Eric Duane Newman and Tamara Tucker.
Practically everything about a cruise ship is geared towards bringing out the chimp in the dindu: the cramped living quarters, the fact that you’re surrounded on all sides by water (the most racist of the elements)…
This was inevitable.
A Kansas man has pleaded guilty to killing his girlfriend by strangling her then pushing her over a balcony on a cruise ship off the coast of Florida last year.
Eric Duane Newman, 55, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Tuesday in the January 2018 death of his longtime girlfriend Tamara Tucker.
Newman and his 50-year-old girlfriend were on a Carnival cruise from Jacksonville, Florida, to the Bahamas at the time.
The couple were staying in a cabin on the 13th deck.
Newman admitted during his plea hearing in federal court in Kansas that the couple started arguing in their cabin just before midnight on January 18.
He said he strangled Tucker then pushed her over the cabin room balcony railing to the 11th deck.
Tucker died from blunt force trauma caused by the fall.
At the time, the cruise ship was about 30 nautical miles from New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
…
Tucker was a full-time faculty member in the social work department at Park University in Parkville, Missouri, from 2012 to 2017.
She had been an adjunct instructor before that since 2007.
Newman is due to be sentenced on March 18, 2020.
To give him a bit of credit, waiting to kill a woman on a cruise ship is a smart move.
People get away with that pretty regularly, one has to assume. Because surely, most of these people who “fell off when drunk” were actually strangled and thrown overboard.