Case of the Spattered Ceiling

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 with the case. He decided to straighten it out.

Who Shot Again? The case was a mess from the beginning. Violet had told the Seattle police, that night in 1954: "He's been nagging me for weeks, picking at me and driving me nuts, and I couldn't stand it any longer." So, she said, as police examined husband Marion's fatal neck wound, she got out the shotgun, killed her 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.

Dave Weyer neglected nothing. He found not three shot patterns, but four: one in the bathroom doorjamb and the bathroom itself, a second in the living-room ceiling, a third in the couch, the fourth in the pine-paneled hall. Then a defense pathologist discovered bits of flesh on the ceiling, found fragments of Violet's jacket in the gaping hole in the couch. If Violet shot her husband--as she insisted--when he was on the couch, how account for the human tissue on the ceiling and Violet's jacket threads in the couch? And had she really aimed and fired a shotgun at herself? And, if her story was correct that she fired three times, who reloaded the gun and fired the fourth shot? Finally, Lawyer Weyer asked himself again and again, why was Violet so determined to admit her guilt?

A 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.

"He Was 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:

"I laid my purse and gloves on the chair."

"And then?"

"I walked around--do I have to say everything?"

"Leave nothing out. Remember everything."

"I walked in my bedroom and I took off my shoes and hat. I laid the hat on top of the dresser. I came out--I had to go to the bathroom. When I came out he was standing there with a gun. He said he was gonna shoot my guts out. I started --I wanted--" "Go on."

"He--the gun went off. I got scared. He shoved it in my stomach. I--he fired it and hit my arm--how he looked--I was scared. I ran--started to run for the door but he blocked my way--I couldn't get to the door. I ran to the corner window to call the neighbor lady--he shot me again --in the stomach. I fell on the floor. He knocked me down--he hit me--I don't know what, in the back of the neck. He was standing there with the end of the gun on the floor--I crawled over--he said he was gonna kill me--then I grabbed the bottom of the gun--I reached up. I hit him, I shot him--I didn't mean to--I wanted to get away--he was standing there with the end--I grabbed and he wouldn't--and I just pulled the trigger--I didn't want to shoot him--I was trying to get the gun away so he wouldn't shoot me any more--he grabbed the phone--he fell off the chair--I grabbed the phone--I told him I didn't mean to hurt him--I was sorry, I didn't mean it . . ."

The 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, Expert MacDonald pointed out that the shots fired at Violet were aimed from at least 15 inches away; the gun barrel was 28 inches long. Conclusion : she could not have shot herself.

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.

Chances were good, also, that diligent Dave Weyer had won his first criminal case.

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