Poisoned Blood: A True Story of Murder, Passion, and an Astonishing Hoax
<b><i>New York Times </i></b><b>Bestseller: The “astonishing” true story of the notorious “black widow” who preyed on her husband and daughter and faked her own death (<i>The Washington Post Book World</i>).</b><br /><br /> Pretty, smart, and pampered, Audrey Marie Hilley grew up in a small Alabama town believing she was entitled to the best of everything. But marriage to her high school sweetheart, a cushy secretarial job, and motherhood were not enough to satisfy Marie, and she soon began to act out in troubling ways. Only when her husband, Frank, became sick with a mysterious illness, did it seem that she was ready to put someone else’s needs ahead of her own. The truth was far more disturbing.<br />  <br /> Four years after Frank died, Marie’s daughter, Carol, began to experience debilitating stomach pains. The young woman was near death when the horrifying reality finally emerged: Marie had poisoned her husband with arsenic and was attempting to do the same to her daughter. It was the first in a series of shocking twists that exposed Marie Hilley as a cold-blooded chameleon capable of the most sinister of crimes. From Alabama to Florida to New Hampshire, her trail of death and deceit included multiple identities, a second marriage, a false kidnapping, a fake death, several dramatic escapes, and a final act of desperation that brought the whole sordid saga to an astonishing end.<br />  <br /> A mesmerizing portrait of an American murderess with “a genius for deception,” <i>Poisoned Blood </i>is “one of the most riveting true-crime stories in memory” (<i>Publishers Weekly</i>).