Parole has been denied for a former model convicted of killing her husband, then cooking and eating his remains 20 years ago. Omaima Aree Nelson went before the parole board Wednesday seeking early release from her 27-years-to-life sentence in the murder of William E. Nelson, 56, over Thanksgiving weekend in 1991.
She told the board: "I am not a monster."
She insisted that her husband, William, was trying to strangle her when she hit him with a lamp, stabbed him with scissors and killed him.
"If I didn't defend my life, I would have been dead. I'm sorry it happened, but I'm glad I lived." "I'm sorry I dismembered him."
She denied eating her husband, despite testimony by her psychiatrist at her trial. "I swear to God I did not eat any part of him. I am not a monster," she said. Her first bid at parole was also rejected in 2006.
The prosecutor who helped send Nelson to prison wrote a letter to the board saying Nelson would be a threat to public safety if released.
He says he'll never forget the horror of visiting the couple's home.
"There were suitcases and plastic bags soaked with dark liquid from his body parts. In the fry cooker there sat Mr. Nelson's hands and when we opened the refrigerator, there was Mr. Nelson's head with stab wounds," Palowski recalls.
"She had his entrails in his Corvette and she was trying to get an ex-boyfriend to yank out the dentures from the head so she could dump it in the Back Bay."
Nelson, who worked as a part-time model and nanny in Egypt, immigrated to the U.S. in 1986. She was in her 20's when she killed her husband and then dismembered and cooked parts of his body in their Costa Mesa apartment. The couple had been married for about a month.
After the murder, Nelson boiled her husband's head on the stove in an attempt to remove his teeth, skinned his torso and fried his hands in oil, Pawloski told the Daily Pilot.
Nelson told a psychiatrists that she carved up part of her husband's back and dipped it in barbecue sauce, something she now denies. Nelson then drove garbage bags filled with the body parts to various ex-boyfriends, asking them to help dispose of the evidence and offering $75,000 for help, Pawloski said.
Neighbors at the time said the garbage disposal was on for "a long time" and "constant chopping sounds" were coming from the home, according to the newspaper.
In court, a psychiatrist testified that Nelson put on red shoes, a red hat and red lipstick before spending hours chopping up her husband's body.
According to Pawloski, Nelson was the first defendant to used the "battered wife" defense in Orange County, claiming her husband raped her the night before she killed him.
She also told psychiatrists and her attorney that she had been the victim of sexual abuse as a child in Egypt where she was molested, beaten and forced to undergo female circumcision, a mutilation of the female genitalia.
Woman kills husband Omaima Aree Nelson
