Years After Trying to Have His Wife Killed, Tim Lambesis Thinks Maybe That Wasn’t Such a Good Idea
It’s been almost 10 years since As I Lay Dying frontman Tim Lambesis was arrested for trying to hire someone to kill his then-wife Meggan Murphy and he’s now back in the public limelight to suggest that maybe that was a bad idea.
While participating in an interview on the Garza Podcast, the former convict outlined his extremely shitty thought process that led to his arrest in May 7, 2013, and how getting locked up made him realize how bad he fucked up.
“My thinking was so isolated in my own mind and disconnected from my support system that I didn’t really even fathom or realize how much I had lost myself and the core of who I really was. It’s, like, I was this one person for most of my life, and then for this period of time, I had this very isolated, different type of mindset, and then have since returned to being much of who I was in the earlier part of my life plus, of course, the added perspective of everything I went through.
“I don’t really know how to describe it. I lost myself, I lost my way, and I sat there in a cell being, like, ‘How did I become this person?’ It kind of blew my own mind. And as the mental cloud, the fog went away and I could see clearly, there are so obviously a thousand better ways that I could have gone through a divorce or a thousand better ways that if I wanted to be close with my family or if I felt that burning of a father who felt…”
“I can talk about, vaguely speaking, any father who loses his children, there’s a burning feeling of just, like, ‘I’ll do anything to fix this or to make this right or to maintain this relationship.’ But just ’cause you feel like you would be willing to do anything to maintain what matters to you the most in the world doesn’t mean you show that those are your best options. And I saw clearly sitting there thinking in a cell, ‘Wow, I could have handled this a thousand different ways,’ and the fact that in my mindset I thought at the time this was the best way to handle the situation, it blew my own mind. It’s, like, how did I even think that? It just was shocking. And there’s really no defense or no way to take away [to] what I did other than that, thankfully, there was actually no true physical harm of any kind.”
It’s easy for someone to say that sort of stuff after the fact, but it’s insanely hard to fathom what Murphy and her family went through back in 2013. The amount of fear, anger, and betrayal that must have eaten away at Lambesis’ family must have been unbearable. Who knows how someone can ever actually be forgiven for something as fucked up as trying to have the mother of your children executed. To have your kids deprived of their mother and left in the care of an out-of-their-mind asshole.
Then there’s the fans. Lambesis goes on in the interview to say that he understands it will be a long time before fans can truly forgive him, but that may not be the case. We’ve seen countless times where scumbags and shitty people are welcomed back by fans as long as the music, TV shows, sports championships, or whatever continue to happen.
“Knowing that I’m relatively young and I have the rest of my life to demonstrate to myself, beyond other people, that that is a very isolated, dark thought process in my life. And if that is an isolated, dark thought process, over the course of 30. 40, 50 years, you’ll see that. But I can’t prove that to anybody, coming out of prison, like, ‘Hey, guys. I’m changed. I’m good.’
“They have to say, ‘Here’s who you were for 32 years. Here’s this dark period of your life. And here’s who you are for the next 20…’ I have at least 20 years till most people in this world are willing to be, like, ‘You know what? Maybe he really did change. Maybe incarceration really did…’ In one of those rare instances where incarceration actually helped an individual; maybe I’m one of those rare cases. But I have 20 years to prove that. So I’m not in a rush other than to be myself and let people see that slowly over time.
“I hate talking about it in any kind of contextual way because I feel like it might come across like I’m giving excuses. I’m not. I’m just telling people the context under which these things happened. That’s it.”
In the past, we’ve said we’re never going to cover As I Lay Dying again and we’re largely sticking to that stance. Until the day Meggan Murphy can publicly forgive Lambesis for TRYING TO HIRE SOMEONE TO HAVE HER KILLED, we find it hard to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.
