From Newsday:
January 14, 1998 Rita Kaplan, a Smithtown woman who was shot in the head by her husband, Benjamin, moments before he killed himself early Wednesday morning, died yesterday at University Medical Center at Stony Brook, hospital officials said.
For months, the 59-year-old retired bookkeeper had been caring for her husband, a retired Queens printing teacher, who authorities said had been suffering from an unidentified ailment.
Friends and neighbors described the couple as inseparable, traveling the country and never missing an opportunity to get in their car and drive, whether to Manhattan, Atlantic City or Las Vegas.
But since the fall, Benjamin Kaplan, 64, had been withdrawn and depressed, his family told Suffolk police. He had apparently refused treatment for an illness, but police and friends say they do not know which one.
“They spent their time together every day. Then he got sick,” said a Sandy Hollow Road neighbor who asked not to be identified. “He wasn’t going outside. She did her errands by herself. She never said what was wrong with him. But we could tell he was sick.”
The couple’s survivors include two sons, Theodore, 29, who lived with his parents, and William, 32, of Atlanta. A man who answered the phone at the family’s house declined to comment last night.
Homicide detectives said Benjamin Kaplan shot his wife in the head with a .22-cal. rifle as she lay in bed shortly before 3 a.m. Wednesday.
The noise awoke Theodore Kaplan, who called 911, thinking his father had suffered a heart attack, police said.
Detectives said he quickly learned that his mother had been shot.
As an officer entered the bedroom minutes later and asked Benjamin Kaplan to put the rifle down, Mr. Kaplan turned the rifle on himself, firing once.
The former teacher was pronounced dead a short time later at St. John’s Hospital in Smithtown. Funeral information was not available.
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