From Deseret News archives:
2 deaths linked to despair
It comes as aging-services caseworkers say the deaths could be part of a disturbing new trend among many reaching the twilight of their years.
Deputies said 82-year-old Robert Erno and his wife, Grace, had completed their wills and even made their own funeral arrangements. The pair drove from their home in St. George and turned onto a dirt road about two miles northeast of Beaver.
It was there on a sagebrush flat, Beaver County sheriff's deputies said, that Robert Erno took a .380 handgun and shot his wife, then turned the gun on himself. The couple was found by the owner of the field on Saturday.
"They were married for 60-plus years, and both of them have suffered over the last six to seven years with medical problems," Beaver County Sheriff's Sgt. Cameron Noel said. "They decided it was time.
"He recently found out that he had some life-threatening medical problems," Noel added Monday. "They got all their personal things in order and just did it."
By all accounts, the couple was happily married. Noel said when deputies informed the couple's daughter, who lives in another state, she "didn't have any idea."
The Ernos' deaths are the latest in a series of such murder-suicides, going back several years.
In October 2005, 89-year-old Robert Stoutenburg shot and killed his 85-year-old wife, Ernestine, and then killed himself. Smithfield police said a note left behind indicated the couple had been dealing with medical problems.
At Cottonwood Hospital in September 2004, police said Kimball Jencks, 84, walked into Cottonwood Hospital and shot and killed his 81-year-old wife, Beata, as she lay in her bed. He then turned the gun on himself. A note left behind indicated some kind of a death pact because the couple was in deteriorating health.
A few days later, police said Jean Smaw, 80, was shot and killed by her 85-year-old husband, William, who then shot himself. Residents in the tiny central Utah town of Salina said Jean Smaw had just learned she was suffering from a terminal illness.
"You have an individual or a couple who is at wit's end, lacks resources, doesn't have support, is isolated, any number of those factors. If they think there is nothing available to them and they're at wit's end, they consider this as an option," said Chuck Diviney of the Utah Division of Aging and Adult Services.
While some find it unthinkable that their parents or grandparents could do such a thing, caseworkers say many — particularly from the World War II generation — refuse help, even from senior centers.
"They rely on themselves, they keep it in the family," Diviney said Monday.
