March 2023 Bonus Review: Wife, Mother, Murderer

The crime
Forgive me for cannibalizing my own material, but Audrey Marie Hilley’s reign of barfy and fraudulent terror is too complex to reconstitute from scratch, so here’s the summary from my February review of Poisoned Blood:

Marie Hilley poisoned her husband, Frank, for a life-insurance payout; poisoned her daughter, Carol, for the same reason, although Carol survived; may have also poisoned her mother, mother-in-law, son and daughter-in-law, and more than a few neighborhood children, for…no apparent reason; passed a bunch of bad checks in and around Anniston, AL while waiting for Carol to die and cover Hilley’s nut; jumped bail on the theft charges and posted up in Florida under the name Robbi Hannon, where she married the willfully clueless John Homan and repaired with him to New Hampshire; decid—

“Chrissakes, how long does this list go on?” A while. Grab some gorp. …As I was saying: decided, although she had to date gotten away with lamming it and probably could have indefinitely, to fake her (well, “her”) own death, then reappear as her thinner and blonder twin, Teri, which prompted the NH locals to fact-check her shit; got busted and returned to Alabama to stand trial, AND THEN…

…and then I dropped a SPOILER WARNING because trying to avoid giving away the ludicrous end to Hilley’s demented tale subtracts like three discrete other criminal proceedings from the conversation, so if you don’t want to get spoiled, skip to the last graf now.