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Joan Smith,
in her book Misogynies, reports on the case of Nicholas Boyce, who in
1985 finally snapped after too much nagging from his allegedly "impossible"
wife, Christobel. Boyce "killed her, filleted the flesh from her bones,
and cooked it so that it would look like someone's Sunday lunch"; he
then distributed the parcels of cooked meat around London. Sentencing
Boyce to six years for manslaughter, the judge, Sir James Miskin, said:
"Before these dreadful events, you were hard-working, of good character
... you were simply unable to get on with your wife."
Boyce got six years despite the aggravated nature of
his concealment and disposal of the body. Just six years, with the
judge's words that "a man of reasonable self-control might have been
similarly provoked" ringing pleasantly in his ears.
Economist Gets 6 Years for
Dismembering Wife
Los Angeles Times
October 10, 1985
LONDON — Economist Nicholas Boyce was sent to
prison Wednesday for dismembering his wife and dumping the pieces
of her body around London in a court case linked to a British
aristocratic mystery, the 1974 disappearance of Lord Lucan.
A jury at London's Old Bailey court cleared Boyce,
37, of murdering his wife, Christabel, but convicted him of manslaughter
in a furious domestic row over his sexual prowess. He was sentenced him
to six years in jail.
Christabel, 32, was a former governess to the
children of Lord Lucan, who vanished without a trace after another nanny
was battered to death at his home in London's Belgravia district. Police
the world over have sought vainly to track down the missing peer.
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