Dying wife admits to killing husband

? For more than a decade, Geraldine Kelley told her children their father had been killed when he stepped in front of a car in a drunken haze.

She complained when her daughter pestered her about where he was buried, according to a woman who worked for Kelley as a maid at a California motel she ran.

“‘I don’t know why they’re all concerned, because John never cared, he never loved them,”‘ Marilynn Contreras quoted Kelley as saying.

“I had no reason to doubt the fact that she was so bitter about her husband, she didn’t want her children to know where he is,” Contreras said, recalling the 1997 conversation.

That changed last week with Kelley’s deathbed confession to her daughter that she’d killed John Kelley about 13 years ago. Kelley claimed her husband had abused her for years.

A prosecutor said her reasons for confessing were likely a mix of wanting to unburden herself and ensuring her children were not blamed if the body was ever found.

“It appears her concern was for them,” said Middlesex Dist. Atty. Martha Coakley.

Authorities on Thursday found human remains in a locked, unplugged freezer in a storage room in Somerville.

On Friday, Coakley said the body had been tentatively identified as John Kelley’s, based on tattoos he was known to have as well as similarities to his 5-foot-6, 135-pound build. The cause of death was a gunshot to the back of the head.

The family was torn by domestic violence and the Kelleys’ two children were estranged from both parents by the late 1980s, Coakley said. John Kelley was also estranged from other members of his family, and that was likely why no one asked questions when he went missing in the early 1990s.

“It does not appear that anyone was aware of his disappearance,” Coakley said.

Kelley, 54, died at home on Nov. 12 of breast cancer, but not before telling her daughter, Sheri-Ann Bouchie, now 36, what she had done.

The family’s attorneys released a statement from Kelley’s daughter and son, John P. Kelley, which said this was “a time of deep emotion” for them.

“Until the recent disclosure by their mother, they accepted and believed their mother’s story as true,” the statement read. “Today they are facing the grim reality of what actually happened.”

Attorneys declined to disclose details of the deathbed confession.