Weird Crimes And Weirder Police Work
Orange County courts are currently hearing the case of a Garden Grove woman who drugged her husband and cut off his penis. Fifty-year-old Catherine Kieu was arrested the night of the incident in the summer of 2011, when she drugged her 60-year-old husband with the sleep aid Ambien, tied him spread-eagle to the four corners of the bed and proceeded to remove his penis. Kieu called 911, saying her husband was bleeding. The man was rushed to UC Medical Center but attempts to reattach the organ were unsuccessful — Kieu had apparently put it through the garbage disposal after removing it.
She has plead not guilty to felony charges of torture and aggravated mayhem, which carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. At the time of her arrest, she told the police officers that her husband “deserved” it. Her defense attorneys are working to bolster that idea, saying during opening statements that Kieu grew up in a cradle of violence in war-torn Vietnam and suffered from mental problems, which resulted in this “break with reality.”
Prosecutors, meanwhile, argue that Kieu was motivated with jealousy. Whatever her childhood, “it doesn’t change the fact she sliced off the penis due to her vengeance, vanity and jealousy,” Deputy District Attorney John Christi told the Orange County Register.
Meanwhile, across the nation in Pittsburgh, the police are hard at work. While browsing Backpage, Homestead Police Department Detective Ronald DePellegrin discovered an ad for “Becky Dymon,” a “gorgeous Barbie, classy provider” (i.e., sex worker), so he put in a request with the chief to conduct an undercover operation with his partner. When he got the go-ahead, DePellegrin hit Dymon up, arranged to meet, showed up, got naked, let Dymon put a condom on him and perform oral, and then he arrested her. (Seriously. You can read the sequence of events as described by DePellegrin in his criminal complaint.)
According to Reason.tv, Carl Bailey of the Homestead Police Union has stated that there is no misconduct here. “In the course of officers doing undercover work, sometimes they have to do what they have to do to effectuate an arrest,” Bailey said.
Who, exactly, does this arrest help, though? According to Reason.tv’s Ted Balaker, “the criminal complaint does not specify how much time DePellegrin spent poking around the web for call girls, but based on what can be gleaned from the document, this particular sting operation occupied the time of at least five officers. […] Even if the department is staffed by dedicated officers who spend much more time pursuing violent thugs than luring call girls, can they really say this prostitution sting was the best use of their time–any of their time? Their priorities seem all the more wayward given the fact that Homestead suffers from some of the highest violent crime rates in the Pittsburgh area, rates roughly three times the national average.”
Dymon has since been released. According to the Smoking Gun, her attorney Michael Waltman has suggested the possibility of bringing a civil suit to the Homestead Police Department.
Header photo features Richard Belzer, famous for his role as Detective Munch across a variety of police shows, most notably, the Law & Order franchise.
