CHELSEA, Vt. (AP) – On the outs with his wife, whom he believed was seeing another man, Herbert Rodgers waited for divine intervention.

When God didn’t stop him, he said, he set out for her home, planning to beat the man with a baseball bat and pour lye over him. But when he got there, there was no man, so Rodgers broke into the house through a window, tied her up and dumped lye all over her in an attack that left her with a broken arm, a broken eye socket and burns over 80 percent of her body, according to police.

“I lost it, I just lost it,” he said as he was being arrested.

Rodgers, 52, of White River Junction, was ordered held without bail Monday after pleading not guilty to burglary, domestic assault and first-degree aggravated domestic assault in the attack early Sunday in Thetford. Wearing white bandages on his arms for burns suffered from the lye, he made no comments during a brief arraignment before being returned to jail.

His estranged wife, Carmen Tarleton, 39, remained in critical condition at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, while in White River Junction, hazardous materials crews executed a search warrant at his apartment, concerned about what substances may have been left there.

“During my encounter with Rodgers he told me that he had been talking to God over the past week or so asking him to stop him from doing this,” Vermont State Police Trooper Hugh O’Donnell said in an affidavit released Monday. “He said that he was going to wait until his birthday for God to respond.”

His birthday had been Saturday.

O’Donnell responded to a 911 call from the modest ranch house where Tarleton lived with her 12- and 14-year-old daughters to find the girls outside yelling “He’s killing her,” according to O’Donnell.

Inside, O’Donnell and other responding officers found Tarleton crawling on the floor, her face distorted from the chemical, her skin turning brown before his eyes as she begged for an ambulance. Lethargic and unable to stand, she pulled herself into a bathroom shower as she awaited medical help.

Tarleton, a nurse at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., was coherent enough to talk to police arriving on the scene but can no longer help in the investigation, according to Detective Lt. John Paul Sinclair of the Vermont State Police.

Lye can have a devastating effect on the body. Officials at Brigham and Women’s Hospital would not discuss her condition or her injuries.

“It forms horrible, horrible burns,” said Joseph A. Heppert, a chemistry professor at the University of Kansas. The burns are caused by “damage of disrupting cells, and causing lot cell damage in an area.”

It wasn’t clear where the lye came from, except that Rodgers told fire officials he had poured it out of its container and into another container before leaving his apartment.

Rodgers, who has a criminal record in New Jersey and California and has used three different Social Security numbers, was working as a clerk at a J.C. Penney, according to Sinclair.

Tarleton had lived in the neatly kept one-story home just off Interstate 91 for about a year, according to neighbors.

“They seemed like nice people,” said neighbor Brian Blanchfield, 54, who said he never heard noise or trouble from next door until Sunday, when his dogs – barking at the commotion – woke him up.

His wife had told people – including Thetford Police Chief Jim Lanctot – about their pending divorce, but she never mentioned violence and there were no trouble calls to the house before Sunday, he said.

“I call them “awareness calls.’ She’d call and tell me she was going through a divorce. I told her how to apply for a restraining order, and I told her to call 911 any time, even if something just feels funny,” said Lanctot, who responded to the 3 a.m. call.

Rodgers was convinced she was seeing another man, and that’s who he was after when he set out, Deputy Orange County State’s Attorney Robert DiBartolo said.

Defense attorney Kevin Griffin said Rodgers had specifically asked him not to argue for bail at Monday’s hearing, although he didn’t say why.