US Open umpire arrested for beating her husband to death

PanARMENIAN.Net - The veteran tennis umpire Lois Goodman has been arrested in New York while preparing for the US Open and charged with beating her 80-year-old husband to death with a coffee mug, The Guardian reported.

Goodman, 70, was arrested on Tuesday, August 21 accused of committing the murder at her home in Los Angeles in April.

The US Open's spokesman Tim Curry said Goodman has been a line judge at the tournament for many years and was about to begin working at the qualifying matches.

Alan Goodman died on 12 April at the couple's condominium in the Woodland Hills area. Lt David Storaker of the Los Angeles police department said Lois Goodman told officers it appeared to have been an accident, and that she had been out all day refereeing a tennis match.

When Goodman found her husband unresponsive in bed, "she said she surmised he had fallen down the steps, had a heart attack and managed to get back upstairs to the bed," Storaker said. "It was a suspicious death from the beginning."

The Los Angeles County coroner's office spokesman Ed Winter said investigators were sent to the mortuary where Alan Goodman's body was taken, and they noticed that he had multiple sharp force injuries on and around his head that were inconsistent with Lois Goodman's explanation.

Police found similar inconsistencies, including an amount of blood that did not suggest a fall, and a broken coffee mug, Storaker said. Working with coroner's investigators, police ruled the death a homicide and presented their conclusions to the district attorney's office. Storaker declined to discuss a possible motive.