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. 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.
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.
Mary Winkler (born 1973) was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the 2006 shooting of her husband,
Matthew Winkler (1974–2006), a minister, in Tennessee.
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
Lorina Dodson (the Spider-Man villain
White Rabbit) killed her husband after feeling treated as a
trophy wife.
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.
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.
In the television series Once Upon a Time,
Queen Regina arranged the death of her husband, King Leopold, in order to take over his kingdom.
Video games
In Sly 2: Band of Thieves, Bentley explains in a voice-over that the Contessa had married a
Czech general, who mysteriously died a few weeks after the wedding; the general is heavily implied to have been poisoned by his wife, as the cutscene showing his wedding has green bubbles coming from his wine glass.
Much later on, in Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Bentley discovers that his girlfriend, Penelope, is plotting to use him to
make a fortune in warfare out of
jealousy towards Sly for supposedly holding them back. When Bentley objects to her goals, denounces her as a
sociopath, and dumps her in disgust, Penelope attacks him in murderous rage for choosing Sly and Murray over her, forcing Bentley to fight in self-defense. Bentley survives and escapes, and the two become
archenemies as Penelope embraces her newfound
villainy.
^
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