Exclusive: Green Beret's strange suicide - upi

MONUMENT, Colo., May 11 (UPI) -- Early one Sunday evening in March, Army Special Forces soldier Bill Howell fed his 7-month-old daughter a bottle and fell asleep with her for half an hour on the couch. It was a minor moment of domestic tranquility, a contrast to his most recent five-month deployment in Iraq. Home just three weeks, Bill was settling back into the family life he shared with his wife, Laura, and three children near Fort Carson.

But by 9:27 p.m., things had gone horribly wrong. That is when a 911 dispatcher received a call from Laura Howell:

"My husband just hit me, and he's going downstairs to get his gun."

Laura Howell hung up and slipped out a door, but her husband cornered her between the garage and their truck parked in front of it. He took a .357-caliber revolver from his waistband and pointed it in her face. "You are going to watch this. You are going to watch this," Bill said to his wife -- meaning watch as he shot her in the face.

Police were approaching through a neighbor's yard. Bill was left-handed. Laura wondered later whether from their angle the police could see the high-powered handgun. "It was huge. Huge," she said of the gun. As the police drew near, she knocked his hand up and away.

In the next moment, Bill Howell put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. The bullet went up and back through his head. A policeman simultaneously shot him in the arm, but it was his own gun that killed Chief Warrant Officer Bill Howell.

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