Husband Charged With Butchering Wife After Spat About Overcooked Pasta

An insurance executive was charged with tearing out his wife’s heart and lungs and impaling them on a stake in a fight about overcooked ziti.

Richard Rosenthal, his 4-month-old daughter with him in his car, was arrested Tuesday and charged with murder after he followed a couple home and tried to engage them in a driveway conversation about gun control, police said.

The couple’s license plate read “357-BAN.” Rosenthal told the court-appointed forensic psychologist that he thought the plate referred to .357-caliber Magnum handguns.

The couple called police, who found the baby in the back seat of Rosenthal’s car, along with a plastic bag full of bloody men’s clothing, Middlesex County prosecutor Martin Murphy said.

Police followed a trail of blood from Rosenthal’s stately Framingham house to the woods and found the beaten, mutilated body of his wife, Laura Rosenthal.

Laura Rosenthal, 34, had been slit with a butcher knife from her throat to her navel, and her organs had been placed on an 18-inch stake in a nearby garden.

Her face also had been pummeled with a softball-size rock, leaving her so disfigured that she was listed as “Jane Doe” on Rosenthal’s arrest report. It took more than a day to identify her.

Investigators said Rosenthal, 40, told them his wife had chided him for burning the ziti. “I had an argument. … I overcooked the ziti,” they quoted Rosenthal as saying.

It was not clear when Laura Rosenthal was killed. She was last seen alive on Sunday, police said.