Wife Jailed After Killing Husband ‘at His Request’

A 61-year-old woman told Santa Monica police that she shot and fatally wounded her husband at his own request late Tuesday because she is terminally ill and he did not wish to survive her.

Lt. Jim Dawson said Sibyl Marvin told detectives that her husband, Donald, 70, handed her a .25-caliber pistol and asked her to shoot him, saying, “Kill me. I can’t live without you.”

Investigators, however, questioned her story after neighbors told them that Marvin had been physically abusive to his wife and that she may have fought back after a beating.

“We believe both were intoxicated,” Homicide Detective Ray Cooper said today. “There was an argument, some name-calling. Our information is that he assaulted her. He told her to go ahead and shoot him, and she did.”

Sibyl Marvin was taken to a Santa Monica hospital, where she was treated for a swollen jaw, Cooper said, adding that she was to have undergone surgery for throat cancer today.

She told officers that she shot her husband as he had asked, and then went next door to tell a neighbor what she had done. The neighbor called police, who found the man unconscious at his house in the 800 block of Bay Street. He was taken to Santa Monica Hospital, where he died about 90 minutes later.

Sibyl Marvin was booked for investigation of murder and is being held without bail in the jail ward of County-USC Medical Center.