The Burning Bed
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The Burning Bed is a non-fiction book by Faith McNulty about battered Dansville, Michigan housewife, Francine Hughes. After thirteen years of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband James Berlin ("Mickey") Hughes, she set fire to the bed he was sleeping in on March 9, 1977. Mickey Hughes was killed and the house destroyed in the resulting inferno.
On the night of the fire, Hughes told her children to put their coats on and wait for her in the car. She then started the fire with gasoline poured around the bed Mickey Hughes was sleeping in. After the house had caught fire, Hughes drove with her three children to the local police station in order to confess.
Hughes was tried in Lansing and found by a jury of her peers to be not guilty by reason of insanity.
Having turned the book into a made-for-television movie, McNulty's screenplay, "The Burning Bed" premiered on NBC on October 8, 1984. The movie, directed by Robert Greenwald, starred Farrah Fawcett as Francine Hughes and Paul LeMat as Mickey Hughes. The true story happened in Dansville, Michigan.
Twenty five years after the movie was released much has changed in the way domestic violence cases are handeled. The Lansing State Journal (Lansing, Michigan) covered the story through the individuals whose lives were affected be The Burning Bed. For more on the aftermath see their project here: [1]
[edit] External links
- The Burning Bed at the Internet Movie Database
- The Burning Bed at Allmovie
- The Burning Bed at the TCM Movie Database
- Lansing State Journal - Unmasking the Violence [2]
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