ABSTRACT
On an early autumn evening in the late 1940s, 2 in a medium-sized city located in the Canadian west coast province of British Columbia, 33 year old Charlotte Ross 3 severed her husband’s jugular vein with a 14 inch carving knife as he sat sleeping in the living room of their fashionable duplex apartment. Awakened by the attack, the unfortunate Jimmy Ross managed to stagger a few feet to the centre of the room before collapsing in a pool of his own blood. Charlotte then turned the knife on herself, slashing her left wrist and throat and, in the process, half-severing the trachea. After an abortive effort to telephone the police, Charlotte slumped onto a sofa chair and gradually lost consciousness. It was not until hours later that Jimmy’s son arrived at the apartment, stumbled onto the macabre aftermath of the attack, and called the police. As the press later reported, ‘officers who first examined the death scene said the phone receiver was off the hook and a blood-stained butcher knife, believed to be the weapon, was lying on the telephone table’. 4 Jimmy was clearly dead, but Charlotte’s eyelids were fluttering and she was moaning almost imperceptibly.
