Two by Two

Hook: the chain of hands, and who actually hangs.

Five hands stood between the people who wanted Sir Thomas Overbury dead and the food he ate. Frances Howard and her uncle delivered their instructions through a London widow named Anne Turner, who placed orders with an apothecary, who prepared the poisons, which were carried to a Tower keeper, who served them in food approved by a lieutenant who had observed earlier attempts and chosen not to interfere.

Of the five hands, four were hanged in seven weeks of 1615. The two who had set the chain in motion spent six years in the Tower and received their pardons.

That asymmetry is the question the present volume is interested in.

Twenty-two cases collected here span four centuries - from the courts of Jacobean England to a 2018 cliff on the California coast. Married couples make the largest single category. A pair of teenage Chicago intellectuals choose a victim at random in 1924 to test a thesis. A nineteen-year-old high-school girlfriend in New Hampshire engineers her husband's murder around a calendar of summer school. Two sisters run a Liverpool insurance-fraud poisoning ring across the 1880s. A whole village of women in Hungary share the same midwife, the same arsenic supply, and the same answer to the same domestic problem.

What the cases share, across nine countries and four centuries, is the chain of hands. One partner moves the body; the other manages the perimeter - the household, the alibi, the cash, the press version.

Several chapters describe sustained harm to children. The accounts have been held to the documentary record. The subject matter is, in places, distressing.

Documentary true crime in the tradition of Harold Schechter, Patricia Pearson, and Erik Larson.