A man who shot his wife in an alleged ‘mercy killing’ then remained in the house with her rotting corpse for four days before alerting the authorities
Police responding to a call from a man who claimed to have shot his wife were not prepared for the horrors they found.
Dave Meyer, who was 69 at the time of the murder, dialled 911 from his home in Roy, Utah on January 21, 2023, and told the dispatcher that he had shot 62-year-old Suzanne Meyer in the head.
When officers arrived at the scene, they found Suzanne face-down on the bed with her feet on the floor, positioned as if she had been kneeling. She had died from a single gunshot wound, the Real Crime Psychology podcast notes, and officers noted a strong odour of decomposition.
In an attempt to explain why he had waited for four days before contacting police, Meyer said: “I guess I was in shock. I sat in my house and just tried to not focus on what I’d done.”
In a surprisingly calm and relaxed police interview, Meyer explained that his usually fit and healthy wife had been left in constant pain after being struck by a cyclist while jogging in Hawaii.
The accident, Meyer said, ”just totally destroyed her”. He claimed she was “a very strong woman in the gym all her life” who “ran, lifted every day, [she kept] in shape”.
But after the accident, doctors had to put steel pins in her spine to repair the damage – leaving her unable to stand or sit comfortably and taking constant medication for the pain.
Meyer claimed that Suzanne had repeatedly begged him to end her life. Finally, he said, he was unable to stand seeing his beloved wife in such pain and while he was hiving her a back-up reached out with his other hand for a 9mm pistol and shot her in the head.
“I couldn’t stand to see her suffer any more,” he told police. But testimony from two other witnesses told a far darker story.
Suzanne’s sister Sandy insisted: “My sister did not want to die. There’s no way in hell. This is a a bodybuilder who has made plans, she still has Amazon packages coming.”
“My mum’s dying, she wouldn’t let me do it by myself.”
Sandy said that Meyer had forced Suzanne to have sex with other men on camera, and threatened her when she refused to do what he told her to. She added that, while her sister had complained of “horrible” pain, she never expressed any suicidal thoughts.
The evidence that convinced detectives that Meyer had not put his suffering wife of misery out of love, but had a much more twisted motive, came from a client at the gym where he worked.
It emerged that Meyer had been having sex with the woman over a period of a few months.
The witness, whose name has not been revealed, told police that Meyer had a very difficult relationship with his wife and that Suzanne would “try to get him to hit her so she could call the cops on him”.
More damningly, the woman said, Meyer had been thinking about killing his wife for a while. She continued: “A couple of weeks ago, he told me that he almost shot her.”
In a separate conversation, the witness said, Meyer had told her that Suzanne would be “gone soon”.
In the face of such compelling evidence, Dave Meyer accepted a plea deal in March 2023, pleading guilty to murder in exchange for dismissal of several other charges. Finally, on May 10th, 2024, at the second district court in Ogden, Utah, Judge Joseph Bean sentenced Meyer to 15 years to life in prison.
He is currently incarcerated at the Utah State Prison.