Neurotic Explosion

At 45, Colonel Aubrey Dewitt Smith, chief of the Plans & Operations Division (Logistics Section) of the U.S. Army in Japan, was destined for bigger things. An up & coming West Pointer (class of '30), decorated at Okinawa (Silver Star) and a Korean war veteran, his life was all Army.

He was at his desk all day, relaxed in the Officers' Club, and was married to a general's daughter: Dorothy Krueger Smith, 40, the only daughter of retired General Walter Krueger, World War II commander of the island-hopping Sixth Army. But to Dorothy Smith, brunette and high-strung, the lot of a conscientious soldier's wife was not a happy one. Monotony unnerved her, loneliness oppressed; she sought excitement in alcohol, forgetfulness in dope. The colonel, she believed, regarded his wife as a clinging handicap to his professional career.

Last October Colonel Smith got orders to leave for Washington, where a promotion awaited him. That night, as he slept, he was stabbed to death.

"Willful Murder." In Tokyo last week a U.S. Army court-martial, headed by a major general and including a WAC lieutenant colonel, heard the prosecution accuse Dorothy Smith of "willful and premeditated murder." Shigeko Tani, her Japanese maid, testified that she found the colonel bleeding to death in bed and Mrs. Smith, in bra and panties, clutching a bloody, ten-inch-long hunting knife. A neighbor, Lieut. Colonel Joseph S. Hardin, found the defendant sitting alongside her dying husband, trying to light two cigarettes at once. She blurted out: "I'm sorry I didn't get him in the heart."

"Primitive Impulse." For the defense, Lieut. Colonel Howard S. Levie challenged the court-martial's legal competence on the grounds that the Army ceases to have jurisdiction over a soldier's wife at the moment of her husband's death. Overruled, Levie entered a plea of "temporary insanity" and came close to making it stick. Mrs. Smith, said a witness, "didn't know what she was doing" when under the influence of drugs or liquor; at the time of the murder she was "doped" with paraldehyde, a sedative.

Brigadier General Rawley E. Chambers, the Army's top psychiatrist and Mrs. Smith's former personal physician, told the court that the defendant is subject to "neurotic explosions," that she has frequently slashed her wrists, and that once she knocked down another officer's wife. "I believe she would be able to tell right from wrong," the general said. "But I do not believe that she had any ability to adhere to the right."

By six votes to three, the court found Dorothy Smith guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced her "to be confined at hard labor for the rest of her natural life." * Major General Joseph P. Sullivan choked up as he read the sentence.

*A unnaminous verdit of guilty would have made the death sentence mandatory.

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