The case of a German con man who had ties to the likes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Dick Cheney is truly, truly strange.
Albrecht Muth, who's now 48, is accused of bludgeoning his 91-year-old journalist wife Viola Drath to death in August 2011.
But his trial keeps getting delayed because he's defiantly starving himself. His lawyer says the 6-foot-tall Muth is down to 104 pounds, The Washington Post reported last week.
If Muth keeps fasting, he might not ever get tried for his wife's murder. Muth says he's abstaining from food on orders from the archangel Gabriel, according to Washington Post.
Drath and Muth were an eccentric and troubled pair. He began courting Drath when he was a teenager and she was in her 60s, according to a fascinating New York Times Magazine article called "The Worst Marriage In Georgetown."
The two didn't have a lot of money, but they got people like Scalia and Cheney to come over for elaborate meals because of their cultural cache.
Drath was a journalist who was once a friend to Norman Mailer. Muth was apparently a very smooth talker who somehow managed to get George Soros to give him seed money for an NGO called the "Eminent Persons Group," according to the Times article.
Muth also walked around Georgetown wearing a green uniform and red beret and pretending to be an Iraqi general, according to the Times. There's no evidence he even went to Iraq.
There is evidence Muth was gay and made no secret of it, according to the Times. There are also signs he was a cruel husband. He got arrested for allegedly pounding his elderly wife's head into the floor in 2006.
Five years later, he called 911 to report finding his wife's dead body. Investigators asked him about their 44-year age difference. He told them, according to the Times, "It was a marriage of convenience."
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