Media Misogyny: Monstrous Women Analysis

Media Misogyny: Monstrous Women
Bad Wife:
In 2012 Sandra Melgar murdered her husband and staged the crime to look like a home invasion. The prosecutor claimed Melgar killed her husband for the $250,000 life insurance policy, and their religion forced her hand, as divorce is difficult and an extensive process. The night of the murder their family showed up to the Melgar household to celebrate the couples anniversary to discover Jamie, her husband, tied up and stabbed to death in his closet while Sandra was tied up and claimed she had a seizure during the incident and couldn’t remember anything. Their daughter tells the jury that “they were best friends”, they were happy together and never had any violent or angry disagreements in their marriage
Despite the daughter’s tale of happy marriage, investigators in the case believe Sandra planned out this murder in order to collect life insurance but also to escape her marriage. Investigators feel that Sandra thought out the murder scene and staged a break in on that particular day because she knew people would be coming to her house and would find her tied up and hysterical about her husband, claiming a stranger broke in and killed him. Investigators found that her husband had been tied up after his death and found smudges on Sandra’s fingernails that point to cleaning agents found on the murder weapon. The media portrays her as a villain and a bad wife because of the things she did while killing her husband. The murder was premeditated, deliberate, and staged to look like a different crime. There lies the proof that maybe Sandra was not necessarily
Those words were Catherine Birnie’s sick sign to her husband they’d found their latest target. ‘David was the puppet, Catherine was the puppeteer. She gave the tick of approval. She would say ‘I’ve got the munchies’, which meant ‘you can have this one’” (Schipp, 2017). This collection of quotes from an article that interviewed the survivor of the Birnie’s sick crime spree is foolproof evidence that Catherine Birnie was the evil manipulator in their couple. Catherine and David would kidnap, rape, and murder women they had lured into their van. They had previously killed four women and Kate Moir, who was only 17 at the time, thought she was going to be next. In the article Kate talks about the gruesome things the couple had done to her and how she was lucky enough to escape “The Death House” (Schipp, 2017). While this article discusses more of the interview of the victim, it shows how the media talked about the couple and the heinous things that they did to multiple women. Catherine was the manipulator, Catherine gave the words of approval, Catherine was the one that sat back and took notes about the behavior of the victims throughout the process. It is unknown whether or not David would have done this alone but to the media, and the sole surviving victim, Catherine was the truly evil