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The tragic events of March 27, 2017, left no room for ambiguity: Steve Kruspe shot his wife, Pam. However, the motivations behind this act remain clouded in complexity and have wreaked havoc on his family, as highlighted in Oxygen’s series, Accident, Suicide, or Murder.
The narrative began to unfold that evening when Steve made a calm yet shocking 911 call at 7:30 p.m. He clearly stated, “Um, I just shot my wife.” When questioned by the dispatcher about the condition of his 61-year-old wife, Steve responded somberly, “No, she’s dead.”
Steve Kruspe Admits to Killing Wife in 911 Call
After the call, Steve provided his name to the dispatcher and waited at the Parkside Inn assisted living facility for authorities to arrive and take him into custody. This tragic incident has sparked an intense debate: Was this a desperate act of compassion at Pam’s behest, driven by the debilitating effects of her aggressive Alzheimer’s Disease, or was it an independent decision by Steve?
When the dispatcher asked whether his 61-year-old wife was “awake,” Steve told her, “No, she’s dead.”
Steve proceeded to give the dispatcher his name and waited for authorities to arrive at the Parkside Inn assisted living facility to take him into custody.
“We were expecting some sort of chaos because we were responding to a shooting,” Boynton Beach Police Sgt. Widy Jean recalled in the Dec. 13 episode. “When we approached, we saw nothing. The parking lot was empty so that even added to our confusion.”
The 911 dispatcher was able to convince Steve to leave his wife’s side to come out to the parking lot.
“When we laid eyes on him, we didn’t see a typical homicidal maniac,” Jean said. “We just saw an older man who does not appear that he can hurt a fly, just walking out. He was not agitated, he looked a bit sad, but he was quite cooperative.”
What Happened to Pam Kruspe?
At the back of the building, authorities found Steve’s wife Pam, 61, laying in the grass on her back by the patio with a gunshot wound to the chest.
“There was very little blood for someone who was shot to death in the heart,” remarked Dave Aronberg, the Former State Attorney Palm Beach County, Florida. “It looks like it was done by someone who really knew what he was doing and wanted to end her life right away. This was no ordinary perpetrator. This was a marksman.”
Investigators could find no defensive wounds or signs of a struggle.
Back at the station, Steve insisted that his wife of 47 years had been saying she wanted to kill herself for the last “four months” and begged him to take her life after suffering from a devastating diagnosis. Pam had frontal temporal lobe dementia, an aggressive form of Alzheimer’s Disease, that was progressively taking more and more of her abilities.
According to Steve, Pam received the diagnosis four years earlier after she found herself struggling in her job working in the Clerk of Courts.
As her son Matt Kruspe explained, “A lot of things rapidly, that she loved to do, she could no longer do anymore.”
Friend Says Couple “Complemented Each Other”
Pam could also be combative or violent at times as a result of the disease, a stark contrast from the loving and nurturing woman she had always been in the past.
The tragic, deadly final end to the couple’s marriage came as a shock to those who knew them. Steve—a former Marine who once trained America’s most elite soldiers—and Pam had always seemed to be madly in love with each other.
“Pam and Steve complemented each other,” friend Kent Bolin remembered. “They were two sides of each other’s heart. They always were thoughtful and respectful about what each other thought and felt and they didn’t operate unless it was together.”
The couple, who married in 1976, went on to have three children together and shared a beautiful life before Pam’s diagnosis.
According to Steve, their final night together, he’d gone to pick up his wife at the assisted living center and taken her for coffee. As they drove back to the facility, Steve told investigators that his wife—who could sometimes still be lucid and aware of her diminishing abilities—was getting more distraught.
“The closer we got, the more unhappy she would get, incessantly with, ‘I’m going to kill myself. I want you to kill me,’” he said in an interrogation. “I mean, the anguish that she was going through. Just…unbelievable. It’s a horror story.”
According to Steve, Pam told him “this is not how I want to live the rest of my life” and continued to beg him to help her end her life. Eventually, he went to get his gun from the car.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” Steve said. “She was so broken hearted.”
Steve told authorities that Pam had insisted he pull the trigger, killing her with one fatal gunshot to the chest.
Regardless of the reason why he fired the shot, Florida did not have a law that allowed assisted suicide and Steve was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Pam Kruspe’s Death Tears Family Apart
Pam’s shocking death divided her family. None of her children had ever witnessed Pam voicing thoughts about suicide and, as a devout Catholic, they questioned their father’s assertion that would have ever wanted to take her own life.
Aronberg explained, “That’s why the family and others thought that the whole wanting to die was perhaps a creation of Steven Kruspe’s mind.”
Although Matt had been furious with his father, he eventually began to feel there may have been more to his mom’s declining health than he realized.
“I just started to process, you know, ‘What was my mom going through? What was my dad going through?’” he explained. “Do I agree with of what he did? No, absolutely not. Of course, I didn’t agree with him, but I understood why. My dad’s a fixer. If something’s wrong, he’s gonna figure out why and fix it.”
However, Matt’s two siblings didn’t feel the same way and testified in court proceedings that they didn’t trust their father and believed he had decided to take matters into his own hands.
“If murdering someone is his way of showing love,” his daughter Stephanie said at his bond hearing, “then I would hate to know what he could do to other loved ones if he is let out into the real world.”
Was Steve Kruspe Convicted?
As the defense prepared for trial, they noted that Pam’s DNA was found on the gun, primarily on the grip, suggesting that she could have been involved in discharging the weapon. No gun shot residue test had been performed on her hands after the shooting, revealing a possible hole in the investigation.
A firearms reconstruction expert also believed the location of Pam’s wound and the DNA on the gun showed she could have pulled the gun toward her that night.
Given the new evidence, prosecutors reduced the charges to manslaughter by assisted suicide. Steve agreed to plead guilty to the new charge in August of 2023 and was sentenced to 20 years behind bars after two of his children asked the judge for the harshest possible sentence.
The family remains divided about what happened that fateful night.
