After shooting her estranged husband six times, Dorothy Joudrie left the chairman of Canadian Tire Corp. and Algoma Steel lying in a pool of his own blood on the garage floor of her Alberta home while she went back inside to have another drink of her favorite beverage, a double Seagram's VO whiskey on the rocks. She then reappeared with a freshened drink.
Her badly wounded husband, Earl Joudrie, begged her to call 911, but she ignored his pleas until he promised not to press charges against her for trying to kill him.
The dramatic picture of the 1995 incident was painted hours after Earl Joudrie died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma in Fenelon Falls, Ontario, on Thursday. He was 72.
His good friend, Martha Billes, the majority shareholder of Canadian Tire, said in an interview that while she had not been witness to the socialite's shooting of her husband, she had warned Joudrie about visiting his estranged wife, whom Billes described as being well known as a nasty drunk.
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"I knew he was headed to Calgary and going to have the meeting with Dorothy (about divorcing her) and I told him: 'Don't go alone. Have somebody go with you,' " Billes said.
Joudrie ignored Billes' warnings. "He was kindhearted, and he didn't believe what we believed, and he went alone," she said.
"She left him bleeding on the garage floor and went away and had a drink and came back and said, 'Aren't you dead yet?' Then she would go away and have another drink," Billes said.
Ms. Joudrie was charged with attempted murder, but was found not guilty in May of 1996 after presenting a defense of temporary insanity and arguing that her husband had beaten her severely in the first two decades of their nearly 40-year marriage.
She died of liver and kidney failure at age 66 in 2002.
Joudrie was called as a witness in the trial. Their son Colin Joudrie said Thursday from Turkey that the relationship between his parents was very intense, but he admitted that "my mom hit my dad and my dad hit my mom in the late 1970s, but that was the first and the last time."
He said that there was "no way" his mother could have gotten off without his father's cooperation. His mother had committed a "heinous" act in shooting his father, he said.
The couple divorced in the summer of 1995 and he subsequently married Lynn Manning, a Toronto businesswoman and a distant cousin of Ms. Joudrie. Joudrie carried four bullets in his body for the rest of his life.
"Aren't you dead yet?"
Dorothy Joudrie, after shooting her husband, Earl
according to Martha Billes, Earl's close friend
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