Massachusetts: New American Doc Charged in Strangulation Death of Wife

I saw the story first a few days ago at the UK Daily Mail which as usual was ahead of most of the local Boston news stories.

Surgeon arrested for murdering his missing wife in Massachusetts whose remains are found near their home two days after she went missing

A surgeon was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife whose remains were found in an outdoor area near the home they shared in Massachusetts after she went missing earlier this week, authorities said.

Tuerk and McLean appear to be enjoying an Oktoberfest gathering in a photo obtained by the Daily Mail.

Ingolf Tuerk, 58, was accused of killing his wife Kathleen McLean, 45, whose remains were found in an outdoor area near their Valley Road home in Dover late Saturday. How she died was not disclosed.

McLean, who was last seen in her home, had been missing since Thursday. By Saturday, Norfolk District Attorney Michael W. Morrissey’s office issued a statement calling McLean’s disappearance ‘suspicious’ and said an investigation was underway.

The surgeon, born in Germany, had earlier this year been dismissed from St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center over allegations of falsely billing Medicaid, says the Daily Mail.

Read it all yourself.

I’ve now spent way too much time reading subsequent news accounts of how the controlling Tuerk behaved in the months leading up to the strangulation death of his new wife.

By the way, he has two teenage children and she has three according to some reports.

Here is a column from the Boston Globe that gives us some additional insight into the truly disgusting story that hopefully serves as a warning to women whether they are 45 years old like Katie McLean or 17 like that poor girl decapitated by a sicko in Sweden.

They were a couple of healers. Now one is charged with murdering the other

They got married in Las Vegas 11 days before Christmas.

Fifty-one days later, he was out of their house in Dover.

She filed for divorce two months after their wedding.

Three months after that, she was dead.

In five months, from the moment Kathleen “Katie” McLean said “I do,” to the moment State Police divers found her body Saturday in a pond near the home she shared with her husband Dr. Ingolf “Harry” Tuerk, her marriage and life dissolved into a disturbing text-book case of domestic violence.

Even after her husband choked her, even after filing charges against him, even after filing for divorce, Katie McLean took him back and tried to reconcile. Maybe because, as survivors of domestic violence in their desperation sometimes hope, she thought that might get him to stop hurting her.

She withdrew her divorce papers. She asked Norfolk County prosecutors to drop the conditions that kept her husband out of their home, but Assistant District Attorney Michael Pirrello refused and two judges agreed with him. But when she withdrew the restraining order, Tuerk was back in.

Now prosecutors, who carry the sobering knowledge that men who choke their wives in a fit of rage don’t change overnight, will try Harry Tuerk for the strangulation murder of his wife.

Despite their age difference, Tuerk, 58, and McLean, 45, had something in common. They were healers. He was a renowned urologist, an especially prolific surgeon. She was a practitioner of Reiki, a non-invasive alternative approach that stimulates the body’s natural healing process.

At 6-foot-3, 235 pounds, Tuerk was an Olympic athlete for his native East Germany and remained an imposing figure, towering over his colleagues during surgeries, which, according to a 2004 Globe profile, he performed in bare feet while blasting classic rock.

But, after Tuerk’s career ended abruptly, what might be seen as quirky behavior could also manifest itself as controlling, such as his refusal to tell his wife the code for their home’s thermostat. According to police, after McLean took out a restraining order, Tuerk remotely dropped the temperature in the house to 54 degrees.

More here.  That last bit I highlighted speaks volumes.

Question: Do restraining orders ever work?