How to take care of a step daughter by his father

1.Man impregnates ‘Mother-in-law’ who came to take care of newborn baby in Taraba

Africa News of Tuesday, 28 January 2020

Source: www.withinnigeria.com

Priscilla Kwange and Christopher Chori

A woman, Priscilla Kwange is presently in a dilemma after being impregnated by her son-in-law during the period she spent in their home for Omugwo, that is babysitting their newborn child.

It was a bad life experience for an ex-military officer, Silvanus Kwange as well having discovered that his son-in-law Christopher Chori impregnated his second wife, Priscilla Kwange.

Mr. Christopher Chori, the son-in-law is also in a state of confusion after impregnating his father-in-law’s second wife, Priscilla Kwange.

Kwange’s marriage misfortunes

Mr. Kwange, a Tiv from Taraba State, has been married to his second wife for about 10 years. Their marriage came after he lost his first wife, Rose Kwange, to a fatal motor accident. But before she met her untimely death, the late Rose had a daughter and the only child with Mr. Kwange. It was after her death that her widower husband got married to Priscilla. But unfortunately, in the past 10 years, the couple never had a child. And this development had always caused quarrels in their marriage as the man’s family members strongly believe that the fault is Priscilla’s. They cited Rose’s daughter as proof of Kwange’s virility.

Kwange who was in a quandary over his wife’s inability to conceive, equally believed that she is the problem and made several attempts to send her packing. But Chori, their son-in-law, a Mada from Kokona Local Government Area of Nasarawa State who got married to Faith, the man’s only daughter, prevailed on him not to do so. He was said to always intervene, telling his father-in-law that God is the only One who gives children. He is said to have also advised him to seek medical attention or try some fertility drugs if he was not too keen on seeing medical or fertility experts. But he had always refused, noting that there was no problem with his body and citing Faith as a proof of the point he was trying to make.

Chori was said to always been on the phone with his father-in-law and mother-in-law trying to appeal to them to see reasons and that their inability to have a child should not constitute a clog in the wheel of their marital bliss. All the same that did not deter Kwange from looking for other ways out of the problem. Unconfirmed sources told Saturday Sun that he is into all sorts of an extramarital relationship with other women in his bid to get a child but so far none had produced the expected result.

On Priscilla’s part, as Africans would say, during those years, she traversed seven lands and seven seas in her search of a child she would call her own. In her desperation to keep her home, she did a lot but without any of her numerous medical efforts yielding tangible results. Sources say there is no known fertility hospital she has not visited in Taraba, Makurdi, Abuja and Jos, with the help of their son-in-law, Chori. But it was all to no avail. It was in the course of these fruitless searches for a solution that the devil chose to strike in a most embarrassing and shameful way.

Living with fate after the departure of Faith

Sometimes, towards the end of 2018, Faith, who had been married to Christopher for about four years but without a child to bless their union, suddenly took in and gave birth to a baby boy in May 2019. Good news! But the sad news is that she died shortly afterward, leaving the poor baby without a mother. She was said to have died from complications that resulted from her delivery of the baby through the caesarian section. She was buried within one week of the incident. Faced with such a difficult situation, Kwange asked his second wife to move to Lafia to assist with taking care of the newborn baby Faith left behind.

One thing led to the other, and after spending seven months in Lafia with her son-in-law who works with one of the federal government agencies, Priscilla was found pregnant. Investigation shows that within that period, she had regular sex with her son-in-law. Pregnancy later became the result of her sexual escapades.

Kwange’s regrettable story

Right now, her husband, Mr. Sylvanus Kwange, an ex-serviceman, is livid with anger over the sordid development. Speaking exclusively with our correspondent in Lafia on his arrival from Jalingo, the man who is boiling like a kettle of hot water, threatened to deal with both his wife and his son-in-law for daring to commit such sacrilege. He vowed that his wife would never step her foot into his house again, come what may. He affirmed that his wife had been in Lafia for about seven months.

“That is to say, it is about seven months that I have not seen her. We only talk on the phone,” he said. “I know the importance of her coming to stay in Lafia for some period of time, to take care of the newborn baby whose mother is late. I thought it was my own responsibility to help my son-in-law and the new baby of my late daughter. So, I allowed my own wife to come and help.” Then he turned to you and asked rhetorically: “Is that an offence?”

You asked how he learnt about the abominable news. His words: “Two weeks ago, a friend ran into my wife in Lafia and called to tell me that he saw her with bulging stomach. I was speechless with shock and asked, how come? I didn’t want to believe it or confront her on the phone. She has been here since June last year. I decided to visit them to also see how the little boy is doing. I was coming with so much joy, not knowing that I was coming to meet disaster waiting for me. When I got to the house of my son-in-law, I met the shock of my life as I saw my own wife with a protruding stomach. I stood transfixed to the spot as I looked at her, trying to recall if there was any time she told me she was pregnant but I could not remember.

“I quickly asked my wife what happened and she broke down and confessed that Mr. Chori seduced her and they had sex and it became frequent and the result was the pregnancy. She started begging me for forgiveness. She said that she actually allowed him to have his way as a way of checking her fertility status and it turned out to be this way and that she refused to abort it because she has spent 10 solid years with me without a child. She said it is almost getting late as she is no longer getting younger. She pleaded with me not to cause her any embarrassment or disgrace by exposing her to ridicule and shame. She actually begged me to handle the matter in a mature way, but I’m yet to get out of the shock seeing my own wife impregnated by my own son-in-law. My anger knows no bounds. If it were during my days as a military man, I would have used my gun to kill the two of them. But if I do that now, I will be taking the law into my hands. What I will do now is to go back to Taraba. I have asked my wife not to come back to my house. As for Christopher Chori, I leave him to his conscience.”

Chori’s side of the story and battle with conscience

That, Christopher Chori insists, is even a worse punishment than being killed as he doesn’t know how to deal with the continuous tugging of his conscience. For him, it would have been better if Kwange had used the military-issued rifle he was talking about to kill him outright. It would have shortened the emotional trauma he is going through right now.

His story: “After the death and burial of my wife, my mother-in-law came to stay with me here in Lafia, to help look after the baby because my mother is no longer alive; she died many years ago. I work with one of the federal government agencies in Lafia. My younger sister who is equally staying with me is in SS2 and could not combine her studies with taking care of the baby. So my father-in-law asked his wife to come because his first wife who happens to be my real mother-in-law is late.

“I live in two-bedroom apartment. So when she came to take care of the baby with the assistance of my younger sister, I left one of the rooms for them to use while I stay in the other room but I come home regularly to check on them and to ensure that she does not lack anything especially when my younger sister is out in school.

“In the first one month of her stay with me, nothing happened but during the second month, which was July 2019, something happened that left me with so much guilty feelings. My sister went to school. I did not go to work that day, leaving me and my mother-in-law alone in the house. It rained the previous night all through and the weather was very cold. I was checking on them in their room to see how my newborn baby was doing. But when I opened the door, I was shocked to see my mother-in-law almost naked as she wore only lingerie with no underwear. I could clearly see the outline of her firm Bosom s and her private part. I tried to turn back but she said I should come in. When I hesitated, she walked up to me and grabbed me, asking me why I was behaving like a small boy. She asked whether she was not looking attractive to me. I told her I could not do what she had in mind with her as I saw her as my own mother as well as mother-in-law.

“But she disabused my mind and insisted that I must sleep with her. As a human being, I fell for the temptation and slept with her that day, and somehow it continued at any given opportunity. It became a daily routine as I was not going to work regularly. As soon as my sister leaves for school and the boy is able to sleep, we would stay indoors and have sex all day and it later resulted in pregnancy but she refused to abort it. She said she has been longing for a child of her own. I cannot but blame myself for falling into such a temptation but then the deed has been done. I feel very bad because there is no way my father-in-law would thump his chest and claim to be the owner of the pregnancy because she has spent some months in my house and she missed her period while staying here, not in her husband’s house.”

Inasmuch as he feels bad about his action, he feels worse about his father-in-law’s decision to go public with what he feels was supposed to be a family affair and should have been settled internally. “I’m confused at the moment,” he said. “I don’t know what to do but the days ahead will surely bring a solution to this embarrassing situation.”

Priscilla’s lamentations

Of the three people involved in the tragedy, Priscilla seems to be the worst hit. She explained: “I’m not proud of myself because apart from being a housewife, the victim is my son-in-law. My reason for teasing him was to test my fertility status since there was a golden opportunity and sticking to my husband in the past ten years has not yielded any result. I wanted to be sure of where the problem lies.

Unfortunately, I took in. It was a wrong decision but I didn’t want to take the risk of aborting the baby as it may not come my way again. Although, I didn’t want it made public, my husband has succeeded in exposing it. I admit I am guilty of allowing my son-in-law to impregnate me but I was also considering my condition, even though I never expected pregnancy to come. But since it has come, I will want to keep it even if he decides to push me out of his house, I can’t afford to die childless.”

02

Armed northern Utah man intended to kill stepson, family, charges say

SALT LAKE CITY — A northern Utah man who prosecutors say intended to kill his stepson and his family now faces numerous criminal charges.

Charles Warren Leff, 64, Perry, Box Elder County, was charged Monday in 1st District Court with five counts of attempted aggravated murder, a first-degree felony; four counts of possession of a firearm by a restricted person, a third-degree felony; drug possession, a class A misdemeanor; DUI and possession of drug paraphernalia, both class B misdemeanors.

The investigation began Friday when deputies from the Cache County Sheriff’s Office were informed that Leff had been in a fight with his wife at their home in Perry and was on his way to his stepson’s house in Mendon, according to a police affidavit.

“Charles’ wife contacted her daughter-in-law by phone and told her Charles was on his way over to her house with a gun to kill her and her family,” the affidavit states. The daughter-in-law then called 911 and told dispatchers she had seen Leff drive past her house.

“In the call you can hear (the daughter-in-law’s) voice and the sheer terror as she explains that her mother-in-law had called her telling her to be careful because Charles was on his way over to her house to take her and the kids out,” police wrote.

The daughter-in-law said she locked her doors and had her children go in the basement and turn off the lights.

When the children were later interviewed by police, “They each also spoke about hearing their grandmother on speakerphone this morning crying and telling their mother not to go outside because Grandpa was on his way over with a gun to shoot them. They also talked about how they all went downstairs and were very scared,” the affidavit states.

Before leaving his house, Leff allegedly told his wife, “‘If those ... children step in my house again, I will blow them away!’ Charles continued to argue with his wife and said, ‘If you get in my way, I will blow you away too. I am going to go kill those kids,’” the report states. “As Charles was heading to the door to leave the house he stated ... ‘I’m going to kill your ... son and his ... children!’”

A deputy responded to the house and found Leff parked in front. Four guns, drug and drug paraphernalia were found in the car, according to deputies.

Charles' wife contacted her daughter-in-law by phone and told her Charles was on his way over to her house with a gun to kill her and her family.

As detectives further investigated the situation, they learned that Leff had allegedly grown increasingly angry at his daughter-in-law and their family. He forced his wife to take down all the pictures in their house of the daughter-in-law’s family and to get a new phone number, the affidavit states.

Leff told police the dispute started when the daughter-in-law would not let her children — Leff’s grandchildren — go to his house because he had a dog and one of her children was allergic to animals, the affidavit states.

But Leff said the daughter-in-law has cats at her house. The last time the grandchildren were allowed to have a sleepover at Leff’s house, “Charles told his grandkids that he was going to take their cats, place them in a bag, and then throw the bag out in the road and run over them. This was extremely upsetting to the children and (the daughter-in-law) did not allow them to go over to Charlie’s house ever again,” deputies wrote in the report.

Leff initially told police he had been arguing with his wife that day because she wanted him to apologize for threatening to kill the cats, the affidavit states. Leff, however, claimed he was moving out and leaving for Oregon.

But Leff also admitted he took four handguns with him when he packed his suitcase, according to the affidavit.

“Charles told me he never said he was going to go and kill (the daughter-in-law) and his grandchildren, but told his wife he was going to go to their house and take care of it. Charles admitted that he could see how his wife may have believed he meant he was going over to kill her son and his family, but he said he was on his way over to apologize,” the affidavit states.

Leff’s wife, however, told detectives that she “was very afraid for her life as well as her son and his family’s lives” and then told them about prior domestic violence incidents including one in which “Charles had held a loaded gun to her head,” the report states.

The daughter-in-law also told police that the wife had told her at one point “if she died to make sure the police did an autopsy on her body because if she died that meant Charlie had killed her,” the affidavit states.

According to court records, Leff was convicted of threatening to use a dangerous weapon in 1993, and lewdness involving a child in 1995.

03

How Osgood Perkins, Anthony Perkins’ Son, Became a Horror-Movie Maestro

It’s never easy escaping the shadow of a famous parent—especially when you’re a horror director and your father is none other than Psycho icon Anthony Perkins. Nonetheless, in only a few short years, Osgood Perkins has established himself as one of the genre’s most distinctive and daring auteurs. That trend continues with this Friday’s Gretel & Hansel, a reimagining of the classic fairy tale that, like his prior The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, is a saga about a young woman grappling with loss and abandonment, and struggling to regain a measure of sanity—and agency—in a world where unholy threats lurk around every corner.

After two smaller-scale indie ventures, Gretel & Hansel is a step up to the studio big leagues for the 45-year-old filmmaker, although that transition has done little to diminish Perkins’ uniquely haunted voice. In his latest, Gretel (It’s Sophia Lillis) and her younger brother Hansel (Samuel Leakey) are forced to abandon their plague-ravaged home and trek through a forest to seek refuge at a convent. Their journey is interrupted by the discovery of an eerie, triangular woodland home where a cunning witch (Alice Krige) welcomes them with opulent feasts that defy logic, and entices Gretel with lessons about how to wield the magic within. Loneliness, need and empowerment collide, and in Perkins’ hands, they do so with ominous menace and trippiness—the latter quality materializing literally, when the discarded kids munch on some mind-altering mushrooms.

Gretel & Hansel continues Perkins’ thematic preoccupations but amplifies them to mythic scale, and speaking with us before the film’s Jan. 31 theatrical premiere, he confesses that the familiarity of his story was a big part of its draw. Having long wanted to tackle a fairy tale, the project proved a natural fit for his creative instincts, and the resultant work is dark and malevolent, lyrical and hallucinatory, not to mention slyly funny. Those elements, along with creepy pagan and demonic imagery, make Gretel & Hansel an early-year standout.

This is your third feature, but your first studio production. Why now? And why, in particular, the legend of Hansel and Gretel?

I think the “why now” question is the easiest one, and it comes down to: I assume no matter who you are, if you’re in the business that I’m in, the object is to get people to see what you’re doing. It’s becoming increasingly impossible to get that to actually happen in a way that’s gratifying. So theatrical studio movies, as maligned as they’ve become—and in some cases, certainly deserving of that derision—if you want to be seen and if you want people to experience what you care about and want to express, you have to make bigger movies for studios. You hope for theatrical, and the fact that we’re getting such a generous theatrical run out of this is really very exciting.

Gretel & Hansel came to me as a script; it wasn’t something I generated, it already had steam behind it. The truth is that, since I started cutting my teeth in this profession, I’d always fantasized, loosely, about doing a fairy tale. And Hansel and Gretel was always the one I’d wanted. So when it arrived at my door, it was like, OK!

Was it a daunting challenge to reinvent such a well-known fairy tale into a feature that still had the power to surprise?

Honestly, the quality of “everybody knows it” is, for me, one of the most appealing aspects. Obviously, you and I both know that, especially in today’s marketplace, everything is IP [Intellectual Property]. Everything is something that we’ve heard of. It’s Joker or a Scorsese movie about a Scorsese movie, or something that’s once removed from a classic. Even Joker, which is not only source-materialled from 50-60 years ago, but is also Scorsese—it’s like, that whole thing of pastiche, and what’s familiar but what’s new. The IP craze that’s currently happening—and maybe will be forever, and maybe always has been forever, since Olivier did Hamlet—we want that. It’s power for us. It’s electricity for the machine. So that was the best part, that everybody knows the story.

You’ve said your second film, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, was about your relationship with your father, Anthony Perkins. And all three of your films—including this one—are about people dealing with loss and/or parental abandonment. Is that thread a conscious thing on your part, or is it just an instinctive draw?

Probably a combination of both. At the very least, I want to be doing things I know about. I don’t want to feel like a tourist. Sometimes in Los Angeles, you drive alongside one of these tour buses that’s pointing places out, and the person at the microphone is always talking in a soullessly-touristic way, like they’ve never been to any of these places. They have no meaning for them. For the artist making a movie, it’s the old adage of “write what you know.” If you’re “lucky” enough to know something that’s worth investigating… although in my case, lucky is maybe not the right word. I’ve had a couple of bad hands dealt to me, and as traumatic and difficult and painful and heartbreaking as they were and are, they’re also hugely informative about what it is to be living, and experiential. So to not make movies about the loss of parents, or about the fact that you can’t know your father, or about the fact that it’s fucking hard out there, would be ridiculous. I don’t know what I’d be doing. I’d be visiting somebody else’s house, and I’d rather not be doing that. I’d rather be manifesting what I understand.

Do you feel like your dad’s work and legacy, and your relationship with him, still figure prominently in your creative process?

I think that, as I gain confidence and my footing in this—because as you said, this is my third movie, and they’ve all been close together and late in life, because I didn’t start doing this until I was 40—my dad’s presence in what I’m now doing is more in his very wry, sophisticated, cheeky humor. You have to look for it, you have to be hip to it, and you have to want it, and be sensitive enough to find where these things are really cheeky. Gretel & Hansel, there are a lot of moments in it which are very cheeky and sly, and that’s very much my dad, who was a shape-shifting trickster. That spirit is very much alive in what I’m doing.

J.J. Abrams and Zachary Quinto have plans to make a movie about your dad (Tab & Tony). Are you involved with it, or would you want to be?

Zach Quinto has a project called Tab & Tony, and I think that also falls under Bad Robot’s shingle, which is all fine—it doesn’t mean anything to me. To be honest with you, it’s like an inert gas: it has no value to me. To extend that, people are like, “Do you watch Bates Motel?” And I’m like, errrrr, what? Why would I? It doesn’t make any sense. I find biopics to be kind of low-common denominator. Biopic doesn’t interest me. I have had a project that I’ve been developing that is about my dad in a way, but so obliquely, it’s almost like a fake biography of him that would highlight certain aspects that are important to me, but would involve none of his actual life. My friend Steven Shainberg had a brilliant approach with Fur, which was about Diane Arbus, but it also wasn’t. It was untrue, but it was about her. I think that’s super-cool. But to track the events of someone’s life and pretend to be them? As successful and happy as that makes people, I don’t get it.

“The quality of un-hiding these dark mysteries is really intriguing to me.”

You’ve flipped Gretel & Hansel’s traditional title, which is in keeping with the film’s focus on Gretel. And that, in turn, makes this your third straight feature with a female protagonist. Where does that interest come from?

I’m asked that a lot, and every time I’m asked it, I’m like, oh, I should probably think of a good answer for the next time. And then I forget and other things happen. [Laughs] I think where I land with it is, as long as we’re in the horror genre—although Gretel & Hansel is more of a fairy tale than a horror movie to me—the quality that is richest in a horror picture is embracing the unknown. Horror movies/novels/poetry is so much about what we can’t know. Elementally, we can’t know what death is—that’s what horror means, in a way. Whether it’s, am I going to die because there’s a killer at my camp that wears a hockey mask, or am I going to die because people come into my house at night, or am I going to die because the devil’s inside of me – whatever concept it is, it’s always, am I going to die, or I know it’s going to happen but I can’t see it. The quality of looking beyond something that you can understand—Robert Motherwell, the great painter, calls it “un-hiding” something. The quality of un-hiding these dark mysteries is really intriguing to me.

The straight line between that and female protagonists is, do I know exactly what women feel, think, want? I have impressions, I have experiences, I can observe. But elementally, a woman in the protagonist seat for a male director of a horror movie enables another layer of mystery and darkness and curiosity and hiding. Movies are a collection of aspects, departments, art forms, and impressions. They’re a collage. One of the elements I like to use in the palette is the mystery of the female. You have someone like Sophia Lillis—and granted, she’s 16—who when she opens her eyes and the camera looks into them, I can’t help but say, I really wonder what is there!

Your films’ female characters are also, generally speaking, more nuanced, empathetic and active than most typical victimized horror women.

I think filmmakers have come before me who have really highlighted that, in one way or another, and the best example that no one really talks about (or no one I talk to talks about) is The Shining. When you see that movie enough times, and people like me wind up seeing it 500 times, [you realize] that Shelley Duvall, if she’s not doing what she’s doing, if she’s not emoting the way she is, and hanging in with the story the way she is, we would certainly lose a lot. I think the strength of Duvall’s presence is one of these immeasurable quantities which is so powerful. Then obviously you have Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween and Sigourney Weaver in Alien. There have been these brilliant movies where women switch off the victimhood, and go into personhood. We want to feel that undoing of victimhood, and we all want to feel.

You have Gretel and Hansel eat mushrooms and experience a less-than-totally euphoric trip. Were there any objections to depicting kids in that way?

I kept expecting it—I was sort of half-ducking the whole time, expecting the MPAA to say, “No, no, no.” But frankly, I don’t think they even know what that is. Not to undermine the MPAA, but that’s not important to them. When we were struggling to get our rating from an R to a PG-13, I kept saying, they’re bothered by the mushrooms, right? And I kept hearing, no, they don’t mind the mushrooms. They care about the color of the blood, or the shot is four frames too long, or some shit like that. The mushrooms bit was a little bit of fun, and a little bit of a touchstone—like the sounding of a tuning fork—to say that this is what our world feels like. This is the texture of the world. I felt like it was a nice little side street we could take to show the neighborhood. And yeah, the fact that no one seems to mind that 8-year-old Samuel Leakey is high on mushrooms, well, all the better.