‘Duck Sauce Killer’ abused wife for decades, her lawyer says

The widow of accused “Duck Sauce Killer” Glenn Hirsch endured decades of “sadistic” beatings and rape and wouldn’t have dared prevent him from storing guns and ammo in her Queens apartment, her lawyer argues in a new court filing.

The lawyer for Dorothy Hirsch offered the horrific details from her marriage to bolster his argument she should have never been charged with gun possession after police found firearms and ammo stashed in her apartment.

“Glenn’s acts of brutality against Dorothy (before and during their marriage) included sadistic and violent sexual abuse, striking, cutting and menacing her with weapons, punching her, slapping her, threatening to kill her, extortion and contempt,” lawyer Mark Bederow wrote .

Prosecutors knew about the history of abuse when they arrested her — they sent over a detailed list of Hirsch’s past domestic arrests to the judge in his case on June 3, the same day his wife was busted on gun charges, Bederow said.

Dorothy Hirsch, 62, was busted the day after her husband’s arrest in the April 30 slaying of beloved Chinese-food deliveryman Zhiwen Yan, 45.

Hirsch killed the Great Wall restaurant delivery worker over a monthlong grudge centering on Hirsch’s belief he didn’t get enough duck sauce packets with a meal, according to prosecutors.

Cops found eight guns when they searched the home of Hirsch’s wife after his arrest, all stashed in a closet wrapped in bags, one wrapped in tinfoil.

Prosecutors “knew that Dorothy was a longtime victim of Glenn’s domestic violence” before green-lightning her arrest, Bederow wrote to Assistant District Attorney Thomas Salmon on Friday.

That abuse included a grueling Dec. 19, 1995, ordeal before they were married in which Hirsch was accused of holding her captive in a motel room, stripping and pistol-whipping her, then leaving her handcuffed, gagged and blindfolded while he repeatedly raped her. She accused him of cutting her by running a knife over her stomach and rib cage and hitting her with a ruler, a radio antenna and his fists.

The ultimate disposition of the 1995 case was not immediately clear. But the case was part of decades of abuse the Queens district attorney’s office detailed in a June 3 letter to Queens Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Holder. The letter describes the allegations against Hirsch in 10 sealed arrests between 1991 and 2012, mostly relating to his wife.

In another horrific incident, on Jan. 19, 2007, Hirsch was accused of hitting his wife with a rolled-up towel, punching and scratching her and putting a pillow and comforter over her face to muffle her screams. The next day, he was allegedly threatened to kill her and her family if she left him and went to the police.

At the time, cops found a gun, hundreds of bullets, a knife and a duplicate police shield in his bedroom. Even though Dorothy Hirsch didn’t need to cooperate for prosecutors to pursue weapons charges against him, the case was dismissed for speedy trial reasons, Bederow wrote.

Hirsch was freed on bail for the April killing, then fatally shot himself on Aug. 5, proclaiming his innocence and asking prosecutors to drop the case against his wife in a suicide note Bederow filed with the court.

A grand jury indicted Dorothy Hirsch on multiple weapons possession charges in early September.

Bederow is demanding the DA’s office turn over any details from Glenn Hirsch’s unsealed arrests that would bolster his wife’s defense, arguing that he’d explained to Salmon that “evidence of Glenn’s yearslong abuse of Dorothy was favorable to her because it offered an obvious explanation as to why she wouldn’t question Glenn about his behavior and his property, and why she wouldn’t inspect his possessions.”

“The DA knew before arresting Dorothy that Glenn abused her for years,” Bederow said in a Sunday statement to the Daily News. “That evidence obviously is relevant to her defense that she didn’t know the guns were in HIS closet because she wouldn’t dare question him or snoop through the junk he stored.”

“It is regrettable that the DA would simply disregard the domestic violence history and refuse to disclose favorable evidence by coldly decreeing that it is not relevant,” he added. “We are entitled to evidence they knew about before they chose to indict Dorothy for possessing what obviously were Glenn Hirsch’s guns.”

The Queens DA’s office did not immediately return a message seeking comment Sunday.