MARITICIDE

Mariticide (not to be confused with matricide); from the Latin maritus (married) & cidium (killing), literally means the murder of one's married partner, but has become most associated with the murder of a husband by his wife, as the reverse is given the name uxoricide.

Historical

* Heather Osland drugged and had her son kill her husband in 1991, creating a test case for the 'battered woman syndrome' defense in Australia.

* In 1995, Lilian Getkate shot her husband dead while he slept.

* Thao Thi Tran was spared a jail sentence for stabbing her husband to death for the sake of her three children.

* Liysa Northon shot her husband in the head during a camping trip and pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2001. The motive was apparently to collect on her husband's life insurance policy. For years leading up to the murder, Liysa concocted a series of stories and self-inflicted injuries to support the idea that she was being abused by her husband.

* Katherine Knight murdered her de facto husband by stabbing him, then skinned him and attempted to feed pieces of his body to his children. She was sentenced to life in prison, but her rejected appeal said that the sentence was too severe for the crime.

* In 1991, Pamela Smart had her husband murdered by a student of hers. 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.

* Michelle Theer had convinced her lover, an Army sharpshooter, to murder her husband Martin Theer, an Air Force officer. Theer had begun to tire of being an Air Force wife and frequently complained to her husband that he was poorly compensated for his work. Michelle Theer also hoped that collecting her husband's Servicemembers Group Life Insurance policy of $500,000 would pave the way to a swankier lifestyle. Instead she and her paramour (the man who actually murdered her husband) got life imprisonment.

* Evelyn Dick

* Melanie McGuire

Fictional and mythological

* In Greek mythology, Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon as an act of vengeance for the murder of their daughter Iphigeneia, and to retain power after his return from Troy. In Aeschylus' Oresteia the Erinyes consider Orestes' matricide a greater crime than Clytemnestra's mariticide since the killing of a spouse does not shed familial blood.

* In Greek mythology, the Amazons were said to kill men they partnered with after conceiving.

* In the musical Chicago, the killing of husbands is humorously celebrated by the incarcerated women in the song "Cell Block Tango".