Of all the places for Mary Clark, the mother of killer Nathan Gale to wind up on TV, you’d think womens network WE would be one of the last. Yet her story is one of the four featured on the show Secret Lives of Women, which is doing an episode on mothers of murderers. Gale executed Pantera/Damageplan guitarist Dimebag Darrell and three others onstage at a Damageplan show at the Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio on December 8, 2004.
The New York Daily News suggests that Clark comes off as a somewhat sympathetic character. She has thanked James Niggemeyer, the officer that killed Gale, for saving other people from being killed. And while her son told her he was schizophrenic after being discharged from the Marines, she said that she had no idea that we was that unbalanced. She thinks that the Marines should have helped treat her son instead of just discharging him.
Still, while it’s got to be hard to know you’ve raised a killer, she bought him the gun that he killed with, and if she knew he was schizophrenic in the first place, she should have tried to get her son some help. Either way it’s a tragic situation that bummed me out just by writing this post. And in closing, tonight might be the first time I’ve ever watched WE.
