Why husband kills wife?

For a few days DIG Koirala’s  murdering his wife has become a fat spice to the newspaper and a hot gammok to office goers, house wives, rickshaw pullers, auto drivers and people of the teashops or the workshops. As a teacher, I have also a gossip circle to vomiting the knowledge no matter how musty it is during leisure or the tea break. Everyone is smart on arguing and those who don’t like the tea gaffs would leave the place unnoticing.  However, we all were agreed to a point that it was one of the inhuman and barbaric acts ever committed.  

Just a few days before the incident had taken place, I taught a gothic story “A Tell- Tale Heart” by Edgar Ellen Poe” to my students. In the story, a boy kills the old man, with whom he has been living together for long, because he doesn’t like his blue vulture eyes. The narrator of the story tells his audiences that what he was doing was not because of his madness, but his disliking the vulture eyes of the old man. He seems smart and does everything cautiously. After killing the old man, he chops his body into pieces and hides under the floor.  As the police get information from his neighbors, they reach the home in the morning. Although he becomes able to deceive the police for a few minutes, he can’t deceive himself and finally confesses the crime. One of my students asked me a question impulsively that how the boy could listen the heartbeat of the dead man. I gave him answer showing the difference between fact and fiction and other prepared answers which were sufficient to shut his mouth. But his question has a meaning and more say than I replied. It opened a new world of rationality. I could better discuss on the issue with the support of modern theories. I didn’t.

After the class I went to the library and snatch a newspaper from the librarian’s hand (it happens often between us) and read the headline news, “DIG Ranjan Koirala Murdered His Wife Single-handed”. Our newspaper covers eighty percent of bad news because it draws first attention of the readers. I am not exception. I reminded Edgar Ellen Poe, who said, “Every human possess a beasty quality in them. Civilization is a mask to cover the beast or the dark side of human being.” I went through the page, “Koirala, who is currently in custody at Hanumandhoka, told an investigating team of Nepal Police that he alone murdered Dhakal at her residence at Budhanilkantha on January 11. According to the discourse, (I call it a discourse since it has many versions of truths as Derrida says, “all meanings or truths are never absolute or timeless, but are always framed by socially and historically specific conditions of knowledge.”) Koirala had a long dispute with his wife and were living separately. That day he kicked his wife as he used to do before and she died. His murder was unintentional according to him. Then he kept her dead body in to the car and drove towards Daman, Makwanpur. I don’t know why many criminals choose this place as a shelter of crime. He burnt her body at the edge of the road. It’s said that he had chopped her body into pieces like the narrator of “The Tale -Tell Heart” before he burnt it. He watched the flames of her body changing into eternal soul. Then collected remaining parts of her body from the ashes and threw down the forest like in the holy rivers of kashi.  Then he returned from there and went to kiss the fucking asshole of his new beloved. Next day, the local people found the parts of the victim and informed the police in Daman. Then they went to the spot and collected the remaining. Mr koirala was unknown about it. So, he went to the spot for the second time to dismiss the evidences after a few days. But he was suspected by the local people and finally caught by the police. When he found no way to escape, he said cohesively, “ I have done it, I am gone” to his friends. However, there are so many stories yet to come out. My concern here is why such incidents take place time and again. Why a husband kills his wife and vice versa?

 Is murder becoming a divorce substitute? It seems that men murdering their spouses have become more rampant or is it just more sensationalized and followed blow by blow on news magazine. Seventy-five percent of domestic homicides occur just after or during abandonment. Often the wife has a restraining order at the time of the murder.

Most of the cases are about husbands who were having affairs. But reasons to shed their wives are many and varied. Sex, philandering, money (either insurance or an unwillingness to split assets) and jealousy are just a few of the motives. Even more bizarre are the crazy women that write to convicted murderers and want to marry them-in jail. What makes them tick? It's a crazy mixed-up dangerous world if you stop and think about it.

When you think about it: Two people meet, fall in love and join in the sacrament of matrimony; they promise to love and honor one another. How could those attending the wedding ever imagine the union would end up in murder?Over time, day to day life gets in the way. But how could a man who once professed undying love for his wife end up eventually taking her life and quite often leaving his children motherless. And yet have the audacity to think he can get away with murder?  Married in 1994, the couple had been living separately for more than six years after their relations turned bitter. Their 14-year-old son was living with Koirala while the younger son, who is 10, was living with Dhakal. Is there fault in our law so that such crimes are repeatedly done? It can be an issue of debate for the law makers.

According to the crime psychology, “The wife murder can be explained in terms of a personality mechanism that is categorized as "pathological jealousy" or "sexual possessiveness. They claim that wife murder cannot be explained on the basis of a single male personality trait, but that it is rather a combination of various factors that together produce the foundations for this lethal violence (which is also why this phenomenon is relatively rare in comparison to other forms of domestic violence).

However, most of us will never understand how such a beautiful beginning can have such a tragic ending.  Are we all beasts as Poe said long before? After all, divorce is an option.