Florida Woman Shot Her Husband, Hid Body In Closet: Police

A 65-year-old woman from Florida was charged Friday with killing her 72-year-old husband and hiding his duct-taped body behind a brick wall she built inside a closet.

Barbara Wozniak was charged with a case of second-degree murder along with the charge of tampering with the evidence.

According to the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office, the woman from the town of Shalimar in the Florida Panhandle killed her elderly husband Alfred Wozniak on Nov.10 and was served the murder warrant late Friday night at the Okaloosa County jail, where she was already being held on a charge of tampering with evidence.

Reports said the woman allegedly told her adult children that she shot her husband in self-defense after he tried to choke her in their Shalimar home.

The two adult children called 911 on Wednesday,

According to the New York Post, the Okaloosa Sheriff’s Office said, “Investigators obtained a search warrant and found a fabricated brick wall inside a closet under a stairway. After removing the bricks and drywall, a large dark plastic type of tarp was observed, shaped in the consistency of an adult body. The material had been thoroughly duct-taped.”

The Medical Examiner’s Office where an autopsy was done Friday revealed that the man had been shot in the left temple. Wozniak was also accused of duct-taping her husband’s wrists, and midsection before covering it with the tarp. His feet had also been taped together at the ankles.

According to a report in Fox10 News, the medical examiner explained that the projectile that was found near the dead husband's right temple had traveled from left to right, back to front.

According to investigators at the sheriff's office, the trajectory through the victim’s skull is not reliable with the defendant’s statement to her children.

Further investigations revealed that Wozniak had bought $130 worth of supplies from a Fort Walton Beach business, using her debit card; the supplies were later found around her husband’s body.

The items included a large tarp, plastic sheet, 20 pounds of repair mortar, Clorox and tape. The agency said that surveillance video shows a white female who looked like Wozniak at the check-out counter, reports said.

There have been other recent instances of women killing their husbands for different reasons.

According to a report in the Daily Mail, an 81-year-old woman was jailed for two years in August last year for stabbing her sick husband to death as he lay in bed. Audrey Hingston’s plea of not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility was accepted by the Crown at Plymouth Crown Court, U.K.

In another incident, a Pakistani woman who had planned to murder her husband after she was forced into marriage ended up accidentally killing more than a dozen members of her husband’s family last month. The poisoned milk that she had planned to serve her husband was turned into yogurt and consumed by family members, including her husband, police said, according to Geo News. The woman along with two others was arrested.