http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/12/27/2009-12-27_the_tale_of_killer_sally_her_12gauge__her_husband.html(Courtesy of NYDaily News.com)
Valentine's Day 1995 was not going well for Sally and Ray McNeil.
Not that either expected love poems and roses.
Both bodybuilders and ex-Marines, the couple's awful eight-year marriage was wearing out, ground down by vanity, jealousy and muscular machismo.
Yet Sally seethed that evening when Ray was late in showing up at their apartment in Oceanside, Calif., north of San Diego.
She was spoiling for a fight when he finally arrived after 10 p.m.
Shantina and John, Sally's preteen children from another marriage, cowered in their bedroom as the combat commenced. The kids knew the drill.
As a prosecutor later said of the marriage, "That's what they did - they hit each other."
And neither was the sort to surrender.
Ray McNeil, 29, was a buff 256-pounder who was named Mr. California in 1991. Sally, a 34-year-old ripped blonde, had won the U.S. Armed Services Physique Championship twice in the late '80s.
But this confrontation would be different. It would be their last.
As Ray stood at the kitchen stove cooking chicken, Sally asked him to explain where he had been.
After some shouting, Shantina, 11, said she heard a "gurgling" sound, as though her mother was being choked.
Sally went to a closet, removed a 12-gauge shotgun from its case and chambered a shell. She walked back to the kitchen and pulled the trigger.
The shot blew a hole through Ray's six-pack abs. He fell to his knees, and his wife loaded a second shell and shot him in the jaw.
She then called 911. In the background, Ray could be heard moaning, "Why, oh god, why?"
Shantina ran to a neighbor's apartment, hollering, "Oh my God! My mom shot my dad!" As Sally waited for police, the neighbor overheard her say, "I just wanted him to leave me alone."
Ray McNeil was still alive and conscious when police arrived. As he listened to Sally tell cops that he had choked her, the bodybuilder tossed his bloody head from side to side and uttered a firm "No!"
He was declared dead two hours later, and Sally was charged with murder, causing a sensation in the insular world of bodybuilding.
Ray McNeil, a native Jamaican, was among the top 20 professionals in the nation in his weight class.
Sally, who grew up in Allentown, Penn., was an amateur bodybuilder, but she used her physique to earn money in niche muscle sports, including female submission wrestling and a semi-erotic amusement known as apartment wrestling, in which men pay to grapple with muscular women.
She used the nickname "Killer Sally" in those enterprises.
It fit, said her first husband, Anthony Lowden.
