Milestones: Mar. 23, 1981

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ENGAGEMENT REVEALED. George Wallace, 61, former three-time Alabama Governor and independent presidential candidate; and Lisa Taylor, 32, country-and-western singer turned executive of a family-owned coal firm; in Jasper, Ala.

DIED. Chester Bitterman, 28, Protestant missionary who was kidnaped from the Colombian headquarters of Wycliffe Bible Translators on Jan. 19 by hooded terrorists claiming to represent the Marxist "April 19th Movement"; of gunshot wounds after 48 days in captivity; in Bogota, Colombia. Bitterman, the father of two, was found in a stolen minibus after the evangelical Wycliffe organization rejected a terrorist manifesto accusing it of being a CIA front and demanding that it pull out of the country.

DIED. Robert Cecil Romer Maugham, 64, nephew of Author W. Somerset Maugham and, as "Robin" Maugham, a prolific novelist, playwright and memoirist in his own right (Somerset and All the Maughams, Conversations with Willie); in Brighton, England.

DIED. Maurice Oldfield, 65, amiable bachelor who, after serving in World War II intelligence, rose through the ranks of the British Secret Service to head it between 1973 and 1978, and who was believed to be the inspiration for both "M," the intelligence chief in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and George Smiley, the deceptively bland hero of John le Carré thrillers like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; of cancer; in London. In 1979 Oldfield emerged from a brief retirement to head an antiterrorist security force in Northern Ireland following the assassination of Earl Mountbatten by the Provisional I.R.A.

DIED. Max Delbrück, 74, molecular biologist whose pioneering research on bacteriophages (viruses whose genetic matter "invades" or "infects" bacteria) laid the foundation of modern molecular genetics and won him a Nobel Prize in 1969; of cancer; in Pasadena, Calif.

DIED. Bosley Crowther, 75, sober, scholarly film critic for the New York Times from 1940 to 1967, and author of The Lion's Share: The Story of an Entertainment Empire (1957) and Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer (1960); of a heart attack; in Mount Kisco, N. Y.

DIED. Ray Allen Billington, 77, historian who chronicled the westward movement of the American frontier in such scholarly but vivid books as Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (1949) and this year's Land of Savagery, Land of Promise; of a heart attack; in San Marino, Calif. Billington taught from 1944 to 1963 at Northwestern University, where he showed generations of undergraduates the way West in a course known as Cowboys and Indians.