Wife Recalls Abuse By `Lobster Boy' Before His Killing -- She's Accused Of Buying Carnival Performer's Death

TAMPA, Fla. - To the gawkers in the carnival sideshow tent, he was Lobster Boy, the man with pincer-like hands and stubs for legs.

To Mary Stiles, accused of paying a teenage neighbor $1,500 to kill him, he was the drunken husband who made a habit of smacking her face, head-butting her mouth and sexually abusing her with a blackjack.

Through tears, she testified Friday that years of abuse led her to one conclusion: "Something had to be done."

That something happened when a neighbor shot 55-year-old Grady Stiles in the back of the head as he sat in his mobile home, watching television in his underwear.

Prosecutors say Mary Stiles had ways to stop her husband's abuse short of killing him. Her lawyer says she suffered "spousal-abuse syndrome" and only resorted to violence because she feared for her life.

If convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy, she could be sentenced to life in prison. Her son, Harry Glenn Newman III, 19, will be tried later on the same charges. He plans to use a similar defense. The trigger man, Christopher Wyant, 18, was convicted of second-degree murder and conspiracy and sentenced to 27 years in prison.

In a full day on the stand, Mary Stiles testified that she remembered little about the killing.

Her lawyer says post-traumatic stress syndrome wiped the details from her mind.

She does remember the last straw, which came over Thanksgiving weekend 1992, when her husband woke her with his familiar whiskey breath, holding a butcher knife at her throat.

"`One of these days I'm going to kill you and your family, but the time isn't right,"' she quoted him as saying. "Then he dropped the knife and crawled away."

"I didn't know if I was going to wake up the next morning - if my family would be there," she said. "Something had to be done."

Two days later, Lobster Boy was dead.

"I loved my husband - I still do," she said. "And to think I would do something like this - I couldn't stand the thought of it. It's so terrible, I don't ever want to think about it now. I just want to forget it. Forget it."

Sobbing, Mary Stiles testified that she married Grady Stiles in 1958 and joined him on the sideshow circuit with acts such as the gorilla lady, the human pincushion and the man with the iron tongue.

He suffered from ectrodactyly, a rare genetic condition that fuses the fingers and toes.

Whiskey changed him from a caring family man to a battering brute, she said. After the marriage ended in 1973, she wed Harry Glenn Newman, known as the "World's Smallest Man." She divorced him in 1987 and re-married Stiles in 1988 after he assured her he had stopped drinking.

"Two weeks later," she said, "He was back to the same old Grady."

She said the beatings intensified in the last two years of his life, when he sexually abused her with a blackjack and tried to smother her with a pillow when she suggested a divorce.

Asked why she didn't leave him, she said she feared for the safety of her children - two of whom were born with the lobster-claw deformity.

"Where would we go?" Mary Stiles asked. "I can't hide the whole family. They stand out."