A native of Anniston, Alabama, Hilley was born in 1933 and seemed to enjoy a normal childhood. Married at 18, she was having marital problems nine years later when her second daughter -- Carol -- was born. Psychiatrists, applying hindsight, feel the birth may have somehow triggered a radical shift in Hilley's personality, resentment of the new child simmering over time, finally surfacing in a series of lethal attacks upon family members.

When Audrey's husband, Frank, passed on in 1975, cancer was blamed for his death. The same diagnosis was made two years later, in the death of Hilley's mother, Lucille Frazier. By 1979, victims had begun to pile up, with daughter Carol lingering on the brink of death for several weeks before doctors managed to pull her back. They were too late for mother-in-law Carrie Hilley, who died in November after a prolonged illness.

By that time, authorities were already closing the ring around Audrey. Doctors had discovered abnormal levels of arsenic in Carol's blood, and on a hunch, they started checking other family members recently deceased. On October 25, 1979, Hilley was indicted for attempted murder of her daughter, plus an unrelated charge of check fraud. Three weeks later, free on $14,000 bond, she vanished from a Birmingham motel where she had been awaiting trial. Indictments were handed down in the murder of her husband on January 11, 1980, but they meant little without a suspect in custody.

In flight, Hilley adopted the identity of "Robbi Hannon," attaching herself to bachelor John Homan in Marlow, New Hampshire. They lived together for several months before they were married, in May 1981, and "Robbi" was talking divorce a month later, lighting out for Texas in a search for "space." She spent that summer in the Lone Star State, occasionally telephoning Homan as herself, and in the guise of her own alleged twin, "Teri Martin." A brief reconciliation with Homan was followed by yet another separation, in September 1982, and "Robbi" moved on to Florida, where she contrived to fake her own death. Incredibly, she then returned to New Hampshire -- as "Teri Martin" spent time consoling her "brother-in-law" before moving on to Vermont. There, her suspicious behavior finally alerted authorities, and Hilley was arrested in January 1983.

Her trial opened in Anniston four months later, and Hilley was convicted on two counts, receiving a life term for the murder of husband Frank Hilley, plus twenty years for the attempted murder of her daughter. On February 19, 1987, Hilley was granted a three-day furlough from the women's prison at Wetumpka, Alabama, and she never returned. Discovered on the porch of an Anniston home February 26, in the midst of winter rainstorm, Hilley was soaked to the skin and spattered with mud, suffering from severe hypothermia. Fading in and out of consciousness, she gave her name as "Sellers," but authorities identified her from the wanted posters issued after her escape. Stricken by a heart attack en route to the local hospital, Hilley was beyond the help of medical science, and doctors pronounced her dead that afternoon.

In retrospect, there seems to be no rational motive for Hilley's various crimes. She maintained her innocence to the end, while complaining of various "blackouts" and memory lapses, but she remains a suspect in several other cases. In the late 1970s, Hilley repeatedly complained to police about prowlers and threatening phone calls, always greeting patrolmen with fresh pots of coffee when they arrived at her home. At least two of those officers later complained of severe stomach cramps and nausea after drinking the coffee, and Hilley was also linked with the chronic, unexplained illness of various neighorhood children who played with her daughter around Hilley's home. One such playmate, eleven-year-old Sonya Gibson, died of unknown causes in 1975, but a 1983 autopsy revealed only "normal" levels of arsenic in her remains. The final count of Marie Hilley's victims -- like her motive itself -- remains unknown.