Andrea Crew didn’t want her husband and the father of her children sent to jail, so she dropped domestic violence charges against him and left court with him by her side. She even held his hand.
But in the car on the way home, Caleb Crew, 26, unleashed a ferocious attack, strangling Andrea, 31, to death with the very tie he had worn to his court appearance.
The trouble started as soon as the couple, from Fairfax County, Virginia, left the building, the Mirror reports.
As they drove home together, they started to argue, and Colombia-born Andrea threatened to call the police and report him again. Her husband — an ex-Marine who’d served time in Afghanistan — was angry and when they stopped outside a local bank the row turned violent.
Crew, who has just been sentenced to life in prison for the August 2013 attack, pulled Andrea into the back seat of the couple’s Jeep and, in a rage, he throttled her.
First he used his bare hands to render her unconscious and when he felt still had a pulse he stuffed his suit jacket into her mouth and wrapped the tie he’d worn to court around her neck and pulled it tight.
He dumped her body in a nearby forest and later returned to get it under the cover of darkness, stuffing it into a bag weighted down with rocks before rolling it into a river.
The next day, he went to the police and reported Andrea missing.
Crew told them on the way home from court, they’d argued and she’d talked about taking their girls away from him. He said she’d walked off to think about things and hadn’t come back.
Days later, a local man fishing on the river spotted a body and it was identified as Andrea. Crew was quickly arrested and once he was questioned, his story started to unravel. He admitted he’d killed his wife because he didn’t want to deal with another call to the police.
A month before killing his wife, Crew had been charged for pouring motor oil over her head, an resulting in the fatal court appearance.
Later, in an interview with police, Caleb Crew confessed to killing his wife in startling detail, telling them: “I took the phone. I grabbed her out of her chair.
“I grabbed her throat and strangled her in the back seat,” he said. “First thing I said was ‘Goodbye’. I knew once I went down that path I couldn’t go back. She said, ‘Please Caleb’, I started crying but I couldn’t stop.
When police asked him why he’d used his tie after strangling her, he replied simply, “To finish the job.”
When the case reached a Virginia court in October 2014, he pleaded guilty to murder on the first day of the trial.
He didn’t have much choice. The evidence was stacked against him. Rocks were found in Crew’s home that matched the ones found in the backpack that weighed Andrea down. The tie found around her neck also matched the one seen around her husband’s neck as he left court, captured on CCTV footage.
“Evil visited Andrea Crew in the form of her husband,” prosecutor’s said. “Evil that manifested itself in a man that was able to look his wife in the eye and then choke the life out of her body.”
Last month, Crew, now 27, was sentenced to life in jail.
Andrea’s sister, Jeimmy Arias Pineda, said her sister was religious and always aimed to be a good role model for her children. The children, now aged two and six, are living with her relatives in Colombia.