ENOLA, Pa. — A bloodstained would-be suicide note has given police a glimpse into the mind of a Pennsylvania man accused of fatally shooting his wife on Christmas Eve.
Christopher Kendig Colbert, 39, of Enola, is accused of killing Tamara Colbert with a gunshot wound to the head. He has been charged with criminal homicide, aggravated assault, strangulation and tampering with evidence.
Cumberland County prosecutors allege that Christopher Colbert killed his wife during a Dec. 24 domestic dispute. No one else was in the home when Tamara Colbert, 39, was slain.
According to CBS 21 in Harrisburg, Christopher Colbert called his father in Florida on Christmas Eve and told him Tamara Colbert had shot herself. His father later told police his son was “irrational, emotional and not completing sentences,” PennLive reported.
The line went dead, and the elder Colbert tried for several minutes to reach his son. When he couldn’t, he called Hampden Township police, who sent officers to the couple’s home for a welfare check.
The officers found Christopher Colbert sitting in his car inside the garage, with alcohol on his breath and blood on his head, PennLive reported. Court records obtained by the news outlet allege that a pistol was nearby.
Tamara Colbert was dead in a bedroom upstairs.
"We never should have had weapons in the house," Christopher Colbert wrote after Tamara was shot in the head in Hampden Township. Now he's charged with homicide. https://t.co/VsDPn7w5ZH
— The Patriot-News (@PatriotNews) December 29, 2022
Christopher Colbert told detectives that he and his wife had an argument, at which point she “stormed upstairs, unlocked the gun safe … we wrestled.”
“I need a lawyer,” Colbert said, according to court records.
Authorities believe the couple got into an argument and Christopher Colbert attempted to attack his wife with a knife, which was found on the kitchen floor.
Tamara Colbert fled upstairs, where the fight continued. It was there that Christopher Colbert fired the fatal gunshot, according to police.
Christopher Colbert was initially charged with simple assault and reckless endangerment. An autopsy determined, however, that the gunshot wound to the top of Tamara Colbert’s head was the result of homicide, not suicide.
The autopsy also showed internal signs of strangulation, PennLive reported.
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In the blood-spattered note found inside the house, Christopher Colbert allegedly wrote that there was no one he loved more than his wife.
“She was my world and I ruined it,” the note read, according to PennLive. “I’m so impossibly sorry. Understand that I didn’t kill her. She and I had a fight. We were not doing well.”
Colbert wrote that both he and his wife had tendencies toward anger when their relationship was going poorly.
“Writing any of this is silly, since we’re dead and I’m going to be seen as the cause.”
The couple had been married for 10 months at the time of the shooting, PennLive reported.
Christopher Colbert is being held without bond in the Cumberland County Jail.
If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. The hotline is available 24/7, and calls are toll-free and confidential.
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