A man who shot his wife with dementia and claimed it was assisted suicide has pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
In 2017, Stephen Kruspe shot his wife, Pamela Kruspe, point-blank in the heart, claiming that she had asked him to. He confessed to the murder immediately, but originally pleaded not guilty. The Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office originally charged Kruspe with premeditated murder, but now, almost six years later, Assistant State Attorney Reid Scott has accepted a reduced manslaughter charge.
Kruspe, for his part, romanticized his wife’s murder. “She actually smiled at me as life is leaving her body,” he said during his arrest. “She didn’t flinch. She didn’t move. She just went down.”
The guilty plea was entered as an open plea, meaning the prosecution and defense did not agree on sentencing. A judge will decide Kruspe’s sentence later, and he faces up to 30 years in prison. Two of the couple’s three children are witnesses for the prosecution and have fought back against Kruspe’s claim that Pamela was suicidal and wanted to die.
Stephanie Wilhelm, one of the children who testified against her father, said that although her mother was sick with Alzheimer’s disease, she never heard her say that she wanted to die — and that her children would have stepped up to care for her if their father didn’t want to anymore.
“He could’ve put her in that home and walked away if things got too difficult. We would’ve made sure she was taken care of. He chose to take matters into his own hands to make it go away,” she said of her mother in a previous court hearing before addressing her father directly. “He is not capable of doing what’s recommended when faced with adversity. To have and to hold, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health is not demonstrated by a .45 to the chest.”
Another of their children, Andrew Kruspe, testified that his father had previously spoken of wanting to kill their mother. “I wish I could just put a round in her chest and put her out of her misery,” he said his father had said. “We thought he was just saying this out of frustration with her condition. Until he wasn’t.”
Paula Purdy, Pamela’s sister, likewise wrote a letter to the court slamming Kruspe — and the media — for romanticizing murder.
“He is not the upstanding, honorable person that the defense is attempting to paint him as. The bullet Mr. Kruspe chose to end my sister’s life with has ricocheted around the family causing immense pain, testing relationships, and left us reeling as to how one person’s selfishness can cause so much destruction,” she wrote. “Let’s not romanticize the acts of a murderer and spin it into a Shakespearian tale that never actually existed.”
