Snapped: Women Who Murder - Marie Hilley
Episode Date: October 3, 2021After a bizarre account of suspected false identity is reported, authorities uncover a long history of an evasive criminal and launch a nationwide hunt to catch a killer who uses Southern cha...rm as a weapon of deception.Season 27, Episode 8Originally aired: May 31, 2020Watch full episodes of Snapped for FREE on the Oxygen app: https://oxygentv.app.link/WsLCJWqmIebSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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She was a prim and proper Southern bell, always looking to better her life.
She knew she should be tending church on Sunday and showing her Southern braces.
She was a very well-respected Southern lady and tried in every way she could to have that kind of reputation. But when a mysterious illness
befalls a member of the family,
questions are raised about her true demeanor.
I couldn't feel anything from above the knee down.
My ankles were like jello.
It was very painful.
There's something strange going on here.
When the truth is revealed,
it will expose one of the most mind-boggling cases
to ever emerge from the deep south.
This can't be a true case.
People just cannot be that manipulative
and vicious.
It's just beyond belief.
This was a different kind of dangerous.
We all just hope we don't meet somebody like that
in our lives.
Twins, mistaken identity, death.
Moving from one part of country to the other
gets to become a local legend.
I've been in law enforcement 30 years,
but I've never had a case that more closely
resembled the portrayal of evil in this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case. In this case.
In this case. In this case.
In this case. In this case.
In this case.
In this case.
In this case. In this case. In this.
January 12, 19 1983,
January 12, 1983, Brattle Burrow Vermont. January It's a cold Monday afternoon when FBI agent David Steele receives a call from the Vermont
State Police about a potential false identity case.
Normally, we don't work those types of cases unless we're requested by the local police department,
but I received a call from Detective Michael Clare, which is Vermont State Police.
And Michael's telling me that they've had some
interesting developments on a woman,
identifying herself as Terry Martin.
Investigators explain that they first learned
of Terry Martin one week ago after receiving a call
from her co-workers.
Terry said to co-workers and friends that
she was the identical twin sister
of an individual by the name of Robbie Holman,
who had died.
Terry came up to console her brother-in-law
and ended up moving in with her brother-in-law
and went to work where her dead sister had worked.
And this was the story that the co-workers weren't buying. and went to work where her dead sister had worked.
And this was the story that the co-workers weren't buying.
There's been a lot of questions raised as to who Terry Martin was
because the people that she worked with
and even some of the town folks,
as soon as they see her, they're going,
that's the same lady. We did a lot of searching of records,
and we were left scratching our heads with,
who could she be and just what is going on?
They just felt, let's just go to the source.
Anxious to learn about the woman's true identity,
law enforcement's stakeout Terry's place of employment,
and confront her in the
parking lot.
We said, we need to talk to you because you're not who you say you are, and we're going
to find out who you are right now.
She looked to the ground and she said, no, you're right.
And a very calm voice, which we weren't anticipating at all.
She says, look, take me to the police department,
and I'll tell you who I am.
Back at the police station, Terry makes good on her promise.
She identified herself as Audrey Marie Hilly.
And she said that she was from the eastern Alabama.
She admitted that she had been masquerading her identity
because she was wanted in the state of Alabama.
We asked what do you wanted for,
and she said, well, some bad check charges.
But detectives have no idea that the demure woman before them
has been on the run for four years,
hiding from a crime far more sinister than bad checks.
Nobody has the faintest idea what's going on.
Born into the Great Depression,
Blue Mountain Alabama native Audrey Marie Frazier
always wanted more.
Her family didn't have a lot of money, but what they did have, they were willing to spend on her.
And so she became somewhat spoiled and expected always to get what she wanted.
Marie was aspirational, and she always wanted to achieve a greater social status than she had.
to achieve a greater social status than she had. All of Marie's qualities added up to a sometimes called
Southern Charm.
She was personable and she dressed well.
She smiled and was friendly and very popular.
One young man was particularly captivated
by Marie's beauty and grace.
Marie met Frank Hilly in high school.
He was a popular guy and got along with people.
And he seemed solid.
And he appealed to Marie and they started going out.
The couple married in 1951 and moved to Aniston, Alabama.
Then in November of 1952,
they welcomed their first child, Michael.
Though she was a mother,
Marie didn't let her dreams take a back seat.
She worked for some of the most powerful people
in that community, certainly the more wealthy ones,
and she became accepted amongst those people,
and that suited her well.
The Hilly family continued to move up
Aniston's social ladder.
And on January 14th, 1960,
Marie and Frank welcomed their second child.
They had a daughter named Carol,
and they moved into a nice house in another neighborhood in Aniston.
Those were good days. My dad, he loved me, I know that because he'd tape me. They'd let me go in
at the Elks Club through the back door and he'd sit me up on the bar still and get me the coke
and potato chips and tell everybody about what kind of person I was.
But as Carol grew older,
she and her mother didn't always see eye to eye.
I couldn't please her no matter what I did.
She didn't like what I wore, she didn't like how I thought she didn't like who I hung out with.
Marie had a philosophy of life,
in that you try to do the best you can,
get all the money, you can,
gain all the social status you can,
and you address to the nines.
Caroll didn't buy into that.
But Marie's focus shifted in the mid-1970s.
Frank was struck by a mysterious illness
and unable to work.
Doctors couldn't diagnose what was wrong with him.
And the family watched Frank deteriorate.
His face, it was real ashy colored,
and his eyes were like really blood red.
They took him onto the hospital,
and within a day or two, he was dead.
My whole life went totally different
that they, everything changed that very minute.
They performed an autopsy.
All the signs were there for hepatitis.
And so, they buried him.
As the family grieved, Marie, Mike and Carol
attempted to move on with their lives.
Mike got married, became a minister, and moved to Florida.
Marie and Carol sold her dawn with the assistance of Frank's $31,000 life insurance policy.
This is $75, $31,000 would have bought you a very nice middle-class house in a good part of Aniston.
In those days and times, it was pretty difficult
to go through $30,000, but she did rather quickly.
Coming up, not all is what it seems
for the hilly's in Sweet Home, Alabama.
You find yourself weakening, unable to perform
the simplest of functions, any case worse, and worse, and worse.
She was a very, very sick and barely close to death.
And a serpentine tale is about to wind its way
from the fields of Alabama all the way up
to an interrogation room in Vermont.
My brother started realizing that maybe my dad,
maybe he didn't just die of natural causes. Despite losing her husband, Frank, in 1975, Marie Hilly, like any proud Southern woman, tried to keep up outward appearances.
She was a lady that liked to spend a lot of money. She was very meticulous in her dress, which southern ladies are.
Though her relationship with her daughter Carol had been rocky in the past,
by the spring of 1979, Marie was trying to break that cycle, starting by helping her get ready for prom. Carol was kind of a tomboy, and her mother was quite the opposite.
Always well-made up, well dressed, so when Carol decided to go to the prom,
it was her opportunity to help Carol really get herself fixed up.
But this night to remember took a turn for the worse.
I was in the start of feeling kind of nauseated,
and then I was okay.
A day or two later, the very next Sunday,
I started up again, hard and heavy.
She eventually was hospitalized,
and underwent a lot of medical tests to try to determine
what was causing the illness.
I was starting to feel the tingling to determine what was causing the illness.
I was starting to feel the tingling in my feet
later in the summer.
It was full blown.
I mean, I couldn't feel anything from above the knee down.
It was very painful.
She couldn't walk, and in fact, there was nerve damage
and damage for her muscles was quite severe.
She was very, very sick and barely close to death.
With Carol's situation dire, family members fear for her life.
And to some, like Carol's Aunt Frida,
it feels like deja vu.
Marie was taking special care of Frank
when he was not feeling well.
One of the things she did was volunteer
to give him injections.
And Frida had thought at the time,
that just doesn't seem quite right.
But it wasn't a major thing.
But now, with Carol going from hospital to hospital
and no conclusions about what was wrong with her,
Frida was reminded of that.
She contacted Mike Killick to find out
was Marie giving Carol any of those injections.
Mike immediately called Carol in the hospital
and asked her, Carol, his mama giving you shots
and her mother was standing there in the room.
And Carol said, no.
And he said, do you promise?
And I said, no.
And so the next thing I know, my brother called him
and told him that I was receiving shots.
When Mike reaches out to hospital staff,
doctors say they never authorized Marie to give Carol injections.
It started at the hospital.
She came in there and gave me an injection, telling me that it would help me to walk again.
And so I let her do it.
It's at this point, Mike Hilly informs the Aniston Police Department about the injections
and is shocked when detectives revealed they've been monitoring his mother for some time.
She had written a lot of bad checks.
It was much easier for people to pass bad checks in the 1970s.
It might take them a few days before the police caught up with them.
It was a sort of physical paper trail process.
On September 19, 1979, police confront Marie Hilli.
My mom was up in the room with me that they'd put me in.
And I saw some men out in the hallway.
And she came in and told me she was
I've got to go back to Anderson. There was a bad told me, she's got to go back to Hanson.
There was a bad check written, and I got to go straight in that out.
So they were arresting her, so what was really going on.
With Marie Detain, Carol is admitted to the University of Alabama Hospital in Birmingham,
and is assigned a new doctor to examine her.
The doctor, thinking that this was a situation
of unauthorized injection examiner,
he looked at her hair, the roots of her hair,
and then he looked at her fingernails.
He had noticed my fingernails had a little line across them.
You could feel it if you put your fingernail across it.
To the untrained eye, the lines appear harmless,
but it's a startling sign of something extremely serious.
He had the experience that nobody else had to recognize arsenic poisoning.
And he saw various tell-tale signs that led him to believe
this girl is being poisoned.
But was Marie really capable of poisoning her own daughter
to find out Drs. Order blood work on Carol
to test for the presence of arsenic?
It never went into my mind that she was using that
and that that was being harmful.
It found such significant levels in carols, blood,
that there was no question.
She had been poison.
There's no other way you could get that much arsenic
into your system.
Back in Aniston, police are now forced to grapple
with the possibility that Carol's own
mother may be responsible.
The idea that a good, southern woman would be trying to harm her children was unthinkable.
When a mother sit there and watch her daughter suffer, excruciating pain, being the one
who's causing the pain.
One question raised by Marie's son, Michael, proves to be particularly disturbing.
Mike sent a letter to the District Attorney's Office.
He laid out what had happened to his father.
My brother started realizing that maybe he didn't just
die of natural causes.
My mom was having an excuse for his sickness.
Of course, nobody paid any attention
because nobody really got anything at that point.
The coroner called me and said,
they think she may have poisoned her daughter and her husband.
And we're getting an order to dig up her husband.
Two weeks after Marisa rest, Frank Hilli's body is exhumed.
Through it all, Marie maintains her innocence.
When they asked Marie why she gave Carol an injection,
she was full of concern for her daughter.
She said she was so uncomfortable with the nausea
that I wanted to help her.
And so I gave her a shot with some anti-naudio medications.
Detectives aren't so sure, and instead,
believe the truth lies in Marie's desire
to maintain her social image.
She was outspending money that we didn't have.
She's always impeccably dressed.
So money apparently got spent pretty fast on lots of clothing.
With expensive taste and no money to back it up,
detectives believe Marie put a new plan into action.
She took out a $25,000 insurance policy on Carol.
Parents very rarely take out an insurance policy on their children.
We all expect our children to outlive us,
and the logic in taking out an insurance policy on a child
is just not there.
Though Marie was out of money, could she really be responsible
for poisoning her own family?
I asked my aunt, do you think Mom did this to me?
And she said yes I did.
And I knew that, not that answer in so many questions, but it still raised that many more.
Coming up, the people of Aniston fear there may have been more victims.
Police officers were getting tested.
I police some of the neighbors got so sick.
Where Marie was, the sickness followed.
And Marie makes a run for it.
That she was able to escape.
I couldn't believe that that that had happened.
I was like, oh my god, what is this crazy woman doing?
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Sam Bankman Free. You can talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends, talk to your friends In October of 1979, 46-year-old Southern mother Marie Hilli is behind bars for check fraud.
But after a diagnosis revealed the presence of arsenic in Marie's sick 19-year-old daughter
Carol, detectives have reason to believe this charismatic Alabama mother is guilty of a far more terrible crime.
I've been in law enforcement for 30 years, but I've never had a case that more closely resembled the
portrayal of evil in this case.
Police also suspect that Carol may not be Marie's first victim.
There was a strong suspicion she had murdered her husband.
On October 3rd, 1979, an autopsy is performed on the exhumed body of Marie's husband, Frank Hilly.
Frank had been dead for three or four years
by that point.
The body apparently was still pretty well preserved.
When the toxicology tests come back,
they confirm everyone's worst fears.
It determined there's no question he was killed
by arcing poison.
The hair, the fingernails, Frank's body was loaded with arsenic.
As investigators begin to build their case against Marie,
her sister-in-law, Frida, steps in once again.
Frida adcock, the sister of Frank,
was adamant that Marie killed him.
And she set out to prove it. She went looking for a woman who was a man who was a man of Frank was adamant that Marie killed him.
And she set out to prove it.
She went looking around Marie's house.
And in the cellar, in a box, she found a pill bottle.
She took it to the police, tested it,
they found there was a heart attack.
On October 9, 1979, Marie is formally charged for the attempted murder of her daughter, Carol Hilly.
Several months later, she is also indicted for poisoning her husband, Frank.
Arsenic poisoning is a terrible way to die.
Arsonic poisoning is a terrible way to die. You find yourself weakening, unable to perform the simplest of functions.
Your fingers become numb.
You can't feel your feet.
Difficult to walk.
And it gets worse and worse and worse.
Police suspect Marie may have gotten the arsenic
from a common household product, such as rat poison,
and administered it through injections,
as well as other methods.
During Carol's hospital stays,
Marie was feeding baby food to her.
And it was believed that there was portions of arsenic in the baby food to her. And it was believed that there was portions of arsenic
in the baby food.
Digging into their records, detectives
learned that even police were not immune to Marie's bizarre actions.
In the years following Frank Hilley's death in 1975, Marie had often
summoned officers to her home with claims that her life was in danger.
She loved attention and she would report that people were following her, that people
threatened her. She told me that was related to incidences with my dad, like gambling debts and things like that.
I didn't gamble like that.
But each time police investigated, they found no evidence of the threat's Marie claimed to have received.
They came to the conclusion, this woman is just making this stuff up. She'd lie to us.
She'd lie into us.
As police look back on their interactions with Marie, another troubling possibility emerges.
Did Marie go so far as to poison police officers in her home?
She was typical Southern hospitality.
They come in the house.
She offers them something to eat.
They had no reason not to accept her hospitality.
Now, the officers did not become suspicious.
Anything was wrong.
They just suddenly realized they were sick.
Little did they know that everything she gave them to eat or drink was laced with arsenic.
Everything she gave him to eat or drink was laced with arsenic.
There's a lot of sweet ladies, you know, but she just wasn't one of them.
While she waits in jail for her trial to begin, detectives continue to investigate other possible poison cases involving Marie.
We suspected then in a hindsight,
we really knew that she was indiscriminate
in regards to the people that she poisoned.
She poisoned relatives, neighbors, business associates.
You get enough people, and the reaction
is the same to visiting Marie, same types of stories from them.
So where Marie was, the sickness followed.
She poisoned people for pleasure, for profit.
She had a motive in most cases with her poisoning, but not always.
She was an enigma, and she was impossible to truly understand.
Marie remains in jail for two months,
as her attorneys attempt to secure her release
until the start of her trial.
She finally makes bail.
I think it was only about $14,000.
So her lawyers get her out of jail.
Now, her attorney, Wilford Lane,
didn't want anybody contacting her,
seeing her or having anything to do with her.
So he took her over to a home with Alabama,
and he put her up in a hotel there.
But on November 18, 1979, when her lawyer arrives at the hotel to visit with his client,
he makes an alarming discovery.
She was missing.
Her attorney finds this note.
Some want her to a kidnap note warning him that she has been taken away.
Don't try to follow her that kind of thing.
But as police compare the note with a sample
of Marie's own handwriting, a kidnapping looks less
and less likely.
That handwriting looks similar, and so everybody
figures she just run away, and she had left the note herself.
She didn't fool anybody with that.
With Marie on the run,
police begin a massive search.
In those days, the manhood consisted of calling the FBI,
putting her picture, description out
to all the FBI offices, all the police stations.
We had people looking for her in every state in the United States.
As the days turn into months,
there is a growing concern that Marie may never be seen again.
For police, it was very frustrating.
You could see it in their eyes.
You could hear it in their voices.
The system had let her get away.
And now, how would they go into find her?
Coming up, a case of false identity turns the investigation on its head.
We got this person claiming to be somebody that they're not.
All the stories this person told to her friends and coworkers didn't make a lot of sense.
And that just added to the suspicion as to what really is going on here.
I got to checking around and then began to think, wow, we've got something here, what is it?
It was one of those things where anyone that goes to that length, that pull off something like that,
that's just beyond belief. that length, that pull off something like that, that just, you know, I believe.
In the fall of 1979, all of Alabama is on high alert for an unlikely fugitive, 46-year-old Marie Hilly.
They had told me that she had gone to jail,
but she got bonded out.
She left and disappeared.
I mean, how crazy is that?
We had walked across every cotton field in Corn Patch,
major city, throughout the United States.
I've sent leads to Canada because at one time,
she had said she'd like to live in the mountains
in Canada.
We were truly covering all bases.
More than three years pass with no sign of Marie, then over a thousand miles away,
a seemingly unrelated event
is about to rock the investigation.
January 1983, police in Keene, New Hampshire
have just received a strange allegation.
The boss for a company in Brattle's Burrow,
contacts a person he knows at the Keene Police Department
and says, there's something strange going on here.
We got this person claiming to be somebody that they're not.
The police are told a woman named Robbie
Holman had begun working for the company in October of 1980.
Robbie claimed to be from Texas and married to a man
named John Holman.
Robbie smiled a lot.
She was talking to it with co-workers.
She seemed very like a gentle person.
But in the summer of 1982, Robbie told co-workers some alarming news.
She goes, I've got this rare blood disease,
and I've got to go to this particular doctor in Dallas,
who will treat me, and I must be treated,
or I won't live long.
And so I've got to go.
The manager says a few months later,
a woman named Terry Martin showed up at the company, claiming to be Robbie's twin sister.
She said Robbie passed away down in Texas.
The girls look at each other and say, no way.
That's Robbie Hanon.
I don't care what she says.
Police are unsure what to make of the strange story.
But when they combed through a copy of Robbie's obituary,
they noticed numerous discrepancies.
The obiturer said that she donated her body
to the Sacred Hat Hospital or something in Tyler, Texas.
So I got the check-in around and found
there's no sacred had.
One by one, I was able to discount every single claim
that was made within that obituary.
Why would anybody do what she's done here?
And I'm beginning to think she was.
Seems like this is someone that's trying to conceal her identity.
It seems like this is someone that's trying to conceal her identity.
Investigators quickly notify the FBI for assistance and bring Terry Martin in for questioning.
We took her to the police department and she says,
my name is Audrey Marie Hilley.
I'm from Aniston, Alabama, and I wanted for some bad checks.
The name didn't mean anything to us, so we attained the basic information,
data birth, of that type of information that we could use to run computer checks.
computer checks.
When agents steal runs Marie's information through the police database, he uncoorks his suspects frightening past.
The telepike machine just starts shaking and rumbling and the paper is rolling out.
And it tells them you've got a badly wanted fugitive.
She wanted for murder.
That was a surprise.
She didn't look like the murdering type.
It was a soft spoken, small, polite, Southern woman.
When detectives question Marie about the charges, she refuses to own up.
She was willing to talk about everything else,
the masquerading, et cetera, but she never came back
to the charge that she murdered Frank and attempted
to murder her daughter, Carol.
Police extradite Marie back to Aniston, Alabama
to face charges.
Police extradite Marie back to Aniston, Alabama to face charges.
Meanwhile, they turned to John Homan, the man who'd married Marie Hilly, believing she was really Robbie Hanon.
My concern at that point in time became John Homan.
How much did John Homan know?
John says he first met Robbie Hanon in February of 1980 1980 at a bar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
They developed a relationship.
She, however, was not crazy about Florida, and she had always had the idea that it would
be nice to be somewhere where they're at snow.
So they moved to New Hampshire.
They get a lovely little cottage in a place called Marlowe,
New Hampshire, and they're living happily.
But John tells police that after they married in May of 1981,
their happiness did not last long.
In the summer of 1982, Robbie said she'd have to go to Dallas
to stay with her twin sister and be treated for a rare blood disease.
Yeah, John's are easygoing. He says, okay.
So she travels to Dallas, Texas.
John tells police that several months later,
he received a phone call from his wife's twin sister, Terry Martin.
She tells John that she is sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
But Robbie has died.
She said, I'm leaving now.
It becomes to you.
That's what Robbie wanted me to do.
So in a couple of days, she shows up on John's doorstep.
She had changed her hair color and put her makeup and stuff on differently.
But her face was still the same.
She looks the world like Robbie Hannon,
because she is Robbie Hannon, who is really Marie Hilly.
So John looks at her and says, come on in.
So she comes in and she takes up residence as Terry Martin.
When police ask John if he's aware that Robbie and Terry are the same person, he's taken a back.
John says, no, it just can't be. He was not about to be convinced.
Eventually, he accepted it.
But then his strongest reaction was when we talked about
Marie being wanted for the murder of her husband, Frank,
and her daughter, Carol.
He felt that that just can't be true.
I know this woman.
He had to feel sorry for John Holman.
He was pretty well-duped.
But he stood by her all the way through.
Coming up, prosecutors attempt to convince a jury that the petite southern woman before
them is not what she appears.
The charm, the intelligence, the nice social graces combined with some really evil impulses.
And the case takes one final unbelievable turn.
And note says, I'm leaving the country.
The story that I thought couldn't get crazier
is now crazier. Will it ever end? To many in Aniston, Alabama, Marie Hilly seemed like the embodiment of a southern bell.
She had class, beauty, and respectability.
But prosecutors believe that under that carefully cultivated image lurks a manipulative killer.
She literally could have taken the script from any of the soap operas.
It involved twins, mistaken identity.
It involved moving from one part of country to the other, one of the twins died. She was not stupid.
And you have to be quite clever to pull off what she did.
As Maria waits her trial in an Alabama jail cell,
few people rushed to her defense.
I went to see her at the jail, and she's
that tear rolling down her eye.
And she says, you know, I love you.
Yeah, buddy, I know.
I can sleep in your face.
And anyway, that was not her felt bad.
She's in jail.
She's not going anywhere this time.
Through it all, one man stands by her side.
There has been John still remain royal to her.
He moved down there, established her residency.
He was going to stay with her until she got out.
On May 30, 1983, Marie's trial for the murder
of her first husband, Frank Hilly,
and the attempted murder of her daughter, Carol, gets underway.
Prosecutors say the motive for the two poise nings
boiled down to greed.
Maria wanted the money from the insurance policy.
She was a person who expected that the world
owes her a little bit more than what she was being offered.
One of the things that I think was very persuasive
to the jury were those vials that were found
in the basement of the home that had traces of arsenic in them.
Why would you put rat poison in a little sealed up bottle like that?
When it comes time for Marie's attorney to present their case, they argue that someone,
anyone other than Marie, was behind the poisoning.
They wanted to play on that belief that a good Southern woman could not have done this.
It had to have been somebody with an ulterior motive,
somebody who was trying to make her look bad.
On June 7, 1983, the jury retires to deliberate Maurice fate.
Verdeck was guilty on all charges. Guilty of murder, guilty of attempted murder.
She received a life sentence for murdering Frank.
And 20 years for attempting to murder Carol Hilley.
So she goes to jail for the rest of her life.
Except that Marie Hilly is not the kind of person who's just going to sit in jail and
rot away.
Marie Hilly was a charming person.
She begins to charm the assistant warden.
Eventually she tells the warden her story
and how she'd been framed on all this stuff.
And the warden believes her words she's saying.
Less than four years go by,
and the assistant warden decides
Marie Hilly is a good candidate for a three-day pass.
This means she can leave the prison
as long as she comes back in three days.
On Friday, February 19, 1987,
after three years in jail,
Marie is picked up by her loyal husband, John Homan,
and the couple checks into a boarding house
in Aniston, Alabama. Marie is with John for those three days.
It's time for her to report back to the prison.
And Marie says, John, before I leave,
I really want to visit my mother's grave,
and that's just two blocks across the street.
So I'll meet you at the waffle house on the border over here.
At the waffle house, the border over here.
At the waffle house, John waits patiently for Marie,
but she never appears.
He quickly realizes something is very wrong.
John goes back to their room and he notices there's a note
sticking out under the pillow.
The note says, I love you, John.
You're the only love of my life,
but I can't go back to that prison.
I'm leaving the country.
So here we go again.
History has repeated itself.
She was gone again.
John picks up the phone calls to Sheriff.
A massive show of law enforcement hits the streets
in surrounding communities.
What really bothered me was how could this woman manipulate
a penal system in Alabama to the point
where they let her out on unsupervised leaves from the jail.
I couldn't believe that that that had happened.
Three days go by.
Nobody gets any lead on where Marie is or where she's gone.
Weather is brutal.
Brutal, wet, cold, icy.
Marie didn't rest for winter weather.
We've all speculated now what happened to her.
John Holman was still here.
He didn't know.
Everybody is wondering where is she.
On the fourth day of Marie's disappearance,
detectives get a break in the case.
A woman who lived in Blue Mountain,
the part of Aniston, where Marie had grown up,
looked out the window and she saw someone lying almost still on the porch.
It seemed she had just traveled for miles through mountainous terrain.
She's bleeding.
She's bruised.
Her clothing is torn from her body.
The lady calls the police immediately.
The police respond and call an ambulance.
When EMT's arrive, they realize the woman is Marie Hilly.
They load Marie up, put her in the ambulance,
as they're taking her to Aniston Memorial Hospital.
She dies before they get to the hospital of hypothermia.
Nobody ever got to question her. Nobody ever knew what happened.
While Marie's death is the final chapter of an unbelievable story, more than 30 years later, the impact of her twisted behavior is still being felt.
I will go on through a stage of hating her.
And now I'm to the stage I really don't care.
I live in my life.
It's like that was someone in another life that has gone and over.
People are still curious what would cause one human being to do that to another human
being, especially if they come from a culture where it surprises you.
A typical nice, other lady, it's our local legend.
And I hope we don't have another one that comes along.
One is enough.
Carol Haley has virtually no lingering effects
from the poisoning.
Marie Haley is buried next to her husband Frank in Alabama.
is buried next to her husband Frank in Alabama. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music