I came across this side quest a while back. I talked to the husband and agreed to try and "rescue" his wife. When I got to her she said she didn't want to go back to him anyway and, as she was a bandit leader, I fought and killed her. Found the ring on here body and took it back to here husband. I was thinking that there's be a few speech options with him, such as "I couldn't find her" or "she'd been killed by the bandits, but here's her ring" or such. Instead when I spoke to him the only speech option is "She attacked me so I killed her".... not very satisfactory I think. You should at least be able to avoid letting him know that she'd gone bad.
BTW, I avoided risking getting the husband killed by telling him to wait while I looked for her.