ITEM Kimberly Hardy used crack cocane just hours before her son was bom. When the son was bom crack addicted, she was convicted (of delivering cocaine to her son through the umbilical cord). This decision was reversed by the Michigan Supreme Court62 ITEM A million crack-addicted children have been bom snce 1987. but only sixty […]

ITEM Ramiro Rodriguez was driving back from the supermarket. His daughter was sittng on his wife’s lap.60 As Ramiro made a left turn, a van crashed into the car and his daughter was killed Ramiro was charged with homicide. The reason7 He daughter was not placed m a safety seat Ramiro ex planed that his […]

ITEM Colorado. Lory Foster’s husband had returned from Vietnam and was going through mood swrvgs both from posttraumatic stress syndrome and from diabetes.*8 They had gotten mto a fight and he had abused her. So she killed him. Yet even the prosecutor did not ask for a jail term. Why not? So Lory could care […]

Judge Says He Hopes Treatment Will Improve Her Mental Health ■r TOM COKMAN. Гйш aw IV. The mothers don’t kill defense ITEM Illinois. Paula Sens reported that her first daughter. Loralei. was abducted by a masked gunman. In fact she murdered Loralei. But she got away with it57 So when her next daughter. Heather Lee. […]

The baby blues Remember Sheryl Lynn Massip, a mother in her mid-twenties who mur­dered her 6-month-old son by crushing his head under the wheel of the family car? Massip systematically covered up the murder until she was discovered Then she testified that she suffered from postpartum depres­sion — or baby blues. Her sentence’ TreatmentM Do […]

In 1984, Farrah Fawcett starred in an NBC-TV movie called The Burning Bed, based on a true incident in which an abused wife murdered her husband by burning him to death while he slept. The courts freed her because she had been abused.26 The TV movie’s Nielsen rating exceeded that of the World Series, making […]

Tom Hayhurst grew up watching his mother throw phones and dishes at his dad. His dad never returned the beatings24 and was too emotionally dependent to leave. Finally, his dad fatally shot himself in the head. Tom’s mom abused each of the children as well. The children eventually moved away, except for Tom’s sister, who […]

ITEM December 1990. The governor of Ohio releases from prison twenty — five women who had been convicted of killing or assaulting their husbands or companions.” Each woman claimed the man had abused her. Within months, other governors had followed suit20 Until 1982, anyone who called a premeditated murder self-defense would have been laughed out […]

For five years Stella Nickell studied library books on how to poison, and even experimented on her husband, Bruce.7 Finally she got it right: she laced Excedrin with cy anide and waited for Bruce to get his final headache. The coroner’s report did not detea the cyanide and therefore recorded Bruce as dying from pulmonary […]

When Blanche Taylor Moore and her husband went on a honeymoon and he suddenly had to be taken to the hospital, the doctor discovered he had been poisoned by arsenic The dose wasn’t enough to kill him, so Blanche gave him a couple of extra poisoned milk shakes. When the story got out, some people […]