The Accident

The news that Mrs. Ronald Dean had shot and killed her 29-year-old Air Force technical sergeant husband in his parents' home near Oil City, Pa. shocked the members of that town's Optimist Club. It also shocked the club's happy, do-gooding ladies' auxiliary, a group called the Opti-Mrs. Together, they decided to help Lydia Dean. They passed the hat, ran notices in the newspapers, collected a defense fund of more than $2,000 from as far away as Florida. By the time the trial began in Venango County a fortnight ago, the whole of western Pennsylvania knew Lydia Dean's story; she had been done wrong.

Love & Marriage. Slim, doe-eyed Lydia was a Filipina of 16 when she met Airman Dean at a dance in Luzon in 1952. They dated for 21 months ("We were talking of love," explained Lydia in her thin, childish voice), then got married. Dean brought his wife to the U.S. in 1954, and late that year, she had a baby girl. In 1956 Dean was transferred to a base in England, but before embarking, he found a four-room apartment for her in Pleasantville (pop. 704), near Oil City and near the small home of his parents in Shamburg. Lydia and Dean wrote faithfully to each other for about a year. Then Dean stopped writing. When he returned to the U.S. four months later, he called Lydia, announced that he had got an English girl pregnant, wanted a divorce. Six days later Dean was shot and killed by a bullet from an old Army Springfield rifle.

At the trial, Lydia sobbed the story of how she tried desperately to win back her husband, and of how he airily repulsed her. On the night of the killing, Dean slapped her face. Lydia ran into another room, saw the rifle. She decided, she testified, to prove her love by demanding that her husband shoot her. Then she heard her baby cry, and in running to her daughter, tripped. The rifle fell, she insisted, and fired its slug two inches from Dean's ear.

Victory. So far, so good. But the prosecution had a good case. Why did Lydia cut the telephone line in the house? (To prevent Ronald from telephoning his British girl friend.) Why had she cut the wires on Dean's car and placed her daughter in a second car before the shooting? (To keep Ronald from driving away without her.)

Lydia stuck to her story. After a six-day trial, a Venango County jury last week found her not guilty. Lydia Dean decided that she would stay on in Pleasantville, "to be near my husband." And in Oil City the Optimists and the Opti-Mrs. got together for a big victory celebration.

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