The End of Men by Hanna Rosin

Author:Hanna Rosin [Rosin, Hanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101596920
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

A MORE PERFECT POISON

THE NEW WAVE OF FEMALE VIOLENCE

In 2007, forty-seven-year-old Larissa Schuster of Clovis, California, was tried for killing her husband, Timothy, by stuffing him in a vat of acid. According to the prosecution, Schuster and a young male accomplice used a stun gun on Timothy, put him to sleep with chloroform, and then stuffed his body, headfirst, into a fifty-five-gallon blue barrel. Afterward, Schuster poured a few jugs of hydrochloric acid into the barrel to disintegrate the body. When police discovered the barrel in a storage unit, they found only the liquefied remains of the lower half of the body, and hardly any identifiable tissue. Forensic pathologists and other experts surmised that the body had been sawed in half, or that his feet had been sawed off in order to fit into the barrel. “She wanted to wipe him out completely,” said Bob Solis, a friend of Timothy’s, told me. “Make it as if he were never here.”

As the California “acid murderer,” Schuster joined a long line of infamous lady poisoners who work with lethal chemicals instead of brute force. Poison has long been considered the woman’s weapon of choice, although it’s not really a choice—women are generally weaker than men and can’t overpower them in a physical fight. Still, poison crimes have come to stand for women’s supposed lack of raw aggression and will to confront. A poison crime connotes domestic entrapment, the abused wife, or the wife with a lover, too timid to ask for a divorce. The weapon is typically something she bought for less than $5 during her regular round of oppressive errands, at the supermarket or the auto parts store. The favored poison these days is bleach, although many women opt for a more organic approach. Recently a Colorado woman slipped leaves from a foxglove plant into her husband’s salad and told him to make sure he ate his greens. Foxglove leaves contain the deadly poison digitalis.

In mythology and literature, poison is associated with witches, midwives, and cooks, and represents an “attempt to assert power by the powerless,” writes Joyce Carol Oates in a review of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In that novel the Blackwood sisters are town misfits, suspected by their rural neighbors of casting spells. They are also curiously obsessed with kitchens. Food is a fetish in the novel: home-cured bacon, fresh preserves, cookies, coleslaw, and endless pourings of tea. After poisoning the sugar bowl one day, the queer and childlike sister Merricat announces, “I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”

Schuster, however, did not fit this model of powerlessness at all. At the time of the murder, she was running her own successful biochemical lab, Central California Research Laboratories. (BAD CHEMISTRY was one headline favored by papers during the case.) Neighbors described her as working from six thirty A.M. until seven thirty P.M. most days, leaving Timothy, who was a nurse, to drive their two children to doctor’s appointments, music lessons, and football games (“Mr.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.