A Growing Practice

The action took place in the placid reaches of Washington state's Puget Sound country, but the passion-to-poison script read more like one of Georges Simenon's Parisian chillers.

It all started in 1962, when hand some, well-to-do Dr. Robert Boehme (rhymes with Mamie) was brought to trial in Tacoma for the attempted mur der of his wife Dorothy. The state charged Boehme with injecting a near-fatal dose of poison into her veins so that he could be free to marry sensu ous Mary Boehme, his great and good friend, who had previously been mar ried to his brother. Throughout the trial, Wife Dorothy spent most of her time flashing smiles of encouragement at Boehme, who was, in due course, acquitted. Three months later, his wife died of meningitis.

House Calls. Last month Boehme, now 45, was back in court again, charged with the same crime under similar circumstances. Only the support ing characters had changed. Erstwhile Sister-in-Law Mary was now Boehme's wife and, until she was ejected from the courtroom by Judge Hardyn Soule for an intemperate outburst, seldom let go of her husband's hand or lost her demurely trusting smile. The mistress in this case was Wanda Ostby, 30, a comely housewife from nearby Bremer ton, whose testimony seemed genuine despite a tigerskin coat that plainly was not. Wanda had been one of Boehme's patients until, she said, she visited his office one day and "he no longer looked at me professionally."

After that. Dr. Bob looked in on her unprofessionally "almost every Thursday night."

The house calls ended after two years, when Wanda began "to feel like a mistress"--despite the doctor's hinted intention to make her his wife. Boehme had told her, she testified, that Mary would never give him a divorce. But not to worry, he would "take care of the situation-take care of Mary."

Boehme's brand of care was apt to be debilitating, Pierce County Prosecutor John G. McCutcheon contended. As McCutcheon told ft, Boehme and Mary were working around the family's new 40-ft. cabin cruiser last June 29 when Mary was struck on the head by a wooden plank "under very peculiar circumstances." As she lay half stunned, Boehme gave her an injection. Next day, at Tacoma's St. Joseph Hospital, where Mary was admitted in critical condition, Dr. Stanley Durkin was puzzled by her symptoms. Miraculously, Mary rallied, and by 7:30 that night was in such good condition that Durkin went home. Two hours later he received a frantic call from the hospital. After a visit from her husband, Mary had taken an inexplicable turn for the worse.

"Psychiatric Problem." Durkin testified that he rushed back to his patient and found her hovering near death. "She was not breathing. She looked terminal," he told the jury. "It was obvious to me that I was not dealing with a head injury. My patient had somehow been poisoned." Prosecutor McCutcheon thought he knew how. When Boehme visited Mary, he had asked the nurse on duty in her room to leave for a few minutes. While she was gone, McCutcheon charged, Boehme added a dose of a potent tranquilizer to the life-giving mixture of dextrose and distilled water that Mary was being given intravenously. For good measure, he said, Boehme also gave her an injection of a poisonous substance found in carbamate insecticides.

Boehme, a foppish dresser who looked more than ever the rakehell with a brown toupee and a black eyepatch (he lost his left eye last fall in a home-workshop accident), readily admitted giving Mary injections both at the boathouse and the hospital. The first, he said, was a painkiller; the second was an antidote to counteract her daily dosage of tranquilizers, which she was taking because of a "psychiatric problem." As for Wanda, he first denied having been intimate with her, then, after McCutcheon confronted him with some purple billets-doux in his handwriting, admitted their liaison and described her as the "town prostitute."

"A Lecher He Is." Defense Attorney Frank Peters, who lost 16 Ibs. during the trial, spent nearly three hours on his closing argument. "A lecher he is," Peters said of his client, "and I'm not sure he shouldn't be scourged out of the profession of medicine." But, he reasoned, "what we are talking about here is: Did he want to kill his wife?" Of course he did, argued McCutcheon, noting that Big Spender Boehme would have reaped at least $173,000 in life-insurance benefits from Mary's "accidental" death. "With $38,000 boats and his habit of flying people to Hawaii," rasped the prosecutor, "and having a mistress, it takes a lot of money." McCutcheon characterized Boehme as "very cute, very clever and very dangerous."

After deliberating 61 hours last week the jury of four women and eight men found Boehme guilty of assault in the first degree. His wife collapsed in tears. Under Washington law, he could be sentenced to life in prison. Free on $10,000 bond pending appeal, Boehme returned to his clinic next day to take care of his professional backlog. As a result of the two trials, Dr. Boehme now has all the patients he can handle.

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