Rainier Valley/Friday October 6/4:50 pm: Officer Elias reports: “Suspect and victim were dating for approximately 10 years. Victim recently ended the relationship. Today, the victim felt badly for the suspect because he is blind and so she brought some food to his apartment. She entered his apartment. He closed the door and came after her with a hammer. He struck her several times in the head, shoulders, chest. She grabbed a scissors but couldn’t bring herself to stab him. [Even now, even as she is being violently attacked, she has pity for this man. And what does this mean? She has all of the power. She has the power to pity him. He is nothing.]
“A witness walking by the apartment door heard a man yelling ‘I’m going to fucking kill you.’ The witness knocked on the door. She saw the victim crawling to the door, bleeding heavily. The witness got a towel and attempted to stop the bleeding. When we arrived on the scene, the two parties were separated. Our investigation showed the [blind man] was the primary aggressor, and he was taken into custody.”
This report has striking similarities to a crime that happened last month in Portland, the Rose City. The crime, which made all the headlines there, has the kind of twisted horror (or even Galgenhumor) that defines the cinema of the Coen brothers. Because of its proximity to films like Fargo, I will use the form of a film treatment to recount the incident.
The Players
Michael James Kuhnhausen, 58, the owner of Fantasy Adult Video who is estranged from his wife, Susan Kunhausen.
Susan Kuhnhausen, 51, an emergency-room nurse who lives alone in her husband’s house.
Edward Dalton Haffey, 59, makes his living moping up semen from the floors of Fantasy Adult Video. Haffey has a long criminal history.
The Setting
A blue clapboard house with a white picket fence on the 7900 block of Southeast Alder Street, in Southeast Portland.
The Plot
Michael James Kuhnhausen hires Edward Dalton Haffey, the come mopper at his adult store, to kill his wife. On the afternoon of September 14, Kuhnhausen lets Haffey into the house his wife occupies, and for four hours, Haffey waits for his boss’s wife to return home from her job at the emergency room. He wears yellow gloves and holds a claw hammer. Finally the wife returns. Haffey strikes her face, but she doesn’t die. He strikes her face again, and still she doesn’t die. The wife is “a large woman.” Enraged, she manages to knock the hammer out of Haffey’s hands. They tumble to the floor. They wrestle on the floor. They struggle for life. She rolls over him, he rolls over her, they roll over him, they roll over her. At last, her hands get a hold of his neck and the life that was supposed to be cracked out of her begins to be squeezed out of him. With bare hands she kills the come mopper. The wife then runs to her neighbors’ house and calls 911 at 6:15 p.m. There are bite marks up and down her body and hammer marks on the face that did not crack.
