NEED TO KNOW
Theresa Nist says ex-husband Gerry Turner had a “pretty dark” sense of humor during their relationship, including making jokes about her death.
Nist, 72, got candid about her time with the first-ever Golden Bachelor star while appearing on the Nov. 4 episode of the Dear Shandy podcast. (The pair married in January 2024 before splitting just a few months later.)
After host Sharleen Joynt joked that while watching the first season of The Golden Bachelor, her co-host and husband, Andy Levine, used to joke that Turner “had bodies under the floorboards,” Nist replied, “So, do you want me to tell you a story similar to that?”
“I finally went to his house, and 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?’ 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,” Nist claimed.
JOHN FLEENOR / DISNEY
Nist then recalled that she thought to herself, “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, like maybe if he could have gotten rid of me somehow,” she continued of the moment on the podcast, before clarifying: “I don’t think he would have killed me. … No, I don’t think that was true.”
“It’s not true, but it just spoke to an underlying feeling about me,” added Nist.
A rep for Turner did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
Nist’s appearance on the Dear Shandy podcast to discuss her ex-husband, she said, was spurred by the release of his book, Golden Years: What I’ve Learned from Love, Loss, and Reality TV.
In the book, which hit shelves on Nov. 4, Turner reveals that he had doubts before the pair’s wedding and claims that a lack of intimacy led to their divorce.
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“I never planned on saying anything about what happened between us. So many people asked me and I would just say, you know, you can’t really know a person in the amount of time, like in four weeks. And I would leave it at that,” Nist said during the Dear Shandy episode. “And honestly, it was really a matter of if you have nothing good to say, just don’t say anything. And I didn’t want to hurt him. And so I just left it the way it was.”
“But now, I mean, he’s written a book and he said things and now I can’t ignore it,” she continued.
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Nist and Turner got engaged during the finale of The Golden Bachelor in November 2023. They then married in a televised wedding ceremony on Jan. 4, 2024, before announcing their divorce shortly after in April.
Gerry Turner/Instagram
“Theresa and I have had a number of heart-to-heart conversations, and we’ve looked closely at our situation, our living situation and so forth, and we’ve kind of come to the conclusion mutually that it’s probably time for us to dissolve our marriage,” Turner said on Good Morning America at the time.
Turner is now engaged to Lana Sutton. He announced the news on Instagram in October, writing in his caption, “We’ve got BIG news. The Golden Bachelor is OFF the market. I found my perfect match and she said ‘YES’. I Love this woman.”
