Word: sill
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Very baffling, thought Attorney David A. Weyer. A practicing lawyer for only two years, he had taken on his first criminal case and lost it. Violet Sill, 34, a bride of 15 months, had confessed, been tried and found guilty of manslaughter, had been sentenced to 20 years in prison. She had fired the shotgun that killed her tavern-owner husband Marion; this was incontrovertible. Yet for 34-year-old Dave Weyer, who had once worked in a children's psychiatric clinic, Violet Sill's continued insistence on her own guilt raised the suspicion that something was wrong...
...husband as he lay on the couch, and wounded herself superficially in the arm and stomach in a suicide attempt-firing three shots in all. Satisfied with her story, the cops neglected to complete the normal crime-lab studies of the murder scene, fingerprints and other clues, arrested Violet Sill for murder...
...before, for example, Violet unreasoningly blamed herself when her first husband was killed in a traffic accident. The doctors also agreed that Violet had a tendency to get herself into "situations where she was either beaten or subjected to frightening experiences by her husband"; it was known that Marion Sill had often beaten his wife...
...Violet's story with physical proof. Into the case came Ballistics Expert Stanley MacDonald, Multnomah County detective chief in Portland, Ore. MacDonald examined fabric shreds, wall sections, photographs, figured the directions of the four shots, compared firings from the shotgun. Two months later he presented his findings: Marion Sill had fired three times at Violet, then reloaded the gun; the fourth shot, which entered Sill's neck from a perpendicular angle, was the one that splattered his flesh on the ceiling, the one that Violet triggered from the floor. Furthermore, Expert MacDonald pointed out that the shots fired...
Last week Attorney Dave Weyer's petition for pardon was sent to Washington's Governor Arthur B. Langlie. With it were supporting statements from the trial judge and the head of the state parole board. Violet Sill, now 37, no longer felt a need to be pushed around, to feel guilty. Chances were good that she would soon be free...