In 2006, a man from Portland, Oregon, hired someone to kill his 51-year-old wife, Susan Kuhnhausen. But things didn’t go as he planned.
Susan was a trauma nurse and had practiced wrestling as a hobby for 30 years.
One day, when she came home, a man with a hammer, later identified as Ed Haffey, attacked her in the bedroom.
But the man didn’t know Susan wasn’t an ordinary middle-aged woman. She quickly knocked him down with a fast move.
She held him still and used a strangling move—not to kill him, but to make him pass out. When she let go, he got up, angrier and more dangerous.
At that moment, she decided she had to kill him.
Susan thought about her family. She said, “Everyone has someone who loves them—a child, a wife, a mother, a father. The worst part isn’t that someone tried to kill me, but that I had to kill someone to survive. But I’m not ashamed. I chose life.”
The man chased her down the hall, punched her, and knocked her down. He jumped on top of her, raising the hammer to hit her.
Then, adrenaline took over. She bit him hard. He didn’t expect this fight back, especially from someone half his size. This man had a dark past—he had already killed his ex-wife.
Susan grabbed his arm with the hammer, broke free, and strangled him again. This time she didn’t stop until she was sure he was dead.
Police soon found out her husband, Mike Kuhnhausen, was behind the attack and arrested him.
Ten years later, Susan still cries sometimes when she talks about it. “When I cry, I feel better,” she says.
She worked as a nurse until 2014, saving lives every day. After killing the attacker, people called her a hero.
But Susan wondered, “Hero? What does that really mean? Why me?”
Her boss told her, “They call you a hero not because you killed a man, but because they want to believe that they could survive too, if faced with the same danger.”