An 88-year-old Galveston man’s arrest in the fatal shooting of his wife is renewing attention on the rare but disturbing phenomenon of homicides committed by the elderly.
Galveston police said an 89-year-old woman was found dead early Monday inside the couple’s home on Dominique Drive after first responders arrived around 4:30 a.m. Officers alleged that her husband, Ernest Leal, admitted to shooting her, and he was arrested without incident.
Authorities said he is being held in the Galveston County Jail on a $250,000 bond while investigators continue to examine what happened, according to reporting from the Houston Chronicle.
The case comes on the heels of another high-profile killing involving an elderly suspect, this one in a New York nursing home. A 95-year-old woman, Galina Smirnova, was charged in September with second-degree murder after police said she beat her 89-year-old roommate, Nina Kravtsov, to death.
Officers said they found Kravtsov “lying in her bed, non-responsive, covered in blood, and with gash marks about her face and head…” and discovered Smirnova washing blood from her hands, according to a criminal complaint obtained by ABC News. The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office alleged that the murder weapon appeared to be a blood-stained wheelchair foot pedal.
Another case that drew widespread attention occurred in Arizona in July 2018, when authorities said a 92-year-old woman shot and killed her 72-year-old son as he planned to move her into a care facility. Police alleged that Anna Mae Blessing confronted him with two pistols concealed in her robe and later told officers she deserved to be “put to sleep” for her actions. She was charged with murder, aggravated assault, and kidnapping, according to reporting from the BBC.
Crime data indicate that homicide by elderly offenders is extraordinarily uncommon, but such cases recur often enough to attract public intrigue. A 2023 chart from Statista indicates that the most common age range for murder offenders in the United States is between 17 and 30. Still, the same data shows that 144 murders in 2023 involved offenders aged 75 or older.
At the same time, people 65 or older are among the least likely to be murdered. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reported a rate of 0.04 homicides per 1,000 people in that age group, lower than every age bracket except those aged 12 to 14, which the agency said was 0.03 per 1,000, according to the federal report.
Researchers often note that motives in elder-offender cases differ sharply from those involving younger suspects. One 2021 study found, “Social maladjustment, a care-giver role, personal physical and mental health problems and/or substance misuse issues were relevant to the offenders.”
Prosecutions of elderly murder suspects prove difficult, as many incidents require competency evaluations and assessments of fitness to stand trial.
Dallas has its own historical tie to a notorious elderly offender. Viva Leroy Nash, once held in Dallas on a case related to a shot police officer in Connecticut, went on to become the oldest death row inmate in the United States before his death at age 94 in Arizona.
Nash “had been imprisoned almost continuously since he was 15 and was deaf, mostly blind, crippled, mentally ill and had dementia,” his attorney, Thomas Phalen, said at the time. Nash was convicted of a 1982 murder in Phoenix committed after escaping a Utah prison work crew at the age of 66. At the time of his escape, he was incarcerated for the fatal shooting of a postman in 1977.
Nash died of natural causes in February 2010 while state prosecutors were appealing a federal ruling on whether he was mentally competent, according to the Associated Press.
Nash’s long, violent trajectory stands in sharp contrast to the scattered and often tragic cases emerging today, where accused offenders frequently lack a known murderous history.
Authorities in Galveston said additional details about the alleged shooting involving Ernest Leal would be released as their investigation continues.