Simone WilsonThey don't come much freakier than 46-year-old John Levin.
In September 1999, Levin was accused of fatally stabbing his wife, Michelle, in their West Fairview Avenue condo. Her body was found three days later, decomposing in Glendale with a stab wound to the neck, as Levin — on the run and apparently suicidal — attempted to flee into Canada. “When U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers arrested John Levin,” reported the Glendale News-Press, “they noted in a report that his wrists were 'oozing blood.'”
Just yesterday, after a decade of prosecution, the 49-year-old was finally found guilty of the murder — and entered a similar plea for a second offense:
Animal cruelty. Because, in the same rampage that killed his wife, Levin reportedly popped his dog in the microwave for long enough to end its little life.
Credit: Jewel City Juice
Pretty goddamn disgusting. Strangest part is, the Jewel City Juice blog discovered that Levin “was once an active volunteer member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department-affiliated Montrose Search and Rescue Team.” Left, you'll see a photo of the team in 2006 — with Levin third from left, unmistakably moustached — after finding former Glendale Mayor Sheldon Baker'€™s lost dog.
(Is it just us, or is the mayor's dog a total Pomeranian?)
In 2010, the News-Press provided a courtroom update on the murder trial:
Officer David Van Gorden said he and a colleague went to Levin's home Sept. 11 and found it littered with dog excrement, rotting food and numerous pills scattered on a table, Van Gorden testified.They eventually gained entry to a locked second-floor bedroom, where they found and saw Michelle Levin's body on the floor next to the bed. … The couple's dead Pomeranian had also been stuffed inside the microwave, he said.
An autopsy of the dog revealed that it died as a result of the microwave radiation to its entire body, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jodi Taksar said.
The coroner had found the prescription muscle-relaxer Soma, and possibly alcohol, in Michelle's system. And, though Levin initially lied that he woke up to his wife holding a knife to his chest, he later admitted that he had poked his chest himself to create that illusion.
“He left her there dying, and at that point, he locked the door, leaving that part of his life behind him,” another detective testified.
But, uh, not without putting the Pomeranian in the microwave (potential witness, maybe?) and grabbing two computers to take with him to Canada.
Wow. May Levin's “16 years to life” sentence veer much further toward the latter.
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