Greed Makes you Careless
Meet Dorothy Glaser. She might look like a sweet grandma from Georgia, but she’s actually a vicious, cold-blooded killer. She almost got away with murder too, but as it often happens with this kind of criminals, the temptation of money is just too much to stop when they should.
October 4 of 1985 was the day Jerome Glaser was supposed to die. He was Dorothy’s third husband –the previous two had died, one of cancer, the other in unclear circumstances. Dorothy had hired a hitman to do the job, and he was hiding in the Glaser’s home when they arrived from a football game. The hitman, never identified, must not have been a professional, because he fired at Jerome four times and only managed to graze his temple with one of the bullets.
So Jerome lived, but not unscathed. Since the hitman had fired only at him, not at Dorothy, and hadn’t stolen anything from the house, it was clear he was a target. In the following weeks, Jerome grew increasingly paranoid and anxious, getting little sleep and carrying his handgun for protection everywhere. Dorothy helped plenty in this process: she made up that they were receiving threatening anonymous calls, she laced his food with drugs and even went with textbook gaslighting, claiming that Jerome did things like pointing his gun at her, things that Jerome had no memory of because they probably never happened, but they made him believe he was having bouts of amnesia. He went to a psychiatrist, but it didn’t seem to help much.
Jerome’s behavior didn’t go unnoticed to his own family and police. That’s what Dorothy wanted, so she could go ahead with her plan B.
On October 31, Dorothy called police and tearfully told them she’d accidentally shot her husband. Her story was that, after dropping her kids at school that morning, she’d gone into her bedroom and Jerome had pointed his gun at her, yelling “who are you and what are you going to do?” They had struggled for the gun, and it had gone off, killing Jerome.
Police took her story with a huge grain of salt, and the autopsy confirmed their suspicions: based on the angle of the bullet and the lack of gunpowder mark on Jerome’s body, it was impossible the shot would have been fired at as close range as Dorothy claimed. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, but Dorothy proved to be more resourceful than investigators thought: she requested a coroner’s inquest, and a jury of two people decided, after hearing her testimony, that the death had been accidental. With no homicide, no charges were pressed against Dorothy, and she was free to collect $250,000 from her husband’s insurance. This woman even had the gall to sue the therapist that had been seeing Jerome before his death, claiming malpractice because he hadn’t cured Jerome and had led him to his final outburst. She eventually won a settlement of $40,000.
Things could have worked out for Dorothy if she had stopped there, but greed was too tempting. Instead of taking her money and moving on with her life, Dorothy decided to repeat her masterful plan with her sister, Nell Matkin, and in 1990 the two started conspiring to have Nell’s husband Andy killed to later collect his insurance.
Not wanting to repeat her first mistake, Dorothy contacted Bobby Spargo, a nephew of hers who had criminal history, to hire him to kill Andy. But Bobby went straight to police and told them what was happening. They decided to put a wire on him and send him back to get Dorothy’s plan on tape. To everyone’s surprise, Dorothy not only incriminated herself in the attempted murder of Andy: in an effort to convince Bobby to do the deed, she told him all about her first successful enterprise with Jerome’s death. She told him how the “little son of a bith” she’d hired “didn’t do the job right”, so she had to shoot her husband with his own gun. “He was acting delirious and going crazy and all this shit and paranoid. I had set that scene, too, for a whole month (…) I had a whole month to prepare the police and neighbors and friends about his delirium, his paranoia, his schizophrenia, his idea that somebody was coming back to get him,“ she was recorded saying.
Dorothy was tried for murder and attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison. Her sister was sentenced to five years for conspiracy to commit murder.