Romantic novelist killed by husband

NANCY RICHARDS-AKERS described herself as "the little girl with the over-active imagination who became the adolescent who spun endless fantasies about love, who grew up to work in Washington politics, a tragic waste for a chronic daydreamer".

On Saturday night those daydreams came to an end with two bullets from a handgun in the back of her head.

Ms Richards-Akers, 45, was a successful romantic novelist, trading in the dreams and hopes of millions of American women for a more exotic life. She had written 16 books, with titles such as Miss Wickham's Betrothal and So Wild a Kiss.

She wrote of "Irish warriors, blanket bogs and miracles", of Sir Garrett Neville, the English nobleman who wants to take back his land in Ireland, and of Eleanor Archebold, his nemesis. "Her determined green eyes enflame him, adding a new quest to his ambitions. Eleanor's promised to marry him - in name only. He's determined to claim her ... body and soul."

The reality of Ms Richards-Akers's life was different from that of her heroines and much closer to those of her readers. She was one of the white upper-middle-class women who live in the north-west suburbs of Washington, married to a lawyer. Her marriage to Jeremy Akers, 12 years her senior, had gone wrong. She had moved out to a flat on MacArthur Boulevard, down the road, and the children had stayed with her husband.

By all accounts Mr Akers was difficult, conservative and not afraid to talk about it. "He was the kind of guy who got in your personal space and you had to step back," a neighbour told the Washington Post. He was a former marine and he had plenty of guns in the house.

At 10.30pm on Saturday, when most people in these suburban communities are finishing their coffee and heading home to the babysitter, neighbours heard gunshots. The police found Ms Richards-Akers dead in her Jeep in the driveway with two wounds in the back of her head from a small-calibre handgun.

Mr Akers had fled in his Mercury Mountaineer, the kind of rugged car that is favouredby soft suburbanites with a penchant for the outdoors. He called a friend, and police traced the number to a payphone near the Lincoln Memorial. When they arrived they found him sitting on the grass in front of the Vietnam memorial, a sunken wall of etched black marble that is as much a shrine for conservatives as a testament to the dead. Before they could reach him he had placed a shotgun in his mouth and killed himself. Police said there were no other suspects, and they were treating the case as a murder and suicide.

"Romance allows me to find the happy ending, to modify reality just enough to give it hope," Ms Richards-Akers once wrote. It was a tragic irony that the end of her own life was so bleak, brutal and sudden.