Man, 78, Kills Ailing Wife, Then Himself

No longer able to cope with his wife’s worsening Alzheimer’s disease, an elderly El Toro man apparently killed her Tuesday, then committed suicide, an Orange County sheriff’s spokesman said.

Retired airline executive Reid Logan called the Sheriff’s Department about 7 a.m. “with words to the effect that he had killed her. And he would kill himself” before deputies could get there, Lt. Richard Olson said.

When deputies arrived at the Logans’ neatly kept mobile home at the El Toro Mobile Estates, they found the bodies of Logan and his wife, Edith, both 78, in the bathroom.

Reid Logan was shot once in the head with a .357 magnum bullet, Olson said, and Edith Logan was found in the bathtub, dead from “severe trauma to the head.” A note was found beside the bodies but Olson declined to release its contents.

The deaths have been listed as a murder-suicide, but the investigation is continuing, Deputy Coroner Bruce Lyle said. Investigators have not yet identified the weapon used to kill Edith Logan, but Olson said that household items are being tested.

Advanced Stage of Disease

According to Lyle and several of the couple’s neighbors, both husband and wife had been ill for some time--he with heart disease, she with Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive and seriously debilitating form of dementia.

Edith Logan suffered from an advanced stage of the disease and was so confused, her neighbors said, that she would sometimes wander into the street and they would have to lead her home.

“Not too long ago, I was sitting in a chair in the front room. She didn’t know I was there and she came out and she talked to the fern,” said one neighbor, who requested that her name not be used.

Reid Logan, according to neighbor Grace Colby, was “a devoted husband,” caring for his wife and driving the two of them to a nearby senior center for meals after his wife was no longer able to cook. Worried about the couple, Colby and other neighbors in the mobile home park used to bring them food from time to time.

Neighbors said they did not know precisely what led Logan Reid to kill himself and his wife. Recently, one neighbor said, the couple’s 17-year-old black poodle died and “they both were sad.”

But it was hard to know what Logan Reid was thinking, other park residents said, because the couple--among the first residents of the park when it opened 11 years ago--had kept to themselves in recent years.

They rarely had visitors, although last week a daughter who lives in Santa Barbara had come for several days, Colby said. (Neither Colby, other park residents nor the coroner’s office could say if the Logans had other children.)

Shocked and saddened by the deaths Tuesday, some neighbors also said they could understand why Reid Logan might kill himself and his wife. The couple was lonely and Edith Logan was very ill, one neighbor noted.

“They had their backs against the wall,” she said. “So now you can look up and thank God they’re both in paradise.”