GUILTY WI - Edith Schuth, 86, found dead in freezer, La Crosse, 15 Aug 2000

mysteriew said:
Little boy complains that man strikes him in the head
Parents go to complain
Father of little boy shot
15 hour standoff with police
Police find body in man's freezer- believed to be his mother.
A search of the states database of criminal court records shows a clean record.

http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/11472250.htm

Sounds like uncontrolled schizophrenia and a need to have a home...like his mother's! Was he an only child?
 
concernedperson said:
Sounds like uncontrolled schizophrenia and a need to have a home...like his mother's! Was he an only child?

Bet it turns out not to be a homicide, but instead that he didn't want to give up the Social Security check his mother was getting.
 
Philip Schuth's mother walked him to school every day, even in high school, and made him his favorite foods when they got home.

He never lived apart from her, so when Schuth found his 86-year-old mother dead, he says he panicked. He was afraid authorities were coming for him.

That's when investigators say Schuth put his mother, Edith Margorie Schuth, in a chest-style freezer in the basement of their French Island home. They say he filled the freezer with ice, which eventually hardened into a solid block.
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/politics/12271121.htm
 
This is interesting reading.

He didn't cry for days.

His mother's body was still warm when he found it the morning of Aug. 15, 2000.

He panicked. His mind raced. "Oh no, I've lost her. Everybody's coming to get me. What am I going to do? What am I going to do?"

Days later, he was at a table when he finally started blubbering and couldn't stop. He bawled and bawled until one day he was at a window, sobbing so loudly a man in the driveway next door heard him.

So he went to the basement.

Weeks passed, then months. The hair on top of his head fell out in clumps. He lived on Spam, tuna sandwiches, Little Debbie snack cakes and cold beans he stockpiled on rare trips to the grocery store.

His box-shaped house with the flat roof had been falling apart for years. Water seeped through the roof, trickled down the walls and shorted out the wiring. The electricity went out room by room, until all he had was the basement and three outlets on the second floor.

The water heater quit. So did the furnace. After the water was shut off, he dragged 20-gallon plastic drums into the yard to catch rainwater. He kept six in the living room and two in his bedroom. In the winter, he shoveled snow into them, melted it with a space heater.

Often, he pictured himself dead, lying on an autopsy table.

"I just wanted to be alone," he says.

And in his loneliest moments, Philip Schuth would disappear into his basement and stare at that freezer.

Investigators say Schuth put his dead mother, 86-year-old Edith Margorie Schuth, in that freezer the day she died. An autopsy would show her kidneys and heart gave out. They say he filled it with ice, which during the next 4½ years hardened into a solid block.

They say he confessed, that he did it because he thought he would be blamed for her death. They say he had no job and needed her Social Security checks to keep the house.

Against his lawyer's advice, Schuth has given more than three hours of telephone interviews to the Tribune during the past two weeks. He wants to set the record straight, he says, about his life, his family, the case and some of the events on Friday, April 22, the day he could hide no more.

Two boys were in Schuth's backyard that afternoon at 1330 Bainbridge St. in Campbell, Wis., a town of 4,400 wedged between the Mississippi and Black rivers. The boys were tearing apart his steps, Schuth says. Police say he came out and smacked 10-year-old Josh Russell on the side of the head.

Randy Russell Jr. and his wife, Melissa, went to confront Schuth, who was in the backyard. And then, according to police, the man who had spent most of his life trying not to draw attention to himself pulled a handgun from his pocket and started pulling the trigger.

Just like her only son, Margie Schuth never made friends easily. She never became a U.S. citizen, never trusted Americans, never got a driver's license, never really let go of her native England.

She didn't love her husband, James Schuth, who Philip says was sexually abusive and had a violent temper.

Where would she go? She had no family in America and none in England that wanted her. She had no experience to get a job.

Her husband told her she had no right to own property as a foreigner, and if she divorced him, she would be out on the streets with only her "little *advertiser censored*."

Philip graduated from Logan High School in 1971 and from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse 3½ years later, but never moved out of the house. He refused to leave his mother behind, to abandon her as he felt he'd done his grandmother in England, the one who had gone crazy after they left, who begged for change on street corners and didn't even recognize Margie or Philip when they went back to visit. She had died, among strangers, in a dump of a nursing home.

When a black spot formed on her face, she was scared chemotherapy would turn her into a walking skeleton, like Hubert H. Humphrey and John Wayne had looked in the end. She pulled her hair over the spot, so doctors wouldn't notice.

She had high blood pressure and would collapse on her bed. The room would spin like she'd had too much to drink.

That's what their deaths would be like, she told her son, with the world spinning, surrounded by strangers who didn't care if you lived or died, as had happened with her mother. She told him there was no afterlife, there couldn't possibly be enough room in heaven for everyone.

After she died, images would come to Philip. He saw his own corpse on an autopsy slab, ready to be cut open. He pictured Jim Schuth's penis. He envisioned his grandmother, raving in a nursing home.

He heard his mother's voice, describing death.

He lived in fear. More than once, he says, his house was broken into, that kids would throw snowballs and shoot BB-guns at him as he walked.


The full story here
 
:(

This is such a sad tale. What is scary is that there are other poor souls like him wandering around out there.
 
Anyone else think he may fall within the spectrum of autism?
 
Linda7NJ said:
Anyone else think he may fall within the spectrum of autism?

He is too articulate and verbal. Maybe more Asperger's syndrome.
 
LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) -- A recluse who kept his dead mother in his freezer and shot at his neighbors when they came to his door was sentenced to seven years in prison Monday.

Philip Schuth, 53, was sentenced for attempted homicide, reckless endangerment and concealment of a corpse.

Schuth told investigators that his mother died of natural causes in 2000, and an autopsy confirmed that. Schuth, who never had held a real job, said he hid her death because he was afraid authorities would blame him and because he wanted to keep collecting her Social Security checks.

He was arrested in April after an all-night standoff with police ...The standoff began when Schuth shot at a couple and their 10-year-old son after they confronted him over whether he had hit the boy.

During negotiations with police, Schuth said he had his dead mother in a freezer in the basement...

"Obviously it's a very serious crime. On the other hand, he had some unique issues in his upbringing that contributed to it which are probably treatable," District Attorney Scott Horne said, referring to Schuth's isolated childhood and hermit-like existence as an adult. "We all learned how to deal with minor conflicts because we're taught and brought up to do that. He wasn't."

Schuth has said he fantasized about being married to "Alias" star Jennifer Garner. At his sentencing, he said: "I apologize to Jennifer Garner and her pool boy Ben Affleck for involving them in my fantasies."


whole story: http://www.ksdk.com/news/us_world_article.aspx?storyid=88108
 
To me, that's a sad story all the way around.

I feel sorry for him and his mom.
I wonder if he'll have to pay that social security back?
I wonder if he could've been collecting some sort of benefits from her being deceased that he didn't even know about. What's he going to do when he gets out? He needs to be in some sort of institution I think, not really a prison. He needs help. I don't think he did anything wrong really except shooting at people and hopefully he didn't hurt them. Smacking the child isn't nice either but they were trespassing on his property, tearing up his stairs, right? Don't you have a right to defend your own property?
If they had a problem with him hitting their child, allegedly, why didn't they let the police handle it?
 
He shot the boy's father - not at him - shot him. It was fixable, but when you shoot at people, you are taking the chance of killing them even if he were an expert (which I doubt considering he doesn't seem to ever leave home).

Hitting the child - also not acceptable - chase the kid off (easy to do), talk to the parents, call the police if neither of these work.

I can see going to talk to my neighbor instead of immediately getting the police involved, as a first step - getting the police involved isn't really appropriate for anything people could discuss and solve for themselves.
 
But as the DA pointed out, he was never taught to do that. He was taught to shun people. And probably to strike back. He seems to have mental health issues as well as some possible problems in the mental capablities area. When his mother died, it left him with no resources to know how to handle a problem and no one else to do it for him.
 
Details said:
He shot the boy's father - not at him - shot him. It was fixable, but when you shoot at people, you are taking the chance of killing them even if he were an expert (which I doubt considering he doesn't seem to ever leave home).

Hitting the child - also not acceptable - chase the kid off (easy to do), talk to the parents, call the police if neither of these work.

I can see going to talk to my neighbor instead of immediately getting the police involved, as a first step - getting the police involved isn't really appropriate for anything people could discuss and solve for themselves.
I don't think he was mentally capable of handling the situation. It's pretty obvious to me he had no socialization while growing up. Who lets their mother walk them school when they're high school?! The relationship he and his mother had was not a healthy one for sure. I think he need to be put in an instiution, not prison. HIs mother definitely had some mental issues to start with.
 
SadieMae said:
I don't think he was mentally capable of handling the situation. It's pretty obvious to me he had no socialization while growing up. Who lets their mother walk them school when they're high school?! The relationship he and his mother had was not a healthy one for sure. I think he need to be put in an instiution, not prison. HIs mother definitely had some mental issues to start with.

I think you summed it up nicely. This is another situation where extended family should have stepped in early on (assuming there is extended family). With that being said I am sure they just thought him eccentric.
 
I bet they had an incestuous relationship too!:sick:
 

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