A Strange Case

John and Kathleen Strange, married about two years, both taught school in Louisville, Kentucky. She was 44 and he was 47. On the night of May 26, 1990, during Memorial Day weekend, Kathleen was shot in the back of the head in the couple’s bedroom.

Early on May 27, firefighters put out a blaze in a vacant house at 2907 South Ninth Street and found a woman’s burned body with the head missing. Detectives were already checking a missing-person report on Kathleen, who had skipped a family get-together. John had been treated Sunday for burned arms and hands, which he blamed on a barbecue grill. On Memorial Day, police found Kathleen’s head, with a .38-caliber bullet in it, buried in the couple’s vegetable garden, plus traces of blood in the house and her car’s trunk. John was arrested that day.

Prosecutors said John drove the body to the empty house, cut off the head to prevent identification, set the fire and later buried the head at home. His daughter Christine, 20, testified that she and her boyfriend helped clean up. His lawyer admitted John mutilated and burned the body but blamed the shooting on Kathleen’s son, Tony Jones. In September 1991, a jury convicted John of murder, abuse of a corpse and first-degree arson, and he received 65 years. Jones was tried for it in 1994 and acquitted.