Sun Stories:..."Blood, Baby"...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

BROWNSVILLE, Texas | What had Amelia ever done, to you or anyone else? Nothing was the definitive word that always came back, in small talk and long conversation. At 39, she was still a good-looking woman. Married for a little more than 18 years. Two kids, one a teenager.

When her neighbors talked about her it was always as if describing a loving sibling. Amelia herself would often say life was simply too precious to ruin. Life in poor Brownsville had depressed her in the beginning, after moving here with her new husband from McAllen 60 miles to the west. She toughed it out, however, as she helped husband Felipe Torres fashion his career.

In church, she led the mixed choir. At her job at the bank, she'd been named "Employee of The Month" 11 times. Men and moms at the Little League games she attended to watch her son pitch, all said they admired her conviction, her visible desire to make sure youngest son Harvey never missed a practice or a game.

Not that anyone in her circle had ever looked deeply into her life.

Everybody figured things were more than fine inside her sprawling, two-story home in the city's best neighborhood. So, it was a true-blue shock when a news report on local TV had it that her banker husband, Felipe, had been viciously beaten to death in his bed while he slept.

Felipe ran the most successful branch bank in town, an operation much larger than that offered by the smaller regional bank that employed Amelia. In the days that followed, additional news reports unfurled the sordid story of an affair between Amelia and the male head of her bank, how she'd fallen in love with him and how Amelia had spiked Felipe's dinner cocktail one night and later pummeled him to death in their bed.

Police said a crotchless black panty had been stuffed in his mouth, offering a clue to something else that may have soiled the marriage...

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