Murdering Your Wife Is a Bad Idea, but Lots of People Try Anyway

But a few months later, police knocked on Wortman's door and informed her of evidence they'd found that suggested her ex-husband, whom she still lived with, was trying to kill her. He'd been researching how to hire a hit man using Bitcoins on a work computer, as well as various plant- and frog-based poisons.

That's when Wortman remembered the toothpaste. She gave it to the police, who found it was effective at both eliminating plaque and, in a much larger dose, humans. It contained Aconitum, a plant-based poison that can be fatal. Wortman's ex-husband, a lawyer, was charged with the solicitation of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and aggravated child endangerment.

Wortman's near-death experience with toxic fluoride proved tantalizing to tabloids, but hers is far from the only romantic murder plot gone awry that's captivated the public.

Last year brought the widely shared story of one woman who showed up to her own funeral and tapped her husband on the shoulder; his plans to have her killed had been dashed by a pair of benevolent assassins who told her what was up. "Is it my eyes? Is it a ghost?" the woman's husband exclaimed upon seeing her. The seriously freaky story had it all: betrayal, attempted murder, and sweet revenge in a wife who appeared to come back from the dead.

The Internet loved it, as evidenced by this bit of fan fiction from a commenter on the Washington Post article:

Murderous spouses have even become an edgy trope in mainstream comedy. On the new season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the character Lillian, played by Carol Kane, gets back together with her old boyfriend, alleged real-life murderer and world-class mutterer Robert Durst, here played by Fred Armisen. "Little Bobby Durst," Lillian says, was her "first crush…literally. He tried to crush me."

While women have hired their own hit men—as well as filled their vaginas with poison and slipped antifreeze into their husbands' Christmas drinks—they are historically much more likely to be on the receiving end of deadly violence. According to a study in the Journal of Forensic Science, one-third of women murdered in the United States are killed by their male husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, and ex-boyfriends. About 25 percent of women will suffer severe domestic violence from an intimate partner during their lifetimes. Given this bleak reality, sharing a story about a man's botched murder attempt on his wife allows us the rare opportunity to laugh with the victim, rather than feel unbearably sad about the state of society; on the flip side, women's failed murder plots on men always seem to elicit misandrist cries of "You go, girl!"

This desire for the ultimate freedom from the bonds of matrimony isn't new. Frances Dolan, a professor at University of California Davis who studies the history of domestic violence in 17th-century England, thinks we've always had a fascination with thwarted crimes of passion. Her research has uncovered many pamphlets—the 17th-century version of movies-of-the-week, about actual crimes—which dealt with the "hot topic" of murderous wives.

The difference between early modern England and today is that, in the good old days, spouses attempted to kill each other because they saw no other way of getting out of a bad marriage. "In the 17th century, people killed because they couldn't divorce," Dolan told me.

Seventeenth-century newlyweds were even provided guides that taught them how to be good, loving spouses—not in order to have a happy life, but because doing so served as an insurance policy against getting murdered in their sleep by an aggrieved lover.

"These marriage guides talk about love as if it's a good a strategy, because if you get your spouse to love you, then she's less likely to kill you," Dolan said. "They hint that on one level, love is strategic."

Dolan believes the way people thought about marriage in the 16th and 17th centuries would have given anyone a case of murderous rage. People saw romantic coupledom as a zero-sum game in which one partner's gain in agency or power "inevitably signified a loss to the other." The being forced-together-forever-in-holy-matrimony thing didn't help, either.

While it was harder to get caught in the act of plotting against your beloved in those days— forensic analysis didn't exist yet, nor did undercover cops masquerading as hit men—there were plenty who were found out after the fact.

Mary, Queen of Scots, successfully completed the most conspicuous of killings: using explosives to literally blow up her husband in his house in Edinburgh. She claimed she wasn't anywhere near the explosion, but then suspiciously ran away with the earl of Bothwell, who was ultimately found to be responsible. She ended up accused of the crime by her own brother-in-law and imprisoned.

Nevertheless, Dolan finds it strange that things like this still happen, given how much more freedom modern couples have.

"What's interesting is that there are still these kinds of stories now, when we have a lot more options," Dolan said. "There's a sense among the murderers that one cannot just cut cords and move on, without 'eliminating' a partner."

Today, those who attempt to poison their spouses with fish tank cleaner are usually suffering from severe mental illness or other types of cognitive impairment, according to one study. Although in many countries women have no recourse for escaping brutal, abusive marriages, in the US, murder is usually not actually "easier than divorcing."