Homicidal Little Old Ladies

As anyone seen the movie Arsenic and Old Lace? This movie (which stars Cary Grant) is about two little old ladies in Brooklyn who murder lonely old men by poisoning them with Elderberry wine. They then bury them in the basement of their house. Their nephew finds out about their little enterprise when he brings his new wife home to meet the family, which includes one nephew who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt and another who kills people and then has plastic surgery to look like them, only his surgeon stinks and instead he looks like Borish Karloff. The little old ladies think they are doing these men a service by putting them out of their misery.

Can you imagine if they tried to re-make this today? Particularly since I just read an article in the New York Times about two little old ladies who were taking out life insurance policies on homeless men who they met at church, and then possibly running them down with their car to claim the insurance money. When I mean little old ladies, I'm talking women in their seventies. Now, I know social security doesn't go as far as it used to nowadays, but that's no reason to murder homeless people! Particularly since one woman has kids to hopefully take care of her in her golden years. Heck, my mother got another job after she retired to help supplement her social security, and my dad had investments.

I was trying to figure out how you could work something like this into a book. Possibly the heroine trying to keep the hero from putting her little old aunts in jail? But really this is a case for Goran on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. I love this show, particularly because the way Vincent D'Onofrio plays him, he's borderline insane. I can just imagine him trying to interrogate Angela Lansbury and Frances Sternhagen as the two women.

The New York Times headline which was "Two Elderly Women Suspected as Femmes Fatales" suggests that these women lead these men to their doom the old-fashioned way. They weren't friendly little old grannies like the ones in Arsenic and Old Lace. All mumsy and warm, pouring homemade wine to sweet little old men.

These women were calculating, they took out like 6 life insurance policies on each of these men worth about $2.2 million. They only got caught when one of the insurance companies got suspicious and wouldn't pay out.

Any stories in the newspaper inspire you lately? Or surprise you?

Thanks for reading!

EKM