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