Woman charged in mom's beating held in jail

A Nassau judge ordered a woman charged with killing her ex-husband to remain in jail Thursday after she was arrested in the beating of her 83-year-old mother.

Nancy Boland, 56, was being held in the Suffolk County jail, where she faces the assault charge for allegedly hitting her mother, Marie Wieden, in Wieden's Oakdale home, prosecutors said.

Boland appeared in Nassau District Court, where she was charged with first-degree manslaughter in the November stabbing death of her husband, Walter Boland, in their North Bellmore home.

"There is no bail that will protect the public from the risks associated with her," Nassau prosecutor Joseph LoRocca told Judge Tammy Robbins in court.

Boland had been free on $1 million bond, posted by her mother, when she allegedly beat Wieden on the head, face and arm with an aluminum cane after they got into an argument, prosecutors said.

If Boland, a Suffolk court clerk, is convicted in both cases, she could face a maximum of 50 years in prison, prosecutors said.

Boland's lawyer, David Besso of Bay Shore, had asked Robbins to release his client, saying she is not a flight risk. Besso has said that Boland is a "peaceful" woman who suffered years of abuse at her husband's hand and was still reeling from its aftereffects when she allegedly attacked her mother last month.

According to a statement Boland gave State Police, she and her ex-husband, divorced but still living together, were moving furniture on Nov. 16 when the headboard of a bed smashed a glass door, angering Walter Boland, who had been drinking heavily.

As they argued, he held a screwdriver. "I was struggling with him, I grabbed it from his right hand and I pushed it into his stomach," Boland's statement said. The following morning, she went to work. When she returned, she said, "He felt cold, and I knew he wasn't good."

Boland said she started to drag his body into her car. "I thought two or three times I might not make it, because he was so heavy and I never moved a dead body before, he was so stiff."

Boland said she left him on the bike path beside the Wantagh State Parkway.

"He was rigid," she said. "It was already too late."