REVENGE FOR ETERNITY

Is there friction between you and the in-laws? Chill out. Compared to the infighting in the family of Chan Dara, the rest of us have it easy.

Chan, 27, was a goldsmith from Phnom Penh who had eloped with a would-be singer named Pich Sorphoan, 18, to the fury of her mother. The young woman's career blossomed, and she became a nightclub singer,   earning a fabulous $20 a night. Her husband's business deteriorated.

This further angered Chan's mother-in-law, Pich Chanborey. So she told people that her daughter was single. The young woman started receiving proposals from wealthy suitors. The older woman admitted she wanted her daughter to abandon her unemployed husband and marry someone rich.

The depressed, spurned husband decided to escape to the after-life. Chan Dara wrote a note blaming "a nasty mother-in-law, crazy for prestige and money," and then shot his wife, their nine-month-old baby and himself.

But the mother-in-law had the final revenge, the South China Morning Post reported in March. She noted that Cambodian tradition requires husbands and wives to be cremated together to be married in the after-life. So she made sure they had separate funerals. This is the kind of wicked mother-in-law who gets immortalized in fairy tales.