I'm sorry, but every once in a while, I just have to say, ...HUH? They couldn't figure that out? After reading a story about how a body was found in the wall panels of a house, just one look at this picture tells me that the husband did it: I mean, here's the wife, looking all happy go lucky, and what does he look like. Yeah, no shit, a psycho murderer, right? LOL... >.< Spoiler: In Cluttered Home A Dark Secret 3 Decades Old - New York Times Report July 15, 2013 In Cluttered Home, a Dark Secret 3 Decades Old By VIVIAN YEE POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. — There was the night James Nichols introduced himself to his new neighbors on Vassar Road by walking in their front door without knocking. There was the afternoon Denise Darragh asked him to help her with an injured squirrel, and he — still wearing his suit jacket — killed it with a hatchet as the children playing in her yard screamed. And the day she was painting the house, wearing cutoff shorts, and turned around to see him taking photos of her from below with a long camera lens. In later decades, after Mr. Nichols’s wife disappeared — she had killed herself or run away, he told relatives and friends and the police, though they had doubts — he withdrew from the neighbors as his little white house retreated from the world. On the collapsing roof, neat gray shingles gave way to drooping tar paper. In the garage, hills of junk grew higher. On the rare occasions Mr. Nichols appeared, he would be sitting in his car in the driveway, drowsing or reading the paper or maybe doing nothing at all. When he was found dead in December, slumped in a chair inside his home in this Hudson Valley town, there was no will to be found, only masses of decaying books, cameras and computers. Six months later, a clean-out crew delving into the detritus found a hollow-sounding false wall in the basement. Behind that wall, a barrel-shaped container. Inside the container, a black garbage bag bound with rope. Inside the bag, the skeletal remains of a woman missing nearly 30 years: JoAnn Nichols, his wife, disinterred on June 28 a floor below where she used to charm visitors with a honeyed Southern accent and a ready smile. She had died, the county medical examiner said, of blunt-force trauma to her head. It was all but confirmation of what relatives, neighbors and detectives say they had suspected since Ms. Nichols, a popular first-grade teacher, disappeared in 1985: that her husband had killed her. Every neighborhood has its resident eccentric. But even two weeks after the body of Ms. Nichols was found, it was hard, on this street, to comprehend the idea that along with his tools and his trash, James Nichols had been hoarding his wife the whole time. “I’m still upset,” said Mary Feron, a longtime neighbor. “I mean, he wrapped her up and put her in the wall and lived there and went out to church suppers and went out to IHOP and Perkins and all the time....” She shook her head. “I hate that.” Yet if the discovery was gruesome, it also ended the mystery. “It was terrible not knowing, year after year,” said Randy Miller, one of Ms. Nichols’s nephews, who kept calling the Poughkeepsie police for updates after his father, who died in 2006, could no longer do so. “I know that my father, it would’ve really surprised him to learn that the body was right there, under their feet.” Despite a police investigation, a private investigation and years of cold case work, Mr. Nichols was never arrested or publicly named a suspect, and the police never served him with a search warrant. There was no weapon and no body. She persisted only as a warm memory and an investigative file. ‘He Was Weird’ Until she disappeared, neighbors and friends said that for all Mr. Nichols’s strangeness, they never questioned that the churchgoing couple with two chubby golden retrievers had anything but a tranquil marriage. She had grown up JoAnn Miller on her family’s northern Louisiana farm, Sunnyslope, in a big white house with a wraparound porch and several hundred acres of peach and pear orchards and blackberry bushes. While in graduate school at the University of Mississippi, she met and married Mr. Nichols, a doctor’s son from Mississippi who was teaching at the university, and his job with I.B.M. took them to Poughkeepsie. She was devoted to her religion and to her family. Each Sunday she called her mother, and each summer she returned to Sunnyslope for two months. She gave her nieces’ and nephews’ days an idyllic cast, Mr. Miller recalled, taking them to pick fruit before going back to the house to make preserves and pies. Up north, she was a beloved teacher, rolling out red carpets for her students on the first day of school and bringing cupcakes for their birthdays. She tried to bring some of the South to her new home, helping found a small Baptist church near Poughkeepsie. “She was a Southern Baptist girl — no drinking, no makeup, no smoking. The strongest drink she ever had was probably iced tea,” said Jeannie Foster, 71, who was a friend of the Nicholses through the short-lived Baptist church. “A lovely woman, just very laid-back. He, on the other hand, was very different. I thought he was kind of cold.” There was his sense of humor, so dry it could be caustic, and his almost perverse knack for making people ill at ease. Then there were his quirks. He rode around the neighborhood on a lawn mower, once using it to move the couple’s book collection from their first house on Stephanie Lane, the looping street just behind Vassar Road, to their second on Vassar Road. “Most of us didn’t want to have anything to do with him,” said Dee Casella, 77, another neighbor. “There was a little — not fear so much as we didn’t like him. I can’t explain it, but he was weird.” Married for Good The Nicholses’ house was like no other in the neighborhood. Ms. Nichols loved books, and nearly every room was filled with volumes from floor to ceiling. Mr. Nichols collected cameras, guns and books about the Civil War. Neighbors marveled at the tools and gadgets he had amassed through his job at I.B.M. and his evening shifts in the Sears hardware department, including six lawn mowers. In their yard were parked two Amphicars, novelty vehicles that could drive on land and in water, of which only about 3,800 were ever produced. At a time when computers were still relatively unknown in regular homes, the Nicholses had several, lined up in a room off the living room where Mr. Nichols also kept a police and fire scanner running at all times. “They were a married couple,” Ms. Darragh, now 62, said. “She was normal. He was not.” Only to a next-door neighbor and close co-workers did Ms. Nichols hint that her husband’s oddities bothered her, too. She told Mary Jo Santagate, a teachers’ aide at her school, that she disliked the house’s clutter and wished that her husband had not kept their dead cat frozen in their refrigerator: she dreaded opening it to cook. She complained of having to hand her paycheck over to him each week. When the couple’s only son, 25-year-old James Nichols III, drowned in 1982 after falling off the hood of one of the Amphicars in a Mississippi lake, she told Ms. Darragh she was upset that her husband had parked the same Amphicar in the driveway, a daily reminder of her grief. “Knowing her, she tolerated it because she didn’t have the wherewithal to tell him to knock it off or I’m going to leave,” Ms. Santagate said. To her family, she never complained. “She was of the old school,” Mr. Miller said. “When you’re married, you’re married for good.” They had been married for about 30 years when, four days before Christmas in 1985, Mr. Nichols reported his 55-year-old wife missing. He told the police that they had eaten at a local restaurant with another couple the night before, and had come home after an argument. The next morning, he said, he returned from buying dog food to find her gone. There was a note typed on a computer, saying she was depressed after their son’s death. He told the police he believed she had left to join a religious cult or had killed herself; to neighbors he simply announced, flatly, that she had left him. He said she called him on Christmas Eve to say she was fine, but hung up when he asked where she was. For days, the police searched the frozen waterways and the woods by foot and by helicopter. They also walked around the cluttered house a few times, at least once going into the basement, where Mr. Nichols opened a large safe to show them his gun collection. The day after she was reported missing, detectives saw her car parked in the house’s driveway. Mr. Nichols said he had found it in a nearby shopping center and had it cleaned and vacuumed. “That’s when it started to stink,” said Charles Mittelstaedt, the chief of detectives at the time who is now retired, of Mr. Nichols’s story. Detectives set up surveillance on Mr. Nichols, learning that he had been seeing another woman. When the police confronted him with photographs of the two together, however, he said he was retaining a lawyer and refused to answer more questions. “He looks me right in the eye, and he says, ‘So I got a girlfriend,’ ” recalled William Holland, another retired detective. “I was a cop for 30 years, and he was the coldest individual I ever dealt with.” Her brother, John Miller, hired a private detective, who would eventually cost the middle-class family nearly $150,000. Though the detective met three men he said Mr. Nichols had approached about paying to kill Ms. Nichols in a staged home invasion, nothing came of it. Staying on Vassar Road Seven years after Ms. Nichols disappeared, when she could have been declared legally dead, Mr. Miller asked a local court not to do so, his son Randy Miller said. That may have prevented Mr. Nichols from selling the house, which was also in his wife’s name. And so as mold crept up the walls and dark rumors circulated, Mr. Nichols kept living on Vassar Road, perhaps because he could not sell the house, perhaps chained there by its walled-up secret. He rarely spoke to anyone. People saw him a few times a year at the local Methodist church’s roast-beef suppers, always sitting with his only apparent friend, another I.B.M. retiree. But he stopped coming in 2008 after an organizer, Patsy Boisvert, confronted him about making what others said were racist comments about Barack Obama. There were signs of ill health. He collapsed in his driveway once, then again, and was taken away in an ambulance. Shortly before Mr. Nichols died, a neighbor saw him at IHOP, looking confused. Then he was not seen for a week. A neighbor called the authorities. He was 82 when he was found dead on Dec. 27. It was almost 27 years to the day that he had reported his wife missing. “Maybe this isn’t a Christian thing to say,” Mr. Miller said, “but I do get satisfaction out of the fact that he died alone and surrounded by nothing but junk. It sounds like he was right where he should’ve been, miserable and living in filth. There was no reason for him to die alone. He did it all to himself.” Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/n...sing-wife.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all
