Harry Irwin, age 93, kills wife, botches suicide, says he ‘couldn’t take it anymore’ after 70 years of marriage
A 93-year-old south Kansas City man stabbed his ailing wife to death Wednesday, then slit his wrists and plunged a knife into his chest in a failed suicide attempt, according to court records.
Harry Irwin confessed to killing his wife Grace, age 95, then trying to kill himself.
“Yes, I killed her,” Irwin said, according to court records. “And then killed myself. Why am I still awake?”
Irwin told a shift nurse later that he tried to stab himself in the heart but that he must have aimed too low and hit a rib.
He told the nurse he couldn’t remember what he hit his wife with, but he knew he “did her in,” court records said.
He reportedly said he killed his wife because she was “arguing and screaming at him all night and he couldn’t take it anymore,” court records said.
Grace had just celebrated her 95th birthday this month and the Irwins marked their 70th wedding anniversary in December, having wed in Kansas City in 1942, six months after Harry enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight in World War II.
Jackson County prosecutors charged him with second-degree murder. He remained in a hospital intensive care unit Wednesday night but was expected to survive, police said.
The facts warranted a murder charge, said Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker.
“No victim deserves someone else deciding when they will die,” Baker said.
The couples children were contacted by their father who said their mother was not alive. The daughter found her father unconscious, sitting in a recliner with blood on his chest and arms, still holding a knife in his right hand. She found her mother in bed with blood on her face and the pillow.
Her brother soon arrived and found a suicide note on a table.
