Jon ElliottMrs. ScottHonors IS 222 September 2000Man Hath Known No Fury Like a Woman ScornedWomen are often referred to as the weaker sex.
Don’t say this to one of the women youre about to read about. There are over 3000 people on death row in the United States. 42 are women. Is it that women are morally better or is it that they are better at getting away with it? The stories you are about to read deal with women who, if you saw them on the street, you would think they were perfect citizens, but they are cold hearted murderers. Thanks to Forensic Techniques we are taking these kinds of people off the street.
Three women, three murders. The first woman called the cops one night saying that there had been a horrible accident and she had shot her husband in the head. She told the story of the horrible accident to the police. They believed her. She said that when she was sleeping in her bed she heard a sound so she reached for the gun that her husband kept under the pillow for protection. When she was pulling it out she hit the trigger firing a bullet into the back of her husbands head.
She said it was a horrible accident and she couldn’t believe it had happened. The second woman was a woman in her 60s who was married to a well-known Reverend. One day she called in saying her husband was in bad shape and he was very sick. The ambulance came and got him and brought him to the hospital. He almost died but the doctors were able to keep him alive.
His wife would bring cookies and other food to her husband. The third case was a very strange case. Troopers found the body of an insurance salesman that had been missing for some time. The strange part was that the man was shot twice but there was no evidence left at all. There was no bullet casings or any fingerprints. The only thing they had was that they could tell the bullet holes were made by a shotgun and the tire tracks of a car.
They questioned the mans wife but still no clues were found. Then a few days later the police got an anonymous call giving a description of the man who had been talking about killing this man and where he worked. The men who killed the man were brought in and they confessed to the murder. They said that the mans wife had hired them to kill her husband. Using forensics they were able to prove that all three women were guilty of a least one murder.
In the first case of the freak accident, they first discovered that the woman’s story was a little fishy when they saw the way the bullet had entered and exited his head. If her story was true that the gun went of on accident that night as she was pulling the gun out from the pillow, why did the bullet enter the back of his head from the upper right and exit out above the left eye? By the way he was laying this would have meant that the gun was facing downwards. She said that she had fired the gun under the bed sheets. This was proven untrue when scientists could not find any powder burns on the sheets.
That meant that the gun was fired away from the bed. The detectives also found the shell casing of the bullet right next to the mans body. They preformed many tests shooting the gun and every time the casing was thrown far away to the right. There is no way the casing could have landed that close to the body. This meaning that the shell casing had been tampered with.
Linking these clues together with testimonies from friends they convicted the woman for murder. The second case proves that the smallest hairs on someone’s head can convict a murderer. After figuring that there was arsenic in the Reverends body they took hair samples to see how much was in his body. Arsenic is considered a heavy metal and it doesn’t go away. As the hair grows the arsenic is deposited into the roots of the hair.
In one strand of the Reverends hair there was arsenic from the follicle to the tip. This meant that he had been on a regular diet of arsenic steadily for six months. After discovering this they found a file on the woman’s first and second husbands who had both died for unknown reasons. They dug the bodies up and using the Richen Test they discovered high amounts of arsenic in the tissue. To perform this test they took tissue samples of each man and dissolved them with acid. Then they took a copper wire and placed it in the solution.
Copper reacts to Arsenic so if there was arsenic in the tissue the copper would turn black. After discovering that her first and second husbands had died form arsenic poisoning and that her prior husband was suffering from it right now, they knew that she had been giving them Arsenic in their food. She was put on death row. The detectives in the third case had nothing linking the victims wife to the murder except the statements of the two men. They needed some more solid evidence.
Going on a statement that one of the men said that she had tried to kill him before by poisoning him they went to library in her town to she what they could find. They looked at all the books on poisons and they discovered a book with some pages ripped out. They sent the book to the lab to see what they could find. They found a palm print on the page next to the ripped out pages of the book.
When they placed the palm print next to the one of the woman it was a perfect match. This proving that she had tried killing her husband before, and linking her to this murder by hire. Three women who fooled police in three different murders. All the women had different cases.
One set her murder up like a freak accident. The others were poison and murder for hire. All are different cases but they couldn’t fool forensics. Who would have thought that the way you held the gun, one hair, and a book you read two weeks ago could hold enough evidence to convict you of murder. Thanks to forensics the smallest particles can mean so much.
As Forensics techniques continue to improve the unsolved crime rate and the number of murderers walking around on the streets are dropping.
