Summary: The Meat Cutter’s Madness A Safe House Special The main source document for Episode 273 comes from my personal files, something I dug out after doing last week’s regular episode about the professor that decapitated his wife and spent the rest of his life in a hospital for the criminally insane. Although I was an arts/entertainment writer for most of my journalism career, I actually started on the hard news side as an editor and bureau chief, supervising three reporters in the Cincinnati suburb of Fairfield, Ohio. In 1990, one of my reporters covered a murder that took place on Valentine’s Day, when a man decapitated his wife in a psychotic rage. That summer, the reporter came back from a hearing with a copy of the psychiatrist’s report filed with the court, and it was so dramatic and bizarre that I made a copy and stashed it away without any plan, just a writer’s need to have it, little realizing that I would someday be True Crime Historian. So after the last show, I remembered this case and I rooted around my storage unit, broke open a filing cabinet that I’d lost the key to, and found the file. So this story is only about 28 years old, the freshest episode yet! Unlike the deranged professor of Episode 272, however, this mad decapitator did not spend the rest of his life locked up. He’s out there somewhere today, declared sane and walking free. The fact that this happened on Valentine’s Day is even richer when reminded that the holiday actually commemorates a beheading: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/st-valentine-beheaded To hear the doctor’s report and learn what drove the meat cutter to such a gruesome task, please visit www.patreon.com/truecrimehistorian. This episode will be available to patrons at all levels.
