A 77-year-old woman who was shot four decades ago in Upper Lawrencetown, N.S., died earlier this year from complications related to her injuries, making her death a homicide, RCMP said Thursday.

An RCMP spokesperson declined to name the woman, but newspaper reports from June 1976 identified her as Deanna Mary Conant.

She was 35 when she was shot by Wesley Elvin Poole, 34, on June 23, 1976. Poole took his own life the same day at a business in Upper Lawrencetown. With Conant's death, the case is now considered a murder-suicide.

RCMP Cpl. Dal Hutchinson said Thursday he didn't know how the woman survived this long, only to die of her injuries in February of this year.

"There's 41 years of unanswered questions," he said.

Following the woman's death, the Nova Scotia medical examiner's office contacted officers in the Halifax police homicide unit.

In an email on behalf of the provincial medical examiner, Justice Department spokesperson Sarah Gillis explained the woman was permanently disabled as a result of the gunshot.

"The medical examiner's autopsy found that the death was due to a complication from the permanent disability and would still attribute the death to the initial gunshot, regardless of the timeline," Gillis wrote.

What happened

The 1976 newspaper reports said the shooting happened in the evening, and that a "domestic quarrel" was the apparent cause. Conant was rushed into surgery at the Victoria General Hospital, and even the next day it was uncertain whether she would live.

There were no witnesses to the shooting, which police at the time said involved a .30-30 calibre rifle. The man and woman knew each other but did not live together.

RCMP said the case is now closed and the woman's family does not want to speak publicly about it.

In her obituary from February 2017, Conant's family said she enjoyed listening to music and spending time with her grandsons.