Mariticide

Mariticide (from Latin maritus "husband" + -cide, from caedere "to cut, to kill") literally means killing of one's husband or boyfriend. It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out. Used in current common law terminology as gender-neutral for either spouse or significant other of either sex. The killing of a wife is called uxoricide.

Not to be confused with Matricide.
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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]

English common law

Under English common law it was a petty treason until 1828, and until it was altered under the Treason Act 1790 the punishment was to be strangled and burnt at the stake.[3]

Notable instances

Historical
Anne Williams burned at the stake for mariticide in Gloucester, 1753.[3]
  • Laodice I allegedly poisoned her husband Antiochus II Theos of the Seleucid dynasty around 246 BC.
  • Livilla, along with her lover Sejanus, probably poisoned her husband Drusus the Younger.
  • The Roman emperor Claudius was allegedly poisoned by his wife Agrippina the Younger to ensure the succession of her son Nero
  • 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.[5]
  • Mary Channing (1706), a Dorset woman who poisoned her husband to be with her lover.[6]
  • Marie-Josephte Corriveau, 1763, New France
  • 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, 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.
  • 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.
  • Heather Osland drugged and had her son kill her husband in 1991, creating a test case for the battered woman syndrome defense in Australia.[7]
  • Katherine Knight (b. 1955) murdered her de facto husband in Oct. 2001 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]
  • Sheila Garvie, convicted in 1968 of the Murder of Maxwell Garvie, her husband
  • In 1991, Pamela Smart had her husband murdered by a student of hers. 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 2000, Denise Williams of Tallahassee, Florida, 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 2003, Susan Wright tied her husband, Jeff, to a bed and stabbed him multiple times with two different knives.
  • In 2004, Jamila M'Barek paid her brother to murder her husband, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury.

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 fiction

Comics

Films
  • In Dead Alive Vera drowned her husband because he had an affair with a woman.
  • In Addams Family Values, Deborah "Debbie" Jellinsky attempted unsuccessfully to kill her third husband Fester Addams after she killed two of her other husbands and ran off with their money.
  • In the neo-noir film, The Last Seduction, Bridget Gregory murders her estranged husband, Clay Gregory, and frames her lover, Mike Swale, for not only his murder, but for raping her.
  • In the black comedy film, To Die For, Suzanne Stone-Maretto had her husband, Larry Maretto, murdered by seducing and manipulating her under-age teen lover, Jimmy Emmett, into doing it, under the guise that he was abusive to her, but in reality, her husband was putting starting a family over supporting her career.

Literature

Television
  • In the second season of the TV series Supergirl in episode "Distant Sun", Queen Rhea of Daxam murders her husband, King Lar Gand of Daxam when Lar Gand, against his wife's wishes, allowed their son, Mon-El to return to Earth to be with his then-girlfriend, Kara Danvers.

See also
Familial killing terms:
Non-familial killing terms from the same root:
  • Deicide is the killing of a god
  • Genocide is the killing of a large group of people, usually a specific and entire ethnic, racial, religious or national group
  • Homicide is the killing of any human
  • Infanticide, the killing of an infant from birth to 12 months
  • Regicide is the killing of a monarch (king or ruler)
  • Tyrannicide is the killing of a tyrant

References
  1. "Understanding Intimate Partner Violence" (PDF). cdc.gov. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 May 2019. Retrieved 6 March 2016.
  2. "Wilson & Daley:Who kills whom in spouse killings". Wiley. doi:10.1111/j.1745-9125.1992.tb01102.x. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  3. Burgess, 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
  4. Stronach, George (1892). "Kincaid, Jean" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. 31. London: Smith, Elder & Co. p. 123.
  5. Bicks, Caroline (2017). Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare's England. Taylor & Francis. p. 106. ISBN 978-1-351-91766-7.
  6. Durston, Gregory J. (2014). Wicked Ladies: Provincial Women, Crime and the Eighteenth-Century English Justice System. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 143. ISBN 978-1-4438-6599-9.
  7. Stateline Victoria
  8. HTML Document: Regina v Knight [2001] NSWSC 1011 revised – 29 January 2002
  9. Knight loses appeal for skinning partner – Breaking News – National – Breaking News

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