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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The “Torso Slayer”: Nina Housden - 1944


PHOTO CAPTION: HELD IN TORSO SLAYING – Mrs. Nina Housden, 33, Highland Park, Mich., is shown above at Toledo, Ohio, after the dismembered body of her husband, Charles, 32, bus driver, was found in an auto in a garage. Mrs. Housden, a truck driver, had maintained a 48-hour-vigil over the car.

FULL TEXT: Highland Park, Mich. – Wayne county authorities said today a first degree murder charge would be filed against Mrs. Nina Housden, 33, who confessed she strangled her husband across the street from the police station and started to St. Louis with his dismembered body in the trunk of her automobile.

Mrs. Housden, who accused her husband, a cross country bus driver, of bragging of his affairs with other women, was arrested at Toledo, Ohio, when her automobile broke down and a garage attendant became suspicious of her.

~ Planned for Years. ~

Mrs. Housden, a slender brunet who had a war-time job as a driver for the American Railway Express Co., said her husband returned home from his run Thursday.

They went to a motion picture theater, then had several drinks. She had planned to kill him, she said, for more than a year. She succeeded in getting him drunk, she told authorities, then took him to her apartment facing the Highland Park police station.

She strangled him with a clothes line, she said, then went to bed. She kept the body in her apartment for two days, waiting for delivery of an automobile she had bought.


~ Dismembered Body. ~

Mrs. Housden was unable to carry the 200 pound body down the stairs. She dismembered it with a razor, stuffed it into a canvas bag, put it in the trunk of the automobile and started to St. Louis where she planned to dispose of it.

“If I were free, I would go to Kentucky and kill a couple of women he had affairs with,” she said.

[“Wife Confesses Strangling Mate,” The Racine Journal-Times (Wi.), Dec. 26, 1944, p. 16]
 
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[1568-11/10/21]
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