Star Wars collectors are devoted, but one fan in England may have taken that devotion too far.
Thirty-year-old d Rickie La-Touche plead guilty to choking his wife, Pornpilai Srisroy, 28, to death after she pummeled his collection of Star Wars memorabilia, which he’d been building since he was a boy and was worth in the “thousands of pounds.”
La-Touche met his Thailand-born wife in a Bangkok bar 10 years ago, but since then, he claimed, that she was threatening to return home … without him. In a police interview, La-Touche said, “”My wife is from Thailand and she keeps threatening to leave. We argued and she said she was going to make my life hell. … She’s put me through it before. I couldn’t let that happen again. I then just remember getting up from on top of her. I think I’ve choked her.”
La-Touche plead guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to a minimum of 12 years in prison.
My wife said she had it coming. Seriously.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (the mid to late 80s), I collected comics. At one point I had all of the original single issues of the Star Wars comics.
One day, my mom decided to “try something new” with the kids she taught, to get them interested in reading, and she took a handful of my comics to school — without my knowledge or permission.
I didn’t notice until a few weeks later (she’d actually had to navigate my train wreck of a room to get to the boxes of comics), and I asked her if by chance she’d seen them, thinking that maybe I’d left them out somewhere.
She told me what had happened, that she’d taken them to school and that unfortunately, her students had mangled them. She initially dismissed the look of horror and dismay on my face, saying that it was no big deal, she’d just buy #1, #2, and #3 for me again.
I calmly walked into my room, picked up a recent copy of the Comics Price Guide, and pointed out to her that the combined price for her to replace those 3 issues was between $200-225, $130-140 of which was #1 alone.
I told her that I had a lot of comics in that collection that ranged from $20-$100 each. Then I went back into my room and pulled out just one of my boxes of baseball cards, and told her that the entire box of 60s and 70s cards was probably at least what my not-quite crappy college kid’s car was worth, and that she should avoid thinking about using them to entertain any of my cousins, just in case that ever crossed her mind next time they came over with their bikes to ride on the trails in the woods behind the house.
She promised never ever to take anything from my room ever again. She never bought me those replacement comics, though, but she made up for it later.
My brother wouldn’t have done that, since he also collected comics, but I feel safe in saying that if any of my cousins had done that, there could have been bloody lips, broken noses, and possibly busted fingers, and I would have just said that they’d been kicked by one of the horses 🙂