The other day, Barbara Johnson Peterson's cell phone rang in her tidy double-wide.
After two years, her mother-in-law was finally returning one of her calls.
Barbara is 64. Seven years ago, she married a much younger man. Six years ago, she filed for divorce.
Today, that divorce is still dragging on. Barbara can't get her husband, Michael Peterson, 44, to come to court and retire it.
Their marriage was excruciating. He used crack cocaine. She fought off weight and underwent multiple gastric bypasses.
They shared bankruptcies and domestic violence and missing jewelry and sunken boats and destroyed homes and more bitterness than most marriages accumulate in a lifetime.
But at that moment, on her cell phone, Barbara had an opportunity. She could tell her mother-in-law what she really wanted back from this crazy marriage.
It wasn't her dignity or her sanity.
It wasn't her health or her wealth.
It was her mother's ashes.
There are all sorts of laws in Florida governing the disposal of human ashes, which are pulverized human bones.
There are laws that deal with who can do the cremating and how they are licensed. There are laws that prevent the commingling of ashes. And there are laws that cover unclaimed ashes.
But nowhere in Florida's cremation laws does it say anything about whether a husband can take the ashes of his wife's mother and never give them back.
• • •
"Carol, may I ask, is Michael there?" Barbara asked her mother-in-law.
Barbara's mouth was set in a firm line. She wore an ill-fitting green and black pants outfit, having lost more than 50 pounds since her third gastric bypass revision in March.
She had so many questions.
On the other end, the mother-in-law told her no, Michael was not there. He was not in Florida. He was never coming back to Florida. Not until he saw Barbara's obituary. Then, maybe.
• • •
Barbara retrieved a silver-plated photo album from a nearby table. It was engraved with the date, May 11, 2002, and a picture of her and Michael. Her wedding album.
She's leaning on his shoulder, her brown eyes crinkled around the edges in happiness. He looks handsome and tan and full of laughter.
"This was the life we had," she said. "There were vacations and nice cars and homes."
They had met a few years before on Clearwater Beach. Barbara had been married three times and raised two children in California, Indiana and Texas. She had worked as a newspaper reporter, editor and advertising account executive. She had come to Florida in 1995 to watch over her ailing parents in Haines City. When they died five days apart in 1998, she filed a wrongful death lawsuit against their nursing home and won a large settlement.
Weeks later, she ran into Michael, an auto mechanic. He moved in within two weeks. They started a successful home maintenance business.
But Michael, she says, had a drug problem. His parents backed up that claim in court papers. She filed half a dozen domestic violence injunctions (he also filed one against her). Michael pinched me. Michael tried to run me over with a car. Michael threatened me with a knife.
They always reconciled.
He was charged with domestic battery, aggravated assault with a motor vehicle and obstruction. He spent time in jail. He violated his probation once by testing positive for cocaine.
At some point, Barbara says, Michael came to see her parents ashes' as a weapon in their war zone of a marriage.
• • •
Carl and Mary Buechert adopted Barbara when she was 10 days old. They gave her a sparkling childhood.
They told her they wanted to be cremated, but they never said what they wanted after that. So when the boxes of ashes arrived from the funeral home, Barbara didn't know what to do with them. She kept them in her bedroom closet, trying to think of something special befitting them. Then she realized they were a comfort to her just where they were.
Sometimes, she said, Michael would hide them from her when they got into fights.
On June 19, 2003, they were up late arguing when Michael grabbed her mother's ashes and ran into the bathroom, she told police. She grabbed her father's and hid them behind a pillow.
Then she heard multiple flushes behind the bathroom door. But when he emerged, there was no sign of her mother's urn.
She went to the Largo police, who interviewed Michael a week later but found there was no proof he took the ashes. Barbara says one of the officers told her the urn was community property anyway.
Police valued it at $50.
They split up and he stored his things at a tool storage unit owned by a neighbor not far from their home. When they reconciled this time, he said he had put the ashes in the storage shed with his other possessions. But now they were gone.
He filed a small claims suit against the neighbor for his clothes and the ashes. A judge dismissed it.
The neighbor, Thomas Nathan Kleckner, 55, remembers Michael showing him the ashes in the storage shed, but he doesn't know what happened to them. He just knows he didn't take them. But Barbara pestered him for them over and over.
"She was obsessed with the ashes," he said.
• • •
Carol Peterson is Michael's 66-year-old mother. She lives in Lake County and says she hasn't seen Michael since Christmas.
In a phone interview a day after she talked to Barbara, she said he was in Virginia but she didn't know where.
The family has devised an elaborate plan to shield Michael from Barbara. To find him, "I call one of my sons, who calls one of his sons, who calls a friend."
"As long as none of us knows where he is, we can't lie," she said, "because Barbara's main goal in life is to put him in jail."
Michael wants nothing to do with Barbara. During one of their divorce mediations, he quitclaimed the deeds to the homes they owned. He doesn't know where the ashes are.
"He just wants it over," Carol says. "If she wants to get a divorce, she can claim Michael abandoned her."
• • •
Barbara feels like she failed as a daughter.
She thinks there should be a law passed protecting human ashes. She has talked to a state representative's representative about it. He pointed her to a law that covers destruction of a dead body. But there's nothing in that law, she said, that covers destruction of cremated remains.
"I'm a 64-year-old educated woman," Barbara said. "I understood how the world worked, and yet I didn't have enough moxie to get the hell out of this."
More than anything, she wants Michael to admit that he took the ashes, that it was wrong and that her mother didn't deserve this ending. She thinks about where her mother's ashes could be and her mind goes to the Pinellas County dump.
How disrespectful, she thinks.
Her father's ashes are back in the closet. She can't even look at them. It just makes her feel guilty.
Times researcher Shirl Kennedy contributed to this report. Leonora LaPeter Anton can be reached at (727) 893-8640.
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