A tranquil, gentle man well into his retirement years, Nelson Galbraith was in the living room watching TV when Josephine Galbraith took her life in the bedroom.
Severely depressed about a future she was convinced would be full of pain and suffering, Josephine, 76, double-knotted a sash around her neck and strangled herself.
Several months later, officers from the Palo Alto (Calif.) Police Department came to Nelson Galbraith's house, handcuffed him in front of his grandchildren and arrested him for killing Josephine.
Bail was set at half-a-million dollars. Galbraith's children scrambled to raise a tenth of that, $50,000, nonrefundable, to get their father, a World War II veteran who had never had a run-in with the law in 78 years, out of jail.
The homicide charge resulted from an autopsy performed by Dr. Angelo Ozoa, coroner for Santa Clara County, that concluded that Josephine Galbraith wouldn't have been strong enough to tie the sash herself.
No one — not the Galbraith children, not friends nor neighbors, no one — said they had ever seen Nelson Galbraith lay a finger on Josephine in the more than 50 years they were together or even raise his voice to her. Nelson confirmed everyone's incredulity at the charges. He said he knew Josephine was depressed, but he played no part in her death.
The family circled the wagons. They hired lawyers. They booted up their computers and went to work researching. They brought in an outside medical expert to conduct an autopsy.
They discovered that the method Josephine chose to end her life, called ligature strangulation, is not uncommon, particularly among older women. The knots she tied, while relatively loose at first, were tightened by her own blood vessels straining to bring blood from the heart to the brain. When her body was re-examined, the condition of her face, florid with multiple ruptures of blood cells, confirmed this diagnosis.
The signs that pointed to suicide pointed just as strongly that Ozoa couldn't possibly have examined Josephine's neck and surrounding organs as detailed in his report.
Equally difficult to accept was the realization that prosecutors chose to either ignore the problems with the coroner's report or cover them up — because no one offered to drop the charges.
When the case finally came to trial, almost two years later, a jury quickly acquitted Galbraith.
The evidence was so lopsided, and the experience so gut-wrenching, that following the acquittal the Galbraiths filed a $10 million lawsuit, in the name of Nelson Galbraith, against the county of Santa Clara and Ozoa, who has left his post under pressure.
I only know the above because Dick Galbraith, one of Nelson's sons and a professor at BYU, is a friend of mine. When I saw him recently and asked him what's been going on in his life, he told me.
"It's not about the money," Dick said of the $10 million lawsuit. "I won't touch a penny of it. We'll give it to help the poor and disadvantaged with their legal problems. What it's about is we don't want this to happen to your family. We don't want this to happen to anyone else. This was my dad (Nelson Galbraith died recently). The last thing he'd ever do was say an unkind word about anyone. He was a gentle, good man. And they accused him of murder and staked him out and tortured him and didn't even look at their mistakes."
He paused before adding, "If it was your father, what would you do?"
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.