Empty Promises

There were 125 twenty-dollar bills, half-payment to end a man’s life. Sandra Treadway was transported to the Pierce County jail. She was allowed to call her attorney and was then booked for criminal intent to commit murder in the first degree.
    Burt Treadway was at the Oakbrook house when the phone rang. It was Sandra, calling to tell him that she was in jail for attempting to have someone killed.
    The astonished man asked, “Who?”
    “You.”
    When Walt Stout interviewed the bemused Burt Treadway later, he acknowledged that it was true that his marriage was one of convenience rather than devotion, and that he did have a great deal of life insurance with triple-indemnity clauses. Sandra also stood to inherit two homes with mortgage payoff clauses that would be covered by insurance in case of his death.
    But Burt Treadway had had no idea that Sandra wanted him dead. He told Stout that she had tried to persuade him to put off their divorce, giving various excuses for the delay. He had put it down to sentiment on her part, wondering if she really loved him after all. “Now I think I’ll file for divorce as soon as humanly possible,” Treadway said. “Like yesterday.”

    Sandra Treadway was released on bail to await trial. On November 13, 1977, however, her own life almost ended in what some might call poetic justice. She had been spending the evening at home with her daughter, Claudette*—the same daughter that Sandra had wanted to be sure was not in the Oakbrook house back in August.
    Claudette was separated from her husband, Benny Bowes,* and the rift was far from friendly. Benny Bowes was terribly jealous of Claudette and he hated her new boyfriend with a passion. They had all noticed Benny’s car circling the house several times during the early evening. As Sandra sat eating her supper, Claudette ran to the window and cried, “He’s here—he’s coming up to the door!”
    Claudette ran to throw her weight against the door and Sandra joined her, the two women desperately trying to keep Bowes from coming in. But he shattered the door with one kick and strode in through the splintered wood. He had a gun in his hand. Claudette and her new boyfriend ran for the back door, leaving Sandra to face Benny alone. She tried to get away, but Benny Bowes caught her and knocked her to the floor. Screaming epithets, Bowes fired directly at Sandra’s chest, and she writhed on the floor bleeding, crying “Benny, you’ve shot me!”
    The gunfire wasn’t over. Now Bowes aimed at Claudette’s new boyfriend, who stood in the kitchen, hurling bottles at the gunman. Then he ran into a rear bedroom and cowered there. Bowes kicked open the doors of all the bedrooms until he came to the locked room where his rival hid. He fired two shots through the door, and then walked in, shouting, “Take your glasses off, you bastard—I want to shoot you right between the eyes!”
    The gun roared several times. The would-be home wrecker wasn’t shot between the eyes, but he was shot almost every place else. As his latest victim lay bleeding, Bowes put the gun to his own temple—but he didn’t shoot. Benny was still standing with the gun to his head when sheriff’s deputies arrived. They were braced for a standoff, but Benny’s suicidal gesture had been only that. The deputies quickly wrestled the gun away from him.
    Sandra Treadway and the wounded man were rushed to the hospital, where her chest wound was found to be serious but not fatal. Claudette’s new boyfriend was in critical condition, however.
    Ironically, Sandra had wanted to kill her husband for money. Jealousy hadn’t even entered into it. Her son-in-law, however, had attempted murder out of jealousy alone. They were rapidly becoming the poster family for the old joke: “The family that slays together stays together.”
    Sandra recovered in time to plead guilty to a reduced charge of solicitation to commit murder in the second degree and was sentenced to serve ten years in the women’s prison at Purdy, Washington. Purdy is one of Washington’s plusher prisons, but it is still a far cry from the life Sandra had planned for herself once she got her hands on $150,000 in insurance money.
    Claudette’s boyfriend almost died of his wounds, but he eventually recovered. Benny Bowes pleaded guilty in the shooting and went to prison.

    *   *  *
    Not all females are as inept as Carole, Teri, and Sandra. An intelligent, determined female sociopath is as dangerous as any