US woman wanted for husband’s slaying arrested in Rome

ROME — An American woman wanted in the 2002 death of her husband, whose remains were so badly burned they weren’t identified for more than a decade, has been arrested in Rome, police said.

Rome police said Thursday they arrested Beverly McCallum after she checked into a small Rome hotel. Italian hotels are required to register guests in an online system linked to a police database.

The process revealed that McCallum had an international arrest warrant against her, according to a police spokeswoman who declined to give her name in line with police policy.

U.S. authorities had been seeking to extradite McCallum from Pakistan, where she was believed to be living, to stand trial in the slaying of her husband, Robert Caraballo. In 2002, he was beaten and suffocated, and his body was dumped and burned in a blueberry patch in western Michigan.

In Michigan, the Eaton County sheriff’s office was aware of the arrest but had no immediate comment.

Calls to the U.S. Embassy in Rome weren’t immediately returned.

Caraballo’s badly burned remains were found in a scorched footlocker in a wooded area in Ottawa County in the days following his death. The identify of the victim remained unknown until an anonymous tip in 2015 led police to identify the remains as his.

Murder charges were filed in November against McCallum, her daughter, Dineane Ducharme, and Christopher McMillan, of Grand Rapids. The three also were charged with conspiracy, and disinterment and mutilation of a body.

In October, McMillan pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He had been expected to testify against the other two.

McCallum reportedly met a man from Pakistan over the internet and moved there in the years after her husband’s slaying.

Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press