‘Gruesome, beyond belief’: Slidell man certain dismembered woman is his missing wife

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - A Slidell man believes the dismembered woman police found in an Upper 9th Ward freezer Tuesday is his missing wife.

Benjamin Beale, 34, is in custody after police made that horrific discovery inside of a bus in his yard on Pauline Street.

Although police have not released an identity, Micah Dardar believes it’s his wife Julia Dardar, 36, who he reported missing last month.

“She would want to be remembered as a good mother because she tried her best, we had our ups and downs,” Dardar said through tears.

Dardar says his wife Julia formed a Meth addiction a year ago and left him and their teenage daughters after they asked her to get help in June.

“This is a big gap, an emptiness in our lives now because we always did think she would eventually get better and come back,” Dardar said.

But she met Benjamin Beale, known as Kelley, who Dardar says enabled her addiction.

Dardar reported her missing before he learned she and Beale went to California at the end of the summer to pick up the old school bus in which police would eventually find a deep freezer containing a headless torso.

No matter what Dardar heard, he wouldn’t give up on her.

“Because she is the mother of my children,” Dardar said without hesitation. “We were together since 2002. We were together since she was a teenager and I was in college. I always felt like she was my responsibility to take care of and to see her go down this path and no one else watching out for her.”

“I did my best. I did what I could do. I tried to give her order of protective custody, I alerted multiple levels of law enforcement of the situation, but in the end, there was nothing I could do to stop what happened,” Dardar said.

After she returned from California, Dardar says Julia violated a protective order to come steal some tools from him.

“But, they didn’t enforce the protective order and a couple days later is when she might have come up missing,” Dardar said.

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Dardar says someone informed him December 20, his wife had disappeared from Beale’s house on Pauline Street a few days earlier. He said Beale was using her car and refusing to cooperate with police he sent there on a welfare check.

“I knew she was going down a bad road, but the gruesome way this ended is beyond belief,” Dadar said.

While executing a search warrant trying to track down Julia, NOPD investigators found the freezer with remains in Beale’s bus along with a power saw, which appeared to have bits of flesh on the blade.

“Meth steals your soul,” Dardar said. “Never take that first hit because you never know if that first hit is going to be all it takes to drive you to complete insanity.”

Dardar recalled the days before she became addicted when they worked on cars together.

“I hope that she could be remembered for the person she was before all this happened,” he said.

Investigators say they also discovered a clandestine meth lab in Beale’s house and two guns. He has not been charged with murder at this moment.

Beale is booked on a $400,000 bond with obstruction of justice involving a death along with drug and weapons charges.

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