Being Forced to Sleep with The Enemy

By Shannon in News on Oct 29, 2006 8:02PM

Chicagoist tends to turn a skeptical eye towards marriage. We don't go in for the whole practice of blowing two months' salary on a ring, we refuse to pay a small fortune on a dress we'd wear once, and IOHO, the societal pressure is just madness. Plus there's the matter of who to marry in the first place. One woman in Tinley Park probably wishes she'd never married Joseph Lyon, whom she later divorced and at whose hands she wound up the victim of horrifying revenge.

Lyon, 48, hired a man to kidnap himself, his ex-wife, and their teenage son on Aug. 29, 2002. The kidnapper, as directed by Lyon, forced the two to have sex with each other at gunpoint, first at the woman's home, then in a seedy motel in Orland Park. Lyon supplied the man with a camera to take pictures of them in compromising positions at the motel. Their son, meanwhile, had been tied up in a different motel room and being held for "ransom." To release him, the woman had to pay the kidnapper $5,000. When she was finally released the next day, she notified the police, heavily suggesting her ex had something to do with the whole ordeal. Besides what had just happened, he'd obsessed over her since their divorce, despite remarrying. His current wife even warned the ex-wife that something was up the very day she was kidnapped.

Thankfully the police listened to the hapless woman and checked Lyon out. On Friday, he was sentenced to 120 years in jail for orchestrating the entire plot. That sounds awesome on paper, but who knows what unutterable damage Lyon dealt to his ex-wife and his own son? They thought they could die at any moment, then found out they were betrayed by someone who was once so close to them. This just proves our point: Never trust anybody, ever.

Image via transparencynews.com.