Laure Bardina-Kruger French teacher living in Indonesia stabbed to death near Narbonne by her diving instructor husband. Billy Kruger arrested as he was about to fly out of France.
A US diving instructor has admitted to stabbing death his wife to death after her dismembered remains were found near their holiday home in the south of France, according to reports.
Billy Kruger of Brooklyn was arrested Friday as the 50’s something man was about to fly out of France from Toulouse – hours after police found the remains of his 52-year-old wife, Laure Bardina-Kruger, in a storm drain in the village of Peyriac-de-Mer, Agence France-Presse reported.
Come Sunday, the French-American citizen was charged with aggravated murder after confessing to having stabbed his wife twice, while ‘vaguely’ maintaining that it was in self-defense following an argument, prosecutor Marie-Agnes Jolie told AFP.
The couple — who were married for 26 years, would spent a few weeks each year in Peyriac-de-Mer, on the Mediterranean, south of Narbonne — and had planned to leave Friday for their home in Jakarta, Indonesia, where Bardina-Kruger taught French.
‘The victim’s father sounded the alert after his daughter did not turn up for a family reunion in Carcassonne,’ an investigator said, according to the Mirror.
‘She was due to say goodbye to everybody before the couple returned to Jakarta,’ the source said.
‘Instead, police were instructed to search for the victim and they found her body in a gutter in a road near the house.’
After Bardina-Kruger’s body was found, police launched a search for her husband, who was arrested in the departure area of the Toulouse airport.
A bouquet of white roses was placed at the top of the drain where her remains were found. Police found her luggage in their apartment.
‘We don’t know yet what happened, but we never got any alarm signal from Laure regarding violent acts against her by her husband,’ Bardina-Kruger’s brother Pierre Bardina posted on Facebook. ‘You always think this can only happen to other people, but violence against women can happen all of a sudden.’
The couple were last seen at a restaurant in Peyriac-de-Mer on Thursday night, hours before she was slain, France’s L’Express reported.
Bardina-Kruger, who taught at the Jakarta Intercultural School since 2015 according to her Linkdln profile had held previous teaching posts in Shanghai, Cairo and Hawaii, according to the outlet.
The French media outlet reported Kruger saying he worked as a diving instructor in Indonesia.
‘They was never a loud word between them. When they came to sit with us, they could have dinner, sip two or three glasses, but never more,’ a friend of the couple told local media.
This case brings to at least 40 the number of suspected feminicides since the beginning of the year, according to an AFP count. In 2019, AFP identified at least 126 cases of women killed by their partner or ex, or a woman every three days on average.
A regard of wikipedia defines ‘femicide or feminicide’ as a sex-based hate crime term, broadly defined as ‘the intentional killing of females (women or girls) because they are females’, though definitions vary depending on its cultural context.
