An open door leads to slaying of woman

Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2001 | 11:24 a.m.

Disabled since childhood, 67-year-old Tiffany Averill usually left the sliding door to her mobile home cracked 6 to 12 inches so that her cats could get in and out without her having to get up to open and shut it.

That was all her killer needed to get into her residence in the Sunrise Oaks Community Mobile Home Park on Monday. The robber tried to steal her husband's gun collection, then cut her throat before fleeing, family members say.

"I told her not to leave that door open, but she never listened because she never thought anything would happen to her," Tiffany's husband, Russ Averill, a retired deputy constable of North Las Vegas, said.

"I will do whatever I can do to help police solve this crime."

Russ Averill said he hoped to be released today from University Medical Center, where he has been since last Friday, receiving treatment for a leg inflammation.

Metro Police detectives, investigating the homicide in the 1200 block of North Lamb Boulevard, say they have no motives and no suspects.

Averill, who graduated from the police academy, said he believes he knows the motive -- attempted theft of his guns that were kept in cases in one of the rooms of the mobile home. The cases were found disturbed, he said.

"Whoever it was knew the guns were there," Russ Averill said. "My wife apparently was in the kitchen, heard a noise and went to the room, where they slit her throat. They panicked, dropped one of the guns by her body and left. They didn't even take an envelope I had left her, marked 'groceries,' with $300 in it."

Averill last talked to his wife about 8:30 a.m. Monday. She had just made coffee and put the cats out. When he called back at 10:30 a.m., there was no answer.

Later in the day, he was able to reach a neighbor, who went to the house and found the sliding door open wide. He found the woman with a knife wound, police said.

"The message is that you must always be careful -- you have to watch your back even in your own home," said Averill, who met his wife of 51 years at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during World War II. She was a native Pennsylvanian.

Together, they raised seven children and had 12 grandchildren. She had suffered from cerebral palsy as a child and had difficulty moving as an adult.

They were residents of Las Vegas for 23 years but had lived only a short time at the mobile home park, where neighbors today expressed shock over the slaying.

"She was a very sweet and pleasant woman -- very gentle and very loving," neighbor Gwenna Fierro said. "People come over the back wall in this park all of the time, and some of them are pretty shady. But that happens in every neighborhood."

Another neighbor, who asked that her name not be printed, said, "That's the reason I have a Rottweiler."

Anyone with information about this homicide is asked to call detectives at 229-3521 or Secret Witness at 385-5555.