'Dumb' Wife Tried to Feed Dead Husband to the Birds

Ila Solomon, 55, loved her 88-year-old husband so deeply she desperately wanted to fulfill his dying wish — to be fed to the birds.

His World War II buddies were eaten by birds on the beaches at Normandy, she claims he told her, and he wanted to go out that way, too. He wanted her to carry his body to a hillside where the birds could strip the flesh from his bones. When Gerald “Scooter” Gavan died in their Indiana home, Solomon told authorities, she opened the doors and windows so the birds might fly in and peck away at his corpse.

He was too heavy to carry to a hillside, she said.

“Everyone has a death wish,” she told Fox 59 TV at the time. “I opened up the door so the birds could come in and eat him. He wanted to see the world again through a bird’s eye view.”

Alas, the birds did not oblige that day.

She claims she opened up the doors and windows every day for five days after his death in late April 2014, but the birds never came to feast on her husband.

The authorities in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, however, tell a far different story. They say “Scooter” Gavan died nine months earlier, in July 2013, and Solomon kept his corpse in the living room the entire time, where he decomposed on the carpet and left a wretched stain through to the hardwood floor. Police found dehumidifiers and kerosene heaters in the house to speed up the decomposition of his body.

All the while, Solomon — who’d lived with Gavan in Lafayette, Ind., since 2000 but only married him in 2012 — continued to cash the old man’s Social Security and pension checks, about $2,150 a month, as well as the $250 a month he received as a Purple Heart recipient for gunshot wounds sustained during World War II.

On Friday, however, a year and a half after her arrest, Solomon struck a plea deal and all charges of felony welfare fraud and theft were dropped. While she insists her husband was only dead for five days, Solomon agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanors: failure to report a dead body, and unlawful disposition of a dead body.

A judge asked her if she understood what she was admitting to.

“I am kind of a dumb person,” Solomon replied, as she held onto a poster featuring a photo of her late husband, reports WFLI.com. “But yeah, I guess so.”

Under Indiana law, a death must be reported to authorities within three hours.

Solomon continues to assert her husband was alive those nine months. She said he went to the Kentucky Derby and walked the mall with friends. On the day he died, she said, she remembers he went out and got a haircut and stopped at McDonald’s for coffee, she told TheIndyChannel.com. Then, she fed him ice cream, she claims, and Gavan told her his time was up.

The widow attributed the accelerated rate of decay to the dehumidifiers — which she says her husband used to dry out lumber for woodworking projects — as well as hormones, flies and rodents, which only made him appear to be dead for nine months.

She also claimed someone brought in the heaters to mummify his body and stage the scene to look as if he’d been dead a long time in a plot to prevent her from getting Gavan’s trust fund.

“A lot of people know how to mummify a body,” she said.

Neighbors, who knew “Scooter” the war vet as a nice and honorable man, told police they hadn’t seen Gavan for a long time. They saw Solomon almost every day. They thought she was his caretaker and didn’t know she was his wife. Records show she married him April 9, 2012, in Kentucky, a little more than a year before his official date of death.

Tyler Imel, who lives next door, told USAToday he sat on the front porch and spoke with Solomon from time to time, all the while unaware the nice old man was decomposing just inside the house.

“It’s really disturbing,” he said.

» Subscribe to Patch news via email

Eventually, people noticed Gavan was not out and about. Police went to the home on May 4, 2014, and questioned Solomon, who claimed he was out of town and then claimed he was in assisted living after suffering a stroke, according to news accounts. When officers entered the house, they found his corpse beneath a tarp, with bedding on top and powdered lime sprinkled about.

Solomon claimed her union to Gavan was her first marriage, but a Lafayette Journal & Courier investigation revealed marriage records that show Solomon had wed at least three times previously, the first in 1978 when she was 19.

Solomon told the newspaper she grew up knowing Gavan and called him “Uncle Red.”

As her case made its way through the Tippecanoe County courts for a year and a half, Solomon, sometimes wearing her late husband’s dog tags, would bring posters to court with Gavan’s photo on them. The posters touted how Gavan’s right to be eaten by birds was being denied. She insisted she loved Gavan and still wanted to find a way to fulfill his wish. She told a reporter she was looking into shipping his remains to a “body ranch” in Texas, where researchers could feed him to buzzards.

Solomon recently sold the house for $60,000. The house will be torn down and a new one built on the lot.

The widow, who repaid the federal government $20,000, could be sentenced in December to a year in prison and potentially face $105,000 in fines.

Authorities still don’t know what caused Gavan’s death.