Earlier I wrote about the death of Michael Snyder, whose body was found buried under the garage floor on his property eight years after he disappeared. His then-wife, Ellen, shot him and made her teenage son help her bury the body. Well, Ellen — setting the stage for a self-defense story — now claims Michael was abusive. No police reports were filed about this, cops were never called to the home, but she says he was abusive.
The article says Ellen’s son (the one who helped cover up the murder) told a friend that Michael used to beat him. The article also notes that Michael had multiple sclerosis. Wikipedia says: The person with MS can suffer almost any neurological symptom or sign, including changes in sensation (hypoesthesia and paraesthesia), muscle weakness, muscle spasms, or difficulty in moving; difficulties with coordination and balance (ataxia); problems in speech (dysarthria) or swallowing (dysphagia), visual problems (nystagmus, optic neuritis, or diplopia), fatigue, acute or chronic pain, and bladder and bowel difficulties.
Michael’s MS can’t have been that far advanced, since he was able to work as a mechanic — in fact, this is the first I’ve heard of it. This article says he was diagnosed in the summer of 2001, only months before his disappearance. But if he was sick, would he had been capable of beating up a seventeen-year-old boy? Would the young man not have fought back?
According to Ellen’s attorney: He wasn’t beating her up, he wasn’t hitting her with items, but he’d shove her up against a wall, grab her by the shoulders and shake her, he just kind of open-hand hit her in the chest and in the shoulders, and that was going on every night and had for a long time. The attorney also claims Michael was seeing another man: We only know of one, but when he was going to Phoenix, he was seeing a man named Dave… And Dave was calling and leaving very explicit sexual messages on Mike’s cell phone.
Of course, it’s entirely on the cards that Michael really was abusive to his wife and stepson. I know this sort of thing does happen behind closed doors and becomes a closely kept family secret. But Ellen’s actions after the shooting — and she emptied that gun into him, all eight rounds — don’t sound like self defense to me. People who kill in self defense don’t generally hire a backhoe to dig a hole, bury the body, then lie about what happened for eight years. And even if everything Ellen’s lawyer says is true, the self defense thing, so far, doesn’t seem to hold water. Nothing in that story indicates Michael was a serious risk to Ellen’s life.
One of the commenters on the first article says, Obviously this [E]llen woman wasn’t that helpless, look who’s dead.
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