| © AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes Lance Anderson, middle, is charged with murdering his wife and sister in a San Fernando, Calif., courtroom on Dec. 13, 2013. |
Lance Holger Anderson had come to pay his sister one last visit.
On the morning of Dec. 11, 2013, Lisa Nave lay in a vegetative state in a nursing home north of Los Angeles, as she had since suffering a heart attack five years earlier.
Anderson approached her bed and told Lisa he was “sending her home.”
Then he raised a pistol to her head and pulled the trigger.
Afterward, he walked into the courtyard with his head down and waited until the police arrived to arrest him, a resident told the Associated Press.
When Nave’s family learned she had been fatally shot, they asked police to check on Anderson’s ailing wife, who had dementia.
When they did, officers found Bertha Maxine Anderson in the couple’s apartment, also dead from two gunshots to the head.
The double slaying shocked friends and neighbors, who knew Lance Anderson as a doting husband and brother. In an interview with police, Anderson admitted to the crimes but said they were acts of kindness, not cruelty.
“She didn’t want to live like this,” Anderson said of his wife’s dementia, according to the Santa Clarita Valley Signal. “It was brutal.”
Last month, a Los Angeles County judge found Anderson guilty of two counts of murder. And on Wednesday, Anderson, 63, was sentenced to 100 years to life in prison.
As with other so-called mercy killings, the case has stirred debate over euthanasia.