Avondale Estates man carefully prepared before killing ill wife, self

By RHONDA COOK

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Edward Travis had planned for this day — the day this week he would shoot his wife and then himself to escape a life dominated by her dementia.

Neighbors saw Travis watering his lawn on Tuesday. On Monday, he had the plumber come to the house in Avondale Estates.

Then on Wednesday his daughter, Mary, received a letter from her father. It contained a check to help pay for renovations to her Decatur home to accommodate her parents moving in next month. Edward Travis, 86, wrote he couldn’t “imagine a better place” for him and his 85-year-old wife, Anne, to live.

The letter, however, alerted her that something was wrong.

“‘I believe that everyone concerned will get along with me and Anne out of the picture,’” Mary Travis said Friday, reading from her father’s letter. “It didn’t occur to me that [letter] was a suicide note. I thought he was just depressed.”

Mary Travis went to the parents house Wednesday and found her mother in bed. Anne Travis was dead from a bullet fired by her husband of 60 years.

“My parents ... were devoted to each other,” Mary Travis said.

Four hours later, Edward Travis was found in a crawl space in the attic. He had shot himself, after writing a note to whoever found him not to revive him.

She believes he went to a corner of the attic “to give himself time to die. I hate it that my father felt like he had to ... hide to kill himself.”

Elsewhere in the house, Edward Travis had laid out important papers such as wills, a health care power of attorney documents and investment records.

Mary Travis didn’t know her father owned a gun.

And neither she, her brother and two sisters see the murder-suicide coming even though their father, a retired mechanical engineer, had begun to forget things as their mother did in the early stages of her illness.

“I think he was afraid what was happening to her ... was happening to him,” Mary Travis said.

Anne Travis, once a knitting instructor at the Rich’s department store in downtown Atlanta, was diagnosed six months ago with frontal lobe dementia.

Her conversations was nonsensical. She slept all the time.

Anne Travis wouldn’t leave their house and she didn’t want her husband to leave either.

Last month was difficult as Edward Travis and his wife went to the hospital three times, the daughter said.

“There were times she was almost normal after she had been in hospital a couple of days and then in July he realized [this was to be his life],” she said.

The family suspected Anne Travis wanted to die.

The day after the Travis deaths, assisted suicide became international news when British orchestra conductor, Sir Edward Downes, and his wife flew to Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal. It was reported in Britain that Joan Downes was in the final stages of terminal cancer and her healthy husband wanted to die with her. They drank a lethal cocktail of barbiturates provided clinic and held hands until they died.

“An individual ought to be able to make their own end-of-life decisions. They shouldn’t be forced to live longer just because society thinks they should live longer,” Mary Travis said.

But Mary Travis doesn’t believe her father, the grandfather of eight, was ready to go. She believes the pressure of caring for his wife pushed him there.

“I can’t image what happened that made him decide this was the time,” Mary Travis said. “It breaks my heart he was so alone in this.”

Her parents’ bodies were cremated and their ashes will be sprinkled in the memory garden at Holy Trinity Parish-Episcopal in Decatur.