ROME —An American woman wanted in the 2002 death of her husband, whose remains were so badly burned they weren’t identified for more than a decade, has been arrested in Rome, Italy, police said.
Rome police said Thursday they arrested Beverly McCallum overnight after she checked into a small Rome hotel. Italian hotels are required to register guests in an online system linked to a police database.
The process revealed that McCallum had an international arrest warrant against her, according to a police spokeswoman who declined to give her name in line with police policy.
U.S. authorities had been seeking to extradite McCallum from Pakistan, where she was believed to be living, to stand trial in the slaying of her husband, Robert Caraballo. In 2002, he was beaten and suffocated, and his body was dumped and burned in a blueberry patch in western Michigan.
In Michigan, the Eaton County sheriff’s office said it was aware of the arrest but had no immediate comment.
Calls to the U.S. Embassy in Rome weren’t immediately answered. Police said McCallum was being held at Rome’s Rebibbia prison.
Caraballo’s badly burned remains were found in a scorched footlocker in a wooded area in Ottawa County in the days following his death. The identify of the victim remained unknown until an anonymous tip in 2015 led police to identify the remains as his.
In the years after the slaying, McCallum reportedly met a man from Pakistan over the internet and moved there.
Murder charges were filed last year against McCallum, her daughter, Dineane Ducharme, and Christopher McMillan, of Grand Rapids. The three also were charged with conspiracy, and disinterment and mutilation of a body.
McMillan pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He had been expected to testify against the other two. Ducharme was also in custody.
McMillan, a friend of Ducharme, told investigators that the slaying was planned and a “test run” was performed before killing Caraballo, Eaton County sheriff’s Detective James Maltby testified at a hearing last year.
According to the Lansing State Journal, Maltby said McMillan told investigators that McCallum pushed Caraballo down the basement stairs of a home, then beat him with at least one hammer in an attack so vicious that it got lodged in Caraballo’s skull. McCallum wrapped a plastic bag around the head of the still-breathing Caraballo, Maltby testified.
Ducharme, who was 21 at the time of the slaying, told police her mother killed Caraballo and that she helped dispose of her stepfather’s body, according to Maltby.
Maltby testified that the one of the children said McCallum had told her she killed Caraballo in self-defense.
Sometime after the killing, Ducharme and her mother moved to Pasadena, Texas. McCallum subsequently moved to Pakistan after learning that the investigation into the slaying was progressing, Maltby said.
By Nicole Winfield
