Widow who kept dead husband in freezer loses lawsuit to reclaim body

A widow in Missouri who kept her deceased husband’s body in a home freezer for nearly a year has vowed to keep fighting authorities for its return, after a federal court dismissed her lawsuit earlier this month against local police, who had seized the remains.

“I’m not done,” Barbara Watters, 68, told the Joplin Globe. “They think they got away with something. But I’m not done.”

Paul Barton, Ms Watters husband, who suffered from a rare form of Lou Gehrig’s disease, died of natural causes at age 71 in 2018, according to police. The couple, according to Ms Watters, were both concerned that after his death his organs might be harvested for science, which they opposed on religious grounds, so she bought a large freezer before his death and eventually deposited the corpse inside.

"We both believed that carving people up and using their organs is ghoulish and goes against God's word," Ms Watters told the Globe in January. 

Police discovered the body in Joplin, Missouri, in November of 2019 during an unrelated neighborhood arson investigation and arrested Ms Watters soon after, on charges of abandoning a corpse.

A county judge dropped the charges in January 2020, writing that despite the strange facts of the case, it was clear Ms Watters hadn’t exactly abandoned the corpse.

“Though the state did not openly concede this point, under the plain wording of the statute, the defendant did not abandon, dispose or desert her husband's body,” Jasper county circuit judge Joe Hensley wrote. “Quite the contrary, her actions before his death in purchasing a suitably sized freezer and placing it in her own bedroom, rather than a kitchen, garage or any other room in the home suggest she wanted to preserve her husband's body and keep it close to her, the morbidity of her intent notwithstanding."

The dispute over the remains didn’t end there. In May, Ms Watters filed a lawsuit of her own against the Joplin police, city government, and county coroner, seeking the return of her husband’s body, as well as various legal documents she claimed were seized by police along with the remains.

“There’s simply no legal reason why they would continue to withhold his remains,” Austin Knoblock, her attorney, said at the time.

The suit, which eventually made it to federal court, was dismissed in early November, after Ms Watters allegedly didn’t respond to pre-trial orders to try and seek a resolution, which she denies.

The medical and ethical saga over Mr Barton’s body began while he was still alive. In June of 2018, two Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services officials went to the couple’s home, on reports that Ms Watters was denying him care. She allegedly wouldn’t let them in or talk with him alone, instead only wheeling Mr Barton to the door, where he appeared frail but unharmed.

On subsequent well-being checks, police arrived to find aluminum foil over most of the windows.

“She kept making mention of Paul's body being used for research," a police report said. “She said they did not want his body to be taken apart. Barbara said due to them refusing to consent to research, they were having a hard time finding a doctor to help them.”

Later that year, Ms Watters called police to report a homeless woman had assaulted her. The woman told officers there was no assault, and that she was being paid to care for Mr Barton until Ms Watters forced her leave.

One of Ms Watters neighbors also told police they believed a dead person was inside the house, and that Ms Watters threatened to kill him if he spoke to the cops.