anything, I didn’t know what it could be. Detective Heinrich asked me if there was an attic or a basement in the house. He was one of the cops who had treated me poorly earlier. I was glad he was there, he gave me a reason not to speak to ANYONE. I pointed out the attic and then I lead him out the back door and pointed to the entrance of the crawlspace.

I walked back in the house, poured myself some iced tea and sat down at my kitchen table because now they were tearing my living room apart. I watched them as they did, thinking to myself about how I was too sick to do my spring cleaning that year. Between me being sick, the affair and the hideous way my husband treated me, I couldn’t accomplish much. I sat at that table sipping my tea as I remembered the time he whipped his keys at my head. He said it was an accident and I wanted to believe him, so I let that go. I also let it go when he punched our bed with me in it.

All he said that time was, “Oh, sorry, I thought THAT was your leg!” It was always an accident. Anyway, now I felt well enough to clean the house.

I came back to reality when a few cops started dumping things out of my kitchen drawers. I recognized one of the cops. He had come to the house during the one and only altercation that ever made me look bad.

My husband and I had been arguing. It wasn’t about an affair (not that I knew about anyway). It was about a lie he told me. That man would lie about anything. I lived the last year of my life not knowing if ANYTHING he told me was true. The lying itself caused me so much anxiety that I ended up taking Xanax to get rid of the dreadful feeling in the pit of my gut that would never go away.

That particular lie had something to do with a Christmas party at his job that he lied to me about. He didn’t want me to know about it so he told some stupid lie and then hoped that I wouldn’t call while he was out drinking with the office staff. Like most liars, as soon as I confronted him with knowledge of his lie, he immediately turned it around on me and became violently angry. He didn’t have to actually be violent TO me…he was quite aware that I was terrified of an angry man. He blew up at me for something stupid and that effectively shut me up.

What he did next was totally unnecessary.

He marched into our bedroom and picked up a little statue that my grandmother had left me and he threw it at the wall, shattering it into a million pieces. He was always man enough to break stuff, but never man enough to be honest in the first place. When I saw the pieces of my grandmother’s statue fall on the carpet, I decided to calmly reciprocate. I walked into the spare room and picked up a truck that his grandfather had made him when he was a little boy. I took it outside and tried to smash it on the trunk of his car. It was rather smart, I was damaging two things he cared about.

I didn’t call the police that time and I never did find out who did. I just assumed it was a neighbor and forgot about it.

So, that’s what I was doing when the cop who was looking under my kitchen sink first came to my house. I was sure he remembered me even before we made eye contact. I had forgotten his name but I would learn soon that it was Mike Osborn. I watched him as he reached into the corner that hid the anti-freeze just two days before.

That made me think of the anti-freeze jug and I glanced out my kitchen window. I noticed that the police were taking each and every single jug out of my crawlspace. It didn’t concern me, they wouldn’t find any of my fingerprints on them. But it did snap me back to my “planning” mode. I was a criminal now and I had to act like one.

I wondered what an innocent person would do in this situation. I asked Detective Heinrich how much longer the search would go on.

The smart ass responded, “Until we find what we’re looking for.” That reminded me that search warrants had to be somewhat specific. They can’t just let the cops go fishing in your house. I asked him if I could see the search warrant. It took a couple tries but I finally got an answer.

“I don’t have it on me, somebody else does.” He didn’t know who had it. Mike Osborn was still in my kitchen and he had heard me questioning the detective. He said, “Come over here Mrs. Cardis.” I walked around my kitchen counter and looked down at the pile of stuff on my kitchen floor.

As I looked down I heard Mike say, “You stay right here, I’ll get it for you.” I didn’t really answer him at all because I had noticed something sitting off to the side of the main pile of junk. It wasn’t mine.

It was a bottle of foundation for a very dark skinned woman. I was about as white as a white woman could be and there was a bottle of dark foundation sitting on my kitchen floor. I remembered the compact that I had found in our car that my husband said had to have been my sister’s. Neither of my sisters are dark enough to use the colors in the compact either. As I looked down at the foundation, I realized that he had lied about the compact.

And it wasn’t just that the nit wit lied, he made me look stupid while he was doing it. He went out of his way to make me feel guilty for even bringing it up. I thought about all the times that I would be suspicious after he would lie to me only to hear him tell me that I had “trust issues” and that I was becoming “paranoid”. Lately he had been blaming it on my cancer. More than once he told me that, “I don’t know what it is about cancer but it’s making you delusional.” It was one such comment that prompted me to tell my doctor about my “paranoia”. He said that there was nothing about parathyroid cancer that would make a person paranoid and he gave me a prescription for Prozac.

The make-up obviously meant nothing to the cops, they left it there on the floor. Mike handed me the search warrant and that’s how I learned that this was all a result of the whore’s testimony. Some bimbo that I had never met but who was screwing my husband was trying to mess ME up and that wasn’t going to happen.

After taking in what the warrant said, I asked Mike who Saundra Glenn was. He asked, “Don’t you know?”

“No sir, I’ve never heard of her.”

“She’s your husband’s girlfriend.” I stared into his eyes for a moment and then I told him that I had to go take a pill. He followed me into my bedroom and watched as I grabbed my purse from behind the dresser. I reached in and pulled out a prescription bottle. It had my Xanax in it. I opened it and poured one into my hand. I reached into my bathroom for a cup of water and when I turned back, that cop was searching my purse.

“Better me than anyone else. They’d take all of your medicine” OK then, I thought to myself. I’ll let the man search my purse. All of my medicine was in my purse. The anti-depressants, the sedatives, the mood elevators, all of it. He seemed to know what most of the medicines were but he didn’t know fluoxetine. He asked me what it was and I answered him, “It’s generic Prozac.”

He looked at me and smiled. “Are you SURE you didn’t kill your husband?” He said it in a joking manner and I responded with a small chuckle. That very moment I saw an officer pull two pairs of panties out from the back of the closet that I shared with the sonofabitch. That bastard had hidden some whore’s panties in OUR closet. I knew they weren’t mine because one pair was black and one was red. I never wear red or black to bed, too slutty. But exactly what you’d expect to find on a trailer dwelling, husband stealing whore like Saundra Glenn. Now I had a name to put to all of my thoughts.

Mike mistook my reaction for sadness and he led me out of my room and out the front door of my house. It occurred to me that he could be playing nice cop…after all, cops can be mighty crafty little suckers. But it didn’t matter to me, I enjoyed his company, especially under the circumstances. I wasn’t the least bit worried about the search going on in my house, I knew they wouldn’t find anything.

Right then Mike said, “Well, we’ve never been formally introduced so I wanted to say hello, my name is Mike Osborn.” I said that “It was nice to meet you.” and left it at that. I was sure he already knew my name.

Mike was tall and thin but well proportioned. He was rather handsome once I took a good look a him. He had an easy smile and an honest nature about him. If he was playing me, he was doing it well. Not that it would do him any good, but he was gaining my trust…such as it was to give at that moment.

It was late afternoon by the time the police started walking out with bags and bags of potential evidence. I watched them load their vans from one of the two chairs on my front porch. I thought to myself that whatever they had wasn’t nearly as telling as some of the things they tossed aside. If anyone had recognized that stuff for what it was, it all would have been evidence of a motive.

As the last uniformed cop walked out of my house, Mike shook my hand, apologized for the entire situation and then he sauntered over to his cruiser and drove away. I started to walk into my house when Detective Heinrich was about to walk out. I didn’t know there were anymore people in my house.

He sort of stopped and blocked my way to ask me if I “would mind answering a few questions?”

“Oh…yes…I would. Now get the hell out of my house.”

“We could just bring you in for questioning.” What makes cops think that if a person won’t talk to them outside of the police department that they would speak to them inside the stupid place?

“Do what you have to do.” That was my answer to him and then I looked at him and with my head, I motioned to him to move out of my way. I could tell he was annoyed. I turned around and waited for him to walk out the door and then I slammed it.

I made a few more phone calls that had to be made. It was time to tell my children. Their step-father was as dead as he could be and I have no idea how he died. I was right, the whore called my in laws. The in laws began calling me as soon as I plugged the phone back in to call my kids. I answered the first call but his mother was shouting something at me, obviously as drunk as usual. I hung up on her and that was my reason for not speaking to any of his other family members. He didn’t have much in the way of family, just a mother, a step father, a half sister and her family. Oh, he had two kids as well. I called my youngest stepson’s wife and told her to tell the boys that Pop was dead. All of the family members lived out of state so I figured this might be the last quiet night I would have in a while. I had no idea how right I was.

I started cleaning up the mess left by the police. It took me hours but I finished that night. I didn’t know what the whore had touched so I started throwing just about everything away. As I bagged up my despicable husband’s belongings, I found more evidence of his dishonesty than I ever wanted to find. It was pretty hard to believe, after all, I had searched the house quite a few times myself over the past year and I never found anything except that compact in the car. He was obviously quite secure in his ability to convince me that I should believe him and not my lying eyes.

I found receipts from restaurants that I never went to, more sex lotion, a tie in a gift box that I never saw before and a vibrator. Like the tie, I never saw the vibrator before either. I thought of the time I asked him to make love to me only to hear, “Making love to you isn’t as intense as it used to be.”

I guess not. He never bought me sex toys or lingerie. I thought about how painful this would all be if I hadn’t fed the bastard anti-freeze chili. I couldn’t be too angry, after all, I did get him pretty good. But I was still quite hurt. At about 2 AM, I finally fell asleep on my couch, wishing the next 24 hours were already over.

When I woke up the next morning, I turned on the television to find out that I was the story du jour. The press didn’t quite indict me outright, but they certainly did compare me to Lynn Turner, the women who had gotten greedy and killed two men for their insurance money. She had gotten away with the first murder but the second one was one murder too many. She had been convicted of her second anti-freeze murder that past March.

I was convinced that her notoriety was the reason that I was being scrutinized. When the whore spoke to the police, she told them that my husband told her that I would kill him with poison. I doubted that was true but it didn’t really matter. According to the news, the medical examiner checked his kidneys for calcium oxalate crystals, a sure sign of ethylene glycol poisoning. He found it. I decided to take an extra Xanax that morning because I was sure that I was going to need it.

Then, just to be on the safe side, I laid about 50 Xanax in the middle of a piece of tape, all in one long line. Then, I put the tape on my right leg. I did the same thing with my pain medicine only I taped it to my left leg. I would be quite glad that I had done that before long.

I dressed myself for my husband’s memorial service with as much care as I dressed him in his casket. We both wore blue jeans and a t-shirt. I buried him in the t-shirt that I made for him years ago. On the front it said, “Mark and Annie: Forever and ever Amen.”

There was a picture of us on the back but the whore wouldn’t have to see that, the front was good enough. I just assumed that she would show up at the service and I was right. She walked in with his family.

I think that I could have lost it right then and I probably would have if Mike hadn’t been right behind the whore and the family. He walked over to me and asked if there was anything that he could do for me. I took his hand and asked him to walk up to the casket with me. None of my family had gotten there yet so Mike was actually the closest thing I had to support at that moment so I took advantage of him.

My knees shook a bit as I walked up to look at that asshole one last time. I stared down into his casket and it was as though our entire relationship flashed in front of my eyes. I thought of the first time I met him. I thought of so many things, good and bad. I thought about how we made love every single night for the first 7 years of our marriage and how he wouldn’t make love to me at all for the past year until he got sick of listening to me whine about needing to feel him close to me. He’d do me just to shut me up. That thought confirmed that I had done the right thing. I didn’t care what happened to me from then on. He got what he deserved and there isn’t a thing anyone can say to convince me otherwise.

I looked at his mouth and I could see where the undertaker had sewn his lips together. He would never most certainly never lie again. I noticed a pink rose lying next to him and I knew exactly how it had gotten there. Just to be sure, I asked the guy in the dark suit and he confirmed that the “heavy set black lady” had visited an hour before anyone was supposed to be there. She was so persistent that they let her in. I could have been angry but I decided not to be. I just took the rose out of the casket and pulled the petals out of it. Then, I tossed the stem and the petals all in the trash can by the door. I did it rather dramatically and with a smirk to the whore. The smirk was meant to tell her, “Yes, you stupid slut, I absolutely DID kill the bastard.” I am 100% positive that she got my message.

The tacky bitch must have thought that I was upset because of what she had done with the rose. That wasn’t it at all. I seriously doubted that she knew anything about what really made me angry when I found the rose.

The week before I croaked the SOB was our anniversary. He brought me roses. I was looking at them when it occurred to me that there were 4 different colors of roses, and three of each color. But there were only two pink roses. I knew in a heartbeat what had happened, he gave the whore one of my anniversary roses.

If there was any doubt, he wiped it away when I pointed it out to him. “Hey, there’s only 11 roses in that vase.”

“You know, I thought it looked a little skimpy for a dozen roses.”

That fool had never seen a dozen roses in his life. He was so stupid that he didn’t even realize how his answer gave him away. I sure as hell wouldn’t be making that sort of mistake.

I sat down and Mike sat next to me. My kids walked in together at the same time. They all came up and hugged me as though my husband had just died a tragic death instead of the jocular death that it was. The preacher dude walked up to the podium and said a few words that you usually associate with a funeral. When he said the 23rd Psalm, my mother-in-law started crying. I wondered if she was drunk yet.

After the service was over, my kids wanted to come back to my house with me but Mike tried to talk us out of it. When I put up an argument, he gave in easily and we all drove over to my house which was only round the corner. Mike had insisted on driving me home so I went with him. On the way, he told me that I was most likely going to be arrested for murder later on that day.

I decided that Mike wasn’t playing the “good cop”, he was playing a good friend. I didn’t know why, but I certainly appreciated it.

When I got home I went into the living room and waited for all of my children to show up. A few other people were walking into my house but I needed to speak to my kids. Suddenly I noticed my sister. I didn’t know where she came from. I grabbed her by the arm and quickly told her what Mike told me. I asked her to keep everyone away from me and my kids so that I could tell them what was going on. Everything was happening pretty quickly and I had no idea when the cops would come for me or if they’d let me turn myself in as I promised Mike I would do.

I hate having things out of my control so I asked Mike if he would go to the store to pick up a prescription for me. He was happy to go and my sister was happy to give me the keys to her car. I wanted to be in control of when I went to jail.

She distracted the handful of people who were gathered in my kitchen and I told my kids to follow me without asking any questions. The car was parked around the corner and no one saw us walking out of the house. I loaded the kids into the car and started driving. I went west because there was nothing that way at all. I figured the cops would look for me in the other direction if they decided to look for me at all. I pulled into a Waffle House and parked my sister’s car around back. I took the kids in and we all sat down at a booth.

They were all confused but too stunned to ask any questions. I don’t think they even knew what questions to ask.

“You kids know how much I love you, right?”

All three of them answered at the same time, “Yes Mom.”

My daughter was the first one to ask a question. “What’s going on? Why did we sneak away in Aunt Marie’s car?"

“Because I wanted to tell you kids something and I wanted to do it alone. It appears as though I’m going to be arrested for murder later on today.” My daughter and my oldest son both started crying and I said, “Oh my God! It’s nothing to get so upset over! I’m innocent, they can’t send an innocent person to jail for murder!” I was trying not to draw any attention to us but it didn’t seem to be working very well at all. There was a waitress missing a few teeth standing by the register staring at me. I didn’t know what was going through her mind but I decided not to take any chances and just leave. I tossed a ten dollar bill on the table to pay for the coffee we ordered but never drank.

Then, we all got into the car and I turned to go back east when I pulled out of the Waffle House parking lot. I only went east for about a half a mile, then I turned left and headed west again, ending up on the same road that I had started out on. I passed one entrance to The Kennesaw Battlefield and pulled into a parking area so that I could have a chance to spend a bit of time with my kids before I turned myself in.

At about the same time, Mike was driving around looking for me. He was probably a tad angry about being sent on a wild goose chase for a prescription that didn’t exist. If he knew me better, he wouldn’t have worried, he would have known that I would be coming back by myself. I said I would and I meant it. I could see him standing on the sidewalk and I decided to turn myself in to him. I felt good about that.

By the time I pulled up to my house, there were a couple of police cars parked at the end of my driveway. I parked my sister’s car about a block away and I started walking toward the mob of cops that were outside of my house. I stopped, hugged my kids once more and walked toward Mike with my wrists together so that he could handcuff me.

He said, “No, behind your back.” I obliged and put my arms behind my back. He slapped the cuffs on me and I looked at my kids before I got in the police car and smiled at them. They smiled back at me and then I plopped myself down on what turned out to be a very hard back seat. I didn’t expect that at all. You just assume a back seat will be cushioned. Well, police car back seats aren’t. But, police handcuffs are easy to get out of. I slipped my left hand out of the handcuff and brought both of my hands in front of me. The seat was still hard but at least I wasn’t sitting on my hands anymore.

Detective Heinrich opened the door closest to me and said those words that you hear on TV so often, “You’re under arrest…you have the right to remain silent…” That’s all I needed to hear because that’s exactly what I planned on doing…remaining silent.