BMJ  2003;327:E202 (4 October), doi:10.1136/bmjusa.03030007 (published 12 April 2003)

BMJ USA: Filler

The woman who couldn't shoot straight

From BMJ USA 2003;Mar:153

When I was a third-year medical student in the late 1940s, I walked into the Colorado Psychiatric Hospital, where I was going to take a medical history and do a physical examination on a newly admitted patient. While I waited for the elevator, the entry door flew open and two uniformed deputy sheriffs stepped in. They were half-dragging, half-carrying a young woman who was sobbing uncontrollably. Her hair was disheveled, and her face streaked with tears. My heart went out to her. We all stepped into the elevator when it arrived. The deputy sheriffs and their prisoner got off on one floor, and I got off on another.

The next morning, a small group of my classmates and I met with the hospital director, as we did every morning when he interviewed a newly admitted patient. A nurse and an orderly brought the patient in, and I was surprised to find it was the young woman I had seen in the lobby the day before. She was no longer crying, but she sat motionless in a chair—the picture of utter despair, of infinite sadness.

The late Dr Charles Rymer attempted to interview her, but she either ignored his questions or barely nodded her head in response. Finally, the doctor gestured to the nearby attendants, and they escorted the devastated woman from the room. Our professor had managed to piece together what had happened by talking to the sheriff's deputies, and this is the tale he told:

The woman had been married to a poor young man several years earlier, and they struggled to eke out a precarious existence on a lonely farm on the desolate plains of eastern Colorado. The marriage was characterized by heated quarrels from time to time after dinner.

One evening, the woman and her husband found themselves in a particularly vehement argument, and she leaped from the table, ran to the corner of the kitchen, and picked up a .22 rifle. Her husband raced out the door, stopped in front of an outbuilding, and turned around to face her. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder, aimed, and fired. The astonished husband heard the bullet slam into the wall of another outbuilding some distance away.

The wife dropped the rifle, ran to her husband's side, and threw her arms around him while begging his forgiveness. They walked back into the house, and the incident was promptly forgotten.

This little drama was replayed again and again over the next year or so. The couple would quarrel. He would run out the door. The wife would shoot and miss. Then they would kiss and make up.

One evening, the man and his wife had another spat. He tore out the door, and she grabbed the little .22 rifle and fired. She was astonished when he seized his chest and fell to the ground. She had shot him. Somehow she managed to drag him to the car and drive into town. She went directly to the office of the only doctor in the small town, and the two of them dragged her husband into his office. He lived long enough to look up at the doctor and say, "Doc, she didn't mean to shoot me. It was an accident." He died shortly after he uttered those words.

The woman was never charged with the shooting, and she was released from the psychiatric hospital a few days later. I never heard of her again, but I have long been haunted by the memory of the tragedy that surely stayed with her all her life.

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