Audrey Marie Hilley

Audrey Marie Hilley
Audrey Marie Hilley
Born	June 4, 1933; Blue Mountain, Alabama
Died	February 26, 1987 (aged 53); Anniston, Alabama
Cause of death	Heart attack due to hypothermia from exposure.
Criminal charge	Murder, attempted murder

Audrey Marie Hilley (June 4, 1933 – February 26, 1987) was an American murderer. Her life and killing spree are the subjects of the 1991 telefilm Wife, Mother, Murderer.

Early life and first crimes

Audrey Marie Frazier was born on June 4, 1933 in Blue Mountain, Alabama to Lucille (née Meads) and Huey Frazier. She married Frank Hilley on May 8, 1951, which produced two children, Mike and Carol. Despite Frank’s well-paying job and Marie’s secretarial employment, the couple had little money set aside in savings due to Audrey's excessive spending habits, leading to friction in the marriage. Unbeknownst to Frank, his wife was spending more than they earned combined and frequently engaged in sex with her bosses in exchange for money. Frank began suffering from a mysterious illness, as did his son Mike, although Mike's symptoms – which his doctors attributed to stomach flu – abruptly stopped when he moved away to attend seminary.

In 1975, after returning home early due to his illness, Frank walked in to find Audrey in bed with her boss. Despite being hurt and disgusted with his wife's infidelity, Frank did not feel he could do anything about his situation and turned to Mike, then an ordained minister living in Atlanta, for advice. In May 1975, a short time after a visit from Mike, Frank visited his doctor complaining of nausea and tenderness in his abdomen, being diagnosed with a viral stomachache. The condition persisted and he was admitted to a hospital, where tests indicated a malfunction of the liver and doctors diagnosed infectious hepatitis. He died early in the morning of May 25.

Frank's autopsy, performed with Audrey Hilley's permission, revealed swelling of the kidneys and lungs, bilateral pneumonia, and inflammation of the stomach. Because the symptoms closely resembled those of hepatitis, that was listed as Frank's cause of death and no further tests were conducted. Frank had maintained a moderate life insurance policy, secretly taken out by Audrey at the time of his initial illness, that she redeemed for $31,140.

Three years later, Audrey took out a $25,000 life insurance policy on her daughter, Carol; a $25,000 accidental death rider took effect in August 1978. Within a few months, Carol began experiencing trouble with nausea and was admitted to the emergency room several times. A year after filing the insurance policy on her daughter, Audrey gave Carol an injection that she claimed would alleviate the nausea. However, the symptoms only worsened, with Carol enduring numbness in her extremities. After medical tests found no disease, Carol's physician, fearing the symptoms were psychosomatic, had her undergo psychiatric testing at Birmingham's Carraway Methodist Hospital. There, Carol secretly received two more injections from her mother, who warned her not to tell others about the shots.

A month after Carol was admitted to the hospital, her physician said she was suffering from malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies, adding that he suspected heavy metal poisoning was to blame for the symptoms. Panicking, Audrey had Carol discharged from the hospital that afternoon. The following day, Carol was admitted to the University of Alabama Hospital. Coincidentally, Audrey was arrested for passing bad checks — they were written to the insurance company that insured Carol’s life, causing that policy to lapse. University physicians concentrated their investigation on the possibility of heavy metal poisoning, noting that Carol’s hands and feet were numb, she had nerve palsy causing foot drop, and she had lost most of her deep tendon reflexes.

Caught

Physicians noticed Aldrich-Mees' lines on Carol's nails. Forensic tests on samples of her hair were conducted by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences on October 3, 1979, revealing arsenic levels ranging from over 100 times the normal level close to the scalp to zero times the normal level at the end of the hair shaft. This indicated that Carol had been given increasingly larger doses of arsenic over a period of four to eight months. That same day, Frank’s body was exhumed and, upon examination, showed between 10 times and 100 times the normal level of arsenic. It was concluded that both Frank and Carol had suffered from chronic arsenic poisoning, with Frank's poisoning being fatal.

Audrey was still incarcerated on her bad check charges when she was arrested on October 9 for the attempted murder of her daughter. The Anniston police found a vial in her purse, tests of which revealed the presence of arsenic. Two weeks later, Frank’s sister found a jar of rat poison which contained 1.4%-1.5% arsenic. On November 9, Audrey was released on bail, after which she registered at a local motel under an assumed name and disappeared. While a note was left behind indicating that she “might have been kidnapped," Audrey was listed as a fugitive.

Escape

On November 19, there was a break-in at the home of her aunt. A car, some women’s clothing and an overnight bag were missing from the home. Investigators found a note in the house reading, “Do not call police. We will burn you out if you do. We found what we wanted and will not bother you again.”

On January 11, 1980, she was indicted in absentia for her husband's murder. Subsequently, investigators found that both her mother and her mother-in-law, Carrie Hilley, had significant, but not fatal, traces of arsenic in their systems when they died. The remains of Sonya Marcelle Gibson, an eleven-year old friend of Carol Hilley's who had died of indeterminate causes in 1974, were also exhumed and examined,^[1] but were found to contain only a "normal" amount of arsenic. Gibson was one of the many neighborhood children who had fallen ill after drinking beverages that they had been given during visits to the Hilley household. Two police officers who had been dispatched to look into a disturbance that Hilley had called 911 about also reported coming down with nausea and stomach cramps after drinking coffee that Hilley had offered them.^[2]

Although police and the FBI launched a massive manhunt, Hilley remained a fugitive for a little more than three years.

New names, new lives

She first travelled to Florida, where she met a man named John Greenleaf Homan III. She was using the name Robbi Hannon. They lived together for more than a year before she married Homan on May 29, 1981 and took his last name. The couple moved to New Hampshire. She frequently talked about her imaginary twin sister, "Teri", who supposedly lived in Texas.

Late in the summer of 1982, she left New Hampshire, telling her husband that she needed to attend to family business and to see some doctors about an illness. During this time she travelled to Texas and Florida, using the alias Teri Martin.

During the trip, using the alias Teri Martin, she called John Homan and informed him that Robbi Homan had died in Texas but there was no need for him to come to Texas because the body had been donated to medical science.

On November 12 or 13, after changing her hair color and losing weight, she returned to New Hampshire and met John Homan, posing as Teri Martin, his “deceased” wife’s sister.

An obituary for Robbi Homan appeared in a New Hampshire newspaper, but aroused suspicion when police were unable to verify any of the information it contained. A New Hampshire state police detective surmised that the woman living as Teri Martin was, in fact, Robbi Homan and had staged her death. That hunch paid off and shortly after police brought “Teri Martin” in for questioning, she confessed to being Audrey Marie Hilley. She was returned to Alabama to face trial.

She was quickly convicted and sentenced to life in prison for her husband’s murder and 20 years for attempting to kill her daughter.

Incarceration and death

Marie Hilley Homan began serving her sentence in 1983 and was a quiet, model prisoner. This good behavior earned her several one-day passes from the prison, and she always returned on time.

In February 1987, however, Hilley escaped after she was given a three-day pass to visit her husband, John Homan, who had moved to Anniston to be near his wife. They spent a day at an Anniston motel and when Homan left for a few hours, she disappeared, leaving behind a note for Homan asking his forgiveness. Her escape prompted an inquiry into the prison system’s furlough policy.

This time, she wasn't missing for long. Four days after Marie vanished from the motel, Anniston police responding to a call about a suspicious person, went to a home and found her. She apparently had been crawling around in the woods, drenched by four days of frequent rain and numb from temperatures dropping to the low 30s.

She was taken to a local hospital and underwent emergency treatment for hypothermia. While at the hospital, she suffered a heart attack and died.

References

^ McDonald, Robin (14 June 1983). "Order widens in Hilley probe". The Anniston Star. United States.
^ Newton, Michael (1990). Hunting Humans: An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers. Breakout Productions Inc. ISBN 9781559500265.

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