Barbara Kay: First, kill the husband. Second, claim sympathy as a widow

Story here. Excerpt:

'It used to be that the definition of hutzpah was a man who had murdered his parents pleading for mercy from the court because he was an orphan.

We have for our delectation an update on this definition out of Sacramento, California, in a story about a woman – the wife of a police detective, to add spice to the narrative — who, disgruntled over the loss of custody of her children to the husband (and going by the stats on this subject, she must be a piece of work to begin with to have lost custody in today’s mother-friendly courts) hires a motorcycle gang hit man to off her husband.

Or she thinks she did. Members of the hit man’s gang tape damning conversations with her and alert the police, who arrest her and eventually convict her for solicitation to murder. The story doesn’t say why, but I’m thinking the gang probably has enough problems with the police, and don’t need the aggravation of a furious vendetta from their proposed victim’s colleagues.

But get this: Later in divorce court, after being released from prison in 2004, the would-be murderer is awarded half the couple’s property, $70,000, just as though they were any other divorcing couple with, say, “irreconcilable differences.” I guess you don’t get more “irreconcilable” that when one partner tries to whack the other and fails.'