Wife acquitted of murder after shooting husband

By Finn J.D. John
April 13, 2025

DAWN WAS ONLY a couple hours away when 33-year-old lumber mill owner Gene Harington got home from a really long night.

He pulled into the drive around 5:45 a.m., and immediately proceeded to wake up his pretty young wife, Virginia, along with their two babies (ages 1 and 2).

Virginia tucked the two kids back into bed, and after that, an argument ensued. Virginia later said it was a bad one — at one point Gene threatened to kick her out of the house, and at another point he threatened to push her down the basement stairs.

Finally, she said, around 7:45 a.m., he got undressed for bed. But then he got back up again, got into the closet, and got out his .38 Special.

“I’m getting this so you won’t,” he said. Then he put it down on the floor beside the bed.

The couple continued their argument. Virginia wanted Gene to stop drinking; Gene wanted Virginia to get off his back, and maybe have a drink or two herself (she was a teetotaler). She probably accused him of having an affair; after all, he had been out all night.

Then — something happened. Precisely what, only Virginia really knew afterward — but after it was over, Gene Harington was dead, a pair of .38-caliber bullets buried deep in his brain.

Virginia told police he threatened to shoot her with the .38, and grabbed her left arm. Instead of trying to pull away, she had stepped across, snatched the gun away from him, and fired it at him twice.

She said she did not at first realize he was dead, and called a friend to ask what she should do; the friend told her to get an ambulance on the way quick, as well as police.

When they arrived, they found Gene Harington quite dead ... but they thought Virginia’s story was a little fishy. After all, what 23-year-old 1940s housewife is good enough with a pistol to do what she said she had done? Snatch a strange gun out of a man’s hand, get a grip on it, find the trigger, and put two rounds into his eye, all while he clutches (and, presumably, pulls on) her arm?

GENE HARINGTON HAD not always been a mill-owning bigshot. He’d started out as a log-truck driver. Just before the Second World War, he’d bought a small sawmill which he ran on a shoestring; but then, when war broke out, the booming market for lumber made it possible for him to expand the operation into two mills, both in Eugene.

In 1944 he married Virginia and settled down to start a family with her. After the war, the Haringtons bought a home in Eugene’s fancy College Hill neighborhood, and a brand-new Packard luxury car for Gene to drive to work in. It was quite an upgrade from the old log truck, and he looked, from the outside, like he’d really made it.

But, apparently those appearances were deceiving.

ON THE FATAL night, according to witnesses, Harington had gone out for dinner and drinks to a café on the outskirts of Eugene. In the party with him were his secretary from the office; a real-estate agent named Eugene Florence; Florence’s wife; and a third woman, who isn’t named.

After midnight, the ladies all returned home, and Harington and Florence went to another all-night café to have a few more pops and talk about Harington’s plan to sell his lumber mills.

Around 2:30 or 3, the two men went together to inspect the mills — this seems like a very strange thing to do at 3 a.m., but perhaps Harington didn’t want his employees to know he was thinking about selling.

While touring one of the mills, Florence testified that Harington actually telephoned his wife. This would have been around 4 a.m. The conversation apparently didn’t go very well, and Harington asked the mill’s night watchman to speak to her. “She thinks I’m with a woman,” he said.

Florence testified that Harington had had several drinks throughout the evening and into the morning, but said he was not visibly drunk at all.

Virginia, who actually testified in her own defense, said that was not the case, and that Harington had been quite drunk when he came home. He was, she said, a “different man” when drunk, and often became abusive after drinking excessively.

Harington’s blood was tested at the morgue after his death; but the result was listed in the paper as “.017 percent.” If that’s correct, it’s less than the effect of one glass of beer. But I suspect it’s a misprint, because such a finding would have utterly destroyed Virginia’s case.

If, instead, the paper meant to print “0.17 percent,” well, that’s a significant level of intoxication. Most people lose consciousness and pass out at 0.20 percent; but experienced heavy drinkers can function fairly normally at such levels.

Was Harington such a drinker, as his wife testified he was? That, most likely, was the primary thing on the jury’s minds as they filed out of the courtroom to deliberate.

But the prosecution really didn’t have a lot to work with. Their case mostly rested on the oddness of some of the details — like the ninja-class trick shooting Virginia said she’d done, and the fact that the bed on which Harington’s body lay did not appear to be messed up as by a struggle. Their allegation was that she had simply waited for him to fall asleep, then stepped up beside the bed, squared off, took careful aim, and shot him twice in the head as he lay there.

In the end, the evidence to support that theory must have been very thin indeed, because the jury took less than two hours deliberating before they brought in a verdict of Not Guilty.

SO, WHAT REALLY happened? Only one person knew, and therein lay the problem. It’s hard to get “beyond all reasonable doubt” without some kind of solid evidence, and in this case, it was mostly a case of “he said, she said” — with the “he said” part lopped off.

It no doubt helped a great deal that in court, Virginia did not behave at all like a murderess is assumed to act. She was very worried about the two babies, while they were in state custody waiting for their grandmother to arrive from San Jose; and she was quite emotional in all the right ways during her testimony. Of course, some murderers are very good at that kind of acting; but it seems unlikely a 23-year-old would have acquired such skills.

And yet her account of how the shooting happened rings very false. To snatch a gun from the hand of a much stronger person, shift one’s grip on the gun without using the other hand (remember, she said he was holding her arm) and, firing unaimed in double-action mode with her wrist bent, punch two rounds dead center through the bull’s eye?

As anyone who’s fired a double-action revolver will appreciate, it takes a good deal of training to be able to accurately shoot one in double-action mode. The long, heavy pull on the trigger that is required to rotate the cylinder and raise the hammer, and the way the trigger breaks free suddenly when the hammer is released, tends to cause the muzzle to wander.

Yet this pretty young mom, the jury members were told, had held the muzzle right on target for two unaimed shots, holding the gun sideways across her body?

Even from two feet away, that’s truly Annie Oakley-class trick shooting. One lucky hit would be plausible, but the chance of the second shot also being a near-perfect hit would have been vanishingly slight. The story can basically be dismissed out of hand, and it probably was.

So the jury must have decided Harington had had it coming. Or maybe they just didn’t want to finish the job of making orphans of their two kids. Either way, they came to their verdict very quickly and decisively.

As a side note, the newspaper coverage of the Harington case was fairly subdued, probably because it was overshadowed by the far more salacious case of Gladys Ralphs Broadhurst, the bigamous “film noir murderess” from Malheur County, which took place at roughly the same time. (Here is a link to that story.) Newspaper stories about the two murders appeared next to each other several times during the trial.

(Sources: “22 Murder Cases that Rocked Oregon,” an article by Douglas Perry published in the Portland Oregonian on Jan. 22, 2018; Morning Oregonian archives from January to March 1947)