By VICTOR LEWIS-SMITH
Snapped: Women Who Kill Crime Channel
WHAT with our glorious Prime Minister endorsing humanity’s inalienable right to unlimited cheap air travel (and never mind about global warming), there’s never been a better time to launch your own airline. But if you do, take my advice and be careful what you call yourself, because I’ve overheard many a frustrated passenger inventing cruelly unfair explanations for airline acronyms, while staring disconsolately at the “delayed flights” screen in airports.
There’s ALITALIA (Airplane Lands in Toronto and Luggage In Australia), BWIA (But Will It Arrive?), PIA (Please Inform Allah), and EL AL (either Every Landing Always Late or Exploded Luggage Airliner Lost), not to mention obscene ones like LUFTHANSA ( Let Us F*** The Hostess As No Steward Available) and QANTAS (Queenies and Nymphomaniac Transvestite Air Stewards).
And although these humorous acronyms have apparently done no damage to the airlines in question, there are some experts who still maintain that the once-famous BOAC airline finally went out of business because its lettering could be rendered as Better On a Camel.
DELTA has been said to stand for Don’t Expect Loved-ones to Arrive, and that explanation seemed eerily relevant last night as I watched Snapped: Women Who Kill. Stephen Craven was a Delta pilot based in Cincinnati, we were told, but somebody clearly didn’t regard him as a loved one, because when he arrived home on a July day in 2000, he immediately had his bonce smashed in with a crowbar, and it was then ventilated three times by gunshots, just to make sure he’d never fly again.
“It must have been a robbery,” his wife Adele sobbed to detectives when the corpse was found later that evening, but something about the programme’s title (and an opening sequence that highlighted the words “deceit, lies, greed, murder”) made me suspect that she might not be telling them the whole truth.
And once I’d read that this American-made series “chronicles the lives of female criminals and what makes them snap” I’d pretty much ruled out the almost-exclusively male crime of armed robbery, and decided that what the Ohio police needed to do was cherchez la femme. Not exactly a three-pipe problem Holmes.
Using the forensic, emotionless, “just the facts ma’am” style that makes these US crime programmes so infuriatingly watchable, the narration sketched out the backgrounds of Adele and Stephen’s lives. She’d grown up in a poor Hispanic part of Long Beach, California, while he was a (literally) highflying pilot on an annual salary of $200,000, and when they’d first met, married, and moved to Cincinnati, she’d regarded him as “a knight in shining armour” who’d enable her to live the American dream.
However, after a few years they began arguing about money, and Stephen’s frequent work-related absences from the marital home persuaded Adele to set up a decorating business with a local handyman named Rusty McIntyre, who turned out to be very handy indeed. So much so that the couple spent more time panting than painting, were frequently overcome with emulsion when alone together, and had even been caught in flagrante in the company vehicle by the local police (or to use the US vernacular, “when this van’s a rocking, don’t come a knocking”).
As Sherlock once observed, even the greatest criminal masterminds always make one mistake, but Adele had made them by the shedload. In the months before the murder, she’d told at least eight neighbours that she was thinking about hiring a hitman to kill her husband, and that she was praying his plane would crash; so as neither God nor gravity had apparently lived up to Adele’s expectations, the police not unreasonably assumed that it must have been murder, and arrested both Rusty and her.
Rusty soon confessed that they’d paid $15,000 to a hitman named Ronald Pryor to hide in the Craven house and murder Stephen ( after Adele had uttered the magic words “the ferret is loose”), and both men subsequently plea-bargained (to avoid a death sentence) by agreeing to testify against Adele.
Even so, she denied all knowledge of the plot, denounced Rusty as “an obsessed psycho”, and kept her “I’m innocent” story going through four years and two trials before finally remembering that, yes, actually, she had helped to kill her husband after all. Funny how a little thing like that can just slip your mind.
Given the willingness of US jurors and court officials to reveal every aspect of a case (something that is still not legal in the UK), these crime programmes can explore details that would turn the late Edgar Lustgarten green with envy (as opposed to green with decomposition).
And although we like to think of the female murderer as a rarity, the makers are already onto series three of this format, and show no sign of running out of suitable candidates, so I guess that what we’ve been told about sugar and spice and all things nice only applies to little girls, not grown women.
Presumably, some viewers find the idea of female murderers (like female wrestlers) to be mildly titillating, but I was simply depressed by Adele’s bleak story; and to judge from courtroom footage of this broken woman, she’d already begun serving that life sentence in the dungeon of her soul, long before the authorities decided to incarcerate her in the state penitentiary.
All she’d really needed was a short word with a divorce lawyer, instead of which she ended up with a very long sentence indeed, during which she can work out what led her to make the leap from decorating to decorticating.
(c) 2007 Evening Standard; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
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