“Long Island Has Some Of The Stranger Family Homicides”

April 24, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Ron Rosenbaum’s reliably idiosyncratic work, his 1993 New York Times Magazine article about the violent underbelly of Long Island’s bedroom communities, where the only rest for the weary is often the big sleep:

“A UNIFIED FIELD theory of longing would go a long way toward explaining what sometimes seems like an epidemic of desperate — and often desperately incompetent — spouse-murder plots on the Guyland. Recently I immersed myself in some 10 years of tabloid clippings on sensational Long Island homicides and came away with two powerful impressions. First, that the most sensational ones were almost always intrafamily homicides or spouse slayings. Now it’s true that, cross-culturally, homicides among intimates occur more frequently than ‘stranger’ homicides. But in another sense of the word, there’s no doubt Long Island has some of the stranger family homicides, stranger and more desperate. That was the second impression I had from study of the tabloid clips: the desperate longing to get the deed done — however bizarrely, incompetently or self-revealingly — often proved to be the undoing of the doer.

Consider this 1988 New York Post story, not one of the most sensational but representative of the broad midrange of Long Island spouse slayings. It appeared under the headline: ACCUSED HUBBY-KILLER’S HUNT FOR HIT MAN

The trial testimony therein described a woman who might be called the Ancient Mariner of Spouse Slayers — she soliciteth one of three:

‘A Long Island housewife on trial for arranging her husband’s murder openly sought a hit man several times, witnesses testified.’

The key word here is ‘openly.’ She ‘tried to hire a fellow church member, a county official and an undercover cop to kill [ her husband ] prior to his November 1986 bludgeoning death.’

‘Are you connected to the mob?’ she asked a county official with an Italian surname shortly after meeting him. ‘I’m looking for someone to kill my husband.’

Yes, surely this goes on in the rest of America, but not, I feel, with the urgency Long Islanders bring to it.” (Thanks TETW.)

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In 1979, an earnest Merv Griffin interviews Kathleen and George Lutz, the Long Island couple at the center of the Amityville Horror hokum.