There are many ways that a marriage can go wrong, but somehow, a few famous couples managed to turn theirs into stories involving murder and so much worse.
A rising career cut brutally short
18. That’s how old model Dorothy Stratten was when she married Paul Snider in Las Vegas in June 1979. He’d helped push her modeling career forward, but by 1980, Stratten was trying to find a way out of the marriage. She’d begun a relationship with director Peter Bogdanovich.Â
Things between Stratten and Snider ended more terribly than anyone could’ve imagined. She visited Snider at his rented house in West Los Angeles on August 14. Snider r***d and shot the 20-year-old Stratten with a shotgun before eventually killing himself.
A staged burglary fell apart
Ruth Snyder was a seemingly ordinary woman married to a man named Albert Snyder. She wanted out. But rather than going for a divorce like you might expect, she had an affair with a man named Henry Judd Gray. The pair killed Albert inside the Snyders’ Queens home in March 1927.Â
They tried to make the place look like burglars had done it, but that plan didn’t last long. Police picked apart their story. Both were eventually convicted of Albert’s murder, and they were both executed at Sing Sing prison on January 12, 1928.
Oil money sat behind the marriage
An unhappy home life is one thing. What was going on during Mollie and Ernest Burkhart’s marriage was something completely different. Mollie was an Osage woman in Oklahoma who married Ernest in 1917, just as members of her family began inheriting huge sums of money.
But funnily enough, relatives started dying. It turns out that Ernest’s uncle, William Hale, had organized a murder plot targeting Mollie’s family, and Ernest took part in it. There was even evidence that Mollie was being poisoned. Ernest eventually confessed to the crimes, and Mollie divorced him soon after.
Thirty-six cents and a hotel room
Singer Tina Turner left her abusive husband, Ike Turner, with barely anything. All she had was 36 cents and a gas-station credit card. That’s it. The couple had married in 1962 and performed together for years, but Tina later said that he had physically abused her throughout their relationship.Â
It reached a head in Dallas on July 1, 1976, when another violent fight erupted. Tina walked out and crossed a freeway. She eventually found another hotel and filed for divorce that same month, with it being finalized in 1978.
Getting out meant leaving barefoot
Singer Ronnie Spector escaped from Phil Spector in a very literal sense of the word. The pair married in 1968, and she later said he controlled every part of their lives inside their Beverly Hills mansion. He created restrictions on when she could leave. Ronnie even said Phil took away her shoes so she couldn’t run off easily.
It got to the point where, in June 1972, Ronnie’s mother helped her get out of the house, completely barefoot. Their divorce was finalized in 1974. Ronnie said she was forced to give up her future earnings as a singer because Phil threatened her life. What a horrible relationship.
Years of police calls came first
It’s kind of hard to think about a time before O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson became involved in one of the biggest criminal trials in American history. But it existed. The pair were married in 1985, and their relationship involved allegations of violence, along with the police.
Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal battery in 1989 and received probation. He was also forced to do community service and pay a fine. Nicole and Ron Goldman were killed outside her Los Angeles home two years after the divorce was finalized. Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995, but a 1997 civil case found him to be responsible.Â
One night in Manassas changed everything
The Bobbitts’ marriage was probably one of the most dysfunctional ones on record. John and Lorena had married in 1989, but Lorena later accused him of abusing her. John denied this. It was on June 23, 1993, that the event everyone remembers happened.
Lorena cut off John’s penis with a kitchen knife at their home in Manassas, Virginia. She then threw it from her car. Surgeons were miraculously able to reattach it to John, and he was later acquitted of marital sexual assault. Lorena was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.
Jealousy followed them everywhere
Crooner Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner didn’t exactly ease into their married life. The pair got hitched in Philadelphia on November 7, 1951, just days after Sinatra finalized his divorce from his first wife. But it wasn’t exactly a match made in heaven.
Their relationship was packed with jealousy, affairs, separations, reunions, and loud fights. Gardner once described packing her things during an argument at their Palm Springs home, while Sinatra tossed them onto the driveway. There were claims that he shot a gun into a pillow, too. They eventually got divorced in 1957.
Country music couldn’t keep them together
As country singers, George Jones and Tammy Wynette could sell a love song better than almost anyone. That’s part of the reason that reality made things so awkward. They might’ve been country music royalty, but offstage, Jones’s drinking and drug use kept causing trouble.
Wynette said the marriage was both exhausting and unpredictable. She filed for divorce once and changed her mind. The couple finally ended things in 1975, although they kept singing together afterward.
The divorce became an album
Singer Marvin Gaye married Anna Gordy in 1963. She ended up filing for divorce in 1975 after the relationship unraveled. But that wasn’t the end of the story, as Gaye himself had money problems, so their 1977 settlement became slightly unusual.
Anna ended up being entitled to $305,000 from his next album advance and another $295,000 from its royalties. That’s around $1.7 million and $1.6 million today. His response was to create an album titled Here, My Dear that gave all the juicy details from their marriage and breakup. He wasn’t a subtle kind of guy.
A royal wedding came apart publicly
Even royals have their fair share of marriage problems. Prince Charles and Diana divorced in 1996, and by that time, their marriage had become a running news story. They’d gotten married on July 29, 1981, at St. Paul’s Cathedral in front of a huge television audience.Â
They had two children, William and Harry, but both spouses ended up having affairs. Charles resumed his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, and Diana later had one with James Hewitt. Diana and Charles announced their separation in December 1992. But that was just the start of it, as years of news stories followed. Diana died in 1997 after a car crash.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
7 women who used marriage for power & 7 who refused marriage entirely
Marriage is a tricky thing, and for some women, it’s a political tool, but for others, it’s something to absolutely avoid at all costs.
7 women who used marriage for power & 7 who refused marriage entirely
