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He was a decade older, a suave lawyer who courted her with flowers, rides in his powder-blue Cadillac and trips to glittering Manhattan nightclubs. He was married, though not to her.

Before long, tiring of his unfulfilled promises to divorce his wife, she ended their affair. He hired three men, who threw lye in her face, blinding her, and went to prison for more than a decade.

Afterward, she married him.

Linda Riss Pugach, whose blinding by her lover, Burton N. Pugach, in 1959 became a news media sensation, and whose marriage to Mr. Pugach in 1974 became an equally sensational sequel, died at Forest Hills Hospital in Queens on Tuesday at 75.

The cause was heart failure, said Mr. Pugach, her husband of more than 38 years and her only immediate survivor.

In 1974, The New York Times called the attack on Miss Riss "one of the most celebrated crimes of passion in New York history." In the years since, the strange romance of Mr. and Mrs. Pugach (pronounced POOH-gash) has seldom been far from public view.

A book about the couple, "A Very Different Love Story," by Berry Stainback, was published in 1976. More recently, the Pugaches were the subject of a widely seen documentary, "Crazy Love."

Part cautionary tale, part psychological study, part riveting disaster narrative, the film, directed by Dan Klores, was released in 2007 to favorable, if somewhat astonished, notices.

In the decades after their marriage, the Pugaches seemed hungry for limelight. Although reporters who visited their home in the Rego Park section of Queens wrote often of their unremitting bickering, the couple just as often appeared in the newspapers or on television to declare their mutual devotion.

They received renewed attention in 1997, when Mr. Pugach, known as Burt, went on trial in Queens on charges that he had sexually abused a woman and threatened to kill her.

At the trial, at which Mr. Pugach represented himself, Mrs. Pugach testified on his behalf, telling him in open court, "You're a wonderful, caring husband." The alleged victim in the case was Mr. Pugach's mistress of five years.

Mr. Pugach, who was convicted of only a single count — harassment in the second degree — of the 11 with which he was charged in that case, was sentenced to 15 days in jail.

"We loved each other more than any other couple could have," Mr. Pugach, intermittently weeping, said of his wife in a discursive telephone interview on Wednesday. He added, "Ours was a storybook romance."

But to judge from the news accounts then and now, the story in question was "Beauty and the Beast." Or, more precisely, it was that story's unseen second act — the one in which the title union has degenerated into long, grinding yet strangely indissoluble banality.

Linda Eleanor Riss was born in the Bronx on Feb. 23, 1937. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and she was reared by her mother, her grandmother and an aunt.

She graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx; when she met Mr. Pugach, who specialized in negligence law, she was working as a secretary at an air-conditioner dealership on Tremont Avenue there.

After breaking off her affair with Mr. Pugach, Miss Riss became engaged to another man.

The attack, in June 1959, scarred her face and left her almost completely blind; over time, she lost what sight remained. To the end of Mrs. Pugach's life, her face was framed by large dark glasses.

After the attack, Mr. Pugach appeared determined to continue their relationship. He telephoned her to suggest that they reconcile and later wrote her a torrent of letters from prison.

"At one point," The Times reported in 1959, "he was said to have promised, 'I'll get you a Seeing Eye dog for Christmas.' "