Teacher gets life in prison for killing

Before she was sentenced, Nancy Seaman read a statement in which she called the jury’s guilty verdict “a miscarriage of justice” and a “tragic mistake.” She said she would appeal.

“I did not intend or plan to kill my husband,” Seaman said.

Prosecutors said Seaman argued with her husband, Robert, last Mother’s Day, went to Home Depot to buy a hatchet, returned to their Farmington Hills home and killed him with it. Police found Robert Seaman’s body in his wife’s sport utility vehicle a few days later.

Nancy Seaman claimed that she bought the hatchet for yard work and that the couple got into an argument the next morning in which her husband of 31 years menaced her with a steak knife. She said she grabbed the nearest thing to defend herself.

“I fought like my life depended on it because it did,” Seaman said Monday. “If I didn’t kill him, he would have killed me. That’s how it usually ends for abused women.”

Oakland County Circuit Court Judge John McDonald called the case “the most troubling, tragic and sad” he had seen in his 12 years on the bench.

He refuted Seaman’s accusations that the jury was inattentive and had concluded she was guilty before the trial even started.;

“I don’t doubt for a minute that you were physically and emotionally abused. I don’t think the jury doubted it,” McDonald said.

But he said the jurors did not believe the abuse was so severe that it excused killing her husband.He encouraged her to work for the cause of encouraging battered woman to leave their abusers “before it’s too late.”

“I feel pity for you, and I feel pity for your family,” the judge said.

Prosecutors said Seaman took elaborate steps to cover up her crime, wrapping the body in a tarp and painting the walls and bleaching the floor of the garage where the killing took place. She also shoplifted another hatchet and returned it to Home Depot with her original receipt.