Introduction

It’s not news that society in the United States is violent. At this writing, according to the latest statistics available, the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Reports show that approximately 24,500 people were murdered in this country during 1993.

And through the early months of 1994 there was no indication of any significant let-up in the rate that Americans and occasional visitors to this country, shoot, stab, strangle, poison, and beat each other to death. Violent crime in the United States has shot up a mind-boggling 560 percent during the past thirty years, according to US Justice Department figures.

The unwary, unlucky, and sometimes grossly foolish, can become murder victims in myriad ways.

Drug deals go bad and turn into violent shootouts; women and children of both sexes are murdered by rapists; serial killers troll for male and female prostitutes, barroom pickups, or hitchhikers; longtime drinking buddies kill each other in drunken brawls; men and women are shot down for a few dollars after making withdrawals at ATM machines; other die in coldly-calculated, carefully-planned executions; and family members are turning on each other with increasing frequency.

It is a continual struggle between good and evil that provides plotlines for countless movies, television series, newspapers, and books. There is a fascination with murder that is unequalled by any other crime. And the obsession with homicide is especially keen when the accused killer is a woman.

Women aren’t supposed to do such things. They create and nurture life. It is the testosterone-driven male with his naturally-aggressive, competitive, and territorial instincts who most often kills on the battlefields during wars between nations or during the ongoing war that rages on America’s streets and in its homes.

When a woman abandons her more traditional function in the deadly game of homicide as victim, survivor, or observer and assumes the role of killer, it’s especially disturbing—and sensational. Even then, her behavior is often linked to ties with a homicidal male companion that gives their crimes a Bonnie-and-Clyde patina.

They are women like Judith Ann Neelly, who was barely fifteen when she ran off to marry husband, Alvin, and began to make babies and murder anyone unlucky enough to stray into their path during a rape, robbery, and murder spree in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee; of Debra Brown, who joined boyfriend Alton Coleman in a savage orgy of sex and murder that linked them to the slayings of more than a half-dozen men, women, and children in the Midwest. Both murder teams went about their bloody work in the early 1980s.

Women with homicide on their mind also tend to look for a man to do the dirty work for them. Or they use poison to do the job themselves. Any crime historian worth his or her salt can compile a long list of “Arsenic Annies,” who have inflicted agonizing deaths on unsuspecting victims with poisons. Cyanide and strychnine are other lethal compounds that are sometimes used by both female and male poisoners.

Occasionally, homicidal females freelance on their own, but with rare exceptions such as serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a hitchhiking prostitute now on Florida’s death row, their victims are people who have been dependent on their care in hospitals and nursing homes—or family members. When women kill, the victim is likely to be someone who knows and trusts them, or did trust them at one time. It’s a tragic fact that a disproportionate number of women who kill tend to murder boyfriends, husbands, and former mates.

The woman who is the subject of this book fits neatly into that mold. Jill Coit has been described by a private investigator as a “black widow,” a lethal creature who murders her mate then feeds off his corpse.

That term, when applied to humans, is usually reserved for women who have killed a series of husbands. At this writing, Jill was charged with a single murder of an ex-husband who was shot to death with a .22 caliber pistol in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. But an earlier husband she was feuding with in Houston died in disturbingly similar circumstances.

Jill has had a lot of husbands. And the fact she was married multiple times, to nine different men, was a big factor in my decision to examine her life and try to figure out what makes this particular woman tick.

It was a bit of serendipity when I began checking into her tumbleweed travels around the country and learned that three of her husbands live within a forty-mile radius of my small hometown in Indiana. In fact her most bitter divorce was fought out in the Marshall County Courthouse in Plymouth, the bucolic farming community where I grew up.

But it became quickly obvious to me that regardless of whether or not she was living in a small town like Culver, Indiana, or Steamboat Springs, or in a big city like Houston or New Orleans, Jill was one of those women who had the ability to attract boyfriends and husbands almost at will. And she held on to them until she was ready to cut them loose and move on.

Jill wasn’t a woman with a reputation for stealing other women’s men. She didn’t prowl back alleys looking for husbands locked into boring or unhappy marriages who were ripe and ready for plucking. With one exception, none of her men were married to other women when she became involved with them. Her husbands were men who were lifelong bachelors or were already divorced when she met them. She was too intelligent to get herself into situations where she had to waste valuable time and energy fighting another woman over a man.

She was a charming woman, an engaging Lorelei who wore her many marriages like trophies, continuing to hold on to the loyalty of some of her husbands and enlist their help in her various personal and business ventures long after they were divorced. Her husbands represent a richly diverse range of professions and activities that include a bricklayer, student, lawyer, auctioneer, engineer, educator, merchant, Marine officer, and retired Navy chief petty officer. At one time or another, they all fell under her spell.

Some were luckier than others.

Clifford L. Linedecker

October 1994