On deathbed, woman admits killing spouse

No doubt about it: Geraldine Kelley was one tough woman, owners of the Victoria Motel said.

Small and dark-haired, "Geri" sported tattoos, kept attack dogs as pets and sometimes draped a 6-foot boa constrictor around her neck during the seven years she managed their 36-room motel in Ventura, Calif., Valerie and Don Kiunke recalled.

But cold-blooded enough to shoot her husband in the head, stuff his body into a freezer for 13 years and wait until she's on her deathbed to tell her secret?

"When we got the word, we were in shock," said Valerie Kiunke, standing next to her husband in the motel's parking lot Friday. "We just looked at each other. It's just devastating."

The story of Geri and John Kelley's tumultuous marriage is unfolding in investigations on both coasts after the woman's death Nov. 12.

At a Friday news conference, Massachusetts authorities confirmed that remains found in a storage locker in Middlesex County were those of John Kelley.

Two grown children

The couple's two grown children had told Massachusetts state police earlier in the week where to find the freezer containing their father's remains, said Emily LaGrassa, a spokeswoman for the Middlesex County district attorney's office.

As she lay dying of cancer, the 54-year-old mother confessed to her daughter, now 36, that she had killed their father in California several years ago, LaGrassa said. Kelley claimed her husband had abused her for years, the daughter said.

Kelley previously had told her children and others that John Kelley died in Las Vegas after stepping in front of a car while he was drunk.

Estranged from their parents since their teens, the children never had questioned the tale, according to a statement issued by the their attorney.

"Until the recent disclosure by their mother, they accepted and believed their mother's story as true," according to the statement. "Today they are facing the grim reality of what has actually happened."

John Kelley also was estranged from other members of his family, and that likely was why no one asked questions when he went missing in the early 1990s, Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley said.

"It does not appear that anyone was aware of his disappearance," Coakley said.

Questions on burial

Geri Kelley complained when her daughter pestered her about where he was buried, according to a woman who worked for Kelley as a maid at the motel.

" 'I don't know why they're all concerned, because John never cared, he never loved them,' " Marilynn Contreras quoted Kelley as saying.

"I had no reason to doubt the fact that she was so bitter about her husband, she didn't want her children to know where he is," Contreras said, recalling the 1997 conversation.

Based on an autopsy, authorities think Geraldine shot her husband in the back of the head in 1991 or 1992 and hid his body in a freezer. The freezer remained in a Ventura storage facility until 1998, when Kelley moved back to her childhood home of Somerville, Mass., shipping her husband's remains with her.

The remains stayed in a Massachusetts storage facility until Thursday, when medical examiners used a physical description and several tattoos to tentatively identify John Kelley, authorities said.

John and Geri met in a tough neighborhood in Somerville, where they grew up, said Thomas McCann of Dorchester, Mass., who said he was a close friend of John's.

McCann said John Kelley was a gifted auto mechanic and a nice guy when he wasn't drinking. He ran into trouble with the law in the 1980s over a fight in which one of John's relatives died, McCann said.

That was when John and Geri moved to California, he said. McCann, 57, a firefighter, said he never heard from his friend again.

"I never saw violence between them, just a lot of arguments," McCann said. "She was tough. She wouldn't back down from nothing."

District attorney spokeswoman LaGrassa said she didn't know anything about John Kelley's previous legal troubles and couldn't comment on them.

In California, the couple drifted from one job to another, usually managing apartments. By late 1991, according to Valerie Kiunke, they had been hired as in-house managers of the Victoria Motel.

Sometime in early 1992, Geri Kelley informed the Kiunkes that John had been killed by a motorist. She seemed upset, but went on managing the building by herself for six years, they said.