Historical , 1753 •
Mary Hobry (1688), decapitated her abusive husband in London. •
Mary Channing (1706), a Dorset woman who poisoned her husband to be with her lover. •
Marie-Josephte Corriveau, 1763,
New France • The
Black Widows of Liverpool, Catherine Flannigan (1829–1884) and Margaret Higgins (1843–1884) were Irish sisters who were hanged at Kirkdale Gaol in
Liverpool, for the murder of Thomas Higgins, Margaret's husband. •
Rebecca Copin (1796–1881) attempted to murder her husband in Virginia by putting arsenic in his coffee. While the jury agreed that she attempted mariticide in 1835, they did not grant her husband a divorce. •
Florence Maybrick (1862–1941) spent fourteen years in prison in England after being convicted of murdering her considerably older English husband, James Maybrick, in 1889. •
Tillie Klimek claimed to have psychic powers by predicting her husbands' deaths in Chicago, but was proven after the attempted murder of her fifth husband that she was poisoning them with arsenic. •
Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were executed in 1923 for the murder of Thompson's husband Percy in London. •
Annie Walsh became the last woman to be
executed in Ireland, in 1925, having murdered her husband. •
Betty Broderick shot and killed her ex-husband, Daniel, and his new wife, Linda, in 1989 while they were sleeping in their home in the United States. •
Heather Osland drugged and had her son kill her husband in 1991, creating a test case for the
battered woman syndrome defense in Australia. •
Katherine Knight (b. 1955) murdered her
de facto husband in October 2001 in Australia by stabbing him, then skinned him and attempted to feed pieces of his body to his children. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole: her appeal against this sentence as too harsh was rejected. • Sheila Garvie, convicted in 1968 of the
murder of Maxwell Garvie, her husband, in Scotland. • In 1983, musician
Felix Pappalardi was shot and killed by his wife
Gail Collins Pappalardi in the United States. • In 1991,
Pamela Smart had her husband murdered by a student of hers in New Hampshire. Though the student committed the murder, the courts ruled that Smart had been guilty of mariticide due to her influence on the young man and her convincing manner to get him to carry out the act. • In 1998, entertainer
Phil Hartman was killed by his wife
Brynn Hartman, who then
killed herself in Los Angeles. • In 1998, 81-year-old
Gabriel Kisch was murdered by his wife who roasted his head in the oven before throwing his body parts into the water in
central Stockholm. • In 1999, Celeste Beard persuaded her lover to
kill her wealthy husband Steven. • In 2000, Denise Williams conspired with her lover, Brian Winchester, to kill her husband,
Mike Williams. She collected a $2 million insurance payment Winchester had arranged for the couple and then later married him. After they divorced several years later, Winchester, following his arrest after an incident where he sneaked into her car and held her at gunpoint, told police where the body had been buried; the information led to Williams' conviction in 2018. • In 2002,
David Lynn Harris was run over multiple times by a car. The perpetrator was his wife, Clara, killed him by running him over with a car in a parking lot. She was released from prison after serving fifteen years of her twenty year sentence. • In 2003,
Susan Wright tied her husband, Jeff, to a bed and stabbed him multiple times with two different knives in Texas. • In 2004,
Jamila M'Barek paid her brother to murder her husband,
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury. • In 2004,
Melanie McGuire murdered her husband, William, then desecrated his body. •
Mary Winkler (born 1973) was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the 2006 shooting of her husband,
Matthew Winkler (19742006), a minister, in Tennessee. •
Travis Alexander (19772008) was an American
salesman who was murdered by his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Ann Arias (born 1980), in his house in
Mesa, Arizona. Arias was
convicted of
first-degree murder in 2013 and was sentenced to
life in prison without the possibility of
parole in 2015. • In 2008, Chilean architect
María del Pilar Pérez hired a hitman to kill her husband along with two other people. She was sentenced to life in prison. • In 2009,
Dale Harrell was murdered by his wife Marissa-Suzanne DeVault in Arizona. She was sentenced to life in prison. • In 2012,
Susana Freydoz shot and killed her husband
Carlos Soria, the recently inaugurated
Governor of Río Negro Province,
Argentina. She was sentenced to 18 years in prison and paroled in 2023. • In 2018,
Daniel Brophy was killed by his wife Nancy Crampton-Brophy in Portland, Oregon; she was later sentenced to life in prison at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility.
Mythological In
Greek mythology •
Clytemnestra murders her husband
Agamemnon as an act of vengeance for the sacrifice of their daughter
Iphigeneia, and to retain power after his return from Troy. In
Aeschylus'
Oresteia, the
Erinyes consider
Orestes' matricide a greater crime than
Clytemnestra's mariticide, since the killing of a spouse does not shed familial blood, but the opposite view is espoused by Aeschylus's
Athena. • The
Danaïdes were 50 sisters who were forced into marriage. All but one murdered their husbands on their wedding night. In Chinese literature •
Pan Jinlian poisons her husband with arsenic in both the
Water Margin and its spin-off
Jin Ping Mei. ==See also==