An elderly woman’s “mercy killing” looking more like murder – an overview of elderly homicide/suicides

(Editor’s note:  Virginia Chumbley was 48 years old when she was shot to death by her husband.  Technically, she doesn’t fit into the “elderly” data and case examples discussed in this blog post.  However, even if Virginia Chumbley was too young to be considered elderly, the press and public is responding to her shooting death in exactly the same way they react to the murders of elderly women by their husbands – with sympathy for the alleged killer.  Over the past 11 years or so, it’s my opinion that the public and press will assume that when a husband murders his wife, the public will assume it was done out of love, compassion and mercy – as long as his wife was old, ill or disabled.)

In the early morning hours of Wednesday, August 28, 48-year-old Ernest Chris Chumbley called 911 and reported that he had shot his wife to death in their home in London, Kentucky. Later that same day, Chumbley was charged with murder by police. Due to a videotaped “interview” with Chumbley by a local TV station, the story became national news, peaking on August 29 and 30.

Here’s an excerpt from what looks to be the complete AP story that made the rounds on August 30th, this one from Lawofficer.com:

Chumbley told WKYT-TV from jail that his wife wanted him to end her pain, and he told her he could offer her “what the doctor gave you.”

“She said ‘No, I want you to stop my pain for good,'” Chumbley told the news station. Mosley said Chumbley has declined further interviews from the jail.

There’s more elsewhere from the “interview,” but it plays out the same.  Chumbly claims throughout that his wife demanded he kill her and that it was the only thing he could do.  A significant number of headlines – at least a third – call Virginia Chumbley’s murder a “mercy killing” – but without scare quotes, suggesting that she was killed as an act of mercy is a fact rather than an accused killer’s claim.

I used scare quotes around “interview” because Chumbley wasn’t asked any real questions about a couple of pesky details that get in the way of the idea that this was “mercy” and there was nothing else he could do.  Again, from the story:

Ernest Chris Chumbley, 48, cries throughout the 16-minute call placed around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday and says he shot the woman twice in the face with a .32-caliber handgun in their southeastern Kentucky home. (Emphasis added.)

Shooting someone in the face is unusually brutal.  It means they see the shot coming and it means you don’t care about any risk of disfiguring their face.

More:

He told the 911 dispatcher that his wife was a cancer patient and was supposed to go to the doctor the next day. (Emphasis added.)

This should have been a big red flag.  Maybe a real reporter could have asked him why he didn’t give his wife some extra pain meds and then do whatever it took to get through the night? When at the doctor’s office, they could have laid out just how bad things were (if true) and demanded better pain relief, hospice, something to give some relief to them both.

While it’s too early to tell, Ernest Chumbley’s “mercy killing” story may be falling apart.  His wife’s family is speaking out, and they aren’t buying it:

Her family says Virginia ”Jenny Mae” Chumbley was suffering from cancer, but she never would have wanted to die, or for someone to take life from her.

“She loved her kids, her grandkids, what more could you live for?” said her mother, Rita Smith after a preliminary hearing in Laurel District Court Tuesday morning.

And more…

“You tell me, if I’m dying of cancer, with all of these little ones around me, something to give me to live for, to give me hope, why would I look to you and say take my life,” said Smith.

The judge says the grand jury will consider the murder charge, and Chumbley is to stay in jail on a $200,000 cash bond.

“Now he took my baby’s life. Let the Justice system take his,” said Smith.

She claims Chumbley also kept her daughter from some of her doctor’s appointments and chemotherapy, treatments that could have helped her.

Personally, I don’t think we should view the family’s claims – among them that Ernest Chumbley kept his wife from some medical appointments – as any less credible than the self-serving statements of the man who admits to killing Virginia Chumbley.  I don’t expect this to impact public opinion, though, due to simple math.  My own google news search yielded about 80 or so instances of stories posted emphasizing Chumbley’s “interview” and/or claims of “mercy” as a reason for killing his wife.  Some even appeared on news sites outside of the U.S.  In contrast, only two local news sites have posted stories about the reactions and statements of Virginia Chumbley’s family to her murder.  Only a very small audience is getting to see/hear what the family has to say compared to the very large audience who saw Virginia Chumbley’s death framed as a “mercy killing.”

None of this is unusual.  The “rush” to judge an elderly/sick/disabled  woman’s violent death a “mercy killing”, and contrary evidence emerging but reported to a smaller audience, are common in the media coverage of the cases in elderly homicide/suicides (or just homicides) involving husbands and wives.

We encountered this in the very first instance we encountered up close involving the Chicago media virtually inventing a “mercy killing” years ago – the media, without comments from the alleged perpetrator, his family or his lawyer – managed to fabricate a “mercy killing” through implying the shooting death of a hospitalized woman by her husband automatically should be labeled a “mercy killing” and asking leading questions of neighbors.  When facts started to intrude on this fabrication, the stories had become much shorter and had fallen off the front page.  It’s all recorded in excruciating detail in an article I wrote in The Ragged Edge back in 2002:

The first I heard of Shirley Harrison’s violent death was on a WGN news broadcast on New Year’s Day. The announcer said there’d been a “mercy killing” at Christ Hospital — a husband had allegedly shot his wife to death as she lay in her hospital bed.

Being late for a meeting with friends, I took a minute to call the station and register a complaint for the use of the term “mercy killing.” Unfortunately, I was about to get very used to hearing the term in regard to Shirley Harrison’s death.

As you can see from the above, the press started using the term “mercy killing” when literally nothing was known except that a woman had been shot to death by her husband while she was in the hospital.

Shirley Harrison was a 74-year-old woman who’d been admitted to a Chicago area hospital after having a stroke. On New Year’s Eve, her husband came into the hospital with a gun and shot her three times in the chest. He then shot himself once. He survived. She didn’t.

For two full days, this was all the information available to the public and press regarding the death of Shirley Harrison. Unfortunately, this didn’t stop the construction of a story that depicted Shirley Harrison as “suffering,” and her death a “mercy killing.”

Some excerpts from the early coverage:

The Daily Southtown’s coverage began Jan. 2: “Neighbors: Man wanted to end wife’s suffering.” As might be expected from the headline, the story was one of speculation from neighbors. The Harrisons “didn’t mingle with people,” said one; still, those quoted seemed confident in describing the Harrisons’ relationship, Shirley Harrison’s health and emotional status and Harrison’s motives for killing her.

One anonymous neighbor said “there was just no hope for her,” adding that her husband “just didn’t want her to suffer.” Another recalled seeing the couple a month previously — Shirley Harrison, sitting in the car, gave a thumbs down when asked how she was doing. She “had been suffering and was in so much pain,” said that one. It didn’t seem to occur to the reporter or the neighbor that Shirley Harrison’s “thumbs down” could have many explanations — including one that might mean “Tom’s being an asshole today.”

It seemed that Southtown reporters were asking specifically about the murder being a “mercy killing.” The paper reported that police “would not say whether Harrison shot his wife out of mercy for her suffering.” Since it’s unlikely that the police would have issued that refusal spontaneously, it’s reasonable to assume that they were responding to specific questions asked by reporters.

*****

“They were like 2 little birds together” read the headline of the Sun-Times’s Jan. 3 article. The piece, by reporters Kate Grossman and Ana Mendieta, began with quotes from Mary Derda and another neighbor claiming to be “close friends” of the Harrisons; the headline was from Derda: Tom Harrison “did not kill her for malice or meanness. They were like two little birds together.” We also learn that Thomas Harrison has diabetes and would only eat food prepared by his wife. Further down, Grossman and Mendieta look at the growing phenomenon of homicide-suicide cases among elderly couples.

Finally, some factual information made its way – painfully and slowly – into media coverage:

The Daily Southtown’s Jan. 5 article, its shortest so far, told us that Shirley Harrison had been in a regular hospital room — not the ICU — at the time of the shooting, and that Thomas Harrison told several people he wanted his wife to die. He allegedly shot her after sending a nurse to get a sleeping pill for his wife, reported the paper.

The Sun-Times’s story that day was longer. Prosecutors at Harrison’s bedside bond hearing provided information that for the first time gave readers a different picture: Tom Harrison admitted his wife never asked him to kill her. Readers also learn that she was awake when she was shot to death.

John Gorman, spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, told the Sun Times that Shirley Harrison’s doctor “told the defendant that morning that her condition seemed temporary and seemed to be improving,” adding that Shirley Harrison had “never complained of pain or suffering to hospital officials, or the defendant.” Thomas Harrison was ordered held on a $1 million bond. The Sun-Times story quoted Northwestern University law professor Paul Robinson criticizing the first-degree murder charge and amount of bail ordered in the case.

The Daily Southtown’s Jan. 6 story was its first to include prosecutors’ statements about the lack of evidence that Shirley Harrison was suffering or in pain.

For those who like closure, NDY met with some success in turning the rhetoric and framing around.  We did this both through our use of press releases and our presence at numerous hearings as Thomas Harrison’s case made its way through the court.  Two things I never reported as life got us involved with other issues: Thomas Harrison stunned everyone when, during one hearing, he announced a plea of “guilty” to murder – no plea bargain or defense.  I guess that Thomas Harrison finally came to grips with what he’d done and he knew it was murder, even if many were prepared to call it something else.  Also, during the trial, several relatives of Shirley Harrison came to us quietly in the halls before and after hearings to thank us for our efforts on Shirley Harrison’s behalf.  On top of their grief, they were furious with the way in which the press was practically calling her murder a blessing.

You can read the full story – minus those additions above – right here.

For an additional perspective on these and related events, please check out “No Mercy” by the Chicago Reader‘s media critic Michael Miner.  He heard about a protest we did at the Chicago Tribune and wrote about that action and the Harrison case as well.

Anyone who has read this blog entry this far probably noticed that both the cases so far involved elderly men killing their wives.  There is a good reason for that.  As I’ll go into below, roughly 90% of homicides in which one elderly person kills another in a marriage (hetero marriages, no data that I know of for same sex couples so far), involve the husband killing his wife, usually with a gun.  Sometimes the killer attempts suicide and sometimes he doesn’t.

There’s a pretty good summary of research regarding this growing type of domestic violence in an article by Diana Reese published in the Washington Post in January this year (2013):

Murder-suicides among people 55 and older have increased from 21 percent in 2002 to 25 percent in 2011 of the total murder-suicides in the United States, according to the Violence Policy Center.

A murder-suicide involving an elderly couple occurs about every two weeks in Florida, Donna Cohen, a professor at the University of South Florida, told the Kansas City Star. The author of several scholarly research articles on the topic, Cohen estimates that 20 older Americans die each week as the result of murder-suicide.

The typical case? A depressed, controlling husband who shoots his ailing wife — without her permission, according to Cohen. For most, this isn’t the romanticized Romeo and Juliet suicide pact with the couple agreeing on the time and place to ride off into the sunset together.

Although the Snellings might have agreed to end it together, the majority of murder-suicides among older couples are not suicide pacts, reports Sonia Salari, a sociologist at the University of Utah. Salari analyzed data from 225 murder-suicides in which one member was age 60 or older.

Experts say depression, exhaustion and isolation all play a role; often, it’s men who are thrust into the unfamiliar role of caregiver. They may suffer from undiagnosed clinical depression. And if they learn their own health problems put them at risk of dying before their spouses, they may believe that no one else can take care of their wives as well as they can.

And they don’t bother asking their wives for permission; in fact, the spouse is often unaware of the plan — and probably wouldn’t agree to it.

I’ve been aware of Donna Cohen’s work for years.  Sonia Salari’s work is new to me.  Somehow I don’t think it’s at all surprising that the two researchers, looking at different groups at different times, still come up with remarkably similar findings.  Unfortunately, empirical data isn’t something most reporters are interested in – nor are groups like Compassion and Choices, who have sought to exploit these tragedies as somehow making a case for assisted suicide.

The point is – if you are somone who might write, report, or be asked to comment on a so-called elderly “mercy killing” case, you have no excuse for reflexively following an established script.  A few google searches or using the links above will get you acquainted with the work of researchers like Cohen and Salari.  To ignore the research and speak without that information is the depth of irresponsibility – and can further perpetuate the myths that grotesquely write off the violent deaths of elderly women as “acts of mercy.”