ENVY: The Kidnapping and Murder of Sidney Reso

Battered Wife Defense

Irene Seale

Even Irene Seale's sentencing was not without controversy. Though she pleaded guilty, before she was sentenced, Irene Seale, who, according to both prosecutors and her own husband, was involved in every step of the crime — and even took primary responsibility for the neglect that passed for care of Sidney Reso while he was alive in their control, insisted that she too was a victim of her husband's evil machinations.

Hedda Nussbaum

She maintained, according to published reports from the time, that Arthur Seale had abused her physically, mentally and sexually. Using what was at the time still a novel and intriguing defense, used most dramatically by Hedda Nussbaum when she argued that she was a virtual slave to her child-killing husband, Joel Steinberg, Irene Seale claimed that she suffered from battered wife syndrome.

In a blistering response to that claim the prosecution team, headed by Chertoff, as quoted by United Press International on Jan. 24, 1993, wrote that there was no evidence to support Irene Seale's contention that she had been battered by her husband, or for that matter, any proof to support her claim that her role was simply to serve as caretaker for the slowly dying executive.

"'Caretaking?" the prosecutor's wrote, in a memorandum that is redolent with contempt. "Caretaking by locking a man in a box with his hands cuffed, his eyes taped shut, left alone for endless hours in an unlighted storage shed, fed water, vitamins, Tylenol and
sleeping pills a couple of times a day...This is caretaking?"