Audrey Marie Hilley

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Audrey Marie Hilley (née Frazier; June 4, 1933 – February 26, 1987) was an American murderer. Her life and killing spree are the subjects of the 1991 telefilm Wife, Mother, Murderer.

Early life and first crimes[]

Audrey Marie Frazier was born on June 4, 1933, in the Blue Mountain area of Anniston, Alabama, to Lucille (née Meads) and Huey Frazier. She married Frank Hilley on May 8, 1951; they had two children, Mike and Carol. Despite Hilley's well-paying job and Frazier's secretarial employment, the couple had little money set aside in savings due to Frazier's excessive spending habits, leading to friction in the marriage. Unbeknownst to Hilley, his wife frequently engaged in sex with her bosses in exchange for money. Hilley began suffering from a mysterious illness, as did his son Mike, although Mike's symptoms – which his doctors attributed to stomach flu – abruptly stopped when he moved away to attend seminary.

In 1975, after returning home early due to his illness, Hilley walked in to find Frazier in bed with her boss. Hilley turned to Mike, then an ordained minister living in Atlanta, for advice. In May 1975, a short time after a visit from Mike, Hilley visited his doctor complaining of nausea and tenderness in his abdomen, being diagnosed with a viral stomach ache. The condition persisted and he was admitted to a hospital, where tests indicated a malfunction of the liver and doctors diagnosed infectious hepatitis. He died early in the morning of May 25.

Hilley's autopsy, performed with his wife's permission, revealed swelling of the kidneys and lungs, bilateral pneumonia, and inflammation of the stomach. Because the symptoms closely resembled those of hepatitis, that was listed as Hilley's cause of death and no further tests were conducted. Hilley had maintained a moderate life insurance policy, secretly taken out by Frazier at the time of his initial illness, that she redeemed for $31,140.

Three years later, Frazier took out a $25,000 life insurance policy on her daughter, Carol; a $25,000 accidental death rider took effect in August 1978. Within a few months, Carol began experiencing trouble with nausea and was admitted to the emergency room several times. A year after filing the insurance policy on her daughter, Frazier gave Carol an injection that she claimed would alleviate the nausea. However, the symptoms only worsened, with Carol enduring numbness in her extremities. After medical tests found no disease, Carol's physician, fearing the symptoms were psychosomatic, had her undergo psychiatric testing at Birmingham's Carraway Methodist Hospital. There, Carol secretly received two more injections from her mother, who warned her not to tell others about the shots.

A month after Carol was admitted to the hospital, her physician said she was suffering from malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies, adding that he suspected heavy metal poisoning was to blame for the symptoms. Panicking, Frazier had Carol discharged from the hospital that afternoon. The following day, Carol was admitted to the University of Alabama Hospital. Coincidentally, Frazier was arrested for passing bad checks — they were written to the insurance company that insured Carol's life, causing that policy to lapse. University physicians concentrated their investigation on the possibility of heavy metal poisoning, noting that Carol's hands and feet were numb, she had nerve palsy causing foot drop, and she had lost most of her deep tendon reflexes.

Arrest[]

Physicians noticed Aldrich-Mees' lines on Carol's nails. Forensic tests on samples of her hair were conducted by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences on October 3, 1979, revealing arsenic levels ranging from over 100 times the normal level close to the scalp to zero times the normal level at the end of the hair shaft. This indicated that Carol had been given increasingly larger doses of arsenic over a period of four to eight months. That same day, Frank Hilley's body was exhumed and, upon examination, showed between 10 times and 100 times the normal level of arsenic. It was concluded that both Hilley and Carol had suffered from chronic arsenic poisoning, with Hilley's poisoning being fatal.

Frazier was still incarcerated on her bad check charges when she was arrested on October 9 for the attempted murder of her daughter. The Anniston police found a vial in her purse, tests of which revealed the presence of arsenic. Two weeks later, Frank Hilley's sister found a jar of rat poison which contained 1.4–1.5% arsenic. On November 9, Frazier was released on bail, after which she registered at a local motel under an assumed name and disappeared. While a note was left behind indicating that she "might have been kidnapped," Frazier was listed as a fugitive.

Escape[]

On November 19, a burglary occurred at the home of Frazier's aunt. The occupant's car had been stolen, as well as some clothes and an overnight bag. Investigators found a note in the house reading, "Do not call police. We will burn you out if you do. We found what we wanted and will not bother you again."

On January 11, 1980, she was indicted in absentia for her husband's murder. Subsequently, investigators found that both her mother and her mother-in-law, Carrie Hilley, had significant, but not fatal, traces of arsenic in their systems when they died. The remains of Sonya Marcelle Gibson, an eleven-year-old friend of Carol Hilley's who had died of indeterminate causes in 1974, were also exhumed and examined,^[1] but were found to contain only a "normal" amount of arsenic. Gibson was one of the many neighborhood children who had fallen ill after drinking beverages that they had been given during visits to the Hilley household. Two police officers who had been dispatched to look into a disturbance that Hilley had called 911 about also reported coming down with nausea and stomach cramps after drinking coffee that Hilley had offered them.^[2]

Although police and the FBI launched a massive manhunt, Frazier remained a fugitive for a little more than three years.

New names, new lives[]

She first travelled to Florida, where she met a man named John Greenleaf Homan III. She was using the name Robbi Hannon. They lived together for more than a year before she married Homan on May 29, 1981, and took his last name. The couple moved to New Hampshire. She frequently talked about her imaginary twin sister, "Teri", who supposedly lived in Texas.

Late in the summer of 1982, she left New Hampshire, telling her husband that she needed to attend to family business and to see some doctors about an illness. During this time she travelled to Texas and Florida, using the alias Teri Martin.

During the trip, using the alias Teri Martin, she called John Homan and informed him that Robbi Homan had died in Texas but there was no need for him to come to Texas because the body had been donated to medical science. After getting to know "Teri" over the phone, Homan expressed interest in meeting her. She agreed, saying he needed to put "Robbi's" death behind them.

On November 1983, after changing her hair color and losing weight, she returned to New Hampshire and met John Homan, posing as Teri Martin, his “deceased” wife's sister.

An obituary for Robbi Homan appeared in a New Hampshire newspaper, but aroused suspicion when police were unable to verify any of the information it contained. John Homan's coworkers also had suspicions about his new "sister-in-law", and were concerned defalcation may have been at play. A New Hampshire state police detective surmised that the woman living as Teri Martin was, in fact, Robbi Homan and had staged her death. The concerned coworkers and Homan's boss also discovered that Medical Research Institute of Texas, where "Robbi's" body was handed over for study, was nonexistent, as was the church that eulogized her death. While Homan's workplace was audited and no embezzlement found, authorities still believed that "Teri Martin" was possibly a fugitive bank robber named Carol Manning (later disproven) or wanted on other outstanding charges. In the meantime, "Teri" had taken a secretarial job in nearby Brattleboro, Vermont, and was arrested. While being interrogated by Vermont state troopers, she confessed that she was wanted in Alabama on bad check charges and her true name was Audrey Hilley. Contact with Alabama state police confirmed this, and she was also wanted for far more serious charges. She was promptly extradited to Alabama to stand trial.

She was quickly convicted and sentenced to life in prison for her husband's murder and 20 years for attempting to kill her daughter.

Incarceration and death[]

Audrey Marie Hilley Homan began serving her sentence in 1983 at Tutweiler Womens' Institute, a medium-security prison. Her clerical career had gotten her often assigned to doing paperwork, and she was considered a quiet, model prisoner. This good behavior earned her several one-day passes from the prison, from all of which she returned on schedule.

In February 1987 she was given a three-day pass to visit her husband, John Homan, who had moved to Anniston to be near his wife. They spent a day at an Anniston motel and when Homan left for a few hours, she disappeared, leaving behind a note for Homan asking his forgiveness. Homan promptly alerted police. Her escape prompted an inquiry into Alabama's furlough policy.

This time, she was not missing for long. Four days after she vanished from the motel, she had apparently been crawling around in the woods, her body was drenched by four days of frequent rain and it was also feeling numb after being exposed to temperatures which were dropping to the low 30s. She stumbled on the back porch of a house owned by an Anniston woman, who had known her from elementary school. It was likely she had sought help from this schoolfriend but the woman failed to recognize her after not seeing her in years and in her haggard state, and alerted police believing it to be a transient woman in need of immediate help. Anniston police in turn summoned paramedics.

The EMTs who examined Hilley determined she had hypothermia and took her to a nearby hospital for treatment. While she was being transported to the hospital, she suffered a heart attack and died.

See also[]

• Blanche Taylor Moore
• Stacey Castor
• Velma Barfield
• Judy Buenoano
• List of serial killers in the United States

References[]

Further reading[]

• "Woman Found Guilty in Family Killing, Poisoning". The Washington Post. June 9, 1983.
• "Review Of Inmate Release Policies After Prisoner Escapes". Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. February 24, 1987.
• Kulish, Kyle (1987-04-26). "Death of 'Black Widow' as mysterious as her life". UPI. Retrieved 2016-12-06.
• "Last Chapter Of Black Widow Saga: Muddy, Cold, Dying Near Birthplace," The Associated Press, February 27, 1987
• Buckner, Brett (2015-10-16). "From the Alabama true crime files: The Black Widow, the Torso Slayer and the Giggling Granny". The Anniston Star. Retrieved 2016-12-06.
• "'Black Widow' spins a new web," United Press International, February 26, 1987
• Nesbitt, Jim (1987-03-09). "Black Widow's Quest For Good Life Ends In A Lonely Death". Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved 2016-12-06.
• "Husband-Killer Dies of Exposure After Escape : 'Black Widow' Caught in Her Own Web". Los Angeles Times. Associated Press. 1987-02-27. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved 2016-12-06.
• Gribben, Mark (December 16, 2012). "The Great Escape Artist". The Malefactor's Register.
• McDonald, R. Robin (1986). Black widow: The True Story of the Hilley Poisonings. Far Hills, N.J.: New Horizon Press. ISBN 9780882820200.
• Ginsburg, Philip E. (1987). Poisoned blood: A True Story of Murder, Passion, and an Astonishing Hoax. New York: Scribner. ISBN 9780684186696.
• MacLeod, Marlee. "Marie Hilley: Inscrutable Black Widow". Crime Library. Court TV. Archived from the original on August 30, 2006.