She Poisoned Her Husband… Then Her Daughter | The Marie Hilly Case

That’s what everyone believed.

In 1975, Marie Hilly was seen as the kind of woman people trusted without question… until the truth started to unravel. First, her husband died after a mysterious illness. Then, years later, her daughter became sick in the exact same way.

What followed wasn’t just a murder investigation… it was the exposure of something far more unsettling.

A woman who didn’t just lie — she became someone else entirely.

In this episode of GBRLIFE Of Crimes, we break down the case of Marie Hilly — a story of poisoning, deception, identity, and the psychology behind a woman who could perform emotion so convincingly… no one ever questioned it.

In This Episode:

• The small-town image that hid everything 
• The slow poisoning of her husband, Frank Hilly 
• The shocking targeting of her own daughter, Carol 
• The moment arsenic changed everything 
• How Marie escaped and created a completely new identity 
• The psychology of performance, manipulation, and detachment 
• What makes this case one of the most unsettling in true crime

Companion Blog Post:
 Read the full psychological breakdown here:  https://www.gbrlife.com/blog/the-patience-of-poison

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Transcript

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Kaitlyn:
A small town in Alabama, 1975, the kind of town where everybody knows your name, just like the movies.

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And this is before you've even introduced yourself, where the church directory

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is the social register and the front porch, well, that's your news desk,

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and nobody, nobody locks their doors, and not even at night.

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Because why would you? You know your neighbors. You grew up with their parents.

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You went to school with their kids. You brought a casserole when their mother died.

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And they brought you one when yours did. There is a particular kind of safety in a town like that.

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The safety of being known.

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Now picture a woman moving through that town. Make her beautiful.

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In the way that turns heads without trying.

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Dark hair. Good composure.

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Impeccably put together. Even on a Tuesday afternoon when there's really no

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reason to be. And the thing is, she's also charming in a way that makes people feel chosen.

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Like she looked across the room and decided specifically that you were someone

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worth talking to. But she also volunteers.

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She always attends church and she bakes and she nurses her husband through his illness.

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And she does it with such devotion that the neighbors remark on it.

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What a wife. What a woman.

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What a love. Her husband dies anyway. And then her daughter gets sick,

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terribly, mysteriously sick, a baffling illness that doctors are just struggling to explain.

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And through all of it, there she is at the bedside, devoted, present, heartbroken.

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At least it seems she's heartbroken at her very core.

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Her name is Marie Hilly. And in that small town in Alabama, for years and years,

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Everyone thought they knew her, but they didn't know her at all,

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they never even came close.

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Kaitlyn:
Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn, and you're listening

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to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed

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by women, but why they happened and the psychology behind them.

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Today, we're going deep into one of the strangest, most layered,

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and psychologically complex cases in American criminal history.

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This case is about poison and patience, about the performance of grief,

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about a woman who reinvented herself so completely,

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built an entirely new person from the ground up, that she almost got away with it. Almost.

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This is the story of Marie Hilly, wife, mother, and as you know it, murderer.

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Marie Frazier was born on June 4th, 1933, in Anniston, Alabama.

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She was the second of two children, raised in a working-class family in a working-class

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town during some of the hardest years in this country, this country being the United States.

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I know, not today.

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There was a time before. We've all read about it.

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Some experienced it. What was that time? The Depression.

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And the depression was not an abstract thing in Aniston in the 1930s.

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It was the texture of daily life.

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It was what was on the table and very clearly what wasn't.

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It was the clear gap between what you needed and what you had.

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And that particular kind of shame, that gap, produces people who were raised

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to believe that what you have is what you are. Doesn't make it true.

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It's just what people were raised to believe, especially in that time frame.

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And that is the first thread worth pulling in Marie Hilly's story,

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because she grew up in a family that was not poor by the standards of deprivation.

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They were not destitute, not desperate, but they were working class in a town

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and a time and a culture where working class was a category people quietly,

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desperately wanted to escape.

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Where the distance between respectability and struggle was something you felt

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in your clothes and in your accent and in the way people's eyes moved when you

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told them that this is where you lived.

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It does sound similar to today, but this was the first time around.

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And Marie Frazier, she was a bright child, observant, quick.

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She had an instinct for reading people, for understanding what they wanted to

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hear and calibrating herself accordingly. That showed up early and never left.

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She was popular in school, attractive, socially adept, particularly in the way

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that someone who has learned that charm is a resource.

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That warmth is a tool, and the right impression carefully maintained can open

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doors that circumstances would otherwise, well, just firmly shut.

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Her father, Huey, was a mill worker, and he died when Marie was young.

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She was around 18, and his death, coming at the precise moment when she was

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stepping into adulthood, shaped the trajectory of everything that came next.

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Because without her father's income, whatever modest stability the family had built,

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It came down. Marie was 18, but she was beautiful, bright, and,

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I'm sure you guessed, desperate to be something other than what her circumstances said she was.

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So she looked around and she made a decision.

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She said, I can marry my way out of this. I want to hold that for a moment,

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because it matters more than it may seem to.

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There is a particular psychological pattern that researchers have observed in

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women who grew up in environments of, specifically, economic instability and social anxiety.

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These environments where respectability is both desperately craved and perpetually precarious,

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what develops in some of these women is an extraordinarily sophisticated capacity

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for social performance.

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A finely tuned radar for what other people need to see, combined with an equally

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fine-tuned ability to provide it.

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But here's the thing, that is not manipulation in the way that we mean when we say that word.

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Manipulation is more cold, calculating, deliberate.

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It's something more adaptive than that that goes on with this type of situation.

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Something that begins as survival, as a way of navigating a world where you

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cannot afford to be seen as what you actually are.

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Because what you actually are is not going to be considered enough.

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And the danger is in what happens when that adaptive capacity never stops,

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when the performance becomes the only mode,

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or when the gap between who you appear to be and who you actually are becomes so wide,

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so habitual, so total.

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That you lose track of which side of, well, your life is even real.

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And then you may stop caring.

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And this is not necessarily a diagnosis of Marie.

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Forensic psychologists have applied various frameworks to her case over the

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years, and we'll get into those.

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But it is a context, a starting point, if you will.

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It's a way of understanding how a girl in Anniston, Alabama,

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in the 1950s, began building the architecture of a self that was at its foundation

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about escape, about becoming.

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About the gap between what was and what she decided would be.

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So in 1951, when she was 18 years old, when her father had passed, Marie married Frank.

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Frank was a local man, stable, dependable, the kind of man who showed up for

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work and family in the routines of ordinary life.

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But he didn't bring drama or complaint. He worked hard.

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He was as devoted to Marie as she was to him.

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By all accounts, he loved her genuinely and completely, in the uncomplicated

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way of a man who doesn't have cause to look past the surface of the person he

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married, because the surface is everything he could want. They built a life together in Anniston.

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They had two children, a son, Michael, and a daughter, Carol.

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Frank worked at a railroad company and later at a pipe foundry.

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Marie stayed at home for that time. But eventually she started to work various jobs.

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At a jeweler's, in an office, really anywhere she found that she could get a

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good job and feel well-liked.

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And the thing is, she was. She was very well-liked, very presentable.

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The kind of woman neighbors described as friendly, capable, always willing to

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lend a hand. She was active in her community.

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She attended church. She dressed well.

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Perhaps a little too well for the income they had. But nobody made too much of it.

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Some women just have that quality, that ability to make everything look a little more than it was.

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What nobody knew, and what nobody could have known, because the surface held

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so perfectly, was that inside the marriage, things were just not what they appeared to be.

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Marie was not content. She was not in the way the word actually means happy.

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She wanted more than Frank could actually give her.

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More money, more status, more of the life she had decided at 18 that she deserved.

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And Frank, steady, devoted, uncomplaining Frank, he was the man she married

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to get out of that old, hard life.

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But now, Frank was standing between her and this next life she feels like she deserves.

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And this is where the story starts to turn. But it's slow and quiet.

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Isn't that the way the worst things usually go? See, in this case,

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there is a pattern in Marie's early adulthood that forensic psychologists found significant.

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And I wanted to name it before we go any further.

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It's the pattern of financial deception. Before any poison, before any dramatic

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crime, there was a long and consistent history of Marie writing bad checks, borrowing money.

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She never intended on paying that money. She would manipulate accounts,

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run up debts, and then manage the fallout with the same charm and plausibility

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that she managed basically everything else. This was not incidental.

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Financial deception of this kind, sustained, skilled,

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socially invisible, is one of the clearest behavioral signals of a person for

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whom other people's reality, other people's losses, simply does not register as real.

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The harm is abstract. The need is immediate.

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And the performance of innocence when the bill comes, that's practiced and as

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convincing as every other performance.

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Psychologists sometimes use

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the term primary psychopathy to describe this particular configuration.

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Not the cartoon villain variety of psychopathy and And not the dramatic,

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visibly monstrous kind, but the high-functioning, socially fluent,

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deeply charming kind that operates entirely beneath the threshold of detection.

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And this is for years, potentially decades, because it wears the costume of

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warmth so completely that nobody even thinks to look underneath.

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Whether that clinical label fits Marie, that's a question I can't fully answer.

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But the behavioral pattern, the deception, the performance, the profound and

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consistent inability to register other people's harms as something that ought

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to constrain her behavior, basically, that pattern is there. And it's documented.

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And it started early. And it didn't stop.

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And in 1975, Frank got sick. It started gradually.

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Nausea, fatigue, a general deterioration that nobody could quite pin down.

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He was taken to the hospital. He was given various treatments.

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And through all of it, Marie was there. The devoted wife.

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The tireless caregiver. She stayed at his bedside. She spoke to doctors.

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She was by every observable measure distraught.

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People in the community rallied around her. They rallied around the family.

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Because this was such a tragedy.

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He was such a good man and she was such a devoted wife.

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But Frank didn't survive this illness. He died on May 25th, 1975.

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He was 45 years old. The cause of death was listed as infectious hepatitis.

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He was buried and Marie collected on, did you guess it? Life insurance.

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And the town of Aniston grieved alongside her.

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Because that's what you do in a small town when a good man dies young.

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And his beautiful wife, who is left with two children and a broken heart.

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Nobody tested for arsenic, because why would they?

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Nobody suspected anything. The performance had been perfect.

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But here's where Marie's story becomes something that sits in a category of its own.

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Because murdering your husband, as horrible as that is, is in the grim taxomi of these crimes.

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Something that, unfortunately, happens. and something that has a psychological logic.

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Even if it's twisted, what happened next does not have the same logic.

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What happens next is something that requires a level of coldness,

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a depth of detachment from reality of another human being suffering.

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And this one is difficult to genuinely sit with. Three years after Frank's death,

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Marie's daughter, Carol, got sick.

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Carol was 19, and she began experiencing the same symptoms that her father had—nausea, weakness.

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A progressive, debilitating deterioration that doctors couldn't complain.

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She was hospitalized. And then she got worse. But then she got better.

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And then she got worse again.

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And through all of it, through every hospital visit, every frightened phone

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call, every desperate attempt to understand what was happening to this young

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woman, guess who was there?

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At her side, caring for her, administering her medications, bringing her food,

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being by every visible measure, the most devoted mother ever.

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Kaitlyn:
But Marie was poisoning Carol, slowly, methodically, with arsenic.

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And she had been doing that for months.

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The question of why, why after Frank, why would she turn on her own child?

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That's a question with no real satisfying answer. Because Carol was not a threat to Marie.

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Carol was not even a source of financial gain, not in a significant sense.

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What Carol was, perhaps, was a witness,

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a person whose continued existence in Marie's life was a tie to the life that

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Kaitlyn:
she was trying to escape,

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a reminder of who Marie used to be and an obligation she never signed up for

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and had never in any meaningful way actually accepted.

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Or perhaps the why is simpler and more terrible than that.

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Perhaps Carol got sick because Marie could make her sick, and making people

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sick was something Marie had discovered she was capable of, and that capacity

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itself had become, in some dark chamber of her psychology, its own justification.

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That one is the most frightening possibility, but I don't think we can rule out either.

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It was Carol who inadvertently broke this case open, not by reporting her mother.

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Carol, who would spend years defending Marie after everything, Thank you.

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Kaitlyn:
By being sick enough, and for long enough, and in ways specific enough,

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that a doctor finally ran the right test.

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Arsenic was found in Carol's blood. And suddenly, Frank Hilly's death looked very different.

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In 1979, police began investigating Marie Hilly.

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A warrant was issued. Frank's body was exhumed, and arsenic was found there

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too, in concentrations consistent with poisoning.

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So Marie was arrested and charged. The town...

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Kaitlyn:
Which had rallied around her for years, began to reckon with the possibility

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that the woman that they thought they knew, the devoted wife,

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the grieving widow, the attentive mother, she was never real.

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And then while out on bail in 1979, Marie disappeared.

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Kaitlyn:
She didn't just run. She didn't just flee to another state and hide under her own name.

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She created an entirely new person.

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She became Robbie Hannon, a Texas native, a widow, a woman with a past just

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plausible enough and just vague enough that nobody asked too many questions.

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She moved to New Hampshire. She got a job. She made friends.

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She met a man named John Homan, who fell in love with her completely and obviously

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had no idea who she actually was because she and John married in 1981.

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Kaitlyn:
And then because the story of Marie Hilly cannot stay still for long.

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Kaitlyn:
Robbie Hannon got sick. Remember, Robbie is Marie.

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Terribly sick. A mysterious, progressive illness that the doctors couldn't pin down.

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She deteriorated. She told John she was dying.

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And then she, well, okay, she allegedly died. At least she appeared to,

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of course. I said allegedly.

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And then she disappeared from the hospital. And from John's life.

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Robbie basically ceased to exist at this point.

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Oh, but don't worry. she reappeared immediately as Robbie's twin sister,

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Terry Martin, who arrived in John Homan's life to comfort him in his grief,

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and who John, still devastated.

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Welcomed in. Because why wouldn't he?

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She was his dead wife's sister.

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She was the only link he had left to the woman that he loved.

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He didn't know they were the same person.

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And he didn't know this because Marie Hilly, who had spent her entire life becoming

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Kaitlyn:
whoever the moment required, had done it again, had built herself from the ground

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up and stepped into this new role without breaking stride.

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I need to pause here because this is the part of the story that I think reveals

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Kaitlyn:
the most about the psychology of Marie.

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More even than the poison, more than even the murder, more than the financial

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Kaitlyn:
crimes and the bad checks and the long history of deception.

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It's the ease of it. And that is what forensic psychologists find most significant

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Kaitlyn:
about this specific chapter.

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Not that she ran because people facing murder charges, they do run.

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And not even that she changed her name because people in desperate circumstances

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do try to reinvent themselves.

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But the totality of the reinvention, the completeness of it,

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Kaitlyn:
the ability to build not just a new name, but a new history,

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a new personality, a new emotional life, and to sustain it convincingly,

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consistently for years.

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It speaks to the psychological architecture that is genuinely unusual.

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Kaitlyn:
There are two ways to think about what Marie was doing when she became Robbie and then Terry.

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Kaitlyn:
The first is that it was purely instrumental, a means of escape,

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Kaitlyn:
a practical solution to a practical problem.

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The second, and I think the more psychologically interesting possibility,

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is that it wasn't just escape.

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Kaitlyn:
It was relief that the person who had spent her entire life performing,

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performing warmth, performing devotion,

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Kaitlyn:
performing grief, performing the woman that the situation required found in

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Kaitlyn:
the act of becoming someone else entirely something that felt almost like freedom.

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Not because Robbie Hannon was more real than Marie, but,

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Kaitlyn:
but because neither of them were actually real.

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Kaitlyn:
And in the new identity, and in the new clean slate of an invented life,

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the performance had no history,

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no weight, no debt of all things that she had done that she could never as herself escape.

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She was not running from the law.

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Or not only that, she was running from herself.

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The problem is, you can't. which is why her double life collapsed in 1983.

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Kaitlyn:
Someone who knew Marie saw Terry and recognized her. The tips came in.

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The FBI had been searching for Marie for four years, and so they closed in,

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and she was arrested in Vermont in January of 1983.

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Kaitlyn:
John, who had been living with his dead wife's supposed twin sister,

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learned the truth in the most devastating way possible.

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The woman that he had grieved, The woman he married, the woman he had accepted

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Kaitlyn:
comfort from in the guise of her own sister, all the same person.

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Kaitlyn:
All Marie, and she was extradited to Alabama to face trial. And here,

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Kaitlyn:
again, the performance continued.

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Kaitlyn:
Marie in the courtroom was composed, dignified, and utterly convincing in her protestations.

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Kaitlyn:
She maintained her innocence, or at least the innocence of her intentions.

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Kaitlyn:
Her defense team worked with whatever they kind of had.

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Kaitlyn:
The jury worked with the evidence, and in 1983, Marie was convicted of murder

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Kaitlyn:
of Frank and the attempted murder of Carol.

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Kaitlyn:
And she was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder, plus 20 additional

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Kaitlyn:
years for the attempted murder of her daughter.

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Kaitlyn:
Carol, for her part, whose body had been filled with arsenic by her mother,

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Kaitlyn:
who had survived by the narrowest margin and had been left with long-lasting health consequences.

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Kaitlyn:
Continued for years to struggle with believing what evidence required her to

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Kaitlyn:
believe because she loved her mother and she had loved her her whole life and

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Kaitlyn:
the love did not switch off because the truth came out.

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Kaitlyn:
Honestly, it rarely does. And that in its own quiet way is the saddest details in this entire case.

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Kaitlyn:
What Marie did to Carol was not just physical.

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Kaitlyn:
The psychological damage of being poisoned by the person who was supposed to

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Kaitlyn:
protect you, the complete inversion of the most fundamental trust a human can

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Kaitlyn:
have That damage does not resolve with the conviction and a life sentence.

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Kaitlyn:
Marie served time at a prison for women in Alabama, and she was a model prisoner by all accounts.

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Kaitlyn:
Cooperative, well-behaved, charming, even to the people around her,

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Kaitlyn:
because the performance obviously continued, as it always did.

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Kaitlyn:
And in 1987, after four years in prison, she was granted a weekend furlough,

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Kaitlyn:
a supervised release intended for prisoners who were demonstrating rehabilitation.

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Kaitlyn:
It was February. She walked away from her appointed location and disappeared into the cold.

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Kaitlyn:
Three days later, she was found outside a house in Anniston, Alabama.

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Kaitlyn:
The town where everything had begun. She was hypothermic, disoriented, and dying.

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Kaitlyn:
She was taken to the hospital, but she did not recover.

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Kaitlyn:
And on February 26, 1987, Marie died of exposure.

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Kaitlyn:
She was 53 years old. Nobody knows with certainty what she was doing in those

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Kaitlyn:
three days, whether she was trying to run again.

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Kaitlyn:
Trying to reach someone, or trying to find something, whether there was a plan,

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Kaitlyn:
or whether it had finally fallen apart in a way that not even she could manage.

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Kaitlyn:
Either way, she was now gone.

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Kaitlyn:
When it comes to Marie, we know that she grew up in a world that told her,

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Kaitlyn:
clearly and consistently, that who she was was not quite enough.

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Kaitlyn:
That the gap between her circumstances and her aspirations was her problem to solve.

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Kaitlyn:
And that the tools available to a young woman in Anniston, Alabama in the 1950s

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Kaitlyn:
for solving that problem were limited.

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Kaitlyn:
Charm, beauty, performance, the ability to read a room and give it exactly what it wanted.

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Kaitlyn:
She picked up those tools at a very young age and she used them brightly for the rest of her life.

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Kaitlyn:
But the psychological tragedy here is that these tools applied without any of

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Kaitlyn:
the empathy or conscience that normally acts as a brake on human behavior led

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Kaitlyn:
inevitably where they led.

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Kaitlyn:
Because a person who has learned to give other people what they need to see

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Kaitlyn:
without any interior experience of what those other people actually feel will

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Kaitlyn:
eventually run out of reasons not to hurt them.

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Kaitlyn:
Forensic psychologists who have studied Marie's case have most commonly applied

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Kaitlyn:
the framework of antisocial personality disorder with features consistent with

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Kaitlyn:
what some clinicians describe as psychopathy.

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Kaitlyn:
The defining characteristics of a persistent pattern of deception and manipulation.

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Kaitlyn:
A striking absence of remorse, a capacity for performing emotions that she did

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Kaitlyn:
not appear to actually experience, and a self-concept so grandiose and protected from reality...

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Kaitlyn:
That even a murder conviction and a life sentence did not fundamentally alter

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Kaitlyn:
her belief in her own ability to manage or to escape or to become whatever was

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Kaitlyn:
required in that moment.

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Kaitlyn:
And the thing that makes this case different from a simple profile of a psychopathic

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Kaitlyn:
killer is that Marie was not born

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Kaitlyn:
into a circumstance that gave her some reason not to have any empathy.

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Kaitlyn:
She was not raised in isolation. She had a family and a community and relationships

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Kaitlyn:
that appeared from the outside to have warmth and contentment.

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Kaitlyn:
She loved her son, Michael, by most accounts, in whatever way she was capable of love.

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Kaitlyn:
And she was not a person who felt nothing about anyone.

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Kaitlyn:
She was something more complicated and in some ways more frightening.

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Kaitlyn:
A person who felt other people are roughly what other resources are.

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Kaitlyn:
They were useful or they were not. They were assets or they were obstacles.

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Kaitlyn:
And when they became obstacles, she removed them quietly and patiently with

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Kaitlyn:
a glass of water and a slow-acting poison and a look on her face that nobody,

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Kaitlyn:
not one person, ever thought to question.

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Kaitlyn:
So was it mental illness? Or was it a choice?

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Kaitlyn:
Or was it something that was made over time by a particular set of circumstances

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Kaitlyn:
pressing on a particular set of vulnerabilities?

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Kaitlyn:
Or was it always there waiting like arsenic in a glass of water,

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Kaitlyn:
invisible, but already inside of her the whole time?

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Kaitlyn:
This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions,

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Kaitlyn:
and I'm Kaitlyn, reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light.

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Kaitlyn:
Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought

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Kaitlyn:
we knew about the criminal mind.