A fishy story called Wanda

Bottoms up!

Alanna Davis, an investigative reporter for the Free Beacon, has been looking into the death of Gary Lenius, the supposed idiot who ingested aquarium cleaner in reliance on Trump’s advocating it as a Chinese Flu preventative. Her first report, published last week, made it clear that (a) Lenius was a highly intelligent retired engineer whose friends insist would never, ever do such a dumb thing, and (b) his wife Wanda Lenius is a crazed woman with a history of domestic violence.

"Wanda would constantly berate Gary in public," said a source who asked that all identifying information be withheld. "Everyone was embarrassed for him, but he outwardly did not seem to care much."

"In our opinion, their marriage was seen outwardly to be as one-sided as a marriage possibly could be: Gary worshiped Wanda," this person said, adding that his wife "would routinely call him a ‘doofus'" and humiliate him in public.

Lenius's friend recalled Wanda Lenius destroying her husband's aircraft model collection after he returned home late for a meal.

"These planes take many dozens and sometimes hundreds of hours to complete," said the friend. "Gary did not get angry, he simply junked the planes that were not repairable and fixed the rest. That is the Gary I knew, he would never get upset, he just accepted what happened and carried on."

In another recent instance, the same friend said Wanda Lenius broke her husband's laptop screen, allegedly because she was angry he had updated the Windows software on her computer.

"Gary just ordered up a new LCD screen from Dell and took it apart and replaced the screen himself," said the friend. "He knew nothing about repairing laptops, but he was a smart guy, he learned how."

The couple met while working at John Deere in Waterloo in 2000, according to Wanda Lenius. Gary Lenius was a longtime senior engineer at the company and Wanda Halverson had recently started as a temp worker. Both were divorced. They married by the end of the year, and Wanda Lenius was hired full time in the company's supply management division.

Seven months after their wedding, the Waterloo Police Department responded to a domestic incident at their home. The couple had gotten into an argument "concerning counseling and a possible divorce" during which Wanda allegedly hit her husband in the chest and swung a mounted birdhouse at him, according to a court affidavit from the responding officer, William Sauerbrei.

The state attorney's office charged Wanda Lenius with misdemeanor domestic abuse assault. But the couple reconciled and Gary Lenius testified in support of his wife at the trial, saying he was not hurt or put in fear of injury. The judge found Wanda not guilty.

In the verdict, Judge Nathan Callahan wrote that the "911 tape certainly contains sufficient evidence to establish probable cause for [Wanda Lenius's] arrest, and the observations of the officers were consistent with a finding of probable cause for arrest of the Defendant." But due to Gary Lenius's trial testimony, the judge said he was unable to find "proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Defendant either placed her husband in fear, injured him, or that she had the intent to do so."

In 2005, after working full time at John Deere for four years, Wanda Lenius went on long-term disability after developing debilitating mental and physical health problems from gender and age discrimination she faced at the company, according to court records in a 2012 lawsuit she filed against John Deere.

Wanda Lenius told the court that she faced "gender-based harassment" and age discrimination, including getting passed over for promotions because she was a woman in her 40s. The litigation was similar to a lawsuit she had filed in 1997 against her former employer, the Cedar Valley Medical Clinic, although in that case, she said the company discriminated against her because she was viewed as a "young, single girl." That case was dismissed in 1999.

Dr. James Harding, Wanda's psychologist at the Black Hawk-Grundy Mental Health Center in Waterloo, told the court in the John Deere lawsuit that Wanda had post-traumatic stress disorder and anger issues due to her experience at the company.

"In the process of externalizing her stress, she remains very angry and full of adrenaline much of the time which has been very hard on her health," he said in a July 31, 2013, letter. "Anything related to John Deere such as signs, colors, even former friends there can be powerful triggers to flashbacks, causing rage and a desire to attack back."

Our mainstream media dropped the story once it was through using it as a tool to attack Trump, but reporter Davis wasn’t the only one interested in learning how, exactly, the aquarium cleaner ended up in Lenius’s drink. Yesterday she reported that the police are now poking around too:

The Mesa City Police Department's homicide division is investigating the death of Gary Lenius, the Arizona man whose wife served him soda mixed with fish tank cleaner in what she claimed was a bid to fend off the coronavirus. A detective handling the case confirmed the investigation to the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday after requesting a recording of the Free Beacon's interviews with Lenius's wife, Wanda.

Curiouser and curiouser.