Legacy Matters
The newspaper carrier called her as the "Prayer lady" because she would leave him tips in letters to which she often appended a prayer.
`I've been praying for you at night whenever the weather's bad, realizing you're out in it delivering our papers,'"
He knew something was wrong when the newspapers piled up outside her door.
"That wonderful, small voice inside me said, `This isn't right.'"
After his route early Sunday, Pitts went home, napped briefly and, with his wife, returned to Blanche and Fred Roberts' home, just outside Marion, Ill.
They repeatedly rang the doorbells but got no answer. Pitts then eased open an unlocked side door and saw the couple about two feet inside, 84-year-old Blanche Roberts helpless looking right back at Pitts.
Her right leg was pinned beneath the body of her 77-year-old husband Fred, who apparently had died last Wednesday evening of a heart attack after mowing the lawn.
"The good Lord was with her. She was not scared, wasn't panicking," Pitts said during a telephone interview. "She was conscious, talking. Just peaceful. It was remarkable."
Newspaper carrier finds woman pinned by husband's dead body.