A Queens woman who shot her ex-cop husband to death is going to use the Tranny Defense – arguing that the respected lawman was secretly a she-male-loving cross-dresser whose “Irish guilt” and self-loathing made him beat her so bad she needed to fight back, her defense lawyer said today.
Barbara Sheehan’s husband, Raymond, would make her watch him play his dress-up games, in which he would try and make him self look like a woman, said her lawyer Michael Dowd.
“[His get up] looks like a skimpy outfit with what looks like a bra top that he wore when he forced his wife to watch him,” said Dowd, who said he found unsavory videos and a “she-male” magazine in the retired sergeant’s nightstand.
Sheehan sought the “comfort of transvestites” around the state, Dowd said, but “part of this was that he would engage in these endeavors and he would become extremely violent as a result of them. That violence eventually drove Barbara to shoot him 11 times.
“They seemed to increase and send him into a rage and the obvious evidence indicates that here was a person engaged in self-loathing, remorse and Irish Catholic sense of guilt,” Dowd said. “There’s no question his violence preceded any of his out of the mainstream sexual activities, but it seems these activities exacerbated to some degree what was already going on.”
Barbara Sheehan, 46, was in court yesterday as Dowd and the prosecutor rowed over what evidence had to be exchanged in the discovery process.
Dowd was furious that the contents of a computer seized from Sheehan’s house in February had yet to be turned over to him.
But prosecutor Debra Pomodore told Queens Supreme Court Justice Arthur Cooperman that she was unable to open any of the files recovered so far.
“It came up as gibberish” she said. She did hand over a disk containing a download of Raymond Sheehan’s AOL activity.
Dowd said the data on the computer will corroborate e-mails that Barbara Sheehan had already discovered – including an exchange with a transvestite her husband went to visit after arguing with her at an upstate football game and driving off in a rage.
“We could tell from his navigation system where he went,” Dowd said “We went there, found the person that was listed in the e-mail who was a transvestite living with other transvestites and you know we confirmed it.”
The judge also ordered Dowd to surrender to the prosecution notes he had been attempting to retain. The parties return to court on Jan. 14.