Police are trying to figure out how the body of a dead woman ended up in the freezer of her Springfield, Tenn., home and why her husband committed suicide on the side of the road on Friday, the Tennessean reported.
Joseph Parker, 45, called 911 and told operators he had killed his wife, 44-year-old Samantha Parker. This led to a police chase 13 hours later that ended with Joseph Parker taking his own life in Kentucky.
Before he killed himself, Samantha Parker's partially dismembered body was found stuffed inside a freezer in the garage. Police made the discovery when they arrived at the house at 2:30 a.m. in the morning.
Joseph Parker was nowhere to be found when police arrived. When he called 911, he admitted to shooting his wife in the head two days earlier on their 12th anniversary.
"I thought I had killed her, and I put her in the freezer out in the garage," Joseph Parker said on the 911 tape. "Well, I checked on her tonight and she's not dead."
He asked paramedics to come revive his wife, whom he said he still loved. He gave her some water at about 1:30 a.m. when he realized he hadn't killed her yet.
He would not say what happened before the shooting.
Samantha Parker was pronounced dead at the scene, and Russel Gupton, the Robertson County Emergency Medical Services assistant director, seemed to suggest that Joseph Parker was lying or imagining things.
"There was no possibility of her being alive at all," he said.
Metro Police said that Parker had also said he would drive through a car dealership and kill several people, according to WKRN.
