Manhood down drain

A US woman cut off her husband’s penis because she “wanted him to stop hurting her” with it, and was enraged because she thought he had another woman, a Los Angeles court heard.

Catherine Kieu Becker planted audio devices to try to catch him having sex with a lover, but they failed to find any evidence. But the bugs did record the night she “took away his manhood”, tossing it into the refuse disposal, a waste grinder under the kitchen sink.

The trial is reminiscent of the 1990s case in which Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis with a carving knife.

Kieu, 50, is accused of putting drugs in her estranged 60-year-old husband’s dinner then tying him to a bed and cutting off his penis, at their home in Garden Grove, south-east of Los Angeles, in 2011.

“This is a case about a husband wanting to seek a divorce from his wife and her unwillingness to accept it,” prosecutor John Christl said. “By refusing to accept it, she committed a vicious act.

“She took away his manhood,” he said, calling Kieu a “very controlling, manipulative woman... who knew exactly what she was doing.”

The prosecutor said audio bugs recorded the events of July 11, 2011, when she mixed a sleeping pill into a bowl of soup.

“You can hear him saying, ‘Oh, it’s good’,” Christl said. “You can also hear him saying, ‘It’s a little salty’,” before going to bed early, at about 8.10pm. When he was asleep she used ropes to tie him to the bed.

When he woke up, she told him “You deserve it” three times, and then “slices off his penis with one motion of the knife,” Christl said. “She then walks into the kitchen, takes the severed penis and puts it in the garbage disposal.”

Her lawyer Frank Bittar said Kieu had suffered a “lifetime of trauma” beginning with her childhood in civil war-torn Vietnam and being raped by an older brother when she was six years old.

After moving to California she got married for a first time in 1984, but agreed to an “amicable” divorce in 1997.

“She’s not jealous and she’s not wicked and she’s not a black widow,” Bittar insisted.

She married her second husband – whose identity has not been revealed – in 2009. He was “hyper-sexual,” using erectile dysfunction drugs and forcing her into “painful” sexual positions, the attorney said.

“You’re going to learn that in Catherine’s mind, she severed his penis because she wanted him to stop hurting her with his penis,” he said.

If convicted, Kieu faces up to life in prison without parole. – Sapa-AFP