A woman who kept her husband’s corpse in her bedroom has lost a legal fight to get the body back.
68-year-old Barbara Watters was charged with abandonment of remains but a judge dismissed the case and said she had not ‘abandoned’ her husband Paul Barton, adding the widow just wanted to keep him around.
Watters then launched a legal battle to have the body of her husband back but the case has been thrown from the Missouri court.
“I’m not done,” Watters told the Joblin Globs. “They think they got away with something. But I’m not done.”
It was in 2019 when Watters was arrested after police discovered her husband’s body in her bedroom freezer.
Associate Judge Joe Hensley dismissed the criminal charge and said the woman had not ‘abandoned’ her husband’s remains but tried to ‘preserve’ it.
Mr. Barton, who passed away from natural causes aged 71, suffered from a rare form of Lou Gehrig’s disease.
It is believed that Mr. Barton may have passed away in December 2018 and he could’ve been in the bedroom freezer for almost a year.
When police found the body, Mrs. Watters told investigators that she did not want doctors to harvest his tissue and organs as that was her partner’s wish.
In an interview with Globe, she said: “He told me to buy a freezer and to put him in it, so he could not be dug up.”
She then sued Coroner Rob Chapel and the police but the lawsuit failed. Mr. Chapel said to Globe: “We want to honor (Paul Barton). We would like to honor (Barbara Watters) as well — but within the parameters of the law.”
He also said that keeping a family member’s body in your home “is not considered final disposition as I interpret the law.”
But Ms. Watters disagreed and said: “They cannot require my husband be buried. They cannot require that he be cremated and they cannot require that his body be made an anatomical gift.”
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Replaced!