‘Till Death Do Us Part’ a Siren Song for Suffering Couples

Richard and Blanche Zachry were high school sweethearts who married, raised a son and grew old together.

After more than half a century of marriage, they died together.

Zachry, a retired police officer, shot his ailing wife this summer as she sat in a wheelchair outside a nursing home. Then he shot himself.

They were buried on their 52nd wedding anniversary. He was 76. She was 75.

Florida is believed to be the nation’s leader in murder-suicides, especially among older couples, and the numbers are on the rise. Overall, 38 cases have been recorded this year, and 17 of them were carried out by men 55 years and older.

If the pace continues, the overall rate this year will climb 50%, and the rate for older people will more than double.

The most common scenario in cases involving older people: a depressed elderly man with a sick, suffering wife.

“We’re in the middle of an epidemic here,” said Donna Cohen, a psychologist and professor at the University of South Florida’s Department of Aging and Mental Health.

For more than a decade, Cohen has studied this phenomenon that has become all too familiar in the American lexicon, using data provided by the state’s medical examiners and, when possible, interviews with families.

Sometimes a murder-suicide doesn’t go as planned, and the killer survives.

Cohen interviewed Telford Miller, an 80-year-old retired postal inspector who had fatally shot his cancer-stricken wife, Martha, as she lay in her hospital bed in Lake Wales. He had put the vintage 1922 pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

He survived.

It was Dec. 29, 1999, and the couple were just four days shy of their 54th wedding anniversary. Miller, though wounded, was charged with first-degree murder of his 82-year-old wife.

Attorney Jack Edmund, who defended Miller, remembers the first time he met his client in the jail infirmary.

“He was in a fetal position,” Edmund said. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”

Edmund didn’t think his client was competent to stand trial, even though the attorney thought he would get an acquittal from any jury.

“He killed her out of love,” Edmund said.

Research Alters Perception of Problem

After physical, psychological and psychiatric treatment, Miller healed.

“He’s totally lucid,” Edmund said. “He’s bright. I saw him go from that fetal position to back up standing tall.”

Prosecutors offered to reduce the charge to second-degree murder and recommend that sentencing guidelines be waived. The deal was accepted, and Miller, who now lives with his son in California, was sentenced this year to 10 years’ probation.

“It’s just time that people begin to realize that there is something to this murder-suicide thing,” Edmund said.

Cohen said before research was conducted on murder-suicide, it was believed that “these were very old people, both sick, and there was just nothing to go on for.”

“And the response was that this was altruistic or just a giving up-- and so what,” she said.

Psychological Ills Play Important Role

Despite past assumptions, research shows the same kind of emotions that motivate younger men to kill wives and girlfriends when domestic violence becomes lethal--jealousy, anger, possessiveness--also motivate older men, Cohen said.

Those cases, however, account for only about a third of the total number of murder-suicides in people over 55.

Far more common is the scenario seen in the Zachry and Miller cases: An older man with a wife who is ill and suffering feels he has lost the ability to care for and protect her. Sometimes he is also ill. He decides death is a better option for both.

“In almost all of these cases, there’s almost no documentation that the woman said ‘Kill me,’ ” Cohen said, although she added that sometimes a woman has expressed a desire to die.

The decision to take both lives is often made by the elderly man, who typically has struggled with depression or other psychological problems and has thought about his decision for a while, Cohen said.

“It clearly is an aggressive act perpetrated out of depression and an inability to make things better,” Cohen said. “And it’s the depression--the untreated depression--that really is the troubling part.”

And, she said, it is not easy to treat the husband.

“Men are a formidable group of individuals who have a warrior mentality: ‘I can beat that,’ ” Cohen said. “And that warrior mentality is an obstacle to helping them.”

Though becoming more common, murder-suicides are still rare.

A survey of nearly 200 newspapers across the country leads Cohen to believe Florida tops the nation in murder-suicides. The survey looked at 673 cases nationwide from 1997 through 1999. One-quarter of the deaths were carried out by a person 55 or older, and more than three-quarters involved a spouse or lover.

Florida had the most reported murder-suicide cases, with 163. California was second with 98, Texas had 36 and New York 35. But those states also had the most newspapers surveyed.

Last year in Florida, with a population of about 16 million, there were 62 cases of murder-suicide.

Cohen points to simple demographics to explain the increase in such cases among the elderly.

“You’ve got more older people and more people married, and so even though the phenomenon is rare . . . you’ve got a population at risk.”

Zachry, a World War II veteran, had served in the Navy on a submarine in the Pacific and was a 24-year police veteran.

His wife, Blanche, was a vibrant, active woman who was rarely sick until this spring, when her health deteriorated rapidly. After contracting bacterial meningitis, she drifted into a coma and suffered a stroke. Zachry visited her every day at the nursing home in Ormond Beach.

Barry and Dorothy Biss lived across the street from the Zachrys for 30 years and were hit hard by the deaths.

“It’s tragic--love conquers all,” said Biss, who also once worked with Richard Zachry.

“I don’t know what could have helped,” his wife said, “unless he had three or four people in the house with him. But I don’t know if he would have allowed it.”