Husband confesses to killing wife in '95

HOUSTON, Texas (The Houston Chronicle) -- Detectives say nobody missed Ruth Emily Weibel until her sickly 70-year-old husband thought he was facing death and decided to confess to her 1995 slaying.

Now, the unidentified remains found five years ago in a burlap sack have a name, and the Harris County Sheriff's Department "cold case squad" has made another arrest for an all but forgotten killing.

Andrew Weibel was indicted Monday on a charge of murder in the death of his 52-year-old wife, who was never reported missing. He remains in jail, on $20,000 bond.

Weibel, a native of Hungary who came to the United States years ago to escape communism, has serious health problems, and they were getting no better after Adult Protective Services placed him in a nursing home in the Heights, said Detective Roger Wedgeworth.

Suffering from cancer and other ailments, he told a social worker on June 2 that he had strangled and smothered his wife of 21 years after they argued over money, Wedgeworth said. That social worker called authorities and the case landed on the desks of Wedgeworth and his partner, Harry Fikaris, who are assigned to the special squad that takes a fresh look at old unsolved murders.

Weibel, also known as John Dollenstein, repeated his story to them.

"His conscience got the best of him, and his health has been deteriorating for a long time," said Wedgeworth. "He told us that he just lost it and that he strangled her and smothered her and put her in the bag and dumped the body about a block from his house.

"She apparently wasn't missed at all."

The bag was discovered by two people scouting for aluminum cans on July 2, 1995, in the 7200 block of Rimwood. It was about 250 yards off the road near a bayou, and all that was left was essentially skeletal remains that couldn't be identified.

The Harris County Medical Examiner's Office determined the cause of death to be strangulation, and a forensic anthropologist could tell authorities only that the remains appeared to be those of a white female between the ages of 35 and 45.

Because of the summer heat and the rate of decomposition, experts could only guess that the woman had been killed a month or more before the remains were found.

That was all deputies knew until Andrew Weibel started talking, because none of his wife's relatives had reported her missing.

"It was just one of those cases that sat there forever because no one knew who she was," Wedgeworth said.

Norman Dodge, the victim's brother, still lives in Pasadena. He said Monday he had not talked to his sister since 1990 or 1991 because that is about the time she told him she wanted no further contact with her family.

"He (Andrew Weibel) brainwashed her," Dodge said. "He wouldn't let her see our mother when she was in the nursing home. She didn't come to a 50th anniversary party for our folks because she was too badly beaten up and she didn't come to our mother's funeral.

"I figured if she was in any kind of trouble she would call. That's what I told her to do ... I'd been kind of wondering what happened to her and when (the detectives) came to see me, I halfway expected that he had killed her."

Dodge said he is glad he finally knows what happened to his sister, who was the youngest of four children.

"I always thought something like this had happened, but you don't go around accusing anybody when you don't know for sure," Dodge said.

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