Woman Traps Husband With Teenager and Kills Him

One of the juiciest stories in the Home edition of the Sunday Mirror of April 14 involved a woman who shot her husband in the belly after following him and the teenager he had picked up home from a bar. The incident took place in the man's coldwater flat in a tenement building at 525 First Avenue, near Bellevue Hospital.

Michael O'Leary, 35, had been barhopping with 18 year-old Betty Fraytag of 136 East 29th Street. His estranged wife, Mrs. Elizabeth Pascarelli O'Leary, 27, had been lying in wait outside one of the bars with a gun. She followed O'Leary and Miss Fraytag when they stumbled home to his apartment. She burst through the door, took aim and shouted "You're not going to ruin anybody else's life" as she let loose a blast to the gut. O'Leary fell to the floor. It was littered with empty whiskey and beer bottles from the frequent parties the neighbors said he hosted. O'Leary was a veteran of the Pacific theater, living on $20 a week unemployment.

The Mirror described Mrs. O'Leary as "attractive," but the photo shows a dark-haired, pinch-faced woman hardened by circumstance. But nobody looks good in a mug shot. The couple were married in 1937, when Elizabeth Pascarelli would have been the same age as Betty Fraytag. They had two children. Michael Jr., who was seven, and Elizabeth, who was six. They were formally separated in September but had been estranged for three years. Elizabeth had moved in with her brother and mother to 1332 Willoughby Avenue in Brooklyn and taken a job as a stock clerk in a mercantile house.

As she fled the scene, she disassembled the gun and discarded the pieces in garbage cans along the way. She then headed to a First Avenue bar where she asked a friend to cross the street to Bellevue Hospital and summons an ambulance for her husband. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived. When the police got to the scene, Elizabeth's brother Anthony was there. He told the cops he had just blundered into the tragedy and was not held for questioning.

The police found Elizabeth in the bar, dazed and weeping. Reportedly she was still dazed when she was arraigned the following day, charged with homicide and held without bail.