[QUOTE=Faruiza]
I would be pissed. No really, really, out of my mind freakin’ nuclear. How you can tell this in a couple of sentences with such a laid back tone is unpossible in my mind! How did this come to happen in your house? This is a story that begs to be told…at least told to me. 
[/QUOTE]
It happened Sept. 9, 1992, so I’ve had a lot of time to calm down and whittle down the story from a long, detailed bummer.
I had known him for 20 years, not as well as I thought. He married a bad-news girl with great legs, divorced her, married her again, :smack: and was in the process of divorcing her again. He ran short of money, and couldn’t make his house payments. He wanted to let it go into foreclosure, but I talked him into putting it on the market. It sold quickly, but when he went to the closing, his wife and her lawyer were there. She had signed a quitclaim deed in the first divorce, but he didn’t get around to giving her the $1500 the decree called for. :smack: Thus, she still owned half the house, and got half the money from the sale. Dumber yet, he actually had given her the money, but didn’t get receipts. :smack:
He was broke and had no place to live, so I let him stay “for a few weeks” at my house. One afternoon, he went to her place with a bottle of tequila and a fistful of pills, trying to talk her into a better deal for the new divorce. He agreed to take care of their (well, not his) 18-month old daughter for the evening. Mrs. Nott and I went off to our meeting in Indianapolis, not knowing about the babysitting.
Apparently, his wife came over to my house, carrying daughter and playpen. She dropped her half-the-records demand on him, and they argued. She grabbed a big knife from the kitchen. He got cut, but took away the knife. He killed her in a really nasty fashion in my front room. Her blood was splattered on two of my guitars.
I got advice from a luthier on cleaning blood off guitars (Murphy’s Oil Soap, gently.) I put together the framework of a blues song called She Bled To Death On My Guitar. Then, I…I came apart. I don’t know exactly how long it took until it wasn’t the first thing I thought about every morning. I’m not a Catholic, but I asked a priest friend to bless the house. He said prayers for the dead wife, the killer, and us. He installed a guardian angel on our house, and he scattered holy water.