Google me: I married a murderer

By CLAIRE TREVETT

The "I married a murderer" refrain has a long history.

Google the phrase and the search engine churns out 146,000 hits.

At Camelot Village you can learn about Mary Queen of Scots, who married her cousin Lord Darnley, had him killed for extramarital affairs and then married his murderer, the Earl of Bothwell.

The Scottish people were not impressed and she had to abdicate the throne.

In a strikingly similar tale, the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable tells of Candaules, the King of Lydia, whose wife arranged for him to be assassinated.

She then married the murderer, who became king.

The theme has long been good fodder for writers, and is booster material for soap opera ratings.

In Coronation St, poor old Gail married Richard Hillman, who went on to do viewers a service by dispatching some of the more annoying characters in the show (word IQ).

Also prominent in the hits are references to Shakespeare's Hamlet, where Hamlet's father was murdered by his own brother, who then went on to marry Hamlet's mother (Shakespeare Resource Center).

Alfred Hitchcock takes on the theme in his 1936 movie I Married a Murderer, also known as Sabotage and Hidden Power.

Yet fact proved even stranger than fiction. Pennsylvanians Erika and Benjamin Sifrit married and then did the deed together, killing and dismembered Fairfax couple Martha Crutchley and Joshua Ford after a night drinking (phillyBurbs.com).

Meanwhile, a judge in Lee County is still to decide whether murder accused Mark Twilegar can marry longtime friend Debbie Jean Miller. Twilegar is accused of the murder of a lawyer who was shot and buried while still alive.

If the judge agrees, The News-Press reports that Miss Miller will marry Twilegar through a video visitation system at the prison.

"Love has no bars," said his lawyer, public defender Rob Harris.

Blog site Dead Man Eating, which provides intriguing details of the last meals eaten by Death Row inmates, reports that Raymond Rowsey, executed for the 1992 pistol slaying of a convenience store worker, ate pizza, chicken wings, two packets of peanut M&M lollies and a Pepsi before he was killed last January.

His wife, whom he married while in prison, watched the execution.

Most of the tales came out of America. But there was the cached version of a Japan Today story about a Yokohama man whose pachinko gambling and extramarital affairs drove his wife to fatally beat him with a frying pan and stab him more than 300 times with fruit and kitchen knives.