This is a furreal story: People magazine recently released this headline: “Community Believed Senior Couple Was ‘Such Good Neighbors’…” People may have taken quite a while to notice this, but back in 2013, authorities arrested 71-year-old Alice Uden for the 40-year-old murder of her third husband, Ronald Holtz, in Wyoming. (They found him in a disused mine shaft.) One day later, they arrested Gerald Uden, Alice’s current husband, #4, for the 1980 murders of his first wife, Virginia, and her two young sons.
Chadwick, MO, where this very nice elderly couple lived, is, according to Wikipedia, in eastern Christian County, MO, with a total population (2023) of 403. It is located “in the hills of the Ozarks along the south edge of the Springfield Plateau. It sits on a ridge between the East Fork of Bull Creek to the west and Swan Creek to the east…” The rest of the citation discusses the community’s history and its single post office.
Questions, all kinds of questions: 1) Why did it take them so long to get arrested? 2) Why didn’t anybody notice that there was somethin’ funny about Alice and Gerald? 3) Who found Ronald’s body? and 4) What happened to Alice’s first two husbands anyway?
This marriage is like one in which, let’s say, Jeffrey Dahmer marries The Merry Widow, or where a scorpion teams up with a tarantula. My fingers are itching to write the screenplay. I would call the film “Meet the Deadleys.”
It is the middle of the night. Alice wakes up and, through thick darkness, sees her husband Gerald sitting bolt upright beside her in bed, staring fixedly at her and clutching an electric drill. Alice yells, “YOU CAN’T PULL THAT CRAP ON ME, BUD. WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK I AM? THEY DON’T CALL YOU #4 FOR NUTTIN’! GET BACK INTO YOUR SPACE!”
I couldn’t find an image of Gerald in the article, but Alice is there. Head of thinning white hair, a mass of wrinkles: sweet old lady.
Which of them is the “worst”? Is it Gerald or is it Alice? I thought and thought, eventually having to stop because my head hurt.—Kathryn Nocerino