Richard and Nancy Lyon

Divorce By Murder

More than 2 million marriages are celebrated each year in America. Some last forever. Many don't.

A simple divorce is the solution for the vast majority of couples when wedded bliss loses its fragrance. The country records just under 1 million divorces every year.

A small percentage of marriages end without the legal niceties. Each year, several thousand intimate relationships in America are terminated by murder.

Roughly one-quarter of all women slain are killed by a husband, a boyfriend or an ex, according to government statistics. The proportion is lower for men, but the raw numbers are similar. A groundbreaking study of spousal homicides committed in 1988 found that four in 10 killer spouses were women.

The vast majority are predictably mundane: a drunken argument ending in violence.

Seven in 10 domestic homicides result spontaneously from an argument. Nearly two-thirds of the perpetrators are under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

In these cases, access to a weapon tops off the lethal mix of anger and intoxication, and the criminal justice system is left to mop up mess left behind from a classic passion-of-the-moment killing.

Women who kill their spouse use a gun or a knife in roughly 95 out of 100 cases. Men use those weapons or their fists at a comparable rate.

In most of these instances, a spouse is blinded by rage while committing the deadly act, often later regretted.

But in the margins of those numbers—the exceptions to the statistical rules—are the homicides that often make front page news—cases like those of Scott Peterson, Christian Longo, Pam Smart and Ruth Snyder.

For each of them, a marriage had gone sour, but none considered divorce a viable option.

Why? In a word: money.

Perhaps the targeted spouse is wealthy and the conniving spouse cannot bear the thought of a life of freedom fettered with bills—alimony, child support, lawyer fees, credit card debt, even mortgage payments for a former home.

And then there is the classic motive: a big life insurance payday.

These pathological spouses make what they believe are reasoned decisions to save—or make—money by murder. Some do their own work, while others employ killers for the task.

Most of these murders are carried out with the usual implements of death—guns, knives, fists or various blunt objects.

But murder comes in many forms, and a fraction of these premeditated killers choose an ancient method: poison.