Marcus Yam | The Roanoke Times

In 2004, Randy Hurt found his elderly mother dead on this couch. She was killed by her husband, who afterward tried to take his own life.

Marcus Yam | The Roanoke Times

Randy Hurt walks through Colonial Presbyterian Church, a Roanoke County church of which his parents were founding members. The family grew up close by.

Marcus Yam | The Roanoke Times

Randy Hurt plays in the bell choir at the Colonial Presbyterian Church.

Marcus Yam | The Roanoke Times

Randy Hurt found his father, Bill Hurt, in the basement of their Roanoke County home trying to kill himself after suffocating his mother.

Photo courtesy of Randy Hurt

Bill and Neva Hurt had been married for 58 years.

Marcus Yam | The Roanoke Times

Randy Hurt sits outside his parents' house, which he inherited after his father's death. He lives amid his parents' memories.

Randy Hurt found the unthinkable when he walked into his elderly parents' living room on Easter morning 2004: his mother lying dead on the couch, a blue shopping bag tied around her neck.

On the basement floor of their Roanoke County home, his father, Bill, was lying semiconscious and gasping for air, his hair matted with blood. He had suffocated his wife, Neva, and then tried to do the same to himself.

When that didn't work, he drank weedkiller and beat himself on the head with a hammer.

"You came too soon," he told his son.

The plan had been to put his wife -- in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's and so out of her mind that she could only grunt and moan -- out of her misery. Then, with his own demise, he would restore in death the love they had shared for 58 years.

Instead, Bill Hurt went to jail, depressed and deeply ashamed.

While murder-suicide attempts among the elderly are rare, experts warn that such incidents are on the rise, part of the fallout of mushrooming dementia rates and caregiver stress.

Bill Hurt died of congestive heart failure last year at 86. With the anniversary of his father's death just past, Randy Hurt has two things he wants people to know:

Bill Hurt was not a bad man.

If such a tragedy could befall someone like his father, it could happen to anyone.

No hobbies, few friends

The qualities that made Bill Hurt the epitome of "the greatest generation" were the same traits that led to his undoing. He was stoic and loyal, obedient and frugal. He cared about what his neighbors thought.

Above all, he was responsible. As the oldest child of seven, he was 13 when he left his family's home in Glenvar to move in with grandparents -- to give his parents one less mouth to feed.

"He had a tremendous sense of responsibility," said his sister, Peggy Hurt. "But he put so much pressure on himself that he was never quite able to live up to it."

As a bomber pilot in World War II, he bailed his squadron out of trouble more than once, earning several medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross. But at the end of each bombing mission, he asked himself: I wonder how many women and children I killed today?

Bill and Neva married in 1946, and if he was shy, she was painfully so. "She was the most modest woman I've ever known in my life," Bill's brother, Bob Hurt, recalled.

When they were courting, he remembers a group of friends wading together across the Roanoke River on the family's property. "You all, go on up front," Bill Hurt told his siblings. Neva was embarrassed for anyone to see her with her skirt hiked to her knees.

At family gatherings, she sometimes waited outside, alone, in the car. When she did attend, she would call back after she returned home to ask her hosts: Did I do anything to embarrass myself today?

The Hurts' only child, Randy, was born in 1949, and by all accounts it was the happiest time of their lives. Neva Hurt quit her secretarial job and stayed home with Randy. She never drove a car, but Randy recalls her dutifully walking him to the Brambleton Avenue bus stop for his weekly piano lessons.

On Saturdays, they rode the bus downtown to meet Bill Hurt after his morning shift at Stone Printing, where he was a press supervisor. They alternated eating lunch between the Roanoke Wiener Stand and Texas Tavern.

They were also founding members of Colonial Presbyterian Church, which was walking distance from their Green Valley subdivision home. But not long after Randy moved out of the house to start his music career, the couple stopped attending church.

His mother grew increasingly anxious around other people, and his dad didn't want to leave her home alone. Saying her back hurt, she started sleeping on the living-room couch, surrounded by her vast collection of mail-order dolls.

His dad retired from Stone in 1975 after 41 years of service, but he had no real hobbies. He spent his days "piddlin,' " as he called it -- repairing a faucet, mowing the yard. "He would sharpen the blades on the mower whether they need it or not," Randy said.

Bill Hurt liked fixing things. But he was powerless to help his wife when she brought in the mail and forgot where she put it. Or when she burst into tears in the middle of cooking Christmas dinner, saying she just didn't know what to do next.

In March 2001 they were trading in their car for a newer model. With her bookkeeping background, Neva Hurt had always handled the family's finances. But sitting at the car dealership that day, she looked blankly at her husband.

She had forgotten how to write a check.

'We take care of our own'

Bill Hurt didn't believe in asking for help. People brought food by from Colonial Presbyterian, where Randy worked as the church organist.

But when church members asked if there was anything else they could do to ease his caregiving burden, Bill Hurt declined.

"We take care of our own," he said repeatedly.

"Church members didn't understand the severity of what was going on," the Rev. Brent Williams recalled. "And Bill didn't want anyone to think that he couldn't handle his responsibility."

In 2002, at least four years after Neva Hurt had first exhibited signs of dementia, Alzheimer's was diagnosed. According to medical records presented at Bill Hurt's sentencing hearing, his wife told doctors then that she was depressed and had thoughts of killing herself. Asked what year it was, she said 1922.

One doctor suggested she move to a nursing home, but Bill Hurt was rigid about his sickness-and-health vow: under no circumstances.

The following year, her sister-in-law told Neva Hurt's psychiatrist: "She wishes someone would just shoot her." It's a plea Randy heard every time he visited his parents -- "Just kill me!" -- up until Neva Hurt lost her ability to talk.

By the end of 2003, she refused attempts to bathe and feed her. If her husband managed to sneak a spoonful of Ensure into her mouth, she usually spit it out.

Randy Hurt helped out as much as he could, spending a few nights a week at the house. Sometimes his dad would flee as soon as he arrived -- go for a drive, try to clear his mind.

By the next morning, Randy Hurt would have to leave, too. "It was so hard to be around," he said.

"She'd go 24 hours a day without sleeping. At night, you'd hear pots and pans falling on the floor, the refrigerator door banging nonstop. She was literally bouncing into walls."

Sometimes his father woke up in the middle of the night to find his wife standing over him. Her diaper needed changing.

During one doctor visit, Bill Hurt was asked if he had any guns in the house. He had a few antique shotguns, yes.

Get rid of them, the doctor advised. "You might not be in your best thinking and use them," Randy Hurt recalled the doctor saying. Randy took the guns to his condo at Smith Mountain Lake.

While doctors noted Neva's weight loss -- more than 30 pounds in two years -- no one inquired about Bill's health. His clothes hung from his frame, a telltale sign of caregiver depression, especially among men. He'd dropped 25 pounds.

"He was just moody, irritable," Bob Hurt said. "We should've known it wasn't normal. We should've done something, but we just didn't know what to do."

When Neva Hurt was admitted to Lewis-Gale Medical Center in December 2003, Bill Hurt's siblings intervened: You can't handle her any more, they said.

Finally, he relented. But a few days later, when another brother visited her at the dementia-care facility, he found her wandering the halls half-naked. She had also developed a 3-inch-wide bed sore.

Bill Hurt hated the idea of some stranger giving his modest wife a bath, and the nursing assistants had no better luck getting Neva Hurt to eat than he had: They frequently called him for advice.

Though his wife rarely made sense when she spoke, Bill Hurt knew exactly what she meant when she looked at him pleadingly and said: "How could you do this to me?"

Neva Hurt spent 12 days at the facility before her husband came to the conclusion that he could take better care of her at home. Some family members accused him of being too cheap to write the $750-a-week checks, a charge that Randy Hurt denies to this day.

Back at home, Bill Hurt had the bed sore healed in a week. "He's an old country boy," his son recalled. "He put a salve on her and checked it like clockwork and got it healed.

"He had always been the nurse of the family," Randy Hurt added. "I agreed with him that she was better off at home."

Out of options

By spring, Neva Hurt could no longer speak. The noises she did make sounded inhuman, Randy Hurt remembered, "like something from the jungle." It sounded like she was in pain, but it was hard to know.

The week leading up to Easter had brought unannounced visitors to the house -- an Adult Protective Services investigator and, later, a doctor who examined Neva Hurt and arranged for hospice workers to begin treating her the following week.

Bill Hurt did not understand hospice. "The doctor explained it, but in his mind -- he hadn't eaten much or slept -- he couldn't process it," his son said. "He thought all they did was help starve somebody to death."

While the visiting doctor was helpful, Bill Hurt saw the APS worker as a threat, Randy Hurt said, having been sent there to investigate a complaint of neglect lodged by an unnamed family member.

Bill Hurt thought he was in trouble. Maybe he'd be arrested. Maybe they'd institutionalize his wife again.

According to Bill Hurt's testimony at his July 2005 sentencing hearing, when he woke up Easter morning, "Some force like I've never known before just had me in its grip. I thought, 'Now what can we do to get ourselves out of this terrible situation?'

"If I can't have her in life, maybe I can have her in death."

In his best suit -- picked out years before by his wife -- Bill Hurt described suffocating his wife, then trying to do himself in. He said the next thing he remembered, he woke up that afternoon in a hospital emergency room and learned that he'd had a heart attack.

"I'm not proud at all of it," he said, his country drawl beginning to crack. "It looked like, there's just no help for it, and it's a hellish -- pardon me -- it's a hellish situation. She changed from a lady to ... you just didn't know. It turned into nudity."

He came across as meek, repentant and harmless, like a church elder or somebody's great-uncle. At the end of his testimony, he addressed the courtroom: "Just in case anybody might be interested, they told me at Catawba [Hospital, the state mental facility] that this can happen to anyone.

"I wish I had known that."

Saying it was the hardest case he had ever presided over and clearly moved by the circumstances, Roanoke County Circuit Court Judge James Swanson found Bill Hurt guilty of murder in the second degree and sentenced him to 10 years in jail, suspended after one.

"I do not see you in any way as a threat," Swanson said. "On the other hand, I can't suggest to the community that when a person acts to intentionally take the life of another -- particularly when that person is helpless and dependent on them -- that it's OK under any circumstances to act to end their lives."

Family members and church friends sobbed as Bill Hurt was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs.

Randy Hurt couldn't imagine his father surviving the sentence, but the first time he visited him at the Roanoke County Jail, Bill Hurt seemed content. The inmates called him "Pop," and one of the jailers had even created a librarian's job just for him. Church members visited regularly and set up a parishioner schedule so that every day he'd receive a card in the mail.

He held no malice about going to jail. In fact, he told his son, "Maybe this is what I need."

Belief in a forgiving God

Dr. Donna Cohen, an authority on murder-suicide among the elderly, said she believes the Hurt tragedy should serve as a wake-up call to all communities -- families, churches, neighbors, medical professionals.

"If hospice workers could have been brought in earlier and reassured him that she could have stayed at home; if his own doctor would have picked up on his weight loss and the desperate depression; if the family would have gotten more involved -- these situations are largely preventable," said Cohen, a geriatrician and professor at the University of South Florida.

Randy Hurt is haunted by those same what-ifs, but this is the only scenario that brings him comfort: If the retelling of his parents' demise could help just one family dealing with dementia, it will have been worth the pain of reliving it.

It's been a year since Bill Hurt died, and his son continues to live amid the memories -- his mother's dolls, the TV where he watched Sunday football with his dad, even the Christmas decorations from 2003, stacked atop the couch where he found his mother dead.

He knows he needs to get rid of the couch. He can't bring himself to sit on it.

But he has made positive steps. He built a garage out back for his Pontiac collection, six cars ranging from a brand-new sports coupe to a 1964 Pontiac Bonneville -- knowing full well that his thrifty dad would have never approved. He gives piano lessons and plays gigs with Encore, an oldies band.

He's taken strength from his church, where he still plays organ and directs the hand-bell choir. On the anniversary of his father's death, in fact, he called several church members to thank them for not abandoning his dad.

He also thanked Williams, who reassured his dad in his final, anxious months that "our God is a forgiving God."

Bill Hurt continued to wrestle with what he had done. Would he go to heaven? What would his wife say when she saw him there?

By the time he was hospitalized for heart failure, Bill Hurt could no longer speak. But Randy Hurt knew what he was thinking.

He held his father's hand as he took his final breath. "I hope you're happy with mama now," he said.