Empty Promises

helpless act. He asked her why she didn’t call the police after she knew Teri was in custody and no longer a threat to her. Carole answered that she was afraid they wouldn’t believe her—she was still very frightened, not only of Teri but of the police, too.
    “Why did Teri Depew attack your husband?” Boyle asked.
    “I don’t know why.”
    “Was sex the answer, perhaps?”
    “I don’t know. Teri just made the remark that she liked my body. It was just off and on, so I ignored it.”
    “You didn’t encourage her?” Boyle asked skeptically.
    “No.”
    In court, Carole was the epitome of a weak and fragile woman, frequently bursting into tears. But then Boyle introduced a fascinating tape into evidence. Carole had called the police on July 21, all right, and she had indeed sobbed as she reported her husband missing. But she hadn’t realized that she was still being recorded while the 911 dispatcher kept her on hold. During those moments, Carole had a perfectly calm conversation with Teri. From the expression in her voice, she might have been ordering something from a department store or gossiping cheerfully over the back fence. At one point she said to Teri, “Where are those idiots? Are we still on hold?”
    When the operator came back on the line, Carole started to sob again, sounding like an anxious wife.
    “It’s clear she’s an actress,” Boyle told the jury. “Sobs, then a normal conversation, then sobs again.”
    That tape fascinated the jurors, but not as much as a surprise witness the San Diego County prosecutor called. Carole had often hired a seventeen-year-old baby-sitter to stay with her boys. The girl said that she looked upon Carole Hargis as almost a mother, and it was apparent that she hated having to testify against her.
    But testify she did. Teri and Carole were so accustomed to having the baby-sitter in the house that they had freely discussed their plans to kill David in front of her. “Carole said she could get a lot of money from David if he died,” the girl testified in a tremulous voice. “She said she ought to put the spider in his bed and say the boys accidentally left the cover off the terrarium.”
    The girl had overheard the two women discuss a number of deadly plans that would rid them of Carole’s husband so they could be rich.
    On rebuttal, Carole Hargis told the jurors that her baby-sitter was an inveterate liar. “She lies all the time…. She was a habitual liar.”
    The jurors deliberated only a little over two hours, and they decided who the liar was. On December 19, 1977, Carole Hargis was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her husband.
    Because of The Slayer’s Act, which prohibits convicted killers from benefiting financially as a result of their victim’s death, she did not collect a penny on David’s insurance policy.

    In that same July of 1977 when David Hargis died, another restless wife was hatching a similar plan for instant wealth. Some 1,300 miles north of San Diego, Sandra Treadway* was no longer happy with her marriage. Unlike Carole Hargis, however, she didn’t have a willing girlfriend who was ready to help, and she didn’t think she could physically pull off a murder by herself.
    Sandra Treadway lived in Tacoma, Washington. She was forty-eight years old and still quite good-looking. When she did a good job with her makeup and put on heels and hose, she was often asked to dance at the local watering holes, where dim lights and a couple of martinis made her irresistible to the lonely men at the bar. Sandra longed for romance. She and fifty-two-year-old Burt Treadway had been married for many years, but for the last several it had been a marriage of convenience. Working together, they had amassed a considerable inventory of mortgage-insured real estate. Burt had taken out $150,000 in life insurance with a double-indemnity clause in case of his accidental or violent death. He named Sandra as the beneficiary of all the policies.
    Burt and Sandra Treadway agreed that their marriage was more of a business arrangement than a love match. Some years earlier, they had chosen open marriage as a way to handle their boredom. Burt was allowed to see his women friends and Sandra could have her men friends, and they would share the community property. They had children—his, hers, theirs—and there seemed to be no reason to end their marriage.
    It was probably inevitable that the arrangement