Kentucky man shoots wife to death to 'stop her pain' from breast cancer

A Kentucky man has admitted that he shot and killed his wife on Wednesday morning, but he says that she asked him to do it because she was suffering from breast cancer.

"Hello... I just shot my wife," Ernest Chris Chumbley says in a 911 call obtained by WDKY-TV. "Give me police. I’m under arrest."

In an interview at the jail, Chumbley confessed that he killed his wife with a .32 handgun after she asked him to "stop her pain" because she was terminally ill with breast cancer.

"I said, 'All I've got is what the doctor gave you for medicine, the pain pills,'" he recalled. "And she said, 'No. I've took enough of them. I want you to stop my pain for good.'"

Laurel Co. Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Gilbert Acciardo told the station that the investigation was still in the early stages.

"And there are other people to interview on this case. So we’re not going to speculate on what the circumstances are," he said.

Neighbors confirmed that the Chumbleys had been married for more than 20 years and seemed to have a good relationship. However, the cancer had taken its toll on Chumbley's wife, Virginia, in recent years.

"She was hurting real bad," neighbor Stanley Campbell remarked. "We could hear her at night like she was gasping for air."

Chumbley was being held on $200,000 bond, and has already pleaded not guilt to charges of murder. But he understands that the police were just doing their job.

"I just did what she asked," he insisted to WDKY-TV. "And I would expect no different from her if I was asking her."

Watch this video from WDKY-TV, broadcast Aug. 28, 2013.