A
US man whose estranged wife cut off his penis accused her Wednesday of
effectively murdering him, recounting his horror as she severed the
organ and threw it into a garbage disposal machine.
The 60-year-old man
said he would never have sex again after his wife -- who said she
"wanted him to stop hurting her with his penis" -- drugged him and tied
him to a bed, before taking a kitchen knife to his manhood.
Catherine Kieu Becker, 50, is on trial in Los Angeles charged with
torture, bodily injury with a knife and aggravated mayhem over the
alleged attack at their home in Garden Grove, southeast of Los Angeles.
"She murdered me that night," said the victim, identified in court only as Glen, recounting the events of July 11, 2011.
The couple had been married for less than a year in 2010 when he told
her he wanted a divorce, although they continued living together for
financial reasons.
But she accused him of being "hyper-sexual" and seeing too much of an
ex-girlfriend, and planted audio devices round their home to try to
catch him out -- bugs which ended up recording the horrific alleged
attack.
The victim said Kieu made a tofu and chicken dish -- which lawyers said
was laced with the insomnia drug Zolpidem -- on the fateful night, while
she ate a salad. Soon afterwards he felt groggy and went to bed early.
His next memory was waking up with his arms and feet tied to the corners of the bed. His wife was at the foot of the bed.
Recalling the moment she mutilated him, he said Kieu "pulled on my
shorts. I didn't really understand what she was doing ..I looked down
and I saw something metallic, silver, shiny. I still didn't know what
was going on.
"I felt her grab hold of my penis. I was very surprised. All of a sudden
I felt a very sharp pain and she had cut my penis off and then threw it
on the carpet next to the bed."
At first he felt "excruciating" pain. "But I must've gone into shock
because the pain subsided," he said, adding that he recalled his wife
picking up his penis and leaving the room.
"The next thing I heard was the garbage disposal .. I don't know how long that went on -- a long time," he said.
A short time later Kieu returned and he asked her to call for an
ambulance. She held the phone up so he could talk to the 911 dispatcher.
She put a towel over his groin, which was bleeding heavily.
He spent a few days in hospital and underwent surgery but "not
reconstructive surgery," in an operation "to make it usable as far as
going to the bathroom.
"Of course, I will never have a sex life again," he said. "The healing
process may never be completely finished. My mental state is improving,
but it may never be what it was before."
Her lawyer Frank Bittar said Kieu had suffered a "lifetime of trauma" beginning with her childhood in civil war-torn Vietnam.
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 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 penis
because she wanted him to stop hurting her with his penis," he said in
his opening statement.
If convicted, Kieu faces up to life in prison without the possibility of parole. AFP
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