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An elderly man who feared his wife, and water, died after apparently spending too much time with both.
And now his widow, who was once a man herself, could be on her way to prison for exercising the 73-year-old man to death in a pool outside Cleveland last year.
Here's the surveillance video that's going to send Chris Mason to prison. She's the woman in the two-piece bathing suit, dragging her husband, James, through the water.
Chief Joseph A. Stehlik of the Middlefield Police Department says "I think the video speaks volumes for the cruelty that you will see. It's a fairly sinister appearing video."
The video shows Chris and James Mason, she is 40, he was 73, spending nearly two hours last June 2nd in the pool at the Middlefield Village apartments where they lived.
For those 100 minutes, Chris Mason dunks her husband repeatedly under the water, drags and tosses him around, and prevents him from escaping the pool. At the end of this so-called exercise session, James Mason had a heart attack and died the next day.
Chief Stehlik says "Mr. Mason was very afraid of water, so afraid of water he'd seldom bathe, did not exercise, had health problems."
Chris Mason, who had been named Chris Newton John before she married the much older man, has pleaded guilty to reckless homicide.
And Chris used to be a man herself. Until 1993, she was John Vallandingham and actually lived for a while in the same house with Mason as a boy.
Even veteran cops who had seen most everything, were shocked by the cruelty and oddity of this case.
Chief Stehlik says "it does make it one of the oddest ones I've seen. I was thinking about that even today. There are some that are very unique but this one rises probably to the top."
Police say there's evidence Chris Mason thought her husband had money. He didn't. By all accounts he was a timid, abused old man, who spent his last days in deathly fear.
Chris Mason will be sentenced by a judge next month. She could get up to 5 years in prison. There were other reports of abuse in the marriage, which prompted police to investigate Mason's death.
