Trama

Some women like company when they take a life. Teenage lovers chose each other over the life of a loving grandmother; a cold-hearted aunt uses her nephew to become a wealthy widow; and a friendship turns fatal for one unsuspecting husband.

Two rural Missouri women were found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder for hire as a tandem, despite their partnership falling apart and each woman turning on the other in court. Elain Kay Young, 57, and Katherine A. Mock, 58, face life in prison for the crime, which resulted in one man's death.

When Detroit, Michigan, high-school students Larketa Collier and Sharon Patterson fall in love, Larketa's conservative mother, Sandra, and grandmother, Bertha Atkins, become furious, and eventually decide to bar Sharon from the house when she disrespects them too many times. On September 17, 2003, the desperate teens viciously beat Bertha to death with a claw hammer and torch the house to destroy her body. Both girls are sentenced to life in prison without parole, with Larketa getting an additional four to twenty years for arson and conspiracy. On appeal, Sharon is resentenced to forty to sixty years. English rose Christina Button has expensive tastes and a husband, George, who caters to her every desire, even as her spendthrift ways plunge the couple into debt. Far from being grateful, Christina, on March 3, 2003, enlists her twenty-year-old nephew, Simon Tannahill, to beat George to death with a blunt object so she can collect on his life insurance and repay her debts. Simon is sentenced to life, but has been eligible for parole since 2016, while Christina is sentenced to fourteen years to life and is released in 2019. In Novinger, Missouri, Elain Kay Young is on her fourth marriage with Iraq war veteran Melvin Griesbaum. When Melvin refuses to co-sign on a loan to save her farm, Elain, lying that Melvin is physically abusing her, manipulates close friend Katherine Mock into helping her kill Melvin on March 23, 2006, so she can collect on his $600,000 life insurance policy. She gets away with her crimes for two years before a farmhand comes forward with the revelation that Elain once offered him $10,000 to kill Melvin instead in exchange for her killing his wife. Elain and Katherine are serving two concurrent life sentences without parole, and Elain is also suspected in the suspicious death of her own mother several years earlier.—SoSmooth1982