Actor Jack Nicholson immortalized the line, “You can’t handle the truth!”
Handling, or mishandling, the truth is allegedly what happened when a man – in the presence of his wife and a Bethlehem police detective – told the woman, “I am going to kill you.”
The outburst of Hua Dong Lin, 30, of Whitehall – as Det. Moses Miller sat in the same room -- has landed him in Northampton County Prison on a charge of terroristic threats.
So what was “the truth?” It has two parts and involved the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem on Christmas Day and a serious allegation by the wife that turned out to be not the truth, but a lie.
According to a criminal complaint filed by Miller:
First, Lin’s wife – Yan Fong Zheng -- went to Bethlehem police Dec. 26 and said she was kidnapped and raped the day before by an unknown man at the Sands while her husband gambled.
Police investigated, and Zheng admitted she fabricated the story.
Second, the wife admitted to police she was with another man Christmas Day at the Sands while her husband gambled. But he was not "unknown." He was the man with whom she has been having an “ongoing affair.”
She said she left the Sands with this man. And surveillance video indeed shows her leaving with a man.
She said she didn’t want her husband to find out about the affair because she was scared of her husband.
The problem for the husband, meanwhile, is that he apparently didn’t know any of this. He went to police headquarters with his wife Thursday afternoon – more than a week after the Christmas Day events -- still believing she was kidnapped and raped at the Sands.
In fact, the husband told Miller that the man who raped his wife was currently at the Sands.
Miller then talked to the wife. She said she didn’t tell her husband the truth because he said he was going to kill her and the other man if he found out they were lying.
The wife asked Miller to tell her husband that the “unknown man” escaped. Miller said he couldn’t lie to her husband about a criminal investigation dealing with allegations police had declared “unfounded.”
Miller told the wife she needed to tell her husband the truth. The wife then requested that Miller tell him the truth.
Miller complied and began telling the husband the truth. The husband “began punching himself in the head and jumped up out of the chair” and told his wife, in front of Miller, ”I am going to kill you.”
Lin, of the 400 block of Sixth Street in the Fullerton section of Whitehall Township, was arraigned later Thursday afternoon by on-duty District Judge Diane Marakovits of Northampton and committed to county prison in lieu of $7,500 bail.
