‘Plane fury’
Did Linda Lee Couch accidentally take her husband’s life, or was it a calculated killing?
It was two in the morning, but Vitaly Kaloyev stood in the cemetery in his hometown of Vladikavkaz, Russia, sobbing over an elaborate gravestone.
On the front of the stone was a huge image of what he’d lost – his wife, Svetlana, 44, son Konstantin, 10, and daughter Diana, four.
His home too was a shrine to his family, who’d died on the night of 1 July 2002. Vitaly had been at Barcelona airport when he heard the news.
His wife and children had been flying out for a holiday to meet him while he worked on an architecture job.
Their flight had collided in mid-air with a cargo plane – killing all 69 passengers of the Kaloyevs’ flight, and both crew on the other.
Vitaly was consumed by grief… and anger. The crash had occurred over Germany, but the airspace was the responsibility of air traffic control in Switzerland.
That night there had been only one air traffic controller, Peter Nielsen, on duty over two workstations. Due to the deadly mix of overwork and delayed radar data, he’d only managed to give the planes 44 seconds’ warning of what was coming.
Distraught Vitaly had rushed to the scene, participating in the hunt for bodies among the horrifying wreckage. He’d found his daughter’s body where she’d hit tree branches in her fall from the plane.
His wife’s body lay in a corn field and his son’s in the road.
For a year, Vitaly lingered at his family’s grave at all hours. Then his grief hardened.
He hired a PI to hunt down the air traffic controller he blamed for their deaths.
On 24 February 2004, Vitaly turned up at Peter’s home near Zurich airport. He claimed later that he only wanted to speak to the man and get an apology.
Upon finding the 36-yearold in his garden, the two exchanged words.
Vitaly claimed the former air traffic controller was unrepentant so he stabbed him in the stomach, killing him.
In October 2005, Vitaly Kaloyev was convicted of the premeditated murder of Peter Nielsen and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was released just two years later. When he returned home, he was met with cheering crowds who hailed him a hero. ‘I protected the honour of my children... He’s nobody to me. He was an idiot and that’s why he paid for it with his life,’ Kaloyev said. With so much public support, he was later appointed to political office. In 2017, Hollywood film Aftermath was released, with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the character based on Kaloyev. And it seemed Kaloyev was due a blockbuster ending…
Two years ago, Kaloyev, now 65, welcomed twins with his second wife.
‘Iwanted to leave and get out. I was scared to leave. I didn’t know what else to do…’ These are the harrowing words from Linda Lee Couch, a woman who says she suffered years of physical and mental abuse at the hands of her husband, Walter.
At 67, she looks like any other grey-haired grandmother, or mother, but instead, Linda is serving a life sentence for the murder of her husband. She’s been behind bars since 1984, prisoner number W017943 – and is one of around 7,000 women serving life sentences in America.
‘I truly believe if I’d been able to say what I wanted to in court, I would not be sitting here today,’ a dejected Linda says in interviews for the Netflix programme, I Am a Killer. Her story began – like so many others – with meeting the person she thought was the man of her dreams.
Linda was just a teenager when she met Walter Couch at a wedding reception. She’d taken a little sip of her mother’s beer to gain the courage she’d needed to go and speak to him, and was pleased to discover they had things in common.
‘He was wonderful, clean-cut, very good-looking,’ Linda says on reflection. ‘I was amazed he’d even want to date me.’
When Walter proposed, Linda was still just a teenager, but thinking she was in love, she said yes.
She married when she was 16 years old, and she surely hoped it would be a loving, fulfilling relationship.
But instead, she claims the man she’d taken as a husband changed into someone violent,
abusive and a monster.
‘He was so different when we were just dating. But once he had put that ring on my finger, he changed into a monster. I probably would not have ended up in here had I just went ahead and divorced him.’
Linda says it all began when she fell pregnant with their first child and Walter became ‘brutal’. ‘He pushed me down the steps when I was still pregnant,’ she says in series two of I Am a Killer.
After their daughter, Roxanne, was born, Linda says all the parenting was left to her. They went on to have another daughter and a son, but both Roxanne and Linda, she claims, were the subject of abuse.
‘I tried to defend her [Roxanne] so many times and I got the same thing,’ Linda says matter-of-factly. ‘Beaten up.’ She says she suffered a cracked nose, black eyes and it ‘went on the entire time we were married’.
A devastating situation for all those involved, yet friends and family had never seen Walter attack his wife or child. He was thought of as a good father and an upstanding man by the local community.
After 14 years of marriage, Linda had started a college course, but her husband wanted her to quit. She’d refused and an argument had broken out.
Walter supposedly went and grabbed their gun – and Linda feared for her life.
A tussle ensued and she kicked Walter in the groin, meaning he momentarily let go of the firearm.
Linda grabbed it, only she’d tripped on the edge of the bed and the .22 calibre had gone off, hitting Walter in the head, killing him, she says.
A terrible accident. Or had Linda planned it?
‘That’s when I panicked. I wasn’t right… totally right at the time. After everything, I wasn’t thinking straight.’
Linda told family and friends that she and Walter had got into an argument and he’d left. But his parents didn’t believe her story and later called the police, claiming she’d killed their son.
Ten days after the killing, in Linda’s backyard, they found Walter’s body, wrapped in a carpet and buried in what had been their vegetable patch.
Linda was arrested on 23 October 1984 and the children were cared for by Walter’s parents.
During her court case, none of the domestic abuse was brought up. Her lawyers said there was no evidence and Roxanne, the eldest daughter, testified for the prosecution against her mother. They heard that Linda had bought the gun just days before the killing, had sent the children to their grandparents’ house for the weekend – and changed the deeds to their house in Cincinnati so that it was all in her own name.
Even more shocking – it was claimed that Linda had enlisted
‘He would hit her, shove her to the ground’
the help of her children to bury their father in the garden.
On 7 March 1985, Linda Lee Couch was found guilty of aggravated murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
It was after her incarceration that Linda began talking about the domestic abuse she had suffered, and years later, when a film crew met her – and tracked down her daughter, Roxanne, for the Netflix series, more details came to light.
‘My father was a headstrong man,’ Roxanne says. ‘He had a temper that would just go from zero to 80 in a split second.’ She talked of the physical abuse she suffered at his hands and seemed to back part of her mother’s story too…
‘He would hit her, he would shove her to the ground,’ she says, admitting she’d seen the bruises and hand marks around her mother’s neck as a child.
Walter, according to Roxanne, had portrayed himself as a loving father. ‘It was an illusion he created for everyone else,’ she says. But when asked if Linda had protected her from her father – whether she’d taken beatings for Roxanne as a child, she said her mother never, ever had.
Linda had claimed Walter would bring his friends home while they were married, and they would rape her while Walter watched and laughed.
Roxanne said of some of her mother’s claims: ‘Linda’s concern is always about Linda – she likes to tell stories; she likes to get sympathy.’
She also said her mother had secretly taken out credit cards and loans, planning for her future life.
The bank was supposedly insisting Walter physically go in to clear up the debt and, according to Roxanne, Linda had grown scared that her secret would be discovered. Weeks later, he was dead…
Was she driven to murder by an abusive husband? Was Walter’s death a terrible accident? The court decided she was a murderer.
To date, Linda has been refused parole seven times.
‘I’ve changed,’ she says, but it’s hard to know what to believe…
I Am a Killer is available on Netflix