Theresa Nist claimed this week that ex-husband Gerry Turner once said he was going to chop up her body and put it in a shed during their short-lived romance.
“We took a walk around this lake called Pretty Lake and we were coming to the end of it and he said — this is really bizarre — He said, ‘You see that shed up there?’” she said on the Nov. 4 episode of the “Dear Shandy” podcast.
She then alleged, “I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s where I’m going to hide your body after I kill you and chop you up, and he wasn’t laughing. I said, ‘Well, if this was his idea of a joke, that was pretty dark humor.'”
“I just felt like there was animosity in that statement that was underlying,” she said. “Like, maybe if he could have gotten rid of me somehow.” She said she didn’t believe he would have actually killed her. “No, I don’t think that was true. It’s not true, but it just spoke to an underlying feeling about me.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to a rep for Turner for comment.
‘GOLDEN BACHELOR’ STAR GERRY TURNER ADMITS MARRIAGE TO THERESA NIST WAS A ‘MONUMENTAL MISTAKE’
Nist — who married Turner in January 2024 in a televised ceremony, but then divorced three months later — also opened up about her ex’s bombshell memoir, “Golden Years,” and explained why some of his recollections and statements made her “extremely upset.”
Nist, who said Turner’s book recounts stories about them that didn’t quite happen the way she recalled, argued that Turner did her “no favors” by getting into a marriage he knew he didn’t want.
“You did me no favors by marrying a woman that you did not want to marry,” she said, directing her statement towards Turner. “You should not. You should have called off the wedding. No matter that we were on TV, that didn’t matter. This was our lives. You should have stopped it.”
“He regretted it, and then he resented that he was married to me,” she continued. “So, he really tried to make it work and any little thing that I did that he thought wasn’t right, he lashed out at me.”
She added, “If you really wanted to be with [runner-up] Leslie [Fhima], I would have applauded it. I would have supported you. I would have been so happy.”
In his memoir, Turner admits it was hard to accept how quickly things fell apart. He wrote that he’d “rushed into a wedding [he] didn’t believe in” and later found himself “in a very dark place.”
“Well, I do admit that it was a monumental mistake, but it’s always easy to have 20/20 hindsight,” Turner told Fox News Digital ahead of the book’s release on Nov. 4. “I think that I hurt Theresa, I hurt my family. There were a lot of things that I was so imperfect about. … There was no one flash-bang moment where I realized the marriage was over. It was a gradual march toward the end.”
Turner and Nist married in January 2024 in a televised ceremony after Turner proposed in the season finale of the ABC reality dating series.
Turner filed for divorce in his hometown of Petersburg, Indiana, three months later, citing “irreconcilable differences.” His filing came several hours after the couple’s split announcement on “Good Morning America.”
“Theresa and I have had a number of heart-to-heart conversations,” he said. “We’ve looked closely at our living situations, and we’ve kind of come to the conclusion mutually that it’s time for us to dissolve our marriage. The things that strike me the most in our conversations (is) how dedicated both of us are to our families. So, we look at these situations, and I think we just feel like it’s best for the happiness of each of us to live apart.”
The duo finalized their divorce in June 2024.
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During the podcast, Nist admitted she had hoped to remain silent about the book and their previous marriage out of respect for Turner and his family.
“I didn’t want to be saying any of these things, I just felt forced,” she said.
“It was really a matter of, if you have nothing good to say just don’t say anything,” she added. “I didn’t want to hurt him. I never want to hurt another human being. I didn’t want to make anything bad for him, and I didn’t want to make it bad in case he wanted to find someone else.”
“But now, I mean, he’s written a book, and he said things, and now I can’t ignore it.”
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In July, Turner opened up to Fox News Digital about his new love, Lana Sutton, and explained why it’s important for him to live life to the fullest after being diagnosed with cancer last year.
“I decided that I wasn’t going to say ‘no’ to anything,” Turner said of his change in perspective. “Anything that came along, any trip, any chance to have fun, anything that I could do, I was going to take it on. Because I felt myself, even before the diagnosis, I was starting to get to that couch potato point where it was a little nicer to sit at home and do nothing than go out and fight whatever challenge it was to travel. And that’s really been quite a change for me.”
And Sutton, said Turner, has a way of making everything better.
“She has more energy than I do,” he said. “She needs less sleep than I do. I really think she’s a more logical thinker than I am, which I think that’s a lot. But the nice part is we think and we approach things very similarly, so we don’t have any conflicts as we’re trying to make decisions and so forth. We generally arrive at the same place, sometimes not the same way, but usually the same place.”
“With Lana now in the picture, she makes [life] even better. It’s so good to have a partner that understands and is in it with you 100% and so forth. So it took me a while to get to this point, but I’m pretty happy with where I am.”
The pair announced their engagement in October.
Fox News Digital’s Stephanie Nolasco contributed to this post.
