2 cases tagged “1989 murder”
Convicted: Carolyn Warmus
On the night of January 15, 1989, Paul Solomon unlocked the door to his Greenburgh, New York condominium and found his wife, Betty Jeanne, sprawled on the living room floor. She had been shot nine times and pistol-whipped about the head. He had spent the evening bowling with friends, then drinking and having sex with his mistress in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. The two stories would collide in a courtroom spectacle that transfixed a nation. Carolyn Warmus was 25 years old, the daughter of a Michigan insurance mogul worth an estimated $150 million, a Columbia University-educated teacher working at the same Scarsdale-area school as her married lover. She was beautiful, ambitious, and, prosecutors argued, capable of cold-blooded murder. The press called it the 'Fatal Attraction' case, a nod to the 1987 thriller about a married man whose affair spirals into obsession and violence. But the deeper you look at this story, the more the tidy tabloid narrative frays at the edges. Who was the real obsessive? Who, exactly, had the most to gain? And was the woman convicted of Betty Jeanne Solomon's murder actually the one who pulled the trigger? Nearly four decades later, those questions remain stubbornly, disturbingly alive.
Convicted: Tracey Avril Wigginton
The police found her bank card tucked inside the dead man's shoe. His clothes had been folded neatly nearby, as though someone had taken great care with them, though no such care had been taken with Edward Baldock himself. He lay on the grass at Orleigh Park, stabbed twenty-seven times, his head nearly severed from his body. It was October 1989, and Brisbane was about to reckon with one of the most disturbing murders in its history. The woman whose card was found in that shoe was Tracey Wigginton, a 24-year-old who stood six feet tall and moved through the city's occult underground with quiet intensity. She had, by her own account and the accounts of her associates, been working toward this night for some time. She wanted to drink a human being's blood. When police caught up with her, she told them she had felt nothing while stabbing Baldock, that she had sat down afterward to smoke a cigarette and watched him die. At sentencing, she faced the cameras and said: "It's hard to be famous, isn't it? A legend in my own mind." This is the story of Tracey Wigginton: a troubled child from Rockhampton who became the most notorious female killer in modern Australian history, and the questions her case still provokes today about justice, rehabilitation, and the darkness that can take root inside a human being.
