Nail stuck in wife's head not an accident

• Source: Global Times
• [08:30 November 20 2009]
• Comments

By An Baijie

In a bizarre murder attempt to collect insurance money, a man in Jiangsu Province confessed to drugging his wife and hammering a 10-centimeter nail into her head to make her death look like an accident.

The newlywed wife, Zhang Ling, survived the murder attempt after her husband sent her to a Xuzhou hospital on June 14. The husband claimed that she slipped on a watermelon peel and struck her head on a nail in an improvised mosquito incense holder, according to the Yangtze Evening Post.

Police said the husband, 24, identified only by the pseudonym "Wang Chun," was trying to repeat a successful insurance fraud in 2007, when he made the murder of his younger brother-in-law look like a household accident with an electric cooker.

Hospital  urgeon Sun Jianxin, who pulled out the nail, noted that there were two holes in the woman's skull, both the same width but different in depth.

The doctor's discovery alerted Zhang's parents, who called the local police.

The police believed that it was not an accident but the woman couldn't tell them what happened. Although doctors saved her life, the nail had severely damaged her brain and she had lost the power of speech.

In mid-July, police detained the husband after a local insurance company called the victim's family, saying that the couple had purchased an insurance policy in April. In case of accidental death, the husband was entitled to collect as much as 300,000 yuan ($43,927) in compensation.