A Provo woman who told police she shot and killed her husband Saturday in self-defense has been arrested and is under investigation for suspicion of murder.
On Saturday at 7:41 p.m., police received a call from the 56-year-old woman who said she shot her 55-year-old husband after he attacked her. When officers arrived at her home, they found the husband lying in a pool of blood in a hallway outside of their bedroom.
The woman told police she had been in bed when her husband came into the room, grabbed her by the neck, hit her her head and threatened to kill her, investigators wrote in a probable cause statement.
The woman told police she then grabbed her gun, which was next to her in bed, and began shooting him, according to the probable cause statement. She said she continued to shoot at her husband until he collapsed on the floor outside the bedroom, because she said she thought he was going to get a gun.
According to police, when investigators examined the gun the woman said she used to shoot her husband, there was “no obvious blood” on it.
Investigators instead found a second gun in the woman’s purse, under some clothing in the bedroom, and it had “blood spatter on the front end,” according to the probable cause statement. The woman told police that blood was from “shooting rabbits in the desert at close range.” But police wrote the blood later tested positive for human blood.
The husband suffered one gunshot wound to his right side, another to the back of his head and two more to the left side of his face, police said. One of the wounds had burn marks, which indicated it was a “close-range shot,” according to the probable cause statement.
Investigators also found “damage to the floor” beneath the husband’s body, which investigators suspect indicated a downward bullet trajectory, fired from “directly above” him.
“After falling to the ground, there was no evidence of him moving to indicate that he was a threat to [his wife’s] safety,” police wrote.
The probable cause statement also notes that both paramedics and a doctor who examined the woman found no injuries to her head, where she said her husband had struck her.
Police believe the woman “knowingly caused the death of her husband and was no longer acting in self-defense.” She was booked into the Utah County jail, where she is being held without bail under suspicion of murder.
The Salt Lake Tribune generally does not name defendants unless they have been formally charged with a crime.
