Town note
Anniston is in north-eastern Alabama and its nickname is the Model City.
about 0:05:53The story
Frank Hilly was born in 1930 and lived his adult life in Anniston, Alabama, where he worked at the Union Foundry Company and had served in the Korean War. Her parents had left her with her grandmother for weeks at a time, and she told friends her mother did not love her.
Their son Michael was born in 1953 and their daughter Carol in 1960. During the second pregnancy Marie began taking aimless two-in-the-morning walks in her nightgown, saying strange things and writing letters to imaginary lovers that she left for Frank to find. She also spent more than the family could afford and hid the bills, and she worked as a secretary for prominent Anniston men, often coming home from working late with $800 to $1,200 in cash for extra typing. On 22 January 1965 the Anniston Star reported Carol's fifth birthday party at the family home.
By 1973 Marie was telling friends she feared Carol, then in her early teens, was showing a sexual preference for women. Michael married in August 1974, with Frank as best man, and became a minister in East Point, Georgia. In May 1975 Frank visited him complaining of tiredness. On 23 May he was admitted with acute liver malfunction and diagnosed with infectious hepatitis. About a week and a half later he was back, vomiting and hallucinating, reading bedsheets like a newspaper and firing invisible employees. On 27 May 1975 he died, aged forty-five. An autopsy confirmed infectious hepatitis. A few weeks later the foundry's insurance paid Marie $31,145, and with a second policy she received about $42,000; within two years it was gone.
Afterwards she slept with a crowbar beside her, stared in the mirror for hours and moved through six addresses in four years, edging closer to the wealthy east side. She invented a sister called Mandy in Texas and wrote to her. Between 1977 and 1979 she made at least sixty calls to Anniston police about peeping toms, threats, obscene calls and small fires. In 1978 a police tap silenced the calls while it ran. She had also taken out a $25,000 policy on Carol the year before Carol fell ill.
In April 1979 Carol, nineteen, was sick in church after a party. The nausea came and went, then stayed. For four months she was in and out of hospital, unable to keep down even baby food, and no cause was found. In August her friend Eve Cohl, who had no arms, saw Marie inject her in the hip with a hypodermic of milky fluid that was said to stop the nausea. Carol's fingers and toes went numb. On 22 August she was readmitted at 80 pounds instead of 109, unable to walk or open a milk carton. Tests found nothing, so she was sent to the psychiatric ward at Caraway Methodist Hospital in Birmingham, where psychiatrists decided after three weeks that she was not mentally ill. In mid-September Marie injected her again in the hospital and the numbness worsened.
On 18 September 1979 Carol's psychiatrist, Dr John Elmore, suggested heavy metal poisoning and planned tests. That afternoon Marie checked Carol out, took her to a motel, argued with her all night and next morning drove her to the University of Alabama Hospital in Birmingham. Carol said her first thought was mother. Told of the diagnosis, Marie said, and they think I did it, don't they? Carol said people sometimes do things they do not remember, and Marie replied, if I did it, I don't remember.
Detective Gary Carroll took over. Frida Adcock, a relative, searched Marie's stored belongings and found a cosmetic case with a half-filled bottle of arsenic. Three weeks later she found a paper sack with three jars of baby food, a spoon and a bottle of rat poison labelled as containing arsenic. A bottle with arsenic residue was in Marie's purse. Michael Hilly had written to the county coroner on 21 September accusing her of injecting Frank the same way she did Carol. On 3 October Frank, his mother Carrie Hilly and Marie's mother Louise Fraser were exhumed. All three had abnormal arsenic, but only Frank had enough to prove poison killed him: over 100 times the normal amount.
On 9 November 1979 Leonard Roberts, a former boss and one of Anniston's richest men, paid her $10,000 bond. Eight days after she checked into the Roadway Inn in Homewood her lawyer found the room empty and a note: Lane, you led her straight to me. Her aunt Margaret's home was then robbed, with a note saying the car was in Gadsden and the handwriting matched.
In February 1980, in a Fort Lauderdale bar, a small brunette with scarred knuckles introduced herself to John Homan, a recently divorced boat builder. She was Robby Hannon, thirty-five, from Texas, and had lost both children in a car accident. They moved in together in March. She worked as a secretary in West Palm Beach, and in October they moved to Marlow, New Hampshire, where John worked at Findings Inc. and she at the Central Screw Company, whose manager never checked her references. She told colleagues she came from a wealthy Texas family, had severe headaches and was dying of a rare blood disease. In September 1982 she resigned to seek treatment in Europe and invented a twin sister, Terry Martin, in Texas. On 23 September she bleached her hair in Pompano Beach and found work as Terry at Solar Testing Services. On 9 November Terry telephoned John to say Robby had died and her body was donated to science. The obituary appeared on 13 November. Terry moved in with John and took a job at the Book Press in Keene, New Hampshire.
A colleague, Ron Osha, grew suspicious. There was no Sacred Heart Church in Tyler, Texas, no Medical Research Institute in Dallas and no record of Robby's birth in Buffalo. He called the police, and the FBI came in. John was told in January 1983 and said it blew his mind; he had believed they were two separate people because their actions were different.
Carol testified for hours about the three injections, the numbness and the promise not to tell. Wilfred Lane cross-examined Carol about drugs and homosexual liaisons, and she admitted smoking marijuana once and a suicide attempt with about five Tylenol after being sent to the mental hospital. After closing arguments Marie mouthed I love you at Carol and beckoned her over; Carol refused.
John Homan stayed in Anniston and drove almost two hours to Wetumpka every Sunday to visit her, insisting she was innocent and that everything she did, she did for love. By 1986 good behaviour had earned her weekend furloughs, and she always returned until 19 February 1987, when she was given a three-day pass and vanished, leaving a note saying she was going to Canada. On 26 February, in freezing rain, Sue Craft saw a filthy, exhausted figure on a rural porch in the Blue Mountain area, less than a mile from where Marie was raised. Her hands were pinkish purple and she had been crawling in the woods for four days. The household covered her with a drop cloth and left her outside while they called police. She could not give her name. In the ambulance she convulsed and lost consciousness, and at the Regional Medical Center in Anniston she died of hypothermia. The district attorney called it an anticlimactic end for the area's greatest escape artist.