Mariticide

Key takeaways

Mariticide belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Mariticide to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Mariticide from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Mariticide (from Latin maritus "husband" + -cide, from caedere "to cut, to kill") means the killing of one's own husband. It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out. It can also be used in the context of the killing of one's own boyfriend. In current common law terminology, it is used as a gender-neutral term for killing one's own spouse or significant other of either sex. Conversely, the killing of a wife or girlfriend is called uxoricide.

Prevalence According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mariticide made up 30% of the total spouse murders in the United States, data not including proxy murders conducted on behalf of the wife. FBI data from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s found that for every 100 husbands who killed their wives in the United States, about 75 women killed their husbands indicating a 3:4 ratio of mariticide to uxoricide.

English common law Under English common law it was a petty treason until 1828, and until it was altered under the Treason Act 1790 the punishment was to be strangled and burnt at the stake.

Notable instances

Historical

Laodice I allegedly poisoned her husband Antiochus II Theos of the Seleucid dynasty around 246 BC. Livilla, along with her lover Sejanus, probably poisoned her husband Drusus the Younger. The Roman emperor Claudius was allegedly poisoned by his wife Agrippina the Younger to ensure the succession of her son Nero. Jean Kincaid (1579–1600) was a Scottish woman who was convicted of mariticide. Her youth and beauty were dwelt upon in numerous popular ballads, which are to be found in Jamieson's, Kinloch's, and Buchan's collections. Mary Hobry (1688), decapitated her abusive husband in London. Mary Channing (1706), a Dorset woman who poisoned her husband to be with her lover. Marie-Josephte Corriveau, 1763, New France The Black Widows of Liverpool, Catherine Flannigan (1829–1884) and Margaret Higgins (1843–1884) were Irish sisters who were hanged at Kirkdale Gaol in Liverpool, for the murder of Thomas Higgins, Margaret's husband. Rebecca Copin (1796–1881) attempted to murder her husband in Virginia by putting arsenic in his coffee. While the jury agreed that she attempted mariticide in 1835, they did not grant her husband a divorce. Florence Maybrick (1862–1941) spent fourteen years in prison in England after being convicted of murdering her considerably older English husband, James Maybrick, in 1889. Tillie Klimek claimed to have psychic powers by predicting her husbands' deaths in Chicago, but was proven after the attempted murder of her fifth husband that she was poisoning them with arsenic. Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were executed in 1923 for the murder of Thompson's husband Percy in London. Annie Walsh became the last woman to be executed in Ireland, in 1925, having murdered her husband. Betty Broderick shot and killed her ex-husband, Daniel, and his new wife, Linda, in 1989 while they were sleeping in their home in the United States. Heather Osland drugged and had her son kill her husband in 1991, creating a test case for the battered woman syndrome defense in Australia. Katherine Knight (b. 1955) murdered her de facto husband in October 2001 in Australia by stabbing him, then skinned him and attempted to feed pieces of his body to his children. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole: her appeal against this sentence as too harsh was rejected. Sheila Garvie, convicted in 1968 of the murder of Maxwell Garvie, her husband, in Scotland. In 1983, musician Felix Pappalardi was shot and killed by his wife Gail Collins Pappalardi in the United States. In 1991, Pamela Smart had her husband murdered by a student of hers in New Hampshire. Though the student committed the murder, the courts ruled that Smart had been guilty of mariticide due to her influence on the young man and her convincing manner to get him to carry out the act. In 1998, entertainer Phil Hartman was killed by his wife Brynn Hartman, who then killed herself in Los Angeles. In 1998, 81-year-old Gabriel Kisch was murdered by his wife who roasted his head in the oven before throwing his body parts into the water in central Stockholm. In 1999, Celeste Beard persuaded her lover to kill her wealthy husband Steven. In 2000, Denise Williams conspired with her lover, Brian Winchester, to kill her husband, Mike Williams. She collected a $2 million insurance payment Winchester had arranged for the couple and then later married him. After they divorced several years later, Winchester, following his arrest after an incident where he sneaked into her car and held her at gunpoint, told police where the body had been buried; the information led to Williams' conviction in 2018. In 2002, David Lynn Harris was run over multiple times by a car. The perpetrator was his wife, Clara, killed him by running him over with a car in a parking lot. She was released from prison after serving fifteen years of her twenty year sentence. In 2003, Susan Wright tied her husband, Jeff, to a bed and stabbed him multiple times with two different knives in Texas. In 2004, Jamila M'Barek paid her brother to murder her husband, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury. In 2004, Melanie McGuire murdered her husband, William, then desecrated his body. Mary Winkler (born 1973) was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the 2006 shooting of her husband, Matthew Winkler (1974–2006), a minister, in Tennessee. Travis Alexander (1977–2008) was an American salesman who was murdered by his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Ann Arias (born 1980), in his house in Mesa, Arizona. Arias was convicted of first-degree murder in 2013 and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015. In 2008, Chilean architect María del Pilar Pérez hired a hitman to kill her husband along with two other people. She was sentenced to life in prison. In 2009, Dale Harrell was murdered by his wife Marissa-Suzanne DeVault in Arizona. She was sentenced to life in prison. In 2012, Susana Freydoz shot and killed her husband Carlos Soria, the recently inaugurated Governor of Río Negro Province, Argentina. She was sentenced to 18 years in prison and paroled in 2023. In 2018, Daniel Brophy was killed by his wife Nancy Crampton-Brophy in Portland, Oregon; she was later sentenced to life in prison at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility.

Mythological In Greek mythology

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Mariticide

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Mariticide claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Mariticide before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Mariticide ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Mariticide

In research: Mariticide appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Mariticide in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Mariticide is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Death of men, Homicide, Killings by type, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Mariticide outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Mariticide in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Mariticide means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Mariticide out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Mariticide in simple terms?

Mariticide (from Latin maritus "husband" + -cide, from caedere "to cut, to kill") means the killing of one's own husband. It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out.

Why does Mariticide matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Mariticide?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Mariticide.