Omaima Nelson

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Omima Ari left Egypt looking for a better life.

She was on her own in America.

And it wasn't long before she met and married a man 20 years her senior, Bill Nelson.

He's kind of a flamboyant, large belt buckles kind of guy.

It was a whirlwind romance.

Within four weeks, they were very serious.

And just as quickly, their month-long marriage ended in a horrific death.

There were body parts.

The investigation would reveal a crime of unspeakable violence.

It ranks as the most gruesome crime scene that I've ever encountered.

You don't hear reports of cannibalism every day.

And lead to even more disturbing claims about Omima's grip on reality.

Ancient Egyptians either talk with her or act through her.

Something inside me told me that I have to do it-like demons.

Costa Mesa, California, December 1st, 1991.

It was a quiet Sunday morning in this modest Orange County suburb just south of Los Angeles.

Costa Mesa is right next to Newport Beach, which is like what people consider African Orange County.

It's a maniac bedroom community.

And at around 9 that morning, Jose Esquivel was in his bedroom, sleeping late when something woke him.

Just knocking on the door, knocking on the door, frantically.

Jose didn't answer, however.

He looked out the window, saw a red Corvette in the driveway.

It wasn't familiar to him, so he went back to sleep.

And after several minutes of frantic knocking, the woman at his door gave up.

But four hours later, she returned.

She comes back at 1-1.30 and catches him with the front door open.

And when she walked in his front door, Jose realized that he did know her.

A beautiful 23-year-old named Omaima Nelson.

Jose had dated her briefly more than a year earlier.

Him and his roommates, they'd hung out and partied.

This time, she wasn't there to party, however.

She had some injuries.

She was visibly upset, had been crying.

She started to tell him a story that made chills go up his spine.

Omima told Jose that her husband, 56-year-old Bill Nelson, had attacked her.

Her story was Nelson had tied her up and had raped raped her.

Omaima said that she had eventually managed to escape, but that wasn't all she told Jose.

She says, I need some help.

I need some help.

What do you need help with?

I just killed my husband.

But the most chilling part of Omima's story was yet to come.

A gruesome twist that would shock the entire community and raise disturbing questions about Omima.

Omaima's story began 23 years earlier and almost 8,000 miles away.

She was born in the south of Egypt near the Sudanese border.

Growing up in a poor farming village, life was hard, and Omima's life was even harder than most.

The family situation is chaotic.

Her father was

known as a violent man, had a very bad temper.

Her parents divorced.

Once her parents split, Omaima's mother took her to Cairo, to an area called the City of the Dead, a teeming slum where half a million people scraped by amid the city's vast cemeteries.

The City of the Dead is homes surrounded by graves.

That was not an easy existence for her.

Omaima longed for a better life, and in 1986, the beautiful 18-year-old met someone who could help her find it.

She meets an American oil worker in Egypt, and they've been involved to the point where the family intervenes.

And when her family insisted they get married, Omaima agreed.

She was no longer a virgin, and she felt that no Muslim man would accept her.

Besides, marrying an American offered her a way out of Cairo's crowded slums.

She saw him as her ticket to freedom.

She married him.

She moved to the United States.

He took her to Texas when his job ended in Egypt.

But soon after their arrival in Texas, the marriage ended in divorce.

And Omaima, still in her teens, was a stranger in a strange land.

She was a girl without very good English who was on her own in America.

This Egyptian girl in America was completely overwhelmed.

But her exotic beauty did offer her a way to get by.

She was kind of exotic looking, dark-skinned, petite, and what you'd consider very attractive.

Her way of survival turned out to be meeting men in bars.

For the next few years, Omima drifted from one brief relationship to the next, eventually ending up in Orange County, California.

Young girls came out here all the time searching fame and payment fortune.

It would be an attractive place for anybody to move to.

You can just see people truly living the dream.

Of course, living the dream took something Omima had never had.

Money.

She didn't really have any job skills.

Cleaning houses basically was what she was doing.

She worked as a nanny sometimes.

And she still used her beauty to get by.

She occasionally found work as a model.

But then, while having a drink at a local bar in October of 1991, the part-time model caught the eye of a man who just might give her the stability that she had lacked since arriving in America.

Bill Nelson was a character, the kind people call larger than life.

He had this very vibrant personality,

very big presence.

He's the kind of guy that people would kind of look at when he walked into the room.

Bill was originally from Texas and it showed.

Nelson had a red Corvette.

He had red cowboy boots.

He was kind of a flamboyant, large belt buckle kind of guy.

He talked loud and was gregarious and outgoing and kind of a character.

He

sort of projected the image as being a sort of rich Texan type and claimed to own a lot of stuff, including a cattle ranch.

He was also 56, easily old enough to be Omaima's father.

He had five children, 17 grandchildren.

But it didn't appear to bother Omaima.

She was attracted to older men because she thought older men would be nicer.

Omaima was looking for a relationship with someone who would take care of her.

She needed to feel wanted and loved.

Besides, Bill didn't act old, at least not when he was around her.

They acted like two teenagers in love.

The two of them.

Seemed like they were smitten with each other.

It was a whirlwind romance.

Within four weeks, they were very serious.

In fact, Bill was so serious about Omima that less than a month after they met, he asked her to accompany him on a road trip.

They traveled to Texas and to friends and family of Bill's in Arkansas.

He wanted to introduce Omaima to his family.

Bill wanted to show off his new arm candy.

And along the way, Bill and Omaima made their relationship official.

They got in his red Corvette and they drove straight to Phoenix where they found a Justice of the Peace and got married.

The relationship makes complete sense.

Bill was lonely.

Omima is new to this country.

She too wants a companion.

And not only that, she wants a companion who's going to take care of her.

However, when Bill's children met the newlyweds, the relationship didn't seem sensible at all to them, especially since some of them were older than their new stepmother.

They're very suspicious of Omaima.

She didn't quite fit their image.

If you didn't know about that initial spark that attracted them to each other, you'd think, wow, that's an odd couple.

Still, they were willing to give her a chance, especially after an accident while horseback riding showed there was more to Omima than just a pretty face.

Omima had been bucked from the horse.

Everybody thought she should seek some type of medical attention, but she just asked for a baspirin, some vodka, and went on with it.

And that struck Bill's daughter as being, this gal is one tough cookie.

After a couple weeks visiting Bill's family and friends in Arkansas and Texas, the couple drove home to California.

And by Thanksgiving, Bill and Omima had settled back into his Orange County apartment, where based on what Bill told his daughter, the newlyweds had plenty to be thankful for.

Bill Nelson talked to his stepdaughter on Thanksgiving Day and told her that he had a turkey dinner and

with all the fixings and everything,

everything was great.

There were no problems.

But just three days later, Omima would knock on Jose Esquivel's door and tell him that she had just killed her husband.

Coming up, Omaima makes some startling accusations.

And the police make a blood-curdling discovery.

There were body parts.

Costa Mesa, California, December 1st, 1991.

It was around 2 o'clock in the afternoon when a man named Jose Esquivel found a woman at his front door asking for help.

So Mina Nelson, a woman he'd met a year or so back.

They'd gone out a few times back then, but she'd since married a man named Bill Nelson.

So Jose was understandably surprised when the 23-year-old beauty had shown up at his apartment that afternoon with a shocking story.

That her husband had raped her, had beat her up, had put her through a few days of sexual bondage.

According to what she had told Jose, Omaima had managed to escape, however.

She had gotten an arm loose, hit him with a lamp.

And she had apparently hit him hard.

She killed him.

However, Jose said that the fact that Omaima had just killed her husband wasn't the most shocking part of her visit that afternoon.

According to Jose, it was what she had asked him to do about it, help dispose of his body.

She said that she'd cut up her husband and put him in trash bags and needed some type of a truck or a vehicle to help her get the trash bags and dispose of them.

Jose claimed that she had offered to pay him too.

Says, he's got $75,000 in his safe, two motorcycles in his garage, and I'll give those to you.

Jose had played along.

And if she'd wait at his apartment, he'd come back with the truck and he'd help her out.

Omaima had agreed and Jose had left.

Although instead of going for his truck, he'd rush to the nearest pay phone.

He went and dialed 911 and talked to the police instead.

And when police arrived at Jose's apartment a few minutes later, they found Omaima waiting for him to return.

Omaima was obviously distraught.

She was very upset, as if she'd been crying.

And in addition to being distraught, Omaima's appearance appeared to confirm her account of a sexual assault.

She had visible injuries to her face and her breast and her arms.

Although despite her condition, Omima said she didn't need the police.

She immediately denied everything that had been reported by Mr.

Escobel to the police department.

In fact, she swore that her husband, Bill, was very much alive.

She says, oh, he's in Florida on a business trip.

She told officers that she had no way to get in touch with him.

She really hadn't lived with him very long.

She seems cooperative, but the answers that she's giving to questions are a little bit bizarre.

Unconvinced by Omima's story, the police at the scene took a closer look at the red Corvette she'd driven to Jose's apartment.

When he looks in the passenger seat, he sees this bag.

And when one of the officers looked inside the bag, he was shocked and revolted by what he saw.

He lifts up something right above the bag line.

drops his knife and everything.

It appears to be organs.

They were human organs.

We have a coroner's investigator that responds to the scene.

He said, yeah, you see little black spots on the lung.

I said, yeah, he said, that's carbon.

And that's from smoking.

It was clear that Omima wasn't telling police the truth.

At that point, we had a homicide.

While Omima was transported to the Costa Mesa Police Department for questioning, the investigators dispatched officers to the apartment she shared with Bill.

They knocked at the door to see if anybody was home.

And when no one answered, they forced entry into the apartment by breaking the front window.

Once inside, the officers discovered quite a mess.

The apartment was cluttered.

There was a lot of computer boxes around.

Bill Nelson was involved in reprogramming computers and assembling them from spare parts.

But other than the clutter.

Just going in, you don't see anything.

You would not know anything was wrong at all.

Meanwhile, at police headquarters, the homicide investigators sat down with Omaima.

At least the investigators sat.

The interview with Omaima was three to four hours.

And throughout the entire time, she never really sat down.

Instead, she wandered around the interrogation room, rambling on and on.

She'd talk in third person.

She'd talk about hallucinating.

And most of all, she continued to deny that Bill Nelson was dead.

Did you tell Jose the day that you killed your husband?

No,

my husband, mama.

He wished.

He wished, huh?

No, I did not.

You didn't tell Jose that?

He's an asshole.

He doesn't know what he's talking about.

And the bag of human organs in the car?

Omima blamed that on Bill.

They thought that he killed somebody.

And why would she think that?

According to Omima, her larger-than-life husband was a dangerous man.

He had been recently paroled from the federal system.

There were some indications that he may have worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

He was a pilot and was actually piloting these big DC-3s out of an airport in Laredo, Texas, and going down to Mexico and Columbia.

And on one of his return trips.

He was discovered with a plane full of marijuana.

He ends up doing a federal prison sentence for drug smuggling.

Although according to Omima, while Bill had gone to jail for drug running, she claimed he'd committed far worse crimes.

Omaima claimed that Bill had tied her up and raped her too.

Yeah, and I couldn't breathe.

Although when pressed about how she'd escaped and what happened to Bill, Omima continued to deny what she'd supposedly told Jose.

I didn't know.

I don't believe it, Betty.

Omima was a basket case, apparently unable or unwilling to explain just how she'd ended up at Jose's apartment with a bag full of internal organs.

So with the interrogation at an impasse, the investigators decided to try another approach.

She was sent to the hospital for a sexual assault examination and also to document all these injuries.

She has a lot of lacerations and contusions and bruises on her body.

While Omaima was being questioned, the investigators at her place had eventually found signs that despite their initial appraisal, something had happened in the apartment.

Something horrible.

As you began to look more closely, you would see a little drop of blood on the doorknob.

You'd see a little drop of blood on a wall, maybe some blood blood on a carpet.

And amid the clutter of computer boxes, the investigators found several trash bags just like the one they'd found in the Corvette, including their contents.

Once we started opening the trash bags, it became apparent that there were more body parts.

Also in the bags were a broken lamp and an iron.

Repair of blood on it.

Even more disturbing was what the investigators found in the kitchen.

They found the hands in the frying pan.

They were cooked along apparently with some white turkey meat.

And then in the freezer, the investigators made another gruesome discovery.

There was hot dogs, there was

peas, there was carrots, and in the back was Mr.

Nelson's head.

At least they assumed the severed head belonged to Bill Nelson.

She had fried the head in

a defect fryer, so it was pretty badly burned.

Meanwhile, in the couple's bedroom, the investigators found evidence that at first glance appeared to fit Omaima's claim that she had been tied up and raped.

The bed had two posts.

The two posts were broken.

Although when the investigators stripped off the sheets, they started to wonder, was Omaima the one who had been tied up?

There was blood all over the mattress.

It was completely soaked with blood through and through, as well as the box pranks.

suspecting that it was bill who had been tied up on the bed the investigators took a closer look at the severed remains and what they found appeared to confirm their suspicions a reddish-black ring of bruises around each ankle if you tied it long enough or hard enough you will leave a bruising that's what we had on mr nelson

Coming up, the gruesome evidence leads the investigators to a stomach-churning conclusion.

Are we going to turn turn up another Jeffrey Dahmer?

And Omima makes a disturbing confession.

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On the evening of December 1st, 1991, Costa Mesa, California police had just made a chilling discovery.

Inside the apartment 23-year-old Omaima Nelson shared with her 56-year-old husband, Bill, they found garbage bags full of human remains, a pair of hands floating in a deep fryer, and wrapped up among the Thanksgiving leftovers in the couple's freezer, a severed human head.

These crime scene photos made me want to lose my lunch.

They are some of the most gruesome photos I've ever seen.

It ranks as the most gruesome crime scene that I've ever encountered.

Brought in for questioning, Omima had denied killing Bill.

Instead, she claimed that he had tied her up and raped her.

She was painting a picture of him being a very aggressive individual, that she may have been sexually abused.

So while the forensic team processed the grisly grisly scene at her apartment, the investigators had sent Omaima to the hospital.

Where an emergency room trauma physician and a nurse examined her.

And the results of the rape exam were negative.

No evidence of trauma to her vaginally or anally.

Nor did her injuries indicate a struggle.

At least not with anyone who was alive.

The cuts on her body and her feet, her hands, her legs were consistent with somebody that had dismembered dismembered a human body.

And now, with what they believed to be Bill's dismembered remains and evidence suggesting that he'd been the one tied to the couple's bed, the homicide investigators brought Omima back to the station for more questioning.

I sat down with Omima and confronted her with everything we'd found in the apartment.

And her response caught the investigators by surprise.

I have good panel.

I'm sorry.

I have convention.

In a complete contradiction of what she'd previously told the police, Omaima not only admitted Bill was dead, she confessed that she had killed him.

I don't remember how I killed him.

You don't remember?

I only remember, I get out, like I said, and I find him in a trash bag.

I wish I knew how I killed him, though.

Although, according to Omaima, she did know why.

Something inside me told me that I have to do it like demons.

She began talking about drugs and drug use and alcohol and how she was abused and how mysterious people had contacted her and she seen visions.

Were the visions simply a ploy to get out of a murder charge?

It was almost as if she was grabbing for anything she could to minimize her involvement in this horrific crime.

Or was Omima truly mentally ill?

Either way, Omima wrapped up the bizarre confession with a simple request.

The interview over, the investigators booked Omima on murder charges.

She was ultimately transferred to the Orange County Women's Jail.

Bail was extremely high, but she was not let out of custody.

And while Omima sat in jail, the medical examiner's office confirmed that the dismembered remains were indeed Bill Nelson's and then began the grisly process of piecing together how he died.

It involved 25 or more wounds to the skull.

It was a very

violent death.

Omaima hadn't stopped there, however.

After beating her husband to death, she'd proceeded to cut up his body methodically, skillfully.

The way the body was cut up was actually done fairly professional.

Cut with such precision that the coroner's office was very concerned.

Had she done this before?

Even more disturbing, when the medical examiner weighed all the body parts and compared them with the information on Bill Nelson's driver's license?

There was 180 pounds of Mr.

Nelson missing.

And since they'd already found his severed hands in Omaima's deep fryer, it wasn't hard for the investigators to imagine what had happened to the rest of him.

The Jeffrey Dahmer case had just occurred before this, and that was kind of in the back of everybody's mind at that time.

Are we going to turn up another Jeffrey Dahmer?

Was it possible Omima had eaten her husband?

You don't hear reports of cannibalism in Orange County every day.

Or was there another explanation?

When the investigators interviewed Omima and Bill's next door neighbor, he reported hearing something that may have provided a clue.

He said that whole weekend, the garbage or disposal ran.

It went

to the point he said that broke late Saturday night, early Sunday.

And a few hours later, she had gone knocking on an old boyfriend's door, asking for help.

She needed to dispose of it.

She was having trouble figuring out exactly how to do that.

But what about the possibility that he wasn't Omima's first victim?

For that, the investigators spent the next several days digging into her background.

What they found suggested that in some ways, the investigators' instincts were right.

Bill Nelson wasn't Omima's first victim.

She basically had set up a pattern where she would meet men in bars and go home and live with them.

She was a kind of low-rent gold digger.

She didn't particularly want much other than a roof over her head.

What Omima was searching for was probably a sugar daddy to take care of her.

However, unlike Bill Nelson, none of Omima's other sugar daddies had ended up dead.

She would get tired of that relationship for whatever reason and then end up leaving and stealing from them, either a car or money.

Those thefts weren't the only things on Omima's record either.

She was arrested for stealing in pharmacies, petty thefts.

In 1989, 20-year-old Omaima had been shoplifting at a local department store.

And when two female security guards had tried to search her for stolen merchandise, Omima had turned violent.

She bit the breast almost off of one security guard and then grabbed the crotch and brought that female security guard down to her knees and escaped.

Eventually arrested, she had been convicted of shoplifting and battery and sentenced to a few months in jail.

And by 1990, she was living with another man, one whose relationship with Omaima ended in circumstances that were eerily familiar.

The man's name was Robert Hansen.

He informed the authorities that Omima had lived with him briefly before moving on to Bill Nelson.

She thought he was going to be kind and take care of her.

He also was

very much using her for sex.

But their relationship had come to an abrupt end after a sexual encounter that bore some striking similarities to Bill Nelson's death.

According to Mr.

Hansen, she wanted some money, and he basically said, what are you going to do for me?

And she says, I want to tie you up.

And once Hansen had consented and let Omima tie him to the bed, she produced a handgun and threatened to kill him if

he didn't give her more money.

Fortunately for Hansen, his bonds hadn't been as secure as Omima thought.

He was able to wrestle himself free, get the gun from her, and essentially kick her out of the house.

Embarrassed by the incident, Hansen hadn't called the police at the time.

But once he came forward, the Orange County prosecutors were far less forgiving.

They introduced those charges against her as well.

Omaima would be tried for assault as well as for the murder of her husband.

But more importantly, the prosecutors believe that the assault on Hansen revealed Omaima's motive, one that had nothing to do with demons, visions, or sexual abuse.

She manipulated men to get what she wanted.

She stole from them.

There was definitely a pattern.

However, as her trial approached, one big question remained.

Why had Bill Nelson ended up dead and dismembered?

Why was Nelson different is one of the great mysteries.

Coming up, on the witness stand, Omaima describes a lifetime of suffering and abuse.

She had scar tissue as a result of what had been done to her.

And then her story takes a supernatural turn.

Ancient Egyptians talk with her or act through her.

On December 2nd, 1992, 24-year-old Omaima Nelson went on trial for murder in Orange County, California.

It had been a year and a day since the police had found her husband, Bill Nelson's dismembered body inside the apartment they shared.

Prosecutors realized they had a slam dunk.

They had the body.

They had the evidence from the house.

And they even had a confession.

There was one thing they didn't have, however, a defendant who looked like the gold digger that the investigation had revealed.

By the time she stood trial, Omaima looked very different from the lingerie model Bill Nelson had married.

She looked sad, really sad.

She looked like she'd been through it.

But according to the prosecution, it was nothing compared to the ordeal Bill Nelson had been through.

In his opening statement, the prosecutor outlined how Omima's husband had been tortured to death.

We theorize that he entered into a consensual bondage session with Omaima.

She tied him to the headboard and probably wanted some type of money or access to his wealth.

And according to the prosecution's theory, Bill had refused her request, apparently sending Omaima into some sort of rage.

We got the pre-death injuries that could only be interpreted no other way.

The prosecutors also had a witness who told a similar story.

A former boyfriend of Omima's named Robert Hansen.

He took the stand and described what happened one night when Omima had tied him to their bed.

And she pulled the gun out and she put the gun to my face and

said she wanted for me to give her money.

When it was their turn, the defense didn't deny that Omaima had killed Bill.

Obviously she did it.

She confessed to it.

However, her defense attorney argued that she'd had a reason, more or less the same reason she'd originally given Jose Esquivel, the man she'd asked to help her dispose of the body.

He presented this defense that she had been abused and battered over the course of their marriage by Bill Nelson.

She thought she was being raped and therefore

did not have the malice for murder.

And according to the defense, the abuse had begun back in Egypt when she was only seven years old.

She'd endured a female circumcision.

A custom in parts of Africa.

The procedure had been performed by the women of her village without the benefit of anesthesia or sterilized instruments.

She had the most extreme type.

That involves cutting off the clitoris.

And she had borne the physical scars of the crude surgery for the rest of her life.

Female circumcision made it impossible for her to enjoy sex.

She had scar tissue as a result of what had been done to her, and so intercourse was very painful for her there were psychological scars too it has what we consider the standard effects of horrible trauma a person develops post-traumatic stress disorder but according to the defense that trauma was only the beginning of a lifetime of abuse her account is that almost everybody in her family either beat tortured or molested her.

And the defense claimed that Omaima had coped with the abuse by retreating from her harsh reality.

She developed the coping mechanism of living in a fantasy world.

Then, to explain the depth of Omaima's delusions, the defense called the psychologist who had evaluated her to the stand.

I found Omaima to be soft-spoken.

I found her to be rather childlike.

She was frequently very sad and often tearful.

But most of all, the psychologist testified that Omaima was a deeply disturbed young woman.

She began to fantasize that she was descended from ancient Egyptians.

Among her delusional beliefs is ancient Egyptians either talk with her or act through her.

And according to the defense, that included the night that Bill Nelson died, November 30th, 1991.

Although a medical examination had failed to find any evidence that Omima had been raped, the defense claimed that had been Bill Nelson's intent that evening.

In fact, they argued that it was basically an everyday part of his relationship with Omaima.

He demanded oral sex daily.

The oral sex came with name-calling, which was very degrading.

And that night had been particularly degrading, according to the defense.

He was angry that she wasn't doing it the way he wanted it.

But as Bill's anger and his insults mounted, the defense claimed that something had happened to Omima.

She just snapped.

She became psychotic.

She told me that ancient Egyptians helped her.

According to the defense, the voices in Omaima's head had not only urged her to kill Bill, they had directed her to mutilate his dead body.

The ancient Egyptians believed that if your body is scattered, you will not go to the afterlife.

So she cut him up.

She was making sure that if she got to the afterlife, he wouldn't be there.

However, that the spirits of ancient Egyptians had supposedly told her to dismember her husband's body wasn't the most shocking thing Omaima had revealed during the investigation.

She stated that she had cooked some of his ribs in the oven, put some barbecue sauce on it, and actually tasted it.

She said it tasted sweet, just like I like it.

On cross, the prosecution did their best to dismiss all the testimony about Omima's mental state.

They would like to discount psychiatric issues.

They would prefer to look at all of the behaviors of a person that showed that they were cunning and calculating.

And according to the prosecution, that's exactly what Omima's outrageous claims about ancient Egyptian spirits and cannibalism were.

A cunning attempt to build an insanity defense.

The only evidence came out of her mouth.

And the jury would hear it straight from Omima's mouth, too.

The climax of the defense's case came when they called her to the stand.

Everyone was quite riveted on what she had to say.

What I needed to do was to get the jury to focus on what her mental state was at the time she killed.

Omima started by telling the jury that her brief marriage to Bill Nelson had been a month-long ordeal.

What began as a hopeful relationship for Omima turned into what she felt was a nightmare.

She claimed that there was sexual assaults going on, including anal sex.

She also testified that on their way to visit his family, he'd even threatened to kill her.

They were driving across Arizona, and he told her that if she didn't do what he wanted, he would bury her in the desert.

And according to Omima, she had taken her ex-con husband seriously.

Bill served time in a federal jail on drug charges.

After I learned about all this drug-running stuff, that made me think that he could have been an abusive person.

And that made it easier to believe Omaima's account of what had happened on November 30th, 1991.

According to Omima, there was a very violent sexual encounter.

One that only ended, according to Omima, when she grabbed a lamp off the bedside table.

She'd taken the lamp and broke it over his head, and there was a steam iron nearby that she hit him several times with.

And then, when the handle of the iron broke, Omima said she had grabbed the next weapon that was handy, a pair of scissors.

At that point, her memory pretty much goes dark.

According to Omima, she had no memory of dismembering Bill.

And despite the earlier testimony, she denied ever tasting him.

Instead, she claimed that her next memory was finding herself alone in the apartment a day later with bags full of human remains.

I didn't know where to go or who to call or what to do.

And I got mixed, like, confused.

I don't know who I am or

who's that person I'm not related to.

I thought he's a stranger.

I thought, what am I doing in this place?

She was very moving.

She came across, I believe, as very sympathetic.

But would the jury believe Omaima's claims of abuse?

Not if the prosecutor had anything to say about it.

In his cross-examination, he played the jury a video shot on that trip to Texas, the one where Omaima claimed Bill had threatened to kill her.

It just shows them acting like two kids in love, you know, laughing, having a good time.

So when the case went to the jurors on December 17th, it all came down to which one they found more persuasive: the prosecution's pictures or Omima's harrowing words.

It really just becomes this, he said versus she said, and Bill Nelson isn't here to defend himself.

Coming up, the jury reaches a decision.

I just figured she'd been through enough.

And Omima's story takes one final twist.

He ended up leaving her a lot of money.

On January 12, 1993, the jury in Omima Nelson's trial announced it had finally reached a verdict.

The 24-year-old Egyptian immigrant was charged with first-degree murder in the death and dismemberment of 56-year-old Bill Nelson, a man she'd been married to for barely a month.

It's not really a question of, did she do it?

It's, is this first degree murder?

Is it manslaughter?

That's really the big decision that the jury has to make.

And it had taken almost a week of deliberations for jurors to come to that decision.

I felt sorry for her because I just figured she'd been through enough.

We thought we had a chance at either an acquittal based on self-defense, but more likely we had a chance at an involuntary manslaughter.

But others felt that whatever Omaima had been through didn't excuse what she had done to Bill Nelson.

They're not going to let somebody walk away who is charged with cannibalism and dismembering the body.

Which side had won out?

When the verdict was read, the jury found Omaima guilty of murder.

However, the jurors apparently couldn't agree on first-degree murder.

Instead, they convicted her of the lesser charge of second-degree murder.

I felt that a second-degree verdict fit the crime.

We could never really show any premeditation.

Omima was also found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon for her attempted robbery of Robert Hansen.

The sentence was a total amount of 25 years to life.

Omima's attorney saw the fact that she had dodged a first-degree conviction as something of a victory.

The result from the defense standpoint is actually pretty good.

But the psychologist who evaluated her maintains that prison is no place for a sick woman.

She was treatable.

She could have been treated at one of our local California psychiatric hospitals.

And as for Omaima herself.

She says, I'm sorry I dismembered him.

I was in a fight for my life.

If I didn't kill him, I would have been killed that day myself.

She said, I'm not a monster.

Monster or victim, the journey that began in an Egyptian village would end in a California prison.

Or would it?

She had married a man in prison in the 90s.

He used to visit her in prison in the wheelchair for conjugal visits.

He was an elderly man, ended up dying and leaving her a lot of money.

Even from behind bars, she'd found a man to take care of her.

Omaima Nelson was denied parole in 2006 and 2011 and will not be eligible for parole again until 2026.

She will be 58 years old.

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