The apparent murder-suicide of a former U.S. ambassador and his wife Thursday stunned neighbors at an upscale retirement home in Northwest Washington who saw them as a dashing, vibrant couple.
The bodies of Richard Funkhouser and his wife, Phyllis, were found at about 11:30 a.m. in an underground garage at Ingleside health care community, a 14-acre campus nestled in the peaceful environs of Rock Creek Park.
Funkhouser had been very attentive and loving to his wife, who had been seriously injured in an airplane accident years ago and had trouble getting around, friends said.
On Thursday morning, police believe Richard shot his wife, then turned the gun on himself. He was 90. She was 84.
“This was not a crime,” friend Jane Angus said. “This was an act of love.”
Neighbors said they saw the couple at dinner just two nights earlier.
“She was a beautiful person. He was very handsome. They were a lovely couple,” Richard Stoltz said.
Richard Funkhouser was a retired U.S. ambassador to Gabon who served in the foreignservice in the Soviet Union, France, Scotland and Vietnam.
During World War II, Funkhouser was a transport pilot in the China–Burma–India theater, where he went on a secret mission behind Japanese lines and dropped an American spy over the mountains into what is now Thailand.
Funkhouser later described the colorful aftermath of that mission to a Washington Times reporter.
Decades after the air drop, he asked through a newsletter whether anyone knew what had happened to the spy. He received a letter from George Stone.
“I remember you very well because you were the most distinguished young man I had ever seen … not like those fighter pilots,” the letter said. But Funkhouser had deposited Stone on the wrong side of the mountain, and the spy suffered multiple injures, was captured and was sent to a Japanese prison camp. That mistake led to Stone meeting and marrying a Japanese woman and raising a family with her in West Virginia, Funkhouser recalled.
Lou Varella, executive director at Ingleside, said grief counselors would be available to meet with those shaken by the deaths.
