A 91-year-old socialite who was found slain in her Washington home had a violent relationship with her husband 44 years her junior. She was pronounced dead hours later but despite initial reports she died of natural causes, a medical examiner has now ruled that the case is a homicide. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
Funk Flex
Viola Drath obtained a string of orders against Albrecht Gero Muth after he once allegedly attacked her with a chair and held her captive in her own house. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
Muth, 47, is also said to have sat on her during the disturbing incident in which he ‘pounded her head into the floor’ several times.
Miss Drath was found unconscious in the bathroom of her well-maintained rowhouse in the Georgetown neighbourhood of Washington D.C. on Friday.
She was pronounced dead hours later but despite initial reports she died of natural causes, a medical examiner has now ruled that the case is a homicide.
Police have also said that there was no forced entry to the house.
The case has shone a light onto the unusual relationship between Muth and Miss Drath – they married 21 years ago when he was in his mid 20s and she was around 70.
The Washington Post reported that they both understood it was a ‘marriage of convenience’ with ‘clear terms’.
But court documents unearthed by the paper show that even in 1992, early on in the marriage, Miss Drath requested a protective order against him.
She put in a similar request in 2002 after another alleged fight which caused Muth to move out and into a house he shared with a gay lover, Donald Davis.
That relationship soured and Muth moved back in with Miss Drath after he allegedly told Mr Davis ‘he was going to have me [Mr Davis] killed and said I should be careful when I get into my car’.
The incident with the chair is said to have happened in 2006, records from the Washington Superior Court show.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit Muth ‘threw the Complainant [Drath] off the sofa onto the floor and pounded her head into the floor several times and sat on her for between five and ten minutes while yelling at her.
‘When the Defendant [Muth] got off the Complainant (Drath), he refused to let her leave the house to notify the authorities.’
The matter went to court but was not prosecuted because Miss Drath did not want to pursue it.
Miss Drath led an extraordinary life by anybody’s standards.
Born in Germany in 1920 she later moved to the U.S. after marrying and Colonel Francis S Drath, a military governor in part of Bavaria after World War II.
