GRASS RANGE — Diane Livingston always knew that leaving her abusive husband for good would not be easy. She had tried many times before during their 28 years of marriage, only to return to Andrew Livingston.

“It’s the fear factor,” she said. “And you always think that if you love him enough and give him a good family ...”

But on Oct. 3 Diane’s final attempt to leave Andrew ended in his suicide after he nearly shot her to death.

“It dawned on me the other day, I should be dead,” she said.

Sitting at a booth in the Little Montana Cafe this week, Diane calmly recounted the day her husband shot her four times before committing suicide.

Her light red hair — some friends call her “Red” — descends past her shoulders. Her left middle finger is taped and encased in a metal brace, and when she smiles, a hole shows where her top teeth used to be on the right side of her mouth — a black badge of courage.

Dressed warmly against the chill of a fall day, a denim vest and gray wool coat hang loosely on her. She’s lost weight since the shooting, partly because she’s restricted to soft foods.

Diane can recall every moment in great detail. Although she is a private person, Diane agreed to talk about her ordeal in hopes that it may help others. She also wanted to pass on the message that God can work miracles. After all, she’s still alive after being shot four times.

Rural town

Grass Range is a town of about 150 in central Montana, just southeast of the scraggly Judith Mountains. According to the 2000 census, the median income of Grass Range residents was less than $20,000. Surrounding farms and ranches, as well as traffic off Highway 87 that passes right through town, are the lifeblood of the community.

In the town’s heyday, during the land rush in the early 1900s, it boasted two banks and an assortment of bars and hotels. Depression and drought thinned Grass Range’s numbers in the 1930s and now, like many other small Montana towns, most high school graduates leave to look for jobs elsewhere. Two cafes, the store and bar are the main employers.

Diane was one of the few to find employment in Grass Range. For a little more than four years, she had been cooking at the Little Montana Cafe on the night shift.

She was on her way to work Oct. 3, a Friday, when she stopped her car in the large parking lot in front of the cafe and the attached store. It was just before her shift was to start at 2 p.m. She was making cell phone calls to friends. The north edge of the lot where tractor-trailer rigs park, not far from the Little Montana Rock Shop, is the best place to get cell phone reception.

Nine days before, Diane had left Andrew, 54, at their Chippewa Creek home and moved into a tiny yellow house in Grass Range with her 18-year-old daughter, Bess. She had a restraining order against Andrew.

While she was talking to a friend in Billings, Andrew pulled up next to Diane’s car in his pickup. She quickly cut the phone conversation off, rolled down her window and told Andrew he wasn’t supposed to be near her.

Like so many times before, Andrew pleaded with her to come back. He’d lined up a marriage counselor and had talked to his pastor.

“I think he thought he could convince me to come back,” she said.

But instead, Diane told him: “No, I’m done. This is the happiest I’ve ever been.”

He asked if he could have the family dog, Murphy. She agreed, and then tried to drive away.

But Andrew moved his truck to block her car. She backed up and tried to pull away. Andrew rammed his truck into her car. They both got out of their vehicles and started walking toward each other.

Andrew, 5 foot 9 and 200 pounds with dark hair and a mustache, left his truck carrying a white-gripped .22 caliber Ruger revolver. Extending his arm with the pistol drawn, his blue eyes focused, he walked toward Diane and pulled the trigger at close range. The shot hit her in the right side of her mouth, slicing her tongue, shattering several teeth. The bullet fragmented when it hit two steel dental implants.

“Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me,” she pleaded with Andrew, blood spraying from her mouth, as she grabbed the pistol and wrestled for control of the gun.

As they struggled, the gun went off two more times — one shot nearly severing Diane’s left middle finger, another striking her little finger before hitting her chin.

“I was amazed I had that much strength,” she said.

Then Andrew got the pistol and struck her on the head, knocking her to the parking lot gravel.

“All right then,” Diane remembers him saying.

Andrew fired again, hitting her in the back of the head, the bullet leaving a divot and groove in her skull.

“Then the lights went out for me,” Diane recalled. “But then I thought, ‘My heart’s still beating.’ ”

So she prayed.

“God, you’ve got to keep me alive for my children.”

And the lights returned.

As she lay curled on her side on the ground, Andrew went back to his truck, sat behind the steering wheel and shot himself in the back of the head, below the base of the skull.

“I knew he would take care of himself,” Diane said.

Wreck outside

the rock shop

Stan Bradley, 68, was working in his Rock Shop when he heard a crash outside. Expecting a ruckus, he grabbed his 9mm chrome-plated pistol and walked out the door to investigate.

He found the air in the parking lot 30 yards from his shop clouded with dust. He saw a man and a woman struggling. He tried to get the man’s attention.

He yelled at the couple to knock it off.

“He had her by the arm and was slamming her around,” Bradley recalled.

Bradley didn’t recognize the people, although he called Diane a friend and said he had met Andrew twice. But he did see the man had a gun. He watched as Andrew shot Diane, and then got in his truck and shot himself.

Bradley put his gun back in his shop and rushed to Diane’s side.

A patron at the nearby gas pumps hurried into the store to call 911.

Bradley tried to comfort Diane.

“I told her, ‘Don’t talk. You’re all right. Stay with us,’ ” he said.

Diane used her good hand to signal where she’d been shot and that she was OK.

Someone suggested the gun should be removed from Andrew’s grip as drew his final breaths. Bradley retrieved the bloody pistol, placing it on the trunk of Diane’s car.

“The first two or three days it didn’t bother me,” Bradley said. “You don’t expect these things to happen in your backyard. On the Monday following that, geez, I was shaking like a leaf.

“There are better ways to solve your problems than that.”

Neighbors respond

Grass Range has an all-volunteer ambulance service with 19 trained members. On 911 calls, dispatchers alert the town’s emergency medical technicians with pagers.

Mike Vlastelic, who lives northeast of Grass Range, was the first to get to the scene, about three minutes after being paged. Then a half-dozen other EMTs arrived.

In rural areas such as Grass Range, the victim often is someone the EMTs know.

“You put everything else out of your mind and rely on your training, what you have to do,” Vlastelic said. “It’s rewarding when you can save somebody, and not so when you don’t.”

Within 10 minutes, Vlastelic said, the EMTs had Diane loaded in the ambulance and were traveling the 30 miles to Lewistown’s Central Montana Medical Center.

Andrew was pronounced dead at the scene.

Diane was still conscious during the ambulance ride and remembers spitting out pieces of her teeth.

“Probably the most embarrassing thing is going into the emergency room and they cut my clothes off,” she said. She remembers thinking, “You know, I really like that shirt.”

A friend had called Diane’s adult daughter, Annie, who lives in Lewistown. She was waiting when her mother arrived.

At the hospital, Diane had a tube inserted in her throat to keep her airway open as her tongue swelled. She used sign language to tell Annie, “I love you.”

Soon after, Diane was helicoptered to Great Falls Benefis Health System for further care.

Diane’s son, Will, said that when he first arrived at the hospital with his two sisters, doctors told them that his mother could be in a drug-induced coma for five to seven days. The doctors feared the last head wound would cause swelling in Diane’s brain, so they hadn’t even stitched the gash closed. They speculated it could take her a month to recover.

By the second day, however, Diane was stirring and by the end of the day she was awake and writing notes to her family.

“We were amazed at how well she was doing,” Will said. “She came out of it pretty good.”

Nine days after the shooting, Diane was released from the hospital.

Little house

on the prairie

Diane met Andrew in her hometown of Big Timber, where she graduated from Sweet Grass County High School in 1978. He was from Virginia, having moved to Montana to work as a hunting guide and doing odd jobs.

According to his obituary, Andrew was born Andrew Carlyle Wingfield Jr. and grew up in Richmond before attending Randolph Macon College.

Svend Mauland, a former Sweet Grass County sheriff, said Andrew adopted the last name Livingston when he moved to Montana.

Andrew once was investigated in the disappearance of a man in Bozeman, Mauland said, but the evidence was inconclusive and the case “never went anywhere.”

Andrew married Diane Rostad when she was 20. For 18 years they lived in an old schoolhouse made of hand-hewn logs. The house sat on a corner of Diane’s parents’ land in the Boulder River valley. It had no running water and was heated by a wood stove.

They had three children — Annie, now 23; Will, 22, and Elizabeth, 18.

While Diane worked as a checker at a Big Timber grocery store, Andrew judged rodeos, did day work and leather work.

“He was incredibly smart, extremely talented and horribly miserable,” Diane said.

Diane said she was abused off and on over the years, often leaving Andrew but always going back to him. He never harmed the children, she said.

“You have kids and you want to make it work,” she added. “And I was afraid of him. My family was afraid of him. The sheriff in Big Timber was afraid of him.”

Once in the ’90s, in what Diane still believes was an accident, Andrew shot her with a .22 rifle. The bullet went through her left arm and through both lungs, just missing her heart.

Mauland said his officers responded often to reports of domestic violence at the Livingston home.

“It just wasn’t a good situation,” he said. “We always thought we had convinced her to leave, but she’d go back.”

In 1999, the family moved to Grass Range. Four years ago, Diane began working as night cook at the Little Montana.

Diane said the family was good at hiding their abusive home life from friends and acquaintances.

“What I knew of him, he was good,” said Bill Plouffe, pastor of the Grass Range Community Christian Fellowship Church. A former rodeo bullfighter, Plouffe knew the family from the rodeo circuit. “He was always willing to lend a hand when I needed it.”

Nobody except family members knew Andrew’s dark side, Diane said.

Fergus County Sheriff Tom Killham said his office was familiar with Andrew, but he was not considered dangerous.

“We had some history with him, but he’d never been arrested,” Killham said. “We’d worked with him before. There were some disturbance calls but never anything where anybody was arrested.”

Final move

Over their 28 years of marriage, Andrew had sometimes tried to change, Diane said, but it never seemed to last.

Four years ago, he began taking antidepressants and went to counseling. The drugs calmed his anger, Diane said, but left him paranoid and reliant on her, even to make trips to town.

Once when Diane had left Andrew and feared he was lying to his counselor about their relationship, she demanded to go to his next session. He refused.

Nine days before the shooting, she figured the time was right and moved with daughter Bess to a small house in Grass Range, not far from the willow-choked edge of McDonald Creek.

“The kids were finally grown, so they wouldn’t be caught in the middle of it,” she had reasoned.

Sins of the father

The abusive home life had prompted their son, Will, to move in with a Grass Range friend after his junior year of high school.

“My dad and I didn’t get along at all,” said Will, a student at Rocky Mountain College in Billings. “I got whupped on quite a bit as I was growing up. He was easier on my sisters. He’d just slap them around.”

Will said he made the decision to move in with his friend after his mother, who had left Andrew once again, decided to return.

“I always hated seeing her go back, but I always knew she was going to,” Will said. “He’d always find her; it didn’t matter where she went.”

Will credits friends and family for keeping him pointed in the right direction.

“Growing up, I guess I learned from my dad all the things I shouldn’t do,” he said.

In the back of his mind, Will figured his parents’ relationship could end violently. His father had hinted at what would eventually try to do.

“He had mentioned before if he couldn’t have her, nobody else would,” Will said.

When Will got the call that his mother had been shot and his father had taken his own life, Will felt both concern for his mother and relief that his father was gone.

Once his mother recovered, he said, “There was a huge sigh of relief because I knew that she would be safe, and we could all be together again.”

Community support

Stapled and stitched back together, Diane still has a fragment of bullet or tooth raising the skin of her neck. The teeth that were shot away haven’t been replaced and she suffers dizzy spells. Her rebuilt middle finger is pinned together with steel. And her voice has sounds gravelly.

But she is relentlessly positive.

“To me, it was miracle after miracle,” she said. “I survived, I’m a survivor. Things are looking good. I have a future. I have great kids. And it’s great what these folks have done for me.”

Businesses have stepped forward with donations — one gave her use of a minivan. An account has been established at a Lewistown bank to help defray her expenses. The community of Grass Range planned a benefit.

It may be four to six months before she’ll be able to return to work, but she worries more about how her children will cope than about her health.

In a gesture of solidarity, Bess, the youngest daughter, had a cursive “Inner Strength” tattooed in blue on her left forearm.

“Somehow, you have to come to peace and move on,” Diane said. “You can always ask why, and what if, but at some point you have to go on.

“I’m going to like it when I can go back to being anonymous,” she continued. “Right now, I feel about as naked as when I was on that hospital table.”