Nina Housden, who lived near Detroit, was a passionate, violent and neurotic woman who was pathologically jealous of her bus-driver husband Charles. In 1944 he left her.

Just before Christmas that year, she invited him over for a drink "for old times' sake," got him drunk, then strangled him with a clothes line. The next day, she dismembered him and wrapped the parts of the body in newspaper.

But from then on, luck was against her. She set out with the parts of the body in the car, intending to dispose of them in the Kentucky Hills. The car broke down in Toledo, Ohio, and the garage proprietor was surprised when the woman said she would wait in the car, even if it took a week to repair. A garage mechanic looked into one of the evil-smelling parcels in the back seat while Nina slept, and discovered a human leg.

She was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The “Torso Slayer”: Nina Housden - 1944

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Wife Confesses Strangling Mate

The Racine Journal-Times (Wi.)

December 26, 1944

Highland Park, Mich. – Wayne county authorities said today a first degree murder charge would be filed against Mrs. Nina Housden, 33, who confessed she strangled her husband across the street from the police station and started to St. Louis with his dismembered body in the trunk of her automobile.

Mrs. Housden, who accused her husband, a cross country bus driver, of bragging of his affairs with other women, was arrested at Toledo, Ohio, when her automobile broke down and a garage attendant became suspicious of her.

Planned for Years

Mrs. Housden, a slender brunet who had a war-time job as a driver for the American Railway Express Co., said her husband returned home from his run Thursday.

They went to a motion picture theater, then had several drinks. She had planned to kill him, she said, for more than a year. She succeeded in getting him drunk, she told authorities, then took him to her apartment facing the Highland Park police station.

She strangled him with a clothes line, she said, then went to bed. She kept the body in her apartment for two days, waiting for delivery of an automobile she had bought.

Dismembered Body

Mrs. Housden was unable to carry the 200 pound body down the stairs. She dismembered it with a razor, stuffed it into a canvas bag, put it in the trunk of the automobile and started to St. Louis where she planned to dispose of it.

“If I were free, I would go to Kentucky and kill a couple of women he had affairs with,” she said.

Nina Housden

Mrs. Nina Housden, 33, Highland Park, Mich., is shown above at Toledo, Ohio, after the dismembered body of her husband, Charles, 32, bus driver, was found in an auto in a garage. Mrs. Housden, a truck driver, had maintained a 48-hour-vigil over the car.