9.
SHYNGYS BEKENOV & NAZERKE BEKZHANOVA
For a lot of people, it’s important that their family likes the person they choose
to date or marry.
This was certainly the case in 2018 for 21-year-old Nazerke Bekzhanova, a junior doctor who rejected
a marriage proposal from a 26-year-old teacher named Shyngys Bekenov.
Bekzhanova had recently graduated from medical school in Kazakhstan when Bekenov popped the
question.
She said “no” because her family didn’t approve of him.
Bekenov was outraged.
He attacked Bekzhanova with a knife while they sat in his car and brutally decapitated
her.
Then, he tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the abdomen.
He left a suicide note asking that the couple be buried together.
But Bekenov was found clinging to life, and was rushed to the hospital in “grave but
stable” condition.
Meanwhile, Bekzhanova’s body was found in the car.
The young woman had just started her first job as a doctor and she had her whole life
ahead of her when it was abruptly snuffed out.
People who knew the couple were shocked that Bekenov would go to such extremes.
He really didn’t seem capable of doing something like this.
At the time the news of the tragedy broke, he faced a murder charge and a sentence of
up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
8.
AMENEH BAHRAMI
Ameneh Bahrami’s life was forever changed in 2004, when a man named Majid Movahedi attacked
her with acid after she had repeatedly rejected his numerous requests for her hand in marriage.
The Iranian woman screamed in anguish on the street as a crowd gathered around, unsure
of how to help her.
She lost her eyesight and suffered from disfiguring burns to much of her face and body.
Meanwhile, Movahedi bragged to those around him about what he had just done.
A court ruled four years later that Bahrami could watch as a doctor stood over the man
and poured several drops of acid in his eye.
This eye-for-an-eye punishment, known as “qisas,” is an option in traditional Islamic courts
when the victim’s family fails to reach an agreement with the perpetrator.
Although Bahrami was blinded in both eyes, the ruling only allowed for Movahedi to be
blinded in one eye.
This is because women are seen as being worth only half as much as men under the ruling
legal system.
The survivor told the media that she was happy with the sentence, and that she wasn’t resorting
to the punishment out of revenge, but to fight against the type of suffering she endured.
The day finally came to carry out the punishment in 2011.
Officials were counting down the seconds until they would render Movahedi unconscious and
pour the acid in his eye.
Bahrami had a sudden change of heart and stopped them from proceeding at the last moment.
She told The Guardian that Movahedi fell at her feet in gratitude.
Up until that point, he had expressed no remorse for what he’d done.
She told him to go away and never speak her name again.
Bahrami later wondered whether she made the right decision as acid attacks continued throughout
Iran.
She thinks that if she had gone along with the punishment, maybe it would have set an
example to discourage others from committing the same crime.
To add insult to injury, Movahedi was released from prison without compensating Bahrami’s
family as the court had ordered him to do.
7.
JASON EATON & WENDY SABATINI
One day in 2016, 43-year-old Jason Eaton entered the Greensburg Police Department in Indiana
and confessed to killing his girlfriend, Wendy Sabatini.
He told officers that had approached her in her bedroom with an engagement ring.
She supposedly turned down the proposal before he could even ask, so he grabbed a gun from
a nightstand and shot her in the head from behind.
Eaton then went to the home of another woman, who accompanied him to the police station.
He reportedly told her that he’d “messed up” and that he thought he had killed his
girlfriend.
Police went to Sabatini’s home and were let inside by her son, who thought his mother
was at work.
They found her body in her room with a gunshot wound to the head.
Eaton pled guilty to murder and is currently serving a 45-year sentence.
If he lives long enough to see freedom, he’ll do two years of probation.
6.
LEONA LYNDA TAYLOR & WILLIAM WALTER FRANKO
It’s pretty common for a couple to exchange “naughty” photos these days.
Consequently, there’s a growing problem of scorned exes publicizing and circulating
nude images of their former lover in a bid for revenge.
One of the earliest “revenge porn” cases to make its way to the courts happened in
Hawaii.
In 2003 and 2004, a woman named Leona Lynda Taylor took revealing pictures of herself
at the suggestion of her therapist as a way to help her heal from past trauma.
They made their way into the hands of a man she was dating named William Walter Franko.
Taylor eventually lost interest in Franko.
At one point, he proposed to her, and she rejected him.
She ended her relationship with him in late 2004 and moved on with her life.
A year later, she married someone else.
It wasn’t until late 2007 that Taylor found out Franko had put her intimate photos online
and sent them to one of her coworkers.
He also posted the woman’s personal information, as well as how to contact her.
Taylor searched the internet and found her pictures and information on several other
websites.
She was understandably humiliated and sought therapy as random people began to contact
her looking for sex.
Law enforcement failed to help, saying that there wasn’t much they could do without
more information about the people contacting Taylor.
So she hired an attorney and sued Franko in civil court for damages relating to the ordeal,
which had upended her life.
At the time, Hawaii had no laws banning revenge porn specifically.
But Tayor’s lawyer presented a compelling enough case for the court to rule in her favor,
to the tune of $425,000.
And while it sounds like a lot of money, it doesn’t fully make up for the level of embarrassment
she had endured, and was likely to face in the future.
5.
TURNING THE TABLES
A 28-year-old man believed to be from Great Britain stirred up some controversy on Reddit
last year when he took to the forum about a marriage proposal gone wrong.
He had asked his girlfriend of four years to marry him, and did everything he could
think of to make it perfect.
She had said that she didn’t want a public proposal, so he made a nice meal at home and
then popped the question.
The man’s girlfriend said that she wanted to marry him eventually, but she rejected
the offer because she wasn’t ready.
He suggested a long engagement, but she still wasn’t comfortable with the idea.
So he told her that when she was ready for that level of commitment, it would be on her
to get on one knee and propose to him with an engagement ring in hand.
The girlfriend disagreed and accused the man of “punishing” her for not being ready
for marriage.
He asked fellow Redditors for their opinions.
Some commenters agreed that the girlfriend should be the one to propose next, while others
said that the couple should probably just break up because the sting of the woman’s
rejection might be too hard to work past.
The man admitted that the rejected proposal, and how to handle the matter going forward,
were putting a strain on the relationship.
He wrote that he wasn’t trying to punish her, but that he had laid his cards on the
table.
She knew where he stood, so it was on her to make the next move.
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4.
CHRISTOPHER TUCKER & TARA SERINO
There was something that Fred Serino didn’t like about his 19-year-old daughter Tara’s
friend, 34-year-old Christopher Tucker.
But he couldn’t stop her from going to the man’s home in Berks County, Pennsylvania
one night in 2017.
Tara never came home.
Several days later, Christopher’s father, John Tucker showed up at Fred Serino’s house
with some of the teen’s belongings.
He told Serino that police had pulled Christopher over in Illinois.
They ended up taking him for a mental health evaluation because he wasn’t making much
sense, and they found some of Tara’s things in the vehicle.
Tara wasn’t with Christopher when he got arrested.
Her father filed a missing persons report, and police interviewed Christopher.
He reportedly told them that he had asked Tara to marry him, but she said no, that she
was sleeping with other men and that he might as well kill her.
He took her suggestion seriously and strangled her to death.
Then, he gouged her eyes out and struck her repeatedly with a hatchet.
After wrapping Tara’s body in a rug, Christopher skipped town.
Thankfully, it looks like he won’t be getting out of prison anytime soon – a jury found
him guilty of first-degree murder last year.
3.
QUTUBUDIN HATIMBHAI SHAHIWALA
When a 26-year-old woman from Yemen turned down his marriage proposal in 2018, a 28-year-old
Indian man named Qutubudin Hatimbai Shahiwala decided to get creative with his revenge.
Knowing that she would soon catch a flight back to Yemen from Mumbai, he called the airport
and told them that she was carrying a bomb in her bag.
The woman was detained upon her arrival at the airport, and was found to be free of contraband.
She told authorities that Shahiwala had threatened to “cause trouble” if she left him and
helped to confirm the WhatsApp number he had used to make the false report.
Shahiwala had met the woman online several months earlier.
He told her he was a wealthy businessman, and she traveled to Mumbai with her father
to meet him.
She soon learned that Shahiwala had lied about his job, and that he actually worked as a
mechanic.
Naturally, she turned down his marriage proposal – after all, nobody enjoys being lied to.
Police arrested Shahiwala at his home and took him into custody, reminding him that
no matter how burned someone feels after rejection, they still have to respect the person’s
right to say “no.”
2.
NIKHIL HANDA
Indian Army Major Nikhil Rai Handa met Shailaja Dwivedi in 2015, when he and her husband were
stationed at the same barracks.
During that time, Shailaja and Handa became friends.
It wasn’t long before the married Major misinterpreted the friendship as a deeper
connection and began stalking Shailaja.
He became obsessed with the woman, placing over 3,000 phone calls to her over a six-month
span.
The desperate admirer continuously tried to persuade Shailaja to leave her husband and
marry him instead.
In the meantime, Shailaja’s husband, Major Amit Dwivedi, became concerned about the nature
of his wife’s interactions with Handa.
He banned her from having any interaction with the deluded stalker.
But the pair went against Dwivedi’s wishes and met up one day at the military hospital,
where Shailaja had a physical therapy appointment.
After spending a few hours walking around together, they sat in Handa’s car.
At some point, he got into an argument with his wife on the phone.
Shailaja remained silent as Handa told his spouse that he was planning to divorce her.
When he hung up, he made one last-ditch effort to convince his love interest to ditch her
husband and be with him.
She refused, and Handa slit her throat and ran her over with his car.
He allegedly showed no remorse when police arrested him for Shailaja’s murder.
Sadly, it’s a classic case of “if I can’t have you, nobody can.”
1.
MARIA SADAQAT
Maria Sadaqat was a young teacher at a school in Islamabad, Pakistan.
She caught the eye of the school’s owner’s son, who asked her to marry him in 2016.
But Maria wasn’t interested, and she turned down the offer.
Sadly, she paid for it with her life.
Shortly after the rejection, a group of men showed up at the woman’s home and brutally
beat her.
They poured gasoline on her and set her on fire, and then just left her outside to die.
Maria suffered burns to 85 percent of her body and ended up dying from her injuries.
The man’s father and school owner was among the group that viciously murdered her, according
to her father.
Her aunt told the BBC that the man who wanted to marry her niece already had a wife and
child.
He wanted her to run the school that his father owns.
It’s reportedly common in Pakistan for men to kill women for rejecting a marriage proposal.
In the aftermath of Maria’s death, a village elder allegedly told her father that his honor
was at stake.
Others urged him to stay quiet about the matter and handle it outside court.
Activists are fighting to draw more attention to these so-called “honor killings,” which
go largely unreported.
These brutal slayings are often worked out under Islamic laws that were introduced during
the 1980s, which allow the victim’s family to pardon the murderer in exchange for money
or other considerations.
The fight for women’s rights in Pakistan continues as religious groups argue that campaigning
for equality promotes obscenity.
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