ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 11, 1996 TAG: 9604110054
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: S.D. HARRINGTON STAFF WRITER
A police investigation has backed up friends' speculation about why a 71-year-old Lexington man shot his ill wife Tuesday at Lewis-Gale Medical Center and then turned the gun on himself, Salem Deputy Police Chief Jeff Dudley said Wednesday: It was an act of love.
While visiting his wife in room 402, Frank F. Neutze Jr. shot Miriam "Betty" E. Neutze, 71, in the head with a .38-caliber handgun as she sat in a wheelchair. He then shot himself in the head.
In January, she was transferred to Lewis-Gale Medical Center, where she was placed in an inpatient rehabilitation unit.
One friend who visited Betty Neutze in her hospital room last week said she expected to be discharged to a nursing home this week. And although she would have been closer to her Rockbridge County home, she most likely would not have have been released anytime soon, said Pat Winans, who worked with Betty Neutze as a volunteer at Stonewall Jackson Hospital in Lexington.
The Neutzes had lived in an upscale neighborhood in Rockbridge County near the Lexington city limits. They moved there 7 or 8 years ago from Cherry Hill, N.J.
He was a retired lawyer, with a law degree from Cornell University. She was a retired nursery school teacher.
"I understand what Frank was involved in," said Pete Lincoln, who lived across the street from the Neutzes. "My wife died after seven years of illness."
A hospital employee found the couple shortly before noon Tuesday. Betty Neutze was pronounced dead at the scene. Frank Neutze died in surgery an hour later.
On the windowsill, next to a bouquet of flowers, Frank Neutze left a note listing the phone numbers of the couple's three daughters.
After talking with family members, the police investigation "revealed no indication of domestic violence or malice, but that the actions were those of a husband distraught by his wife's suffering," Dudley said Wednesday.
He would not say how police came to that conclusion and would not elaborate on whether the killing occurred with Betty Neutze's consent.
"It was done out of an act of love for his wife," Dudley said.
The Neutze family has declined to comment. The Neutzes had five grandchildren.
Friends and neighbors say that Frank Neutze had been depressed (text was cut off at this point) lately over his wife's medical condition.
After surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore last August for an aneurism of the aorta, she lost the use of her legs and her kidneys, and she breathed through a tube in her throat.
LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines KEYWORDS: FATALITYby CNB