More than two weeks after being slain at her Ellicott City home, Shirley Scott Harney finally was laid to rest yesterday, eulogized as an unfulfilled woman just beginning to blossom.
A half-hour earlier in a courtroom a few miles away, her husband, Daniel Scott Harney, who is accused of killing her, pleaded with a judge to attend her funeral. His request was denied.
More than 100 people gathered on a chilly, rainy day to say goodbye to Mrs. Harney, 41, shot more than once and then run over by a car the day after Christmas. Mr. Harney, 40, from whom she separated in July, was arrested Saturday in Charlotte, N.C., the same day his case appeared on the TV crime show, "America's Most Wanted."
"She said the last few months were the happiest and most fulfilling of her life," said her eulogist, Dr. Samuel Berkowitz, an Ellicott City psychologist and friend of nearly a year.
Then, looking at her two sons seated in the front row with their grandparents, Dr. Berkowitz said: "Your mother's glow was prematurely and brutally snuffed out."
The crowd at the Ellicott City funeral home contrasted sharply with the lack of relatives to arrange Mrs. Harney's funeral. Mourners included neighbors, co-workers, acquaintances from church and her sons' elementary school, as well as members of her husband's family.
"No family members were available, willing or able to bury her," said Rebecca A. Bryant, Mrs. Harney's lawyer who, after being declared executor of her estate, arranged for her funeral. "I finally figured enough's enough. Somebody had to step forward and make the arrangements."
She said Mrs. Harney, whose parents are dead, has a cousin in Louisiana and a brother in Michigan, neither of whom attended the funeral. She said she didn't know why.
"I don't think there was trouble between them," Ms. Bryant said. "I guess they were just unwilling or unable to deal with this now. . . . Ordinarily the husband is the one who makes arrangements to bury his wife."
Mr. Harney's whereabouts were a mystery for 12 days until his arrest. His sons, Ryan, 8, and Paul, 10, were with him, unharmed.
A financial administrator at Westinghouse Corp., Mr. Harney had picked them up at his estranged wife's house Dec. 26 for a prearranged holiday visit. Police said he returned later, broke in, found his wife in a bedroom with a male friend and shot them.
The man -- William A. Helmbold, 45, of Woodlawn -- was wounded in the arm. Mrs. Harney was found in a pool of blood at the end of her driveway.
Mr. Harney drove the boys to Florida, where they went to Walt Disney World.
Yesterday he was in the Howard County Detention Center in Jessup. He spoke by video camera with a judge in Ellicott City during his bond review hearing.
Howard District Judge Louis Becker declined to grant Mr. Harney bail, denied Tuesday night by a county District Court commissioner.
After Judge Becker's decision, Mr. Harney said: "They can take me under lock and key, but I'd like to attend my wife's funeral."
The judge denied the request: "I would have some concerns for your safety." Mr. Harney then asked for the telephone number of Gov. William Donald Schaefer.
"I'd like to call him and make this request," Mr. Harney said. "I find that's an inhuman result."
Mrs. Harney's death was mourned in the softly lighted confines of the Harry H. Witzke Funeral Home. A portrait of the dark-haired woman and a bouquet of pink and white flowers graced the closed, silver casket at the front of the room.
The Rev. Robert Culp, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, the Harneys' church, said Mrs. Harney's death reflected a society "increasingly affected by rage and violence."
He talked of "the legacy of a loving mother" and her "tender, innocent, disbelieving children."
The boys sat quietly with their paternal grandparents, Lucille and Jack Harney, who live in McLean, Va. The grandparents were granted custody of the children at a hearing Tuesday in North Carolina.
Ryan and Paul, who attended Worthington Elementary School in Ellicott City, played sports and took music lessons, yesterday were in their Sunday best, sharp white shirts and little ties.
Dr. Berkowitz quietly, with great emotion, spoke of Mrs. Harney.
The Harney marriage was unraveling, Dr. Berkowitz said, and Mrs. Harney was "in dire need of understanding."
He said she slowly began casting off lifelong feelings of self-doubt and developing a sense of worth, "a side of herself she had never trusted."
"She began to blossom into a very tender, more self-assured woman, still doing for others, but out of a sense of strength instead of her perceived weakness," Dr. Berkowitz said. "She was a gem in the process of being polished and honed."
He addressed the boys, saying he was sorry their mother had been so brutally taken from them. But they should know, he said, that their mother left them a precious gift.
"She liberated herself from despair and depression," Dr. Berkowitz said. "She went from feelings of loneliness and helplessness to feelings of hopefulness and optimism. . . . She left you a gift, the example of her life."
She was a private person who had few close friends -- a gifted writer and musician whose rejection of music scholarships and a career as a concert pianist may have caused a rift between her and her family 20 years ago.
Her poetry revealed both her pain and her sensitivity. "On Going to Walden," one of the 35 poems she wrote for her 1980 master's thesis in English at the University of Maryland, reads in part:
"Each day I walk a little farther and perhaps I will not return. . . . May a man take relief from my own lingering image a hundred years from now."
A native of Michigan, Mrs. Harney was a volunteer tutor at her boys' school and a regular jogger. She worked as a legal secretary at Piper & Marbury, the Baltimore law firm, from 1989 until September, when she took a similar job at another city firm, Venable, Baetjer and Howard.
Carroll Fackler, personnel manager of Piper & Marbury, said Mrs. Harney was extremely quiet, "a very accomplished and learned individual, very organized and disciplined in what she did."
After the midday funeral, a caravan of cars drove slowly to the Good Shepherd Cemetery across town. The grave was in the back, along the edge, and mourners walked past headstones through the mud and gathered once again.
Mr. Culp presided over a brief ceremony. Then he bent down to speak softly with the boys.
Afterward, the boys' grandparents talked briefly with reporters.
"We loved her," Jack Harney said of his daughter-in-law. "She was a very wonderful person."
Lucille Harney recalled telling the boys Monday in Charlotte of their mother's death. They had not known until then.
"It was difficult for everybody," she said.
Lucille Harney added that she had spoken with her son in jail, but that she couldn't reveal what he'd said. She did say that he told her the boys were asleep in bed at his Owings Mills home when their mother was killed.
She never feared for their safety, she said, even though they were with a fugitive.
"He would never hurt them," Lucille Harney said.
As their mother's body was lowered slowly into the ground, the boys walked off through the rain with a flower from her coffin.