Officer's End

The handsome, 31-year-old lieutenant rose from his wheel chair at Camp Anza, Calif, and heard the verdict without batting an eye. The verdict: death by hanging.

Lieut. Beaufort G. Swancutt, crippled by a policeman's bullet but recovering, told a reporter: "I am not afraid to die." Then he was rolled back to confinement. It was the first such sentence voted by a court-martial on an officer in World War II. The wheels of review that will finally take his case to the President began to grind.

Beaufort Swancutt, an infantry officer with a disordered, unstable record that had somehow escaped the notice of the Army, had committed one of the most inexplicable crimes in the service's modern history. At Camp Anza he had killed two 19-year-old girls, his captain and a policeman in a wild shooting rampage that had begun while he was sitting at a table drinking beer.

The evidence was that he was not drunk. The defense's contention was that he was insane. Army psychiatrists, making a belated test of the young officer, ruled that he was not; the court-martial accepted their findings. After that Swancutt, father of two children, had no chance, beyond the possibility that somewhere in the process of review his sentence might be commuted.

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