James W. Schumacher, Tired of Verbal Abuse, Kills Wife with Hatchet

​After 46 years of marriage, Bellevue's James W. Schumacher, 71, apparently reached a breaking point last week - murdering his longtime wife with a hatchet Wednesday morning while she was in bed, locking the door to the room, waiting two days, then walking into Bellevue police headquarters Friday afternoon and turning himself in for committing the grisly crime. Schumacher told authorities he was tired of his wife's verbal abuse.

Soon after the confession, police found Jean Schumacher, also 71, dead in the couple's home, located in the 100 block of 159th Avenue Southeast in the Lake Hills neighborhood of Bellevue. Police say James Schumacher - who worked 17 years at Boeing and 17 years at U.S. Steel - struck his wife repeatedly in the head with a hatchet Wednesday morning, though it wasn't immediately clear whether she was asleep at the time of the attack.

The Schumachers had been married for going on five decades, but local media outlets paint a (varying) picture of long-term abuse.

In 2010 Jean Schumacher, who suffered from severe arthritis, filed for and received a protection order against her husband. The protection order was dropped last May, at Jean Schumacher's request, about the time Jim Schumacher moved back in to the couple's home after an eight-month estrangement. These facts make every account of the story.

The rest we're left to piece together.

A neighbor tells The Times the couple had relationship problems for decades and that Jean Schumacher told him about a year ago, "If I end up dead, he did it." The Times spoke with neighbor Brad Dutson who was quoted as saying:

"She's mentioned that he's hit her and he's thrown her down the stairs."

Dutson also tells The Times that the Schumachers' son told him at some point that his father had a drinking problem and a long history of violence toward his mother.

Q13 Fox cites court documents related to the 2010 protection order. According to those documents, Jean Schumacher feared for her life because her husband had threatened to kill her.

Q13 also talks to Mary Farrell, described as a neighbor and friend of the Schumachers, who's quoted as saying:

"He wasn`t very nice to her a lot of the times. I talked to her. She told me a few things that made their marriage very difficult."

And ...

"He knocked her down a few times. ... The last he pushed her and she fell with her arthritis. She ended up in the hospital for a few days."

Strangely, KOMO News quotes presumably the same Mary Farrell, writing:

Neighbor Mary Farrell said the couple had been living apart for the past six to eight months, and the husband only recently moved back to the home.

She said the couple had a troubled marriage, but nothing that would have suggested this kind of violence.

"I just can't believe he killed her, though," Farrell said. "I just didn't think he was that violent."

Turns out he was.

On Saturday a King County judge found probable cause to hold James Schumacher in lieu of $1 million bail for investigation of first-degree homicide. 

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