Member-only story
Cop Shoots and Kills Wife Before Turning Himself and Her Lover into Jail
A jealous husband violently addressed his wife’s alleged infidelity but did he get away with it?
Failed romantic relationships are frequently instigated by a failure of trust. Whether or not that loss of faith in the other is warranted, it can create a horrible divide and lead to breakups and much worse. In 1931, a small-town deputy sheriff shot and killed his wife while trying to murder her alleged lover. He then promptly went and turned himself and the other man into jail.
In 1931, deputy sheriff Harrison Tuttle (who also operated a filling station) of Kankakee, Illinois, was a paranoid and troubled man. He believed his wife of 25 years, Sylvia, was stepping out on him behind his back. Following his suspicions, he linked her to a 50-year-old married man from Gary, Indiana named William Giroux, who had been their neighbor years before. Finally, he claimed that he intercepted a message about a secret meeting and found the pair sitting together in the back seat of an automobile along the side of an infrequently traveled road.
Tuttle later told authorities that in a fit he pulled out his pistol and fired two shots, intending to kill his rival, Giroux. However, either his aim or his words were untrue, and he struck his wife in the head with a shot. The deputy made the man drive Sylvia to the hospital while he followed behind. Unfortunately, she passed away before they arrived to find help. Doctors later said that blood loss contributed greatly to her demise and that if she had gotten attention earlier she might have survived.
After killing his wife, the cop took the unusual step of taking Giroux into custody and then turning both the alleged lover and himself into the police. When being interrogated, he indicated that his rival was armed, and he also confessed that he believed an affair had been taking place for several years but that the shooting was the first time that he had found proof satisfactory to him that it was real.
“I meant to kill Giroux but she had it coming, too,” Tuttle asserted.
Tuttle was booked on charges of murder but was released on bail of $5,000. Meanwhile, Giroux was held for being an…
