Vladimir Sabich - Death

Death

Late in the afternoon on March 21, 1976, Sabich had returned from a day of skiing in Aspen and was preparing to shower. He was shot in the bathroom of his Starwood home by his live-in girlfriend, singer-actress Claudine Longet, then age 34. The two had met at a pro-celebrity event four years earlier in 1972 in Bear Valley, California, and had quickly become an item. She claimed the gun discharged accidentally, when he was showing her how it worked. He was hit in the abdomen and lost a significant amount of blood before an ambulance arrived. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, with Longet at his side. Spider Sabich was 31 years and 2 months old.

Longet was arrested and charged with the shooting. At the trial, Longet repeated the claim that the gun had accidentally fired when Sabich was showing her how to use it.

The Pitkin County Sheriffs, who made the arrest, made two procedural errors that aided Longet's defense: without warrants, they took a blood sample from her and confiscated her diary. According to prosecutors, the sample showed the presence of cocaine in her blood, and her diary reportedly contradicted her claim that her relationship with Sabich had not soured. In addition, the gun (which had a defect requiring it to be fired several times before it finally discharged) was mishandled by non-weapons experts. As they were unable to cite any of the disallowed material, prosecutors did use the autopsy report to suggest that when Sabich was struck, he was bent over, facing away, and at least 1.80 m (6 feet) from Longet, which would be inconsistent with the position and relative distance of someone demonstrating the operation of a firearm.

The jury convicted her of a lesser charge—misdemeanor criminal negligence—and sentenced her to pay a small fine and spend 30 days in jail. The judge allowed Longet to choose the days she served, believing that this arrangement would allow her to spend the most time with her children, and she chose to work off most of her sentence on weekends. (Critical reaction to the verdict and sentencing was exacerbated when she subsequently vacationed with her defense attorney, Ron Austin, who was married at the time; Longet and Austin later married and still live in Aspen.) After the criminal trial, the Sabich family initiated civil proceedings to sue Longet. The case was eventually resolved out of court, with the proviso that Longet never tell or write about her story.