May 5, 2021 • 60 mins
Last time we encountered Marie Hilley, she was running from the FBI. Now, she’s changed her name and her backstory and (eventually) even her hair color. Meet Robbi. No, meet Teri. You’ll like her. She’ll MAKE you like her.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a same Is it a crime loving you
dear like I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
guilty of loving you.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Oh hi, I didn't see you there. Welcome back, you,
guys to another episode of Criminal Broads, a podcast about
wild women on the wrong side of the law. I'm
Tory Telfer, author of Lady Killers and Confident Women, and
I am here today to gently hold your hand and
walk you through part two of the Audrey Marie Hilly story. Okay,
(00:44):
how is part one? How are we all feeling? Do
we still feel shaken up by the twists, the turns,
the surprises? I hope not, because part two gets way
crazier before we get into it. I want to give
you a little summary of part one if you've forgotten,
I know it's been a week. Okay, I have my
(01:05):
script in front of me, so I'm just gonna like
scroll really fast through part one and tell you what
we learned about Marie. Born in nineteen thirty three in
the town of Well, technically in a little village called
Blue Mountain, but it's basically Aniston, Alabama, was a West
side girl who always wanted to be a wealthier east
side girl. Married Frank Hilly when she was very young.
(01:27):
They had two kids, Mike and Carol. Marie shopped too much,
spent too much money, Frank drank too much. But still
everyone was like, Oh, they're such a perfect couple. And
then Frank started hinting to people that he really needed
to talk about something with them, that he was troubled
by something. He said ominous things like maybe Marie should
see a doctor. Everyone ignored him, no one listened to him.
(01:50):
He got sick, He was sick for a while, and
then all of a sudden, he was super sick and
he was hallucinating, and his skin turned bright yellow, and
he was in the hospital and he died. The doctor
said he died of hepatitis. Okay, so Marie keeps spending money.
She gets a nice life insurance pay out from his death,
but no one thinks it's that weird. And other people
(02:11):
around Marie keep getting sick. Her son gets sick, her
daughter in law gets so sick that she has a miscarriage.
Her mother in law gets sick, and then her daughter
Carol gets sick. Now, Marie and Carol have always fought
with each other. Marie does not like that Carol is
a lesbian. She wants to control her daughter. She wants
(02:34):
her daughter to be this like perfect little girly princess.
She basically wants her daughter to be her in a
weird way. Carol gets sicker and sicker and sicker. No
one knows what's going on until finally some of Carol's
friends and family members tell the doctors like, eh, you
might want to check if someone happens to be giving
her arsenic and the doctor's check, and that is indeed
(02:54):
what happened. In the meantime, Marie is arrested for writing
some bad checks and then Carol's arsenic poisoning is discovered.
Marie is released on bail. Some people are like, she's
definitely not gonna run. Her friends and family are like,
she's totally gonna run, do not release her. Judge releases her.
(03:16):
She goes to a hotel and skips town. Okay, so
we're at the very end now of nineteen seventy nine
and Marie has just vanished. Also, I heard from the
listener who suggested this two part series, Damon. Thank you
Damon officially on the podcast, thank you for suggesting this.
(03:38):
And I also want to thank Alex Taylor and Anna Telfer,
who is my sister, for doing some awesome voiceovers that
you're gonna hear in this episode. Yeah, we're getting into voiceovers, guys.
This is becoming an immersive theatrical experience, so you'll hear
from both of them. You will also probably recognize Anna's voice,
as she is the one who sings our intro and
conclusion songs. All right, without further ado, we're going back
(04:02):
to nineteen seventy nine, but we're not going to Alabama
because that's where Marie Hilly is supposed to be. But
she's not there anymore. She's heading south. Let's go. It
(04:24):
was January eleventh, nineteen eighty when a grand jury indicted
Marie Hilly for the first degree murder of her husband, Frank,
But this was more of a symbolic gesture than anything else,
because everyone in Aniston, Alabama, knew that Marie Hilly was
long gone. Frank's autopsy had revealed a horrifying narrative. He
(04:47):
had been poisoned slowly and steadily for a very long time,
and then right at the end, he had been given
a huge dose of arsenic as though Marie had suddenly
grown impatient as though she'd wanted him dead immediately. Frank
had a hundred times more arsenic in his body than
was normal. It's not unusual for a body to have
(05:08):
a little bit of arsenic in it from the soil
or the water, but Frank's cause of death was crystal clear.
The day Marie disappeared. Her mother in law had died
officially of cancer, but authorities had done autopsies on her
body too, and on Marie's mother's body, thinking that someone
who poisoned her husband and her daughter probably wouldn't stop there. Now.
(05:33):
Neither woman had enough arsenic in her body to officially
say that the arsenic had killed her, but anecdotally, if
you paid attention to things like the way Marie's mother
in law started vomiting when Marie moved in with her,
it seemed like maybe Marie had at least hurried their
death so long. Everyone who knew Marie was panicking now,
(05:55):
wondering if she had tried to do them in. Her
son and daughter in law were really edge. They'd been
sick a lot around Marie. Her daughter in law had
even lost her first child to a miscarriage because of
how sick she'd been so they went to the doctor
and asked, have we been poisoned too? The doctor discovered
(06:15):
some signs of arsenic in their bodies, but he couldn't
tell them how much they'd taken. Carol, who had obviously
been poisoned, was recovering slowly. She was going to physical
therapy to learn how to walk again. Sometimes she felt
sure that her mother couldn't have done this. She'd give
interviews where it sounded like she was rooting for her
(06:36):
mother to get away with everything. If she called me
and told me where she was and asked would I
come meet her, I'd go, Carol told one journalist. I
think that's what you call being an accessory to a crime,
But I'd take that risk. Other times, Carol felt that
same cold stab of fear that she'd felt in the
(06:57):
middle of the night when she woke up and saw
her mind. They're just standing there in her room. Maybe
her mother had tried to kill her. Maybe her mother
had killed her father too. She told a journalist once
that she was convinced that Marie was a paranoid schizophrenic.
And while everyone was talking about Marie and thinking about Marie,
(07:20):
where was Marie herself? She was heading South full of schemes.
After escaping from her motel room and writing all those
ominous notes which managed to throw people off her trail
for about two seconds, Marie set her sights on Florida.
(07:43):
For a woman on the run, she was still dressed impeccably.
There were a few sightings of her as she migrated south.
In one small town, she conned the chief of police
by telling him a sob story about how her purse
had been stolen, and he found her a place to
sleep and even organized a little fundraiser for her. In Savannah, Georgia,
(08:04):
some people saw Marie leaving a hotel with a male companion.
As her biographer wrote, men came to Marie hilly like
bears to spilled molasses. During all of these sightings, the
eyewitnesses noted that Marie looked great. She didn't have a
hair out of place. She was so well quaffed that
the FBI actually sent flyers to beauty parlors around the country.
(08:28):
Sure that Marie was regularly getting her hair done, but
no hairstylist ever turned her in. Up until now, it's
safe to say that Carol had had the most terrifying
experiences with her mother she was the one getting jabbed
in a hip by Marie's hypodermic needles and so on.
But now Mike had a truly terrifying moment with his mom.
(08:51):
Years ago, Marie had tried to convince Mike to let
his son come and stay with her, but his son
was young and Mike didn't really trust his mother, and
so he said no. Marie responded casually that she could
just come and get him whenever she wanted. Now, Mike
had a second son who was only nine months old.
(09:13):
One night, Mike woke up his baby was crying, and
he walked into his son's room and saw that there
was a woman outside trying to open the bedroom window.
Behind her, Mike saw two men just standing there and
a getaway car behind them. He called to his wife,
and the two of them quietly called the police as
(09:35):
the woman walked around the house looking for another way in,
And then the woman accidentally triggered a floodlight in the
neighbor's yard and quickly jumped into the car with her
male companions and drove away. The next day, the FBI
brought a photo of Marie over to the neighbors and
they said, yeah, that's her. Marie had been scraping at
(09:57):
the window like a rat, trying to steal her grandson
in the dead of night. The FBI got involved in
the nationwide hunt for Marie. They told reporters that they
were looking for a woman with multiple identities, a woman
who would change her entire self if she sensed danger.
She can be kind, laughing, considerate, and then brutal and hateful.
(10:21):
They said. We believe she is living in a world
with make believe friends and enemies, and she was Let's
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(10:43):
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(13:20):
few months after escaping from her motel room, Marie arrived
in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There, she sacheted into a bar
and met a depressed, divorced and not all that attractive
man named John Holman. He owned a little boat building shop.
She told him that she desperately needed money, that she
was just about to start a job as a sex worker,
(13:43):
and that he would be her first client. But she
didn't really want to be a sex worker, she said. Oh,
her life had just been one tragedy after another. She
was from Texas, and she'd lost both of her children
in a drunk driving accident, and then later her very
rich husband had died of a heart attack, and she'd
been so distraught that she'd suffered through a series of
(14:05):
nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts. John thought that this charming,
heartbroken woman was just great. She said her name was
Robbie Hannon, and he believed her. When you fall in
love with someone, you don't ask them for an ID,
he said later. Now, Marie's biographer, Philip A. Ginsberg, thinks
(14:26):
that maybe, just maybe Marie and John Holman had met before.
Years earlier, Marie used to send her lovers these letters
about a man named John Romans, saying that if they
wouldn't marry her, then she'd go off and marry John Romans.
Her biographer thinks that it's awfully coincidental that John Romans
sounds a lot like John Holman, and he is also
(14:49):
suspicious of how blindly John Holman stuck by Marie until
the very end, But this is just speculation. If the
two had met years earlier, they kept their seat awfully well.
What seems more likely to me is that Marie just
made John Holman fall completely in love with her, which
she'd done before. He was certainly not the first man
(15:10):
who'd become obsessed with her. He had troubles in his past,
a divorce, a mom who died young, a lot of
responsibility given to him at a very early age, and
maybe he saw Marie as salvation. When you fall in
love with someone and are convinced that they are your
happy ending, it can be really hard to change your mind,
(15:31):
even when you find out that they're wanted by the FBI.
So Marie walked into this bar in Fort Lauderdale calling
herself Robbie, and John was instantly enamored with this pretty,
pulled together woman with a tragic backstory and the promise
of a large inheritance back in Texas. They started dating,
and soon they moved in together. Other people thought that
(15:55):
Robbie was kind of weird, though. John's younger brother Peter,
came to visit them, and one night he was taking
a bath when Marie burst into the bathroom with a
polaroid camera and snapped a photo of him. Later though,
she explained to him that she had a brain tumor,
which was why she sometimes acted impulsively. If you remember,
(16:17):
a brain tumor is how her old friend Rachel had died,
the high school girl, the popular high school girl whom
Marie had seemingly wanted as her twin. By the fall,
John and Marie had decided to move north for a sweeter,
slower life. They settled in tiny Marlowe, New Hampshire. They
rented a yellow cottage by a pond. Marie found work easily,
(16:41):
as always, She got a job in customer service at
a factory that made screws. Her supervisor, ron Oha, thought
that she was just great. She had a real pressure
packed job and was more than up to it. He said,
I wish I had two or three more people like her.
They couldn't have known it at the time, but his
wish was going to come true in a really bizarre way.
(17:03):
Ron also noticed that Robbie hated fake people. She didn't
like phonies, which is kind of strange in retrospect. He said,
she was very outspoken about disliking people who pretended to
be something they weren't. As usual, Marie's co workers liked
her at first. They really admired how well she dressed,
(17:24):
how impeccable her hair was, how expensive her clothes were.
She flirted with the men and gossiped with the women,
and told dirty jokes. In front of the Christians. She
spun wild tales of her wealthy, lonely childhood and the
tragic deaths of her husband and children. She also had
an explanation for why she wasn't currently rich, even though
(17:45):
she had been married to such a rich man. She
said that because she had spent time in a mental institution,
she was experiencing some legal complications and so she couldn't
access her inheritance at the time. She also told them
that she had a twin sister in text named Terry.
The two of them were super close, she said, practically
(18:05):
the same person. But as the months passed, Marie drove
many of her coworkers away, as she always did, she
seemed to find it hard to sustain friendships, especially friendships
with women. Her coworkers started thinking that her stories were
too crazy, that she was too self centered. It was
exhausting hearing about how secretly rich she was all the time,
(18:28):
and she had an unnerving habit of saying, I don't
get mad, I get even. In May of nineteen eighty one,
about a year and a half after Marie had run
away from Alabama, Marie and John flew back to Florida
and got married. Marie had gained some weight during her
life as Robbie, which would become significant soon. She and
(18:49):
John were starting to fight, and Marie even moved out
at one point and went to live in Texas for
a while. When she was in New Hampshire, John noticed
that sometimes she'd have these weird spells where she'd start
acting like she was a little girl, a baby. Even
she would cry and babble and talk in the voice
of a child. Sometimes she said that her grandfather had
(19:12):
molested her. Was this all part of an act. Was
Marie setting the stage for her next con or were
these strange spells actually real. Marie's biographer thinks that these
spells may have been signs that Marie was cracking under
the strain of her double life. She never talked about
these spells later or used them to support one of
(19:34):
her wild stories. She kept them a secret. In September
of nineteen eighty two, almost three years after she'd gone missing,
Marie started acting strange at work. She'd been complaining of
terrible headaches for quite some time, and now she started
telling people that she was having memory problems. I just
(19:56):
lose whole areas of my memory, she cried. I blanked
out a whole piece of my past, my family. I
blanked out my twin sister. How do you forget your
twin sister? She explained that she had a rare blood disease.
It was like the opposite of leukemia. She said she
was going to have to go to Texas and then
(20:16):
Germany for treatment. It was pretty serious. Her coworkers believed her.
They'd seen her crying from the pain of the headaches,
and she always made calls to her twin sister Terry
from her work phone. Terry was definitely real, they thought
her husband John thought so too. After all, if Terry
(20:36):
wasn't real, why was Robbie writing letters to her. Here's
one of the letters that Marie wrote Terry as Robbie
in full.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Dear Terry, thanks for the call today. You always make
me feel bitter about everything, even if I don't agree
you are very wrong about one thing. John is in
love with me anymore, and I don't know how I
really feel about him. We've both changed too much to
answer your question. No, I won't ever go back to him.
(21:11):
I will offer him his freedom doesn't matter either way
to me, as I won't ever marry again. Twice is enough. However,
I feel that someday he will want to remarry, and
I don't want the hassle of a divorce later on,
So now it's preferable to me Terry. John hurt me
very deeply when I was in Houston. The estate was
(21:34):
such a mess, and I needed him then more than
I ever needed anyone. But his love is New Hampshire
and he didn't want to come out with me. Then
when I was coming back, he asked me not to.
He doesn't want marriage. I haven't figured out why he
married me. Guess he had his reasons. Whatever they were,
(21:56):
it didn't work. You will be wondering why I came
back when he didn't want me. At the time, I
was very confused, very lonely, and I still loved him,
or I thought I did. If I hadn't come back,
I wouldn't have lost the feeling I had for him,
so you see, it was necessary. I've left too many
things unfinished, and I know from experience that it can
(22:19):
go on hurting forever. I didn't want that again. I
hope that he and I will remain friends, but also
from experience, I know that we will lose track of
each other. I guess this sounds strange to you, since
you know that once I cared very much for him.
But John isn't the same person I fell in love with,
(22:40):
just as I'm not the same, and everything changes. I
had really hoped that this would work, but I've looked
back too long at things that might have been. That
has been part of my problem. He is very aloof now,
and I felt these past weeks that he couldn't wait
for me to be gone. I try to tell him
(23:01):
once that he need not feel responsible for me to
live his life, but that only annoyed him. Has most
everything I do annoys him. We have very little physical contact,
and this has made me feel that in some way
I'm very unattractive. That too, I don't need anymore. I
(23:21):
had too many years of that. So much for my
love life, or rather my lack of a love life.
Let's get on with other things. I'm really looking forward
to our summer together. If everything goes well and we
don't drive each other insane, then perhaps we can arrange
something permanent until one of us goes on to something else. Terry,
(23:44):
there are two things I don't want to talk about.
One is John. I've told you all that I can
tell you about that. I don't know what went wrong.
I just know that it's over for good, and I'd
rather put it out of my mind.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
The other is.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
I will go back when I'm ready. The money isn't
important to me. All that has done is cause me
hurt and a lot of trouble trying to straighten it out.
I know it's there if I want it. I also
know I can live without it. So if you will
stay away from these two subjects, you and I will
have little or no trouble. One last thing about my marriage.
I hope I haven't made it sound like it's all
(24:22):
John's fault.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
It isn't.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
It is just as much mine, So don't have any
bad feelings towards him. It was just something that happened.
It doesn't hurt anymore, Terry. I called Julie this morning.
She was coming out to the house to look at
the furniture. I really don't care what you do with it.
My days of wanting nice things are over permanently. I'm
afraid if you want to have it redone, go ahead,
(24:48):
But personally I think it's silly. I don't want to
live there, and you said you didn't, and it will
cost quite a lot to move it, especially since I
don't want it. If you really want it, I'll try
to live and I'll do it gracefully. Does Emma have
anything left there? She was very upset when she had
to move. Before you leave, Will you go through the
(25:09):
closet in our bedroom, bring all the clothes that are
nice and call Mandy to pick up the wrist. I
don't know what is there, but I'm sure there are
things we want to keep. You decide. I'm so pleased
that you're doing so well. I hope the cast comes
off soon. It must be awful, so long on your leg.
(25:29):
Take care, say you soon? Let you Rob.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Just look at the depth of detail in that letter,
the clear love from Robbie to her twin sister Terry.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Who in the world.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Would write a letter like that if the people in
question weren't absolutely one hundred percent real. In November nineteen
(26:06):
eighty two, Robbie died tragically, and Terry was born. In
November nineteen eighty two, Marie as Robbie, told her husband
that she was going to Texas to start those treatments
for her rare blood disease that was the opposite of leukemia.
She flew to Dallas, but then she quickly made her
way to Florida, where she started her life as Terry Martin,
(26:28):
Robbie's twin sister. She dyed her hair bright blonde and
lost twenty pounds. She changed her mannerisms. Terry was more
outgoing than Robbie, more of a smoker and a drinker.
Robbie read books, but Terry watched TV, and even though
Marie herself was almost fifty, she insisted that Terry was
(26:48):
in her late thirties. As Terry, Marie got a secretary
job in Florida, and surprise, surprise, she impressed her boss
with her skills and her charm and her youthful good looks.
Her boss liked that she wore high heels every day,
and he noticed that she always called her twin sister
Robbie on her lunch break. Terry loved telling her boss
(27:11):
all about her special bond with her sister. She said
that when Robbie went into labor, she Terry had felt
the contractions Tragically. She told her boss Robbie was currently
suffering from cancer. It didn't take long for imaginary Robbie's
imaginary sickness to escalate. Marie called John Holman on November tenth,
(27:36):
pretending to be Terry. She was calling with bad news.
She said her twin sister Robbie had died, and no,
John couldn't see his wife one last time because her
body had been donated to science. And also she Terry
(27:59):
was coming to visit him. It was what Robbie would
have wanted. After all, If Robbie hadn't wanted her identical
twin sister Terry to visit her husband and then move
in with him, would she have written her identical twin
sister Terry the following totally not fake at all letter.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
Terry, I'm afraid I won't make it at home. I
want so much to see John again, and I know
you have been torn between my wishes and what you
feel is right, but I don't want him to see
me like this. I'm trying to hold on until December,
but though my mind tells me not to give in,
(28:38):
my body is too tired to listen. Writing this has
taking every ounce of my energy. But there are things
I want you to do. If things don't work out,
Please don't call John, use the ticket and go on
to New Hampshire. I don't know what effect you will
have on him. After all, we have confused people who
(28:59):
live with us every so if he doesn't want you there,
please don't feel offended. You could be a painful reminder
about mother's house. It may be the only thing I
have to give you, but you understand anything you get
from it, rent or sail half goes to John. I
just felt it would be easier to put it in
(29:21):
your name, since you are here and there is no
doubt in my mind that you will do the right thing. Terry,
I'm sorry i've given you such a hard time. You
have been wonderful to me. It's just that I miss
John so much. I'm miserable without him, and I took
it out on you. When we went to live with Grandfather,
(29:43):
I was afraid to go to sleep. I was afraid
I would wake up and you would be gone. I've
lived with the same fear since I've known John. Now
I will wake up someplace and both of you will
be gone. I want very much for the two of
you to be friends. I love you both very much
more than anything else. If you don't upset John too much,
(30:07):
please stay with him as long as he needs you.
He is so kind and you need a friend like him,
and I think he will need you. He is very
sensitive and if I don't make it, he will feel
it very deeply. I know you will want to go
back to Denver, but you love cold weather and New
Hampshire is a lovely place, so stay for a while
(30:29):
until John gets over the worst. I don't want either
of you to waste time grieving. For me, life is
too valuable and it doesn't last that long. I don't
want to die. I want to get well and learn
to live as you and John know how to do.
There is a phone number in my wallet if things
(30:51):
don't work out, that is the number to call. I
don't want you to know where they take me. You
might live in that part of the country again, and
I know it would bother you to know that's where
I am. No funeral or memorials. I've lived my life
and those things are too painful for the people who
love you. I hope you don't have to read this.
(31:12):
I hope I will wake up one morning and everything
will be better. But this is just in case things
go wrong. One more thing by John. A lot of
Christmas presents. The one thing especially that I told you about.
He loves Christmas, and if I'm not there, perhaps I'll
come back as a Christmas tree ornament. So please no
(31:35):
sadness at Christmas. I will know and be very unhappy.
My body is so tired, and if it didn't mean
leaving John and you, I'm ready to trade it in.
I want you and John to go someplace and have
a lavish dinner. Even a party. Time is a slow healer,
but I know that eventually it does heal. Just keep
(31:59):
that in mind. Everything passes. Just please take care of John.
He is strong about everything except me. I love you
both more than anything else.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Rob When John Holman saw Terry Martin get off the plane,
(32:36):
he was sure that he was looking at his late
wife's twin sister. Of course, Terry and Robbie looked very similar,
and they sounded exactly the same. But Terry was blonde,
twenty pounds thinner than his wife, and she even smoked
a different brand of cigarettes. I felt they were two
separate people, he said later. Their actions were different. There
(32:59):
was nothing to the two together. Terry promptly moved in
with John and started her life in New Hampshire. She
got a job at a book press in nearby Brattleborough, Vermont,
and she and John bonded over the most romantic activity
there is. They co wrote the obituary for Robbie, and
(33:19):
they got it published in the papers. Now that her
identity as Robbie had officially come to a conclusion, Marie
leaned fully into her identity as Terry. She waltzed around
town dramatically, going to all the same places that Robbie
used to go. It was as if she were daring
people to recognize her. She had plenty of intense interactions
(33:41):
with Robbie's old friends, during which people would call her
Robbie or would blurt out, I thought you were dead.
It must have been thrilling for Marie to be literally
rubbing elbows with people who had known her as someone else.
But sometimes she slipped. She had mentioned something about new
Hampshire that an outsider from Texas shouldn't have known, and
her voice sounded so much like Robbie's that people just
(34:04):
couldn't get over it. There was more than one person
in New Hampshire who wasn't totally convinced by her disguise.
When Marie went by the screw factory where she used
to work, telling everyone that she was Terry, some of
her old coworkers burst into tears at the sight of her,
as though they were staring at a ghost. Marie was
(34:24):
extremely dramatic, asking to see her sister's old desk and
so on, but some of her other coworkers were less emotional.
They whispered to each other that that blonde woman was
totally just Robbie with a new hair color. Right. Their
suspicions grew and grew, until finally a small group of
(34:45):
women decided that they needed to do something about this
bizarre situation, and so they gave themselves a top secret mission.
They were going to fact check Robbie's obituary during work hours.
Here's what Robbie's obituary set.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
Robbie L. Holman, thirty seven of Marlowe, died Wednesday in Dallas, Texas,
after a long illness. She was born in Buffalo, New York,
March twenty fifth, nineteen forty five, daughter of Hugh and
Cindy Grayson, and had lived in Marlowe for two years.
Missus Homan was formerly employed by Central Screwcoe in Keene
(35:23):
and was a member of Sacred Heart Church in Tyler, Texas.
Survivors include her husband, John Homan, of Marlowe, and two sisters,
Terry Martin of Dallas and Jean Anne Trevor of White Plains,
New York. Missus Homan had requested that her body be
donated to the Medical Research Institute in Texas and that
(35:44):
no funeral be held. Contributions may be made in her
memory to a favorite charity.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
When Robbie's co workers started to fact check it, they
couldn't confirm a single detail. They called the church in
Texas where Robbie's funeral was held, it didn't exist. They
called the center where her body had been donated, it
didn't exist. There was no record of her being born.
They couldn't even find a record of the drunk driving
(36:11):
accident that had killed her two children. It was starting
to seem like not only had Robbie not died of
a rare blood disease, but maybe she had never existed
at all. Finally, a skeptical local went to the police.
I don't know what's going on, but I'd bet there's
some kind of hanky panky there, he said. The policeman
(36:33):
agreed that there was indeed some sort of hanky panky happening.
He started making calls. He called the irs. Maybe it
was a tax fraud situation. He called the state police. Eventually,
the FBI got involved, and on January twelfth, nineteen eighty three,
FBI agents intercepted Marie outside of her work. They brought
(36:55):
her into the local police station and they asked her
real name, Marie Hilly. She said, are you wanted? They said,
I'm wanted in Alabama for some check charges, she responded.
An agent went into another room to run her real
name through the system, and he was shocked at what
(37:16):
he found. Marie was wanted for those check charges, but
she was also wanted for the attempted murder of her
teenage daughter and the first degree murder of her husband.
(37:42):
Marie denied the whole nasty arsenic business, of course, but
she easily admitted that she'd been using a fake identity.
It's a relief, she said, I'm tired, it's been so confusing.
Detectives pulled John Holman into the police station and told
him that they had some bad news. His wife, Robbie
(38:03):
was not dead, but was actually her twin sister, Terry,
and also neither of them were real because the woman's
true name was Marie. John was flabbergasted. They're twins. He said, look,
I don't know where you get your information, but it's wrong.
I lived with the woman and now I live with
her sister. The detectives took him into the room where
(38:23):
Marie was waiting, and she told him that yes, her
real name was Marie, and that the whole twin thing
had been made up, and also the blood disease and
the fake death. But she assured John that she had
never killed or tried to kill anyone, and that was
enough for John Holman. He made up his mind then
and there that whether or not Marie had lied about
a few little things like her entire identity, that didn't matter.
(38:46):
She was innocent and he was going to stick by
her forever. After being caught, Marie called her son Mike.
It was the first time they'd spoken in over three years.
Is Carol still a homosexual? She demanded. This fixation on
(39:06):
her daughter's sexuality would be a scandalous theme in Marie's trial,
but it seems like Marie was using Carol's sexuality as
a narrow way to explain or even justify her own
awful behavior. There's just no way that all of Marie's
crimes came down to a dislike of lesbians. Her offenses
(39:28):
were much too far ranging, and they affected people who
had nothing to do with Carol. Marie was clearly a
pathological liar, a compulsive con woman, possibly even a burgeoning
serial killer. She had been lying and cheating on her husband,
and writing bad checks and pretending she had a twin
long before her daughter started preferring genes to dresses and
(39:50):
all the other things that had caused the two of
them to fight so viciously for so long. Marie's fixation
was especially sad because during the three plus years that
she was gone, Carol had been giving interviews about her
mother that were kind of flattering. Carol seemed to really
love her mother, even though her mother had very obviously
(40:10):
tried to murder her just a few weeks before Marie
was arrested, Carol told her local paper that she thought
her mother had gone north and outsmarted everyone. She could
go to some rinky dink little town where no one
had ever heard of her. Carol said, my mother loved
snow and the cold. She liked to stay inside and
be cozy. This quote was heartbreaking, not just because Carol
(40:35):
was right, Marie really did go to a rinky dink
little town where no one had ever heard of her,
but it was heartbreaking because it showed that Carol knew
her mother so well. She knew her mother so well
except in the ways that really counted, except in the
ways that meant life or death. Marie's arrest was a
(41:09):
huge deal. When FBI agents brought her down south back
to Alabama, they had to run through hordes of journalists
and cameramen to catch a plane, as though they were celebrities,
and Marie kind of was. Her trial was the social
event of the decade, and the courtroom was packed with
middle aged women who were there for the gossip. They
(41:30):
brought bagged lunches, and they pushed their way through the
metal detectors at the door, hoping that Marie would take
the stand and talk about all the people that she'd
had affairs with. Everyone there seemed to have a connection
to Marie in that small town way. She'd been missing
from Anniston, Alabama for the past three years, but Aniston,
Alabama had certainly not forgotten about her.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Still.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
The prosecutor warned the jury that this was no fun
in games gossip. Sessh, You're not going to be looking
at a folk hero, he said, You're going to be
looking at a cold, calculating, diabolical killer. In the courtroom,
Marie was back to being a brunette. Her short lived
run as a blonde as Terry Martin was over, and
(42:16):
her defense was cruel. Her defense lawyer tried to undermine
Carol's credibility, saying that she smoked marijuana, dabbled in harder drugs,
had attempted suicide, and was quote a homosexual. But the
smear campaign just didn't work. Carol herself testified against her mother,
(42:38):
and she was so frail up there on the witness stand,
weighing not even one hundred pounds, that it was hard
not to sympathize with her. Her doctor took the stand
and described how Marie's slow poisoning of her daughter had
almost killed the girl. Mike also testified against his mother,
and he refused to look at her. Carol and Mike
(43:00):
did maintain a morbid sense of humor, though. They went
shopping for Mother's Day cards, and they laughed at all
the sweet lines like Happy Mother's Day to the best
mom ever and thank you for everything you've given me, Mom.
None of the sentiments seemed quite right for their own,
very special sort of mother. The prosecution saved their most
(43:21):
explosive witness for last. She wasn't a family member or
a doctor. She seemed sort of random. Her name was
Priscilla Lang, and she had been Marie's cellmate in jail.
But when she took the stand, she painted a picture
of Marie that was truly terrifying. Here's what she said.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
All of a sudden, she changed into a different person.
She became more violent and cursed a lot. And then
she went to talking about the arsenic poison and how
she'd done it, and that she had killed all of them.
She was talking about how she killed her mother in
law and her husband and attempted to poison her daughter.
She said she took arsenic poison and put a little
of it at a time on their food. She said
that she did it because because her daughter was a
(44:01):
lesbian and had been from the age of thirteen or fourteen,
and that her husband and her husband's family all sided
with Carol. She said she was ashamed of her daughter
and hated her for being that way.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
And that was pretty much it for Marie. During the
prosecutor's closing statement, Carol sat at his table, listening to
him talk about how horrible her mother was, how greedy,
how bloodthirsty. As his speech went on and on, Carol
began curling up in her chair, tucking her legs under herself,
(44:33):
wrapping her arms around herself until she was literally in
the fetal position, as though she wanted to go back
to the beginning, back to the womb, and start over.
She was crying silently. When the trial finished, Marie looked
across the room to her daughter, smiled and mouthed, I
(44:56):
love you. She motioned with her hand for Carol to
walk over to her. No, Mom, said Carol, weeping, I can't.
It was as though Marie didn't understand the gravity of
what she had done. She thought that a charming smile
and a little wave of her hand would bring her
(45:18):
daughter running right back to her. The jury convicted Marie
of both attempted murder and murder. The judge sentenced her
to life. On June ninth, nineteen eighty three, Marie was
(45:58):
sent to prison, where she proceeded to plot her escape.
In the meantime, everyone who had known Marie thought back
to times when they'd had a stomach ache or a
strange bout of vomiting, and they wondered, was I next?
Was she trying to do me in? There was good
reason for this citywide paranoia. Marie probably had been trying
(46:21):
to kill other people. Years ago, one of Carol's little
friends died at the age of eleven. Her death came
out of nowhere. She was healthy, and then she was
suddenly sick, and three days later she was dead. Doctors
called it a virus and heart inflammation, but her mother
had always been confused about how quickly her girl had
(46:42):
fallen ill. Now that Marie was a convicted murderer, the
little girl's family writhed in agony their daughter had eaten
at Marie's house plenty of times. Finally they decided to
do an exhumation, and the autopsy revealed that her body
had some arsenic in it, but not enough to be
considered abnormal. This was the same result as the autopsy's
(47:05):
done on Marie's mom and her mother in law. No
one could say for sure if she'd tried to kill
all of those people, or if she'd caused her daughter
in law to miscarry, but you couldn't help wondering maybe
she did, maybe she did. After two years in prison,
the charming, ever convincing Marie had her status changed to
(47:28):
a minimum security prisoner. This meant that she could start
leaving the prison on fun, little outings. Never mind that
multiple guards had reported multiple times that Marie was plotting
an escape. Marie befriended the prison warden over letters, and
she would write outraged notes saying, escape me, I can't
believe the slander. Soon enough, she was taking eight hour
(47:52):
trips outside the prison totally unsupervised. She always came back,
and she often wrote to the warden, thank you her
for the privilege and promising never to abuse it. Soon enough,
she was given the next level of freedom, the ability
to leave prison unsupervised for three whole days. She walked
(48:13):
out on February nineteenth, nineteen eighty seven to meet her husband.
John Holman had remained faithful to Marie for all these years.
He visited her in prison, and he told reporters that
she was a good person, that she was driven only
by love, that she was totally innocent. He lived at
(48:34):
a hotel in Aniston just to be near to her,
and he had started hinting that Marie had been framed
by a bunch of Anniston's eastsiders, the rich folks who
lived in mansions, the ones that Marie had longed to
join ever since she was a child, and now husband
and wife were reunited. They spent most of the weekend
(48:55):
in John's hotel room. On Sunday morning, the day Marie
was to go back to prison, they made plans to
get breakfast at a waffle house. Marie sent John along
to the waffle house and told him that she wanted
to visit her parents' graves first. At the waffle house,
John waited patiently. He was always waiting patiently for Marie,
(49:17):
but she never showed up. Back in his hotel room,
he found Marie's final letter.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
Dear John, I hope you will be able to forgive me.
I'm getting ready to leave it will be best for everybody.
We'll be together again. Please give me an hour to
get out of town. Destroy this note.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
Decades later, Mike was giving a rare interview. He admitted
that he had been working on a book about his
mother for years and he was looking for a publisher.
It was six hundred pages. He said that it would
be dedicated to his sister if he ever managed to
get it published. She went through more than anybody else,
he declared. It shows an incredible strength and persistence of
(50:16):
character that she's still standing for thirty years. Carol had
worked at the Anniston Army Depot, a facility that made
army vehicles and stored chemical weapons, and then she retired.
She didn't think much about her mom anymore. She thought
more about her brother's family. He had kids, even grandkids now.
(50:39):
Carol had taken many stances over the years in interviews.
My mother is innocent, my mother is guilty, my mother
is troubled. I still love my mother. But in what
seems to be her final interview, given in twenty twelve,
she said that she didn't think much about her mother's
crimes anymore. She said it might as well be California.
(51:01):
That's how far away it seems. It's just something that
happened a long time ago. This distancing is something that
Carol and Mike did for years, even when their mother
was still in their lives. It seems like it was
the only way the two of them could ever manage
to survive. They just refused to think about certain things.
(51:24):
There were certain questions that they would never ask. When
Carol visited her mother in prison, she never ever asked her,
why why did you try to kill me? Mom? Maybe
Carol knew it was a futile question because Marie never
told the truth. Or maybe Carol knew that whatever the
answer was, whether it was money or because you're a lesbian,
(51:47):
or because I couldn't control you, or because I couldn't
control myself, it was something horrible, something that Carol would
simply rather not know. When Marie Hilly vanished on the
(52:24):
Sunday when she was supposed to meet her husband at
the waffle house and then return herself to jail, people
were shocked, but not all that surprised. Of course, she'd
made a run for it. This was Marie we're talking about.
Four days later, on February twenty sixth, nineteen eighty seven,
a woman named Sue Craft saw a terrifying sight. There
(52:48):
was a filthy, soaking, wet woman crawling across her neighbor's
back porch. The woman was trying to get inside, but
she couldn't seem to figure out how door handles worked.
She could barely talk. It sounded like her tongue was
swollen inside her mouth. Her hands were purple, and one
(53:08):
of the fingers was crooked. She seemed delirious. She'd lost
a shoe and was trying to put it back on,
but she couldn't manage to do it. Sue ran and
got another neighbor, and the two of them asked the
woman what her name was. Cellars, said the woman. She
slurred that her car had broken down. I walked part
of the way and crawled part of the way, she said.
(53:33):
Sue Kraft had known Marie Hilly her entire life. They
grew up a block apart, they went to the same schools.
But this filthy, shivering woman was nothing like the Marie
Hilly that Sue had known, the sophisticated lady who never
had a hair out of place. Sue and her friend
called the police and covered the woman with a piece
(53:55):
of plastic. The policeman who arrived thought that he was
dealing with someone who was drunk. It took him a
while to realize that this was Marie Hilly herself, the fugitive,
and that she was suffering from hypothermia. She had been
out in the cold and freezing rain for the past
four days. Her body temperature had plummeted to eighty one degrees.
(54:17):
She began convulsing and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors
worked for three hours to save her, but it was
too late. She died at five o six pm. People
could not believe that glamorous, competent Marie had met such
an infamous end. It's unbelievable, said the district attorney. This
(54:39):
goes against everything she's done in the past. The biggest
escape artist in this area in ten years, and what
does she do? She ended up crawling around in the woods.
People speculated that maybe Marie had had a plan but
that it had fallen through. Maybe she thought that someone
would help her, an old lover perhaps, And maybe her
plan had failed and she'd ended up on her hands
(55:01):
and knees in the cold woods, slowly losing her mind.
It just didn't seem possible that Marie would run away
without an elaborate plan in place, without every hair in place.
But was it actually so unbelievable. Marie hadn't ended up
in the middle of nowhere when she was found by
(55:21):
an old classmate, She was only a mile away from
the house where she grew up. Maybe in her last
hallucinatory moments, Marie was trying to go back to the beginning,
back to a time when she took tap dancing lessons
and her mom filled their refrigerator with lovely foods, a
(55:42):
time when her world was small and safe and she
was the center of it. She had grown up and
constructed a terrible world of lies and secrets, and she
had destroyed everyone that she said she loved. Maybe, as
she crawled on her hands and knees through the freezing
(56:03):
rain of her childhood town, she was trying to find
her way home. We reached the end of our Marie
(56:34):
Hilly story. I feel that we have been on a
journey together, and I'm sort of even sad that it's ending,
even though I don't know if any of us could
deal with a third part of Marie's shall we say antics,
quote unquote crimes horrors disguises. What do you think of Marie?
Please tell me, you know I always want to hear
your take on these ladies. You can email me at
(56:56):
criminal Broods at gmail dot com forgot my email for
a second, or Instagram dot com slash criminal broads, where
I'll be putting photos of this second half of Marie's life,
so you'll see Terry and her blonde hair. I'm also
going to show you some photos of Carol in the courtroom.
And now I don't mean to minimize the absolute horror
of her experience of having to be in the courtroom
(57:18):
with a mother who's being tried for trying to kill her,
but her eighties courtroom outfit is really great. She looks great. Also,
oh yeah, hire Alex Taylor and Anna Telfer for all
your voice over needs. Obviously you can tell that they
are both amazing actresses and you haven't even seen them
on screen yet, you just heard their voices, so they're
(57:38):
both amazing. And thank you to this episode's patrons as well,
Eliza l and Regina AA wooh, thank you, thank you
ladies so much. And oh a little preview of next
week's episodes. So do you remember when we met sister
Eli and we talked about wrongful convictions and plea deals. Sorry,
(57:59):
we didn't talk so much about wrongful convictions. We talked
about plea deals, the coercive nature of them, and the system,
et cetera. And we ended on a hopeful note. And
I had that quote from our ACLU lawyer best friend
talking about how we should pay attention to prosecutor races
and if we can vote in prosecutors who are really
going to do things to make the criminal justice system
(58:21):
a better one, a less burdened one, a fairer one,
a more just system, we should vote for these people. Samil,
the lawyer said that these races can be decided by
a few thousand votes. So it's exciting for me the
thought of getting involved because it's like, oh, we can
actually make a difference here. Sometimes it's hard to think
that you're going to make a difference in a presidential
(58:42):
election or something like that, where you're just one person
and you're in a blue state or a red state
and whatever, it feels like it doesn't really matter, it matters,
But these races, your vote weighs a lot more, I
guess I'm saying. So anyway, next episode, we're going to
hear from a fabulous broad who is running for the
(59:05):
Manhattan District Attorney job. So this is a huge job.
I can't overstate what a big job this is. I
described it on Instagram as basically being the criminal justice
influencer for the entire country because everyone looks to the
Manhattan DA to think, like, what are they doing in
New York. Oh, they've decriminalized sex work. Interesting, Oh they're
(59:26):
trying to do this, Maybe we'll do that too. So
it's really important we get a person in that office
who is great, and it's also a job. They're up
for reelection every four years, but there's no term limit,
so you could be in that job for one hundred
and fifty years if you lived that long, and if
you're a terrible person, that's one hundred and fifty years
of terrible policies and terrible prosecution. So it's important, is
(59:49):
my point. So I thought it important that we bring
a broad on the podcast to pitch herself to us.
And if you don't live in New York, it's still
important to follow this race, and there's still a lot
of ways you can get involved. So next week we're
gonna hear from Eliza Orleans, who is awesome and I'm
categorizing her as a crime fighting broad and you will
love meeting her. If you want to know more about
(01:00:11):
her before the episode, you can go to her website,
Eliza Orlans dot com and get a little preview. All right,
love you all, see you back here next week. After that,
we have more stories. It's gonna be a good spring.
Stay safe, Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong loving you like guid.
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty. Guilty loving
Is it a same Is it a crime loving you
dear like I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
guilty of loving you.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Oh hi, I didn't see you there. Welcome back, you,
guys to another episode of Criminal Broads, a podcast about
wild women on the wrong side of the law. I'm
Tory Telfer, author of Lady Killers and Confident Women, and
I am here today to gently hold your hand and
walk you through part two of the Audrey Marie Hilly story. Okay,
(00:44):
how is part one? How are we all feeling? Do
we still feel shaken up by the twists, the turns,
the surprises? I hope not, because part two gets way
crazier before we get into it. I want to give
you a little summary of part one if you've forgotten,
I know it's been a week. Okay, I have my
(01:05):
script in front of me, so I'm just gonna like
scroll really fast through part one and tell you what
we learned about Marie. Born in nineteen thirty three in
the town of Well, technically in a little village called
Blue Mountain, but it's basically Aniston, Alabama, was a West
side girl who always wanted to be a wealthier east
side girl. Married Frank Hilly when she was very young.
(01:27):
They had two kids, Mike and Carol. Marie shopped too much,
spent too much money, Frank drank too much. But still
everyone was like, Oh, they're such a perfect couple. And
then Frank started hinting to people that he really needed
to talk about something with them, that he was troubled
by something. He said ominous things like maybe Marie should
see a doctor. Everyone ignored him, no one listened to him.
(01:50):
He got sick, He was sick for a while, and
then all of a sudden, he was super sick and
he was hallucinating, and his skin turned bright yellow, and
he was in the hospital and he died. The doctor
said he died of hepatitis. Okay, so Marie keeps spending money.
She gets a nice life insurance pay out from his death,
but no one thinks it's that weird. And other people
(02:11):
around Marie keep getting sick. Her son gets sick, her
daughter in law gets so sick that she has a miscarriage.
Her mother in law gets sick, and then her daughter
Carol gets sick. Now, Marie and Carol have always fought
with each other. Marie does not like that Carol is
a lesbian. She wants to control her daughter. She wants
(02:34):
her daughter to be this like perfect little girly princess.
She basically wants her daughter to be her in a
weird way. Carol gets sicker and sicker and sicker. No
one knows what's going on until finally some of Carol's
friends and family members tell the doctors like, eh, you
might want to check if someone happens to be giving
her arsenic and the doctor's check, and that is indeed
(02:54):
what happened. In the meantime, Marie is arrested for writing
some bad checks and then Carol's arsenic poisoning is discovered.
Marie is released on bail. Some people are like, she's
definitely not gonna run. Her friends and family are like,
she's totally gonna run, do not release her. Judge releases her.
(03:16):
She goes to a hotel and skips town. Okay, so
we're at the very end now of nineteen seventy nine
and Marie has just vanished. Also, I heard from the
listener who suggested this two part series, Damon. Thank you
Damon officially on the podcast, thank you for suggesting this.
(03:38):
And I also want to thank Alex Taylor and Anna Telfer,
who is my sister, for doing some awesome voiceovers that
you're gonna hear in this episode. Yeah, we're getting into voiceovers, guys.
This is becoming an immersive theatrical experience, so you'll hear
from both of them. You will also probably recognize Anna's voice,
as she is the one who sings our intro and
conclusion songs. All right, without further ado, we're going back
(04:02):
to nineteen seventy nine, but we're not going to Alabama
because that's where Marie Hilly is supposed to be. But
she's not there anymore. She's heading south. Let's go. It
(04:24):
was January eleventh, nineteen eighty when a grand jury indicted
Marie Hilly for the first degree murder of her husband, Frank,
But this was more of a symbolic gesture than anything else,
because everyone in Aniston, Alabama, knew that Marie Hilly was
long gone. Frank's autopsy had revealed a horrifying narrative. He
(04:47):
had been poisoned slowly and steadily for a very long time,
and then right at the end, he had been given
a huge dose of arsenic as though Marie had suddenly
grown impatient as though she'd wanted him dead immediately. Frank
had a hundred times more arsenic in his body than
was normal. It's not unusual for a body to have
(05:08):
a little bit of arsenic in it from the soil
or the water, but Frank's cause of death was crystal clear.
The day Marie disappeared. Her mother in law had died
officially of cancer, but authorities had done autopsies on her
body too, and on Marie's mother's body, thinking that someone
who poisoned her husband and her daughter probably wouldn't stop there. Now.
(05:33):
Neither woman had enough arsenic in her body to officially
say that the arsenic had killed her, but anecdotally, if
you paid attention to things like the way Marie's mother
in law started vomiting when Marie moved in with her,
it seemed like maybe Marie had at least hurried their
death so long. Everyone who knew Marie was panicking now,
(05:55):
wondering if she had tried to do them in. Her
son and daughter in law were really edge. They'd been
sick a lot around Marie. Her daughter in law had
even lost her first child to a miscarriage because of
how sick she'd been so they went to the doctor
and asked, have we been poisoned too? The doctor discovered
(06:15):
some signs of arsenic in their bodies, but he couldn't
tell them how much they'd taken. Carol, who had obviously
been poisoned, was recovering slowly. She was going to physical
therapy to learn how to walk again. Sometimes she felt
sure that her mother couldn't have done this. She'd give
interviews where it sounded like she was rooting for her
(06:36):
mother to get away with everything. If she called me
and told me where she was and asked would I
come meet her, I'd go, Carol told one journalist. I
think that's what you call being an accessory to a crime,
But I'd take that risk. Other times, Carol felt that
same cold stab of fear that she'd felt in the
(06:57):
middle of the night when she woke up and saw
her mind. They're just standing there in her room. Maybe
her mother had tried to kill her. Maybe her mother
had killed her father too. She told a journalist once
that she was convinced that Marie was a paranoid schizophrenic.
And while everyone was talking about Marie and thinking about Marie,
(07:20):
where was Marie herself? She was heading South full of schemes.
After escaping from her motel room and writing all those
ominous notes which managed to throw people off her trail
for about two seconds, Marie set her sights on Florida.
(07:43):
For a woman on the run, she was still dressed impeccably.
There were a few sightings of her as she migrated south.
In one small town, she conned the chief of police
by telling him a sob story about how her purse
had been stolen, and he found her a place to
sleep and even organized a little fundraiser for her. In Savannah, Georgia,
(08:04):
some people saw Marie leaving a hotel with a male companion.
As her biographer wrote, men came to Marie hilly like
bears to spilled molasses. During all of these sightings, the
eyewitnesses noted that Marie looked great. She didn't have a
hair out of place. She was so well quaffed that
the FBI actually sent flyers to beauty parlors around the country.
(08:28):
Sure that Marie was regularly getting her hair done, but
no hairstylist ever turned her in. Up until now, it's
safe to say that Carol had had the most terrifying
experiences with her mother she was the one getting jabbed
in a hip by Marie's hypodermic needles and so on.
But now Mike had a truly terrifying moment with his mom.
(08:51):
Years ago, Marie had tried to convince Mike to let
his son come and stay with her, but his son
was young and Mike didn't really trust his mother, and
so he said no. Marie responded casually that she could
just come and get him whenever she wanted. Now, Mike
had a second son who was only nine months old.
(09:13):
One night, Mike woke up his baby was crying, and
he walked into his son's room and saw that there
was a woman outside trying to open the bedroom window.
Behind her, Mike saw two men just standing there and
a getaway car behind them. He called to his wife,
and the two of them quietly called the police as
(09:35):
the woman walked around the house looking for another way in,
And then the woman accidentally triggered a floodlight in the
neighbor's yard and quickly jumped into the car with her
male companions and drove away. The next day, the FBI
brought a photo of Marie over to the neighbors and
they said, yeah, that's her. Marie had been scraping at
(09:57):
the window like a rat, trying to steal her grandson
in the dead of night. The FBI got involved in
the nationwide hunt for Marie. They told reporters that they
were looking for a woman with multiple identities, a woman
who would change her entire self if she sensed danger.
She can be kind, laughing, considerate, and then brutal and hateful.
(10:21):
They said. We believe she is living in a world
with make believe friends and enemies, and she was Let's
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(13:20):
few months after escaping from her motel room, Marie arrived
in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There, she sacheted into a bar
and met a depressed, divorced and not all that attractive
man named John Holman. He owned a little boat building shop.
She told him that she desperately needed money, that she
was just about to start a job as a sex worker,
(13:43):
and that he would be her first client. But she
didn't really want to be a sex worker, she said. Oh,
her life had just been one tragedy after another. She
was from Texas, and she'd lost both of her children
in a drunk driving accident, and then later her very
rich husband had died of a heart attack, and she'd
been so distraught that she'd suffered through a series of
(14:05):
nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts. John thought that this charming,
heartbroken woman was just great. She said her name was
Robbie Hannon, and he believed her. When you fall in
love with someone, you don't ask them for an ID,
he said later. Now, Marie's biographer, Philip A. Ginsberg, thinks
(14:26):
that maybe, just maybe Marie and John Holman had met before.
Years earlier, Marie used to send her lovers these letters
about a man named John Romans, saying that if they
wouldn't marry her, then she'd go off and marry John Romans.
Her biographer thinks that it's awfully coincidental that John Romans
sounds a lot like John Holman, and he is also
(14:49):
suspicious of how blindly John Holman stuck by Marie until
the very end, But this is just speculation. If the
two had met years earlier, they kept their seat awfully well.
What seems more likely to me is that Marie just
made John Holman fall completely in love with her, which
she'd done before. He was certainly not the first man
(15:10):
who'd become obsessed with her. He had troubles in his past,
a divorce, a mom who died young, a lot of
responsibility given to him at a very early age, and
maybe he saw Marie as salvation. When you fall in
love with someone and are convinced that they are your
happy ending, it can be really hard to change your mind,
(15:31):
even when you find out that they're wanted by the FBI.
So Marie walked into this bar in Fort Lauderdale calling
herself Robbie, and John was instantly enamored with this pretty,
pulled together woman with a tragic backstory and the promise
of a large inheritance back in Texas. They started dating,
and soon they moved in together. Other people thought that
(15:55):
Robbie was kind of weird, though. John's younger brother Peter,
came to visit them, and one night he was taking
a bath when Marie burst into the bathroom with a
polaroid camera and snapped a photo of him. Later though,
she explained to him that she had a brain tumor,
which was why she sometimes acted impulsively. If you remember,
(16:17):
a brain tumor is how her old friend Rachel had died,
the high school girl, the popular high school girl whom
Marie had seemingly wanted as her twin. By the fall,
John and Marie had decided to move north for a sweeter,
slower life. They settled in tiny Marlowe, New Hampshire. They
rented a yellow cottage by a pond. Marie found work easily,
(16:41):
as always, She got a job in customer service at
a factory that made screws. Her supervisor, ron Oha, thought
that she was just great. She had a real pressure
packed job and was more than up to it. He said,
I wish I had two or three more people like her.
They couldn't have known it at the time, but his
wish was going to come true in a really bizarre way.
(17:03):
Ron also noticed that Robbie hated fake people. She didn't
like phonies, which is kind of strange in retrospect. He said,
she was very outspoken about disliking people who pretended to
be something they weren't. As usual, Marie's co workers liked
her at first. They really admired how well she dressed,
(17:24):
how impeccable her hair was, how expensive her clothes were.
She flirted with the men and gossiped with the women,
and told dirty jokes. In front of the Christians. She
spun wild tales of her wealthy, lonely childhood and the
tragic deaths of her husband and children. She also had
an explanation for why she wasn't currently rich, even though
(17:45):
she had been married to such a rich man. She
said that because she had spent time in a mental institution,
she was experiencing some legal complications and so she couldn't
access her inheritance at the time. She also told them
that she had a twin sister in text named Terry.
The two of them were super close, she said, practically
(18:05):
the same person. But as the months passed, Marie drove
many of her coworkers away, as she always did, she
seemed to find it hard to sustain friendships, especially friendships
with women. Her coworkers started thinking that her stories were
too crazy, that she was too self centered. It was
exhausting hearing about how secretly rich she was all the time,
(18:28):
and she had an unnerving habit of saying, I don't
get mad, I get even. In May of nineteen eighty one,
about a year and a half after Marie had run
away from Alabama, Marie and John flew back to Florida
and got married. Marie had gained some weight during her
life as Robbie, which would become significant soon. She and
(18:49):
John were starting to fight, and Marie even moved out
at one point and went to live in Texas for
a while. When she was in New Hampshire, John noticed
that sometimes she'd have these weird spells where she'd start
acting like she was a little girl, a baby. Even
she would cry and babble and talk in the voice
of a child. Sometimes she said that her grandfather had
(19:12):
molested her. Was this all part of an act. Was
Marie setting the stage for her next con or were
these strange spells actually real. Marie's biographer thinks that these
spells may have been signs that Marie was cracking under
the strain of her double life. She never talked about
these spells later or used them to support one of
(19:34):
her wild stories. She kept them a secret. In September
of nineteen eighty two, almost three years after she'd gone missing,
Marie started acting strange at work. She'd been complaining of
terrible headaches for quite some time, and now she started
telling people that she was having memory problems. I just
(19:56):
lose whole areas of my memory, she cried. I blanked
out a whole piece of my past, my family. I
blanked out my twin sister. How do you forget your
twin sister? She explained that she had a rare blood disease.
It was like the opposite of leukemia. She said she
was going to have to go to Texas and then
(20:16):
Germany for treatment. It was pretty serious. Her coworkers believed her.
They'd seen her crying from the pain of the headaches,
and she always made calls to her twin sister Terry
from her work phone. Terry was definitely real, they thought
her husband John thought so too. After all, if Terry
(20:36):
wasn't real, why was Robbie writing letters to her. Here's
one of the letters that Marie wrote Terry as Robbie
in full.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Dear Terry, thanks for the call today. You always make
me feel bitter about everything, even if I don't agree
you are very wrong about one thing. John is in
love with me anymore, and I don't know how I
really feel about him. We've both changed too much to
answer your question. No, I won't ever go back to him.
(21:11):
I will offer him his freedom doesn't matter either way
to me, as I won't ever marry again. Twice is enough. However,
I feel that someday he will want to remarry, and
I don't want the hassle of a divorce later on,
So now it's preferable to me Terry. John hurt me
very deeply when I was in Houston. The estate was
(21:34):
such a mess, and I needed him then more than
I ever needed anyone. But his love is New Hampshire
and he didn't want to come out with me. Then
when I was coming back, he asked me not to.
He doesn't want marriage. I haven't figured out why he
married me. Guess he had his reasons. Whatever they were,
(21:56):
it didn't work. You will be wondering why I came
back when he didn't want me. At the time, I
was very confused, very lonely, and I still loved him,
or I thought I did. If I hadn't come back,
I wouldn't have lost the feeling I had for him,
so you see, it was necessary. I've left too many
things unfinished, and I know from experience that it can
(22:19):
go on hurting forever. I didn't want that again. I
hope that he and I will remain friends, but also
from experience, I know that we will lose track of
each other. I guess this sounds strange to you, since
you know that once I cared very much for him.
But John isn't the same person I fell in love with,
(22:40):
just as I'm not the same, and everything changes. I
had really hoped that this would work, but I've looked
back too long at things that might have been. That
has been part of my problem. He is very aloof now,
and I felt these past weeks that he couldn't wait
for me to be gone. I try to tell him
(23:01):
once that he need not feel responsible for me to
live his life, but that only annoyed him. Has most
everything I do annoys him. We have very little physical contact,
and this has made me feel that in some way
I'm very unattractive. That too, I don't need anymore. I
(23:21):
had too many years of that. So much for my
love life, or rather my lack of a love life.
Let's get on with other things. I'm really looking forward
to our summer together. If everything goes well and we
don't drive each other insane, then perhaps we can arrange
something permanent until one of us goes on to something else. Terry,
(23:44):
there are two things I don't want to talk about.
One is John. I've told you all that I can
tell you about that. I don't know what went wrong.
I just know that it's over for good, and I'd
rather put it out of my mind.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
The other is.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
I will go back when I'm ready. The money isn't
important to me. All that has done is cause me
hurt and a lot of trouble trying to straighten it out.
I know it's there if I want it. I also
know I can live without it. So if you will
stay away from these two subjects, you and I will
have little or no trouble. One last thing about my marriage.
I hope I haven't made it sound like it's all
(24:22):
John's fault.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
It isn't.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
It is just as much mine, So don't have any
bad feelings towards him. It was just something that happened.
It doesn't hurt anymore, Terry. I called Julie this morning.
She was coming out to the house to look at
the furniture. I really don't care what you do with it.
My days of wanting nice things are over permanently. I'm
afraid if you want to have it redone, go ahead,
(24:48):
But personally I think it's silly. I don't want to
live there, and you said you didn't, and it will
cost quite a lot to move it, especially since I
don't want it. If you really want it, I'll try
to live and I'll do it gracefully. Does Emma have
anything left there? She was very upset when she had
to move. Before you leave, Will you go through the
(25:09):
closet in our bedroom, bring all the clothes that are
nice and call Mandy to pick up the wrist. I
don't know what is there, but I'm sure there are
things we want to keep. You decide. I'm so pleased
that you're doing so well. I hope the cast comes
off soon. It must be awful, so long on your leg.
(25:29):
Take care, say you soon? Let you Rob.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Just look at the depth of detail in that letter,
the clear love from Robbie to her twin sister Terry.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Who in the world.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Would write a letter like that if the people in
question weren't absolutely one hundred percent real. In November nineteen
(26:06):
eighty two, Robbie died tragically, and Terry was born. In
November nineteen eighty two, Marie as Robbie, told her husband
that she was going to Texas to start those treatments
for her rare blood disease that was the opposite of leukemia.
She flew to Dallas, but then she quickly made her
way to Florida, where she started her life as Terry Martin,
(26:28):
Robbie's twin sister. She dyed her hair bright blonde and
lost twenty pounds. She changed her mannerisms. Terry was more
outgoing than Robbie, more of a smoker and a drinker.
Robbie read books, but Terry watched TV, and even though
Marie herself was almost fifty, she insisted that Terry was
(26:48):
in her late thirties. As Terry, Marie got a secretary
job in Florida, and surprise, surprise, she impressed her boss
with her skills and her charm and her youthful good looks.
Her boss liked that she wore high heels every day,
and he noticed that she always called her twin sister
Robbie on her lunch break. Terry loved telling her boss
(27:11):
all about her special bond with her sister. She said
that when Robbie went into labor, she Terry had felt
the contractions Tragically. She told her boss Robbie was currently
suffering from cancer. It didn't take long for imaginary Robbie's
imaginary sickness to escalate. Marie called John Holman on November tenth,
(27:36):
pretending to be Terry. She was calling with bad news.
She said her twin sister Robbie had died, and no,
John couldn't see his wife one last time because her
body had been donated to science. And also she Terry
(27:59):
was coming to visit him. It was what Robbie would
have wanted. After all, If Robbie hadn't wanted her identical
twin sister Terry to visit her husband and then move
in with him, would she have written her identical twin
sister Terry the following totally not fake at all letter.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
Terry, I'm afraid I won't make it at home. I
want so much to see John again, and I know
you have been torn between my wishes and what you
feel is right, but I don't want him to see
me like this. I'm trying to hold on until December,
but though my mind tells me not to give in,
(28:38):
my body is too tired to listen. Writing this has
taking every ounce of my energy. But there are things
I want you to do. If things don't work out,
Please don't call John, use the ticket and go on
to New Hampshire. I don't know what effect you will
have on him. After all, we have confused people who
(28:59):
live with us every so if he doesn't want you there,
please don't feel offended. You could be a painful reminder
about mother's house. It may be the only thing I
have to give you, but you understand anything you get
from it, rent or sail half goes to John. I
just felt it would be easier to put it in
(29:21):
your name, since you are here and there is no
doubt in my mind that you will do the right thing. Terry,
I'm sorry i've given you such a hard time. You
have been wonderful to me. It's just that I miss
John so much. I'm miserable without him, and I took
it out on you. When we went to live with Grandfather,
(29:43):
I was afraid to go to sleep. I was afraid
I would wake up and you would be gone. I've
lived with the same fear since I've known John. Now
I will wake up someplace and both of you will
be gone. I want very much for the two of
you to be friends. I love you both very much
more than anything else. If you don't upset John too much,
(30:07):
please stay with him as long as he needs you.
He is so kind and you need a friend like him,
and I think he will need you. He is very
sensitive and if I don't make it, he will feel
it very deeply. I know you will want to go
back to Denver, but you love cold weather and New
Hampshire is a lovely place, so stay for a while
(30:29):
until John gets over the worst. I don't want either
of you to waste time grieving. For me, life is
too valuable and it doesn't last that long. I don't
want to die. I want to get well and learn
to live as you and John know how to do.
There is a phone number in my wallet if things
(30:51):
don't work out, that is the number to call. I
don't want you to know where they take me. You
might live in that part of the country again, and
I know it would bother you to know that's where
I am. No funeral or memorials. I've lived my life
and those things are too painful for the people who
love you. I hope you don't have to read this.
(31:12):
I hope I will wake up one morning and everything
will be better. But this is just in case things
go wrong. One more thing by John. A lot of
Christmas presents. The one thing especially that I told you about.
He loves Christmas, and if I'm not there, perhaps I'll
come back as a Christmas tree ornament. So please no
(31:35):
sadness at Christmas. I will know and be very unhappy.
My body is so tired, and if it didn't mean
leaving John and you, I'm ready to trade it in.
I want you and John to go someplace and have
a lavish dinner. Even a party. Time is a slow healer,
but I know that eventually it does heal. Just keep
(31:59):
that in mind. Everything passes. Just please take care of John.
He is strong about everything except me. I love you
both more than anything else.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Rob When John Holman saw Terry Martin get off the plane,
(32:36):
he was sure that he was looking at his late
wife's twin sister. Of course, Terry and Robbie looked very similar,
and they sounded exactly the same. But Terry was blonde,
twenty pounds thinner than his wife, and she even smoked
a different brand of cigarettes. I felt they were two
separate people, he said later. Their actions were different. There
(32:59):
was nothing to the two together. Terry promptly moved in
with John and started her life in New Hampshire. She
got a job at a book press in nearby Brattleborough, Vermont,
and she and John bonded over the most romantic activity
there is. They co wrote the obituary for Robbie, and
(33:19):
they got it published in the papers. Now that her
identity as Robbie had officially come to a conclusion, Marie
leaned fully into her identity as Terry. She waltzed around
town dramatically, going to all the same places that Robbie
used to go. It was as if she were daring
people to recognize her. She had plenty of intense interactions
(33:41):
with Robbie's old friends, during which people would call her
Robbie or would blurt out, I thought you were dead.
It must have been thrilling for Marie to be literally
rubbing elbows with people who had known her as someone else.
But sometimes she slipped. She had mentioned something about new
Hampshire that an outsider from Texas shouldn't have known, and
her voice sounded so much like Robbie's that people just
(34:04):
couldn't get over it. There was more than one person
in New Hampshire who wasn't totally convinced by her disguise.
When Marie went by the screw factory where she used
to work, telling everyone that she was Terry, some of
her old coworkers burst into tears at the sight of her,
as though they were staring at a ghost. Marie was
(34:24):
extremely dramatic, asking to see her sister's old desk and
so on, but some of her other coworkers were less emotional.
They whispered to each other that that blonde woman was
totally just Robbie with a new hair color. Right. Their
suspicions grew and grew, until finally a small group of
(34:45):
women decided that they needed to do something about this
bizarre situation, and so they gave themselves a top secret mission.
They were going to fact check Robbie's obituary during work hours.
Here's what Robbie's obituary set.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
Robbie L. Holman, thirty seven of Marlowe, died Wednesday in Dallas, Texas,
after a long illness. She was born in Buffalo, New York,
March twenty fifth, nineteen forty five, daughter of Hugh and
Cindy Grayson, and had lived in Marlowe for two years.
Missus Homan was formerly employed by Central Screwcoe in Keene
(35:23):
and was a member of Sacred Heart Church in Tyler, Texas.
Survivors include her husband, John Homan, of Marlowe, and two sisters,
Terry Martin of Dallas and Jean Anne Trevor of White Plains,
New York. Missus Homan had requested that her body be
donated to the Medical Research Institute in Texas and that
(35:44):
no funeral be held. Contributions may be made in her
memory to a favorite charity.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
When Robbie's co workers started to fact check it, they
couldn't confirm a single detail. They called the church in
Texas where Robbie's funeral was held, it didn't exist. They
called the center where her body had been donated, it
didn't exist. There was no record of her being born.
They couldn't even find a record of the drunk driving
(36:11):
accident that had killed her two children. It was starting
to seem like not only had Robbie not died of
a rare blood disease, but maybe she had never existed
at all. Finally, a skeptical local went to the police.
I don't know what's going on, but I'd bet there's
some kind of hanky panky there, he said. The policeman
(36:33):
agreed that there was indeed some sort of hanky panky happening.
He started making calls. He called the irs. Maybe it
was a tax fraud situation. He called the state police. Eventually,
the FBI got involved, and on January twelfth, nineteen eighty three,
FBI agents intercepted Marie outside of her work. They brought
(36:55):
her into the local police station and they asked her
real name, Marie Hilly. She said, are you wanted? They said,
I'm wanted in Alabama for some check charges, she responded.
An agent went into another room to run her real
name through the system, and he was shocked at what
(37:16):
he found. Marie was wanted for those check charges, but
she was also wanted for the attempted murder of her
teenage daughter and the first degree murder of her husband.
(37:42):
Marie denied the whole nasty arsenic business, of course, but
she easily admitted that she'd been using a fake identity.
It's a relief, she said, I'm tired, it's been so confusing.
Detectives pulled John Holman into the police station and told
him that they had some bad news. His wife, Robbie
(38:03):
was not dead, but was actually her twin sister, Terry,
and also neither of them were real because the woman's
true name was Marie. John was flabbergasted. They're twins. He said, look,
I don't know where you get your information, but it's wrong.
I lived with the woman and now I live with
her sister. The detectives took him into the room where
(38:23):
Marie was waiting, and she told him that yes, her
real name was Marie, and that the whole twin thing
had been made up, and also the blood disease and
the fake death. But she assured John that she had
never killed or tried to kill anyone, and that was
enough for John Holman. He made up his mind then
and there that whether or not Marie had lied about
a few little things like her entire identity, that didn't matter.
(38:46):
She was innocent and he was going to stick by
her forever. After being caught, Marie called her son Mike.
It was the first time they'd spoken in over three years.
Is Carol still a homosexual? She demanded. This fixation on
(39:06):
her daughter's sexuality would be a scandalous theme in Marie's trial,
but it seems like Marie was using Carol's sexuality as
a narrow way to explain or even justify her own
awful behavior. There's just no way that all of Marie's
crimes came down to a dislike of lesbians. Her offenses
(39:28):
were much too far ranging, and they affected people who
had nothing to do with Carol. Marie was clearly a
pathological liar, a compulsive con woman, possibly even a burgeoning
serial killer. She had been lying and cheating on her husband,
and writing bad checks and pretending she had a twin
long before her daughter started preferring genes to dresses and
(39:50):
all the other things that had caused the two of
them to fight so viciously for so long. Marie's fixation
was especially sad because during the three plus years that
she was gone, Carol had been giving interviews about her
mother that were kind of flattering. Carol seemed to really
love her mother, even though her mother had very obviously
(40:10):
tried to murder her just a few weeks before Marie
was arrested, Carol told her local paper that she thought
her mother had gone north and outsmarted everyone. She could
go to some rinky dink little town where no one
had ever heard of her. Carol said, my mother loved
snow and the cold. She liked to stay inside and
be cozy. This quote was heartbreaking, not just because Carol
(40:35):
was right, Marie really did go to a rinky dink
little town where no one had ever heard of her,
but it was heartbreaking because it showed that Carol knew
her mother so well. She knew her mother so well
except in the ways that really counted, except in the
ways that meant life or death. Marie's arrest was a
(41:09):
huge deal. When FBI agents brought her down south back
to Alabama, they had to run through hordes of journalists
and cameramen to catch a plane, as though they were celebrities,
and Marie kind of was. Her trial was the social
event of the decade, and the courtroom was packed with
middle aged women who were there for the gossip. They
(41:30):
brought bagged lunches, and they pushed their way through the
metal detectors at the door, hoping that Marie would take
the stand and talk about all the people that she'd
had affairs with. Everyone there seemed to have a connection
to Marie in that small town way. She'd been missing
from Anniston, Alabama for the past three years, but Aniston,
Alabama had certainly not forgotten about her.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Still.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
The prosecutor warned the jury that this was no fun
in games gossip. Sessh, You're not going to be looking
at a folk hero, he said, You're going to be
looking at a cold, calculating, diabolical killer. In the courtroom,
Marie was back to being a brunette. Her short lived
run as a blonde as Terry Martin was over, and
(42:16):
her defense was cruel. Her defense lawyer tried to undermine
Carol's credibility, saying that she smoked marijuana, dabbled in harder drugs,
had attempted suicide, and was quote a homosexual. But the
smear campaign just didn't work. Carol herself testified against her mother,
(42:38):
and she was so frail up there on the witness stand,
weighing not even one hundred pounds, that it was hard
not to sympathize with her. Her doctor took the stand
and described how Marie's slow poisoning of her daughter had
almost killed the girl. Mike also testified against his mother,
and he refused to look at her. Carol and Mike
(43:00):
did maintain a morbid sense of humor, though. They went
shopping for Mother's Day cards, and they laughed at all
the sweet lines like Happy Mother's Day to the best
mom ever and thank you for everything you've given me, Mom.
None of the sentiments seemed quite right for their own,
very special sort of mother. The prosecution saved their most
(43:21):
explosive witness for last. She wasn't a family member or
a doctor. She seemed sort of random. Her name was
Priscilla Lang, and she had been Marie's cellmate in jail.
But when she took the stand, she painted a picture
of Marie that was truly terrifying. Here's what she said.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
All of a sudden, she changed into a different person.
She became more violent and cursed a lot. And then
she went to talking about the arsenic poison and how
she'd done it, and that she had killed all of them.
She was talking about how she killed her mother in
law and her husband and attempted to poison her daughter.
She said she took arsenic poison and put a little
of it at a time on their food. She said
that she did it because because her daughter was a
(44:01):
lesbian and had been from the age of thirteen or fourteen,
and that her husband and her husband's family all sided
with Carol. She said she was ashamed of her daughter
and hated her for being that way.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
And that was pretty much it for Marie. During the
prosecutor's closing statement, Carol sat at his table, listening to
him talk about how horrible her mother was, how greedy,
how bloodthirsty. As his speech went on and on, Carol
began curling up in her chair, tucking her legs under herself,
(44:33):
wrapping her arms around herself until she was literally in
the fetal position, as though she wanted to go back
to the beginning, back to the womb, and start over.
She was crying silently. When the trial finished, Marie looked
across the room to her daughter, smiled and mouthed, I
(44:56):
love you. She motioned with her hand for Carol to
walk over to her. No, Mom, said Carol, weeping, I can't.
It was as though Marie didn't understand the gravity of
what she had done. She thought that a charming smile
and a little wave of her hand would bring her
(45:18):
daughter running right back to her. The jury convicted Marie
of both attempted murder and murder. The judge sentenced her
to life. On June ninth, nineteen eighty three, Marie was
(45:58):
sent to prison, where she proceeded to plot her escape.
In the meantime, everyone who had known Marie thought back
to times when they'd had a stomach ache or a
strange bout of vomiting, and they wondered, was I next?
Was she trying to do me in? There was good
reason for this citywide paranoia. Marie probably had been trying
(46:21):
to kill other people. Years ago, one of Carol's little
friends died at the age of eleven. Her death came
out of nowhere. She was healthy, and then she was
suddenly sick, and three days later she was dead. Doctors
called it a virus and heart inflammation, but her mother
had always been confused about how quickly her girl had
(46:42):
fallen ill. Now that Marie was a convicted murderer, the
little girl's family writhed in agony their daughter had eaten
at Marie's house plenty of times. Finally they decided to
do an exhumation, and the autopsy revealed that her body
had some arsenic in it, but not enough to be
considered abnormal. This was the same result as the autopsy's
(47:05):
done on Marie's mom and her mother in law. No
one could say for sure if she'd tried to kill
all of those people, or if she'd caused her daughter
in law to miscarry, but you couldn't help wondering maybe
she did, maybe she did. After two years in prison,
the charming, ever convincing Marie had her status changed to
(47:28):
a minimum security prisoner. This meant that she could start
leaving the prison on fun, little outings. Never mind that
multiple guards had reported multiple times that Marie was plotting
an escape. Marie befriended the prison warden over letters, and
she would write outraged notes saying, escape me, I can't
believe the slander. Soon enough, she was taking eight hour
(47:52):
trips outside the prison totally unsupervised. She always came back,
and she often wrote to the warden, thank you her
for the privilege and promising never to abuse it. Soon enough,
she was given the next level of freedom, the ability
to leave prison unsupervised for three whole days. She walked
(48:13):
out on February nineteenth, nineteen eighty seven to meet her husband.
John Holman had remained faithful to Marie for all these years.
He visited her in prison, and he told reporters that
she was a good person, that she was driven only
by love, that she was totally innocent. He lived at
(48:34):
a hotel in Aniston just to be near to her,
and he had started hinting that Marie had been framed
by a bunch of Anniston's eastsiders, the rich folks who
lived in mansions, the ones that Marie had longed to
join ever since she was a child, and now husband
and wife were reunited. They spent most of the weekend
(48:55):
in John's hotel room. On Sunday morning, the day Marie
was to go back to prison, they made plans to
get breakfast at a waffle house. Marie sent John along
to the waffle house and told him that she wanted
to visit her parents' graves first. At the waffle house,
John waited patiently. He was always waiting patiently for Marie,
(49:17):
but she never showed up. Back in his hotel room,
he found Marie's final letter.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
Dear John, I hope you will be able to forgive me.
I'm getting ready to leave it will be best for everybody.
We'll be together again. Please give me an hour to
get out of town. Destroy this note.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
Decades later, Mike was giving a rare interview. He admitted
that he had been working on a book about his
mother for years and he was looking for a publisher.
It was six hundred pages. He said that it would
be dedicated to his sister if he ever managed to
get it published. She went through more than anybody else,
he declared. It shows an incredible strength and persistence of
(50:16):
character that she's still standing for thirty years. Carol had
worked at the Anniston Army Depot, a facility that made
army vehicles and stored chemical weapons, and then she retired.
She didn't think much about her mom anymore. She thought
more about her brother's family. He had kids, even grandkids now.
(50:39):
Carol had taken many stances over the years in interviews.
My mother is innocent, my mother is guilty, my mother
is troubled. I still love my mother. But in what
seems to be her final interview, given in twenty twelve,
she said that she didn't think much about her mother's
crimes anymore. She said it might as well be California.
(51:01):
That's how far away it seems. It's just something that
happened a long time ago. This distancing is something that
Carol and Mike did for years, even when their mother
was still in their lives. It seems like it was
the only way the two of them could ever manage
to survive. They just refused to think about certain things.
(51:24):
There were certain questions that they would never ask. When
Carol visited her mother in prison, she never ever asked her,
why why did you try to kill me? Mom? Maybe
Carol knew it was a futile question because Marie never
told the truth. Or maybe Carol knew that whatever the
answer was, whether it was money or because you're a lesbian,
(51:47):
or because I couldn't control you, or because I couldn't
control myself, it was something horrible, something that Carol would
simply rather not know. When Marie Hilly vanished on the
(52:24):
Sunday when she was supposed to meet her husband at
the waffle house and then return herself to jail, people
were shocked, but not all that surprised. Of course, she'd
made a run for it. This was Marie we're talking about.
Four days later, on February twenty sixth, nineteen eighty seven,
a woman named Sue Craft saw a terrifying sight. There
(52:48):
was a filthy, soaking, wet woman crawling across her neighbor's
back porch. The woman was trying to get inside, but
she couldn't seem to figure out how door handles worked.
She could barely talk. It sounded like her tongue was
swollen inside her mouth. Her hands were purple, and one
(53:08):
of the fingers was crooked. She seemed delirious. She'd lost
a shoe and was trying to put it back on,
but she couldn't manage to do it. Sue ran and
got another neighbor, and the two of them asked the
woman what her name was. Cellars, said the woman. She
slurred that her car had broken down. I walked part
of the way and crawled part of the way, she said.
(53:33):
Sue Kraft had known Marie Hilly her entire life. They
grew up a block apart, they went to the same schools.
But this filthy, shivering woman was nothing like the Marie
Hilly that Sue had known, the sophisticated lady who never
had a hair out of place. Sue and her friend
called the police and covered the woman with a piece
(53:55):
of plastic. The policeman who arrived thought that he was
dealing with someone who was drunk. It took him a
while to realize that this was Marie Hilly herself, the fugitive,
and that she was suffering from hypothermia. She had been
out in the cold and freezing rain for the past
four days. Her body temperature had plummeted to eighty one degrees.
(54:17):
She began convulsing and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors
worked for three hours to save her, but it was
too late. She died at five o six pm. People
could not believe that glamorous, competent Marie had met such
an infamous end. It's unbelievable, said the district attorney. This
(54:39):
goes against everything she's done in the past. The biggest
escape artist in this area in ten years, and what
does she do? She ended up crawling around in the woods.
People speculated that maybe Marie had had a plan but
that it had fallen through. Maybe she thought that someone
would help her, an old lover perhaps, And maybe her
plan had failed and she'd ended up on her hands
(55:01):
and knees in the cold woods, slowly losing her mind.
It just didn't seem possible that Marie would run away
without an elaborate plan in place, without every hair in place.
But was it actually so unbelievable. Marie hadn't ended up
in the middle of nowhere when she was found by
(55:21):
an old classmate, She was only a mile away from
the house where she grew up. Maybe in her last
hallucinatory moments, Marie was trying to go back to the beginning,
back to a time when she took tap dancing lessons
and her mom filled their refrigerator with lovely foods, a
(55:42):
time when her world was small and safe and she
was the center of it. She had grown up and
constructed a terrible world of lies and secrets, and she
had destroyed everyone that she said she loved. Maybe, as
she crawled on her hands and knees through the freezing
(56:03):
rain of her childhood town, she was trying to find
her way home. We reached the end of our Marie
(56:34):
Hilly story. I feel that we have been on a
journey together, and I'm sort of even sad that it's ending,
even though I don't know if any of us could
deal with a third part of Marie's shall we say antics,
quote unquote crimes horrors disguises. What do you think of Marie?
Please tell me, you know I always want to hear
your take on these ladies. You can email me at
(56:56):
criminal Broods at gmail dot com forgot my email for
a second, or Instagram dot com slash criminal broads, where
I'll be putting photos of this second half of Marie's life,
so you'll see Terry and her blonde hair. I'm also
going to show you some photos of Carol in the courtroom.
And now I don't mean to minimize the absolute horror
of her experience of having to be in the courtroom
(57:18):
with a mother who's being tried for trying to kill her,
but her eighties courtroom outfit is really great. She looks great. Also,
oh yeah, hire Alex Taylor and Anna Telfer for all
your voice over needs. Obviously you can tell that they
are both amazing actresses and you haven't even seen them
on screen yet, you just heard their voices, so they're
(57:38):
both amazing. And thank you to this episode's patrons as well,
Eliza l and Regina AA wooh, thank you, thank you
ladies so much. And oh a little preview of next
week's episodes. So do you remember when we met sister
Eli and we talked about wrongful convictions and plea deals. Sorry,
(57:59):
we didn't talk so much about wrongful convictions. We talked
about plea deals, the coercive nature of them, and the system,
et cetera. And we ended on a hopeful note. And
I had that quote from our ACLU lawyer best friend
talking about how we should pay attention to prosecutor races
and if we can vote in prosecutors who are really
going to do things to make the criminal justice system
(58:21):
a better one, a less burdened one, a fairer one,
a more just system, we should vote for these people. Samil,
the lawyer said that these races can be decided by
a few thousand votes. So it's exciting for me the
thought of getting involved because it's like, oh, we can
actually make a difference here. Sometimes it's hard to think
that you're going to make a difference in a presidential
(58:42):
election or something like that, where you're just one person
and you're in a blue state or a red state
and whatever, it feels like it doesn't really matter, it matters,
But these races, your vote weighs a lot more, I
guess I'm saying. So anyway, next episode, we're going to
hear from a fabulous broad who is running for the
(59:05):
Manhattan District Attorney job. So this is a huge job.
I can't overstate what a big job this is. I
described it on Instagram as basically being the criminal justice
influencer for the entire country because everyone looks to the
Manhattan DA to think, like, what are they doing in
New York. Oh, they've decriminalized sex work. Interesting, Oh they're
(59:26):
trying to do this, Maybe we'll do that too. So
it's really important we get a person in that office
who is great, and it's also a job. They're up
for reelection every four years, but there's no term limit,
so you could be in that job for one hundred
and fifty years if you lived that long, and if
you're a terrible person, that's one hundred and fifty years
of terrible policies and terrible prosecution. So it's important, is
(59:49):
my point. So I thought it important that we bring
a broad on the podcast to pitch herself to us.
And if you don't live in New York, it's still
important to follow this race, and there's still a lot
of ways you can get involved. So next week we're
gonna hear from Eliza Orleans, who is awesome and I'm
categorizing her as a crime fighting broad and you will
love meeting her. If you want to know more about
(01:00:11):
her before the episode, you can go to her website,
Eliza Orlans dot com and get a little preview. All right,
love you all, see you back here next week. After that,
we have more stories. It's gonna be a good spring.
Stay safe, Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong loving you like guid.
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty. Guilty loving
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