Word: violet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Need to Suffer. Before the trial, Weyer brought in two psychiatrists. Violet, they concluded, was the sort of woman who had a "need" to "place herself in great jeopardy and receive punishment." Many years 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...
This evidence Attorney Weyer never presented in court. He feared that 1) juries do not take sympathetically to psychiatric evidence; 2) such evidence would necessitate Violet's taking the stand, where she would only insist again that she was guilty; and 3) he still did not know enough to make sense out of the puzzling evidence at the murder scene. And so the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and the judge sentenced Violet to prison for 20 years...
...Gonna Shoot." There, on Dave Weyer's insistence, Violet was brought to Psychiatrist G. Charles Sutch. Typically, in cascades of anxiety and tears, she persisted in saying: "I don't know what happened. I just don't remember." Sutch gave her a dose of Sodium Amytal (truth serum) in an attempt to break through the "tremendous amnesic barrier." "You can remember, Violet," he persuaded her gently. "Tell me everything that happened." Violet haltingly told her story: she had returned home from a restaurant with her husband, quarreling, on the way, about the food. Then...
...Final Shot. Weyer now had only to substantiate 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...
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...