Mariticide (from Latinmaritus "husband" + -cide, from caedere "to cut, to kill") literally means the killing of one's own husband. It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out. It can also be used in the context of the killing of one's own boyfriend. In current common law terminology, it is used as a gender-neutral term for killing one's own spouse or significant other of either sex. Conversely, the killing of a wife or girlfriend is called uxoricide.
Prevalence
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mariticide made up 30% of the total spouse murders in the United States, data not including proxy murders conducted on behalf of the wife.[1] FBI data from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s found that for every 100 husbands who killed their wives in the United States, about 75 women killed their husbands indicating a 3:4 ratio of mariticide to uxoricide.[2]
Jean Kincaid (1579–1600) was a Scottish woman who was convicted of mariticide. Her youth and beauty were dwelt upon in numerous popular ballads, which are to be found in Jamieson's, Kinloch's, and Buchan's collections.[4]
Mary Hobry (1688), decapitated her abusive husband in London.[5]
Mary Channing (1706), a Dorset woman who poisoned her husband to be with her lover.[6]
The Black Widows of Liverpool, Catherine Flannigan (1829–1884) and Margaret Higgins (1843–1884) were Scottish 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.
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.[8] She was sentenced to life in prison without parole: her appeal against this sentence as too harsh was rejected.[9]
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 1999, Celeste Beard killed her husband, Steven, by her lover.
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.[10]
In 2003, Susan Wright tied her husband, Jeff, to a bed and stabbed him multiple times with two different knives in Texas.
In 2004, Melanie McGuire murdered her husband, William, then desecrated his body.[11]
Mary Winkler (born 1973) was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the 2006 shooting of her husband, Matthew Winkler (1974–2006), a minister, in Tennessee.[12]
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 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.[15]
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.
^ abBurgess, Samuel Walter (1825), Historical illustrations of the origin and progress of the passions, and their influence on the conduct of mankind, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, pp. 134–135
