Woman Says She Shot Husband in Miami : 1967 Murder Ends in Confession

Saying she could not longer tolerate her terrible secret, a grandmotherly domestic worker from San Diego has told Los Angeles police that she killed her husband 18 years ago in Miami, where parts of his dismembered body were found floating in Biscayne Bay.

After her subsequent return to Florida, Betty Ruth Evers, 55, was arrested in Miami Circuit Court on suspicion of first-degree murder in connection with the 1967 slaying of Henry Everett Evers, 59. Dade County authorities say they will send the case to a grand jury in the next three weeks for formal charges.

Evers’ statement, Miami authorities said, is a bizarre twist to what was once the city’s most celebrated murder case. The turn of events came suddenly when the gray-haired woman, who had been living in the San Diego area in recent years, walked into the Hollywood Division police station 12 days ago, sat down and calmly said she had killed her husband.

In a statement filed in court in Dade County on Wednesday, Evers said she accidentally shot her husband eight times and then paid some hitchhikers $500 to dispose of the body. She said she did not know how it turned up dismembered in the bay.

“This caught a lot of people by surprise,” said Michael Cornely, assistant state attorney in Miami now in charge of prosecuting Evers. “As of 1970 or so, this investigation was dormant. . . . All of a sudden, she walked into LAPD and said, ‘I done it!’ ”

“She looks like a 55-year-old grandmother,” added Cornely. “She looks like someone who would serve you pancakes at International House of Pancakes.”

Henry Evers’ killing, nicknamed the “torso murder,” generated headlines when seven pieces of his shot and charred body were found in Biscayne Bay on June 3, 1967. Police were stymied in efforts to identify the victim until Evers, then 37, stepped forward after more than a month and identified the body as that of her husband.

At the time, Evers implicated a friend, a 22-year-old acting student, in the slaying. But a Dade County grand jury declined to indict the man because of discrepancies in statements gathered by police.

Miami police were unable to find any further evidence but said Wednesday that they had always suspected Evers in her husband’s death.

Since then, Evers has served five years in an Alabama prison for violating parole on a forgery charge and has spent time crisscrossing the country, landing domestic jobs in Nevada, Hawaii and San Diego.

In the last two years, Evers worked for invalids and elderly people in San Diego before she stole one of her employer’s cars, drove to Hollywood and confessed to the secret she had kept for 18 years.

Evers first came into the station June 28, said LAPD homicide Detective C. M. Harris. Unable to confirm the woman’s story with Miami authorities, Harris said he was forced to ask Evers to come back the following week, despite the woman’s pleas to be locked up. Evers kept her appointment, the fate of her husband was verified and she voluntarily returned to Florida with Dade County authorities.

“She said she was born in Los Angeles, and that’s the reason why she wanted to turn herself in in Los Angeles,” Harris said. “ . . . Obviously, it wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment-type thing. She had been thinking about this for some time. I felt she wanted to get it off her chest.”

Cornely attributed Evers’ statement to “remorse” and “18 years of causing her family grief.” He said he believes that Evers killed her husband, who owned a machine shop in Rhode Island, because he threatened to leave her and take their three children.

In the court statement, Evers said she accidentally shot her husband eight times--once in the back, seven times in the chest--when he started toward her during an argument and she tripped backward over a chair.

Despite that distinction, Evers says she is ready to be punished.

“I have been told by the police that during her statements she steadfastly insisted no attorney represent her because she wanted to plead guilty and get this thing over,” Cornely said.

In the luggage Evers brought with her to the Miami jail, she had a copy of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” a mystery novel in which a woman conspires in the murder of her husband.