Marie Hilley

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She was a prim and proper Southern bell,

always looking to better her life.

She knew she should be attending church on Sunday and showing her Southern graces.

She was a very well-respected Southern lady and tried in every way she could to have that kind of reputation.

But when a mysterious illness befalls a member of the family, questions are raised about her true demeanor.

I couldn't feel anything from above the knee down.

My ankles were like jello.

It was very painful.

There's something strange going on here.

When the truth is revealed, it will expose one of the most mind-boggling cases to ever emerge from the deep south.

This can't be a true case, you know.

People just cannot be that manipulative and vicious.

It's just beyond belief.

This was a different kind of dangerous.

We all just hope we don't meet somebody like that in our lives.

Twins, mistaken identity, death.

Moving from one part of the country to the other, it's become a local legend.

I've been in law enforcement 30 years, but I've never had a case that more closely resembled the portrayal of evil than this case.

January 12th, 1983, Brattleboro, Vermont.

It's a cold Monday afternoon when FBI agent David Steele receives a call from the Vermont State Police about a potential false identity case.

Normally, we don't work those types of cases unless we're requested by the local police department.

But I received a call from Detective Michael Clare with the Vermont State Police.

And Michael's telling me that they've had some interesting developments on a woman identifying herself as Terry Martin.

Investigators explain that they first learned of Terry Martin one week ago after receiving a call from her coworkers.

Terry said to coworkers and friends that she was the identical twin sister of an individual by the name of Robbie Homan who had died.

Terry came up to console her brother-in-law and ended up moving in with her brother-in-law and went to work where her dead sister had worked.

And this was the story that the coworkers weren't buying.

There's been a lot of questions raised as to who Terry Martin was because the people that she worked with and even some of the town folks, as soon as they seen her, they're going,

that's the same lady.

We did a lot of searching of records and we were left scratching our heads with

who could she be and just what is going on.

They just felt, let's just go to the source.

Anxious to learn about the woman's true identity, Law enforcement stake out Terry's place of employment and confront her in the parking lot.

We said, we need to talk to you because you're not who you say you are, and we're going to find out who you are right now.

She looked to the ground and she said,

no, you're right.

In a very calm voice, which we weren't anticipating at all.

She says, Look, take me to the police department and I'll tell you who I am.

Back at the police station, Terry makes good on her promise.

She identified herself as Audrey Marie Hilly.

And she said that she was from Anniston, Alabama.

She admitted that she had been masquerading her identity because she was wanted in the state of Alabama.

We asked, what do you want it for?

And she said, well, some bad check charges.

But detectives have no idea that the demure woman before them has been on the run for four years,

hiding from a crime far more sinister than bad checks.

Nobody has the faintest idea what's going on.

Born into the Great Depression, Blue Mountain, Alabama native Audrey Marie Frazier always wanted more.

Her family didn't have a lot of money, but what they did have, they were willing to spend on her.

And so she became somewhat spoiled and expected always to get what she wanted.

Marie was aspirational and she always wanted to achieve a greater social status than she had.

All of Marie's qualities added up to what is sometimes called southern charm.

She was personal and she dressed well.

She smiled and was friendly and very popular.

One young man was particularly captivated by Marie's beauty and grace.

Marie met Frank Hilley in high school.

He was a popular guy and got along with people and he seemed solid and he appealed to Marie and they started going out.

The couple married in 1951 and moved to Anniston, Alabama.

Then in November of 1952 they welcomed their first child, Michael.

Though she was a mother, Marie didn't let her dreams take a back seat.

She worked for some of the most powerful people in that community, certainly the more wealthy ones, and she became accepted amongst those people.

And that suited her well.

The Hilley family continued to move up Anniston's social ladder.

And on January 14th, 1960, Marie and Frank welcomed their second child.

They had a daughter named Carol, and they moved into a nice house in another another neighborhood in Anniston.

Those were good days.

My dad, he loved me, I know that, because he'd take me, they'd let me go in at the Elks Club through the back door and he'd sit me up on the bar stool and get me the Coke and potato chips and tell everybody about what kind of person I was.

But as Carol grew older, she and her mother didn't always see eye to eye.

I couldn't please her no matter what I did.

She didn't like what I wore, she didn't like how I thought, she didn't like who I hung out with.

Marie had a philosophy of life

in that

you try to do the best you can, get all the money you can, gain all the social status you can, and you dress to the nines.

Carol didn't buy into that.

But Marie's focus shifted in the mid-1970s.

Frank was struck by a mysterious illness and unable to work.

Doctors couldn't diagnose what was wrong with him and the family watched Frank deteriorate.

His face was real ashy colored and his eyes were like really blood red.

They took him on to the hospital and within a day or two he was he was dead.

My whole life went totally different that day.

Everything changed that very minute.

They performed an autopsy.

All the signs were there for hepatitis.

And so they buried him.

As the family grieved, Marie, Mike, and Carol attempted to move on with their lives.

Mike got married, became a minister, and moved to Florida.

Marie and Carol soldiered on with the assistance of Frank's $31,000 life insurance policy.

This is 75.

$31,000 would have bought you a very nice middle-class house in a good part of Anniston.

In those days and times, it was pretty difficult to go through $30,000, but she did rather quickly.

Coming up, not all is what it seems for the hillies in sweet home, Alabama.

You find yourself weakening, unable to perform the simplest of functions, and it gets worse and worse and worse.

She was very, very sick and fairly close to death.

And a serpentine tail is about to wind its way from the fields of Alabama all the way up to an interrogation room in Vermont.

My brother started realizing that maybe my dad, maybe he didn't just die of natural causes.

Despite losing her husband Frank in 1975, Marie Hilley, like any proud Southern woman, tried to keep up outward appearances.

She was a lady that liked to spend a lot of money.

She was very meticulous in her dress, which Southern ladies are.

Though her relationship with her daughter Carol had been rocky in the past, by the spring of 1979, Marie was trying to break that cycle, starting by helping her get ready for prom.

Carol was kind of a tomboy,

and her mother was quite the opposite, always well-made up, well-dressed.

So when Carol decided to go to the prom, it was her opportunity to help Carol really get herself fixed up.

But this night to remember took a turn for the worse.

All of a a sudden I started feeling kind of nauseated.

And then I was okay.

A day or two later, the very next Sunday, I started up again, hard and heavy.

She eventually was hospitalized and underwent a lot of medical tests to try to determine what was causing the illness.

I was starting to feel the tingling in my feet later in the summer.

It was full-blown.

I mean, it was, I couldn't feel anything from above the knee down.

It was very painful.

She couldn't walk.

And in fact, there was nerve damage, and damage to her muscles was quite severe.

She was very, very sick and fairly close to death.

With Carol's situation dire, family members fear for her life.

And to some, like Carol's aunt Frida, it feels like deja vu.

Marie was taking special care of Frank when he was not feeling well.

One of the things she did was volunteer to give him injections.

And Frida had thought at the time, that just doesn't seem quite

right.

But it wasn't a major thing.

But now, with Carol going from hospital to hospital and no conclusions about what was wrong with her, Frida was reminded of that.

She contacted Mike Hilley to find out, was

Marie giving Carol any of those injections.

Mike immediately called Carol in the hospital and asked her, Carol, has mama given you shots and her mother was standing there in the room?

And Carol said, no.

And he said, do you promise?

And I said, no.

And so the next thing I know, my brother called him and told him that I was receiving shots.

When Mike reaches out to hospital staff, doctors say they never authorized Marie to give Carol injections.

It started at the hospital.

She came in there and gave me an injection telling me that it would help me to walk again.

And so I let her do it.

It's at this point Mike Hilley informs the Anniston Police Department about the injections and is shocked when detectives reveal they've been monitoring his mother for some time.

She had written a lot of bad checks.

It was much easier for people to pass bad checks in the 1970s.

It might take them a few days before the police caught up with them.

It was a sort of physical paper trail process.

On September 19th, 1979, police confront Marie Hilley.

My mom was up in the room with me that they had put me in, and I saw some men out in the hallway.

And she came in and told me, she goes, I've got to go back to Aniston.

It was a bad check written and I've got to go straighten that out.

So they were arresting her as what was really going on.

With Marie detained, Carol is admitted to the University of Alabama Hospital in Birmingham and is assigned a new doctor to examine her.

The doctor, thinking that this was a situation of unauthorized injection, examined her.

He looked at her hair, the roots of her hair, and then he looked at her fingernails.

He had noticed my fingernails

had a little line across them, and you could feel it if you put your fingernail across it.

To the untrained eye, the lines appear harmless, but it's a startling sign of something extremely serious.

He had the experience that nobody else had to recognize arsenic poisoning.

And he saw various telltale signs that led him to believe this girl is being poisoned.

But was Marie really capable of poisoning her own daughter?

To find out, doctors order blood work on Carol to test for the presence of arsenic.

It never went into my mind that she was using that and that that was being harmful.

They found such significant levels.

in Carol's blood that there was no question she had been poisoned.

There's no other way you could get that much arsenic into your system.

Back in Anniston, police are now forced to grapple with the possibility that Carol's own mother may be responsible.

The idea that a good southern woman would be trying to harm her children was unthinkable.

Would a mother sit there and watch her daughter suffer excruciating pain, being the one who's causing the pain?

One question raised by Marie's son, Michael, proves to be particularly disturbing.

Mike sent a letter to the district attorney's office.

He laid out what had happened to his father.

My brother started realizing that maybe he didn't just die of natural causes.

My mom was having an excuse for his sickness.

Of course, nobody paid any attention because nobody really thought anything at that point.

The coroner called me and said they think she may have poisoned her daughter and her husband, and we're getting an order to dig up her her husband.

Two weeks after Marie's arrest, Frank Hilley's body is exhumed.

Through it all, Marie maintains her innocence.

When they asked Marie why she gave Carol an injection, she was full of concern for her daughter.

She said, she was so uncomfortable with the nausea that I wanted to help her, and so I gave her a shot with some anti-nausea medications.

Detectives aren't so sure, and instead believe the truth lies in Marie's desire to maintain her social image.

She was out spending money that we didn't have.

She's always impeccably dressed, so money apparently got spent pretty fast on lots of clothing.

With expensive taste and no money to back it up, detectives believe Marie put a new plan into action.

She took out a $25,000 insurance policy on Carol.

Parents very rarely take out an insurance policy on their children.

We all expect our children to outlive us.

And the logic in taking out an insurance policy on a child

is just

not there.

Though Marie was out of money, could she really be responsible for poisoning her own family?

I asked my aunt, do you think mom did this to me?

And she said, yes, I do.

And I knew that back then, that answered so many questions, but it still raised that many more.

Coming up, the people of Anniston fear there may have been more victims.

Police officers were getting tested.

I believe some of the neighbors got so sick.

Where Marie was, the sickness followed.

And Marie makes a run for it.

That she was able to escape.

I couldn't believe that that happened.

I was like, oh my god, what is this crazy woman doing?

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In October of 1979, 46-year-old Southern mother Marie Hilly is behind bars for check fraud.

But after a diagnosis revealed the presence of arsenic in Marie's sick 19-year-old daughter, Carol, detectives have reason to believe this charismatic Alabama mother is guilty of a far more terrible crime.

I've been in law enforcement for 30 years, but I've never had a case that more closely resembled the portrayal of evil than this case.

Police also suspect that Carol may not be Marie's first victim.

There was a strong suspicion she had murdered her husband.

On October 3rd, 1979 an autopsy is performed on the exhumed body of marie's husband frank hilly

frank had been dead for three or four years by that point the body apparently was still pretty well preserved when the toxicology tests come back they confirm everyone's worst fears it determined there's no question he was killed

by arsenic poison

the hair the fingernails frank's body was loaded with arsenic.

As investigators begin to build their case against Marie, her sister-in-law, Frida, steps in once again.

Frida Adcock, the sister of Frank, was adamant that Marie killed him.

And she set out to prove it.

She went looking around Marie's house.

And in the cellar, in a box, she found a pill bottle she took it to the police tested it they found there was arsenic

on october 9th 1979 marie is formally charged for the attempted murder of her daughter carol hilly several months later she is also indicted for poisoning her husband frank

Arsenic poisoning is a terrible way to die.

You find yourself weakening, unable to perform the simplest of functions.

Your fingers become numb.

You can't feel your feet, difficult to walk, and it gets worse and worse and worse.

Police suspect Marie may have gotten the arsenic from a common household product.

such as rat poison and administered it through injections as well as other methods.

During Carol's hospital stays, Marie was feeding baby food to her.

And it was believed that there were portions of arsenic in the baby food.

Digging into their records, detectives learned that even police were not immune to Marie's bizarre actions.

In the years following Frank Hilley's death in 1975,

Marie had often summoned officers to her home with claims that her life was in danger.

She loved attention, and she would report that people were following her, that people had threatened her.

She told me that it was related to incidences with my dad, like gambling debts and things like that.

My dad didn't gamble like that.

But each time police investigated, they found no evidence of the threats Marie claimed to have received.

They came to the conclusion this woman is just making this stuff up.

She's lying to us.

As police look back on their interactions with Marie, another troubling possibility emerges.

Did Marie go so far as to poison police officers in her home?

She was typical southern hospitality.

They come in the house.

She offers them something to eat.

They had no reason not to accept her hospitality.

Now, the officers did not become suspicious.

Anything was wrong.

They just suddenly realized they were sick.

Little did they know

that

everything she gave them to eat or drink was laced with arsenic.

There's a lot of sweet ladies,

you know, but she just wasn't one of them.

While she waits in jail for her trial to begin, detectives continue to investigate other possible poisoning cases involving Marie.

We suspected then, and in hindsight, we really knew that she was indiscriminate in regards to the people that she poisoned.

She poisoned relatives, neighbors, business associates.

You get enough people and the reaction is the same to visiting Marie.

Same types of stories stories from them.

So where Marie was, the sickness followed.

She poisoned people for pleasure,

for profit.

She'd had a motive in most cases with her poisoning, but not always.

She was an enigma, and she was impossible to truly understand.

Marie remains in jail for two two months as her attorneys attempt to secure her release until the start of her trial.

She finally makes bail.

I think it was only about $14,000.

So her lawyers get her out of jail.

Now, her attorney, Wilfred Lane, didn't want anybody contacting her, seeing her, have anything to do with her.

So he took her over to

Homewood.

Alabama, and he put her up in a hotel there.

But on November 18th, 1979, when her lawyer arrives at the hotel to visit with his client, he makes an alarming discovery.

She was missing.

Her attorney finds this note, similar to a kidnap note warning him that she has been taken away.

Don't try to follow her, that kind of thing.

But as police compare the note with a sample of Marie's own handwriting, a kidnapping looks less and less likely.

That handwriting looked similar.

And so everybody figured she had just run away and she had left the note herself.

She didn't fool anybody with that one.

With Marie on the run, police begin a massive search.

In those days, the manhunt consisted of calling the FBI, putting her picture, description out

to all the FBI offices, all the police stations.

We had people looking for her in every state in the United States.

As the days turn into months, there is a growing concern that Marie may never be seen again.

For police, it was very frustrating.

You could see it in their eyes.

You could hear it in their voices.

The system had let her get away,

and now, how are they going to find her?

Coming up.

A case of false identity turns the investigation on its head.

We got this person claiming to be somebody that they're not.

All the stories this person told to her friends and co-workers didn't make a lot of sense.

And that just added to the suspicion as to what really is going on here.

I got to checking around and I'm beginning to think, wow,

we got something here.

What is it?

It was one of those things where anyone that goes to that length to pull off something like that is just beyond belief.

In the fall of 1979, all of Alabama is on high alert for an unlikely fugitive, 46-year-old Marie Hilly.

They had told me that she had gone to jail, that she got bonded out.

She left and disappeared.

I mean, how crazy is that?

We had walked across every cottonfield, corn patch, major city throughout the United States.

I've sent leads to Canada because at one time she had said she'd like to live in the mountains in Canada.

We were truly covering all bases.

More than three years pass with no sign of Marie.

Then, over a thousand miles away, a seemingly unrelated event is about to rock the investigation.

January 1983.

Police in Keene, New Hampshire have just received a strange allegation.

The boss for a company in Brattlesboro contacts a person he knows at the Keene Police Department and says, there's something strange going on here.

We got this.

We got this person claiming to be somebody that they're not.

Police are told a woman named Robbie Holman had begun working for the company in October of 1980.

Robbie claimed to be from Texas and married to a man named John Homan.

Robbie smiled a lot.

She was talkative with coworkers.

She seemed very like a gentle person.

But in the summer of 1982, Robbie told co-workers some alarming news.

She goes, I've got this rare blood disease and I've got to go to this particular doctor in Dallas who will treat me and I must be treated or I won't live long

and so I've got to go

the manager says a few months later a woman named Terry Martin showed up at the company claiming to be Robbie's twin sister She said, Robbie passed away down in Texas.

The girls look at each other and say, no way.

That's Robbie Hannon.

I don't care what she says.

Police are unsure what to make of the strange story.

But when they comb through a copy of Robbie's obituary, they notice numerous discrepancies.

The obituary said that she donated her body to the Sacred Heart Hospital or something in Tyler, Texas.

So I got to checking around and found there's no sacred heart.

One by one, I was able to discount every single claim that was made within that obituary.

Why would anybody do what she has done here?

I'm beginning to think, gee whiz, it seems like this is someone that's trying to conceal her identity.

Investigators quickly notify the FBI for assistance and bring Terry Martin in for questioning.

We took her to the police department and she says, My name is Audrey Marie Hilley.

I'm from Annison, Alabama, and I wanted for some bad checks.

The name didn't mean anything to us, so we obtained the basic information, date of birth, that type of information that we could use to run computer checks.

When Agent Steele runs Marie's information through the police database, he uncorks his suspect's frightening past.

The teletype machine just starts shaking and rumbling and the paper's rolling out and it tells him, you've got a badly wanted fugitive that she's wanted for murder.

That was a surprise.

She didn't look like the murdering type.

It was a soft-spoken, small, polite southern woman.

When detectives question Marie about the charges, she refuses to own up.

She was willing to talk about everything else, the masquerading, et cetera, but she never came back to the charge that she murdered Frank and attempted to murder her daughter, Carol.

Police extradite Marie back to Anniston, Alabama to face charges.

Meanwhile, they turned to John Homan, the man who'd married Marie Hilly, believing she was really Robbie Hannon.

My concern at that point in time became John Homan.

How much did John Homan know?

John says he first met Robbie Hannan in February of 1980 at a bar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

They developed a relationship.

She, however, was not crazy about Florida.

And she had always had the idea

that it would be nice to be somewhere where there had snow.

So they moved to New Hampshire.

They get a lovely little cottage in a place called Marlow, New Hampshire.

And they're living

happily.

But John tells police that after they married in May of 1981, their happiness did not last long.

In the summer of 1982, Robbie said she'd have to go to Dallas to stay with her twin sister and be treated for a rare blood disease.

Yeah, John's easygoing.

He says, okay.

So she travels to Dallas, Texas.

John tells police that several months later, he received a phone call from his wife's twin sister, Terry Martin.

She tells tells John that she is sorry to be the bearer of bad news,

but Robbie has died.

She said, I'm leaving now to come see you.

That's what Robbie wanted me to do.

So in a couple of days, she shows up on John's doorstep.

She had changed her hair color.

and put her makeup and stuff on differently, but her face was still the same.

She looks the world like Robbie Hannan because she is Robbie Hannan, who is really Marie Hilley.

So John looks at her and says, come on in.

So she comes in and she takes up residence as Terry Martin.

When police ask John if he's aware that Robbie and Terry are the same person, he's taken aback.

John says, no, it just can't be.

He was not about to be convinced.

Eventually, he accepted it, but then his strongest reaction was when we talked about Maria being wanted for the murder of her husband, Frank, and her daughter, Carol.

He felt that that just can't be true.

I know this woman.

You had to feel sorry for John Holman.

He was pretty well duped, but he stood by her all the way through.

Coming up, prosecutors attempt to convince a jury that the petite southern woman before them is not what she appears.

The charm, the intelligence, the nice social graces combine with some really evil impulses.

And the case takes one final, unbelievable turn.

The note says, I'm leaving the country.

The story that I thought couldn't get crazier is now crazier.

Will it ever end?

To many in Anniston, Alabama, Marie Hilley seemed like the embodiment of a southern bell.

She had class, beauty, and respectability.

But prosecutors believe that under that carefully cultivated image lurks a manipulative killer.

She literally could have taken the script from any of the soap operas.

It involved twins, a mistaken identity.

It involved moving from one part of the country to the other, one of the twins dying.

She was not stupid,

and you have to be quite clever to pull off what she did.

As Marie awaits her trial in an Alabama jail cell, few people rush to her defense.

I went to see her at the jail, and she's got tears rolling down her eyes.

And she says, you know, I love you.

And I'm like,

yeah, buddy, I know.

I can see it in your face.

And anyway, I was nice to her.

I felt bad.

She's in jail.

She's not going anywhere this time.

Through it all, one man stands by her side.

Her husband, John, still

remained loyal to her.

He moved down there, he established a residency.

He was going to stay with her until she got out.

On May 30th, 1983, Marie's trial for the murder of her first husband, Frank Hilley, and the attempted murder of her daughter, Carol, gets underway.

Prosecutors say the motive for the two poisonings boiled down to greed.

Marie wanted the money from the insurance policies.

She was a person who expected that the world owes her a little bit more than what she was being

One of the things that I think was very persuasive to the jury were those vials that were found in the basement of the home that had traces of arsenic in them.

Why would you put rat poison in a little sealed up bottle like that?

When it comes time for Marie's attorney to present their case, they argue that someone, anyone other than Marie, was behind the poisoning.

They wanted to play on that belief that a good southern woman could not have done this.

It had to have been somebody with an ulterior motive, somebody who was trying to make her look bad.

On June 7th, 1983, the jury retires to deliberate Marie's fate.

The verdict was guilty on all charges.

Guilty of murder, guilty of attempted murder.

She received a life sentence for murdering Frank

and 20 years for attempting to murder Carol Hilley.

So she goes to jail for the rest of her life.

Except that Marie Hilley is not the kind of person who's just going to sit in jail and rot away.

Marie Hilly

was a charming person.

She begins to charm the assistant warden.

Eventually, she tells the warden her story and how she'd been framed on all this stuff.

And the warden believes every word she's saying.

Less than four years go by and the assistant warden decides Marie Hilly is a good candidate for a three-day pass.

This means she can leave the prison as long as she comes back in three days.

On Friday, February 19th, 1987, after three years in jail, Marie is picked up by her loyal husband, John Holman, and the couple checks into a boarding house in Anniston, Alabama.

Marie is with John for those three days.

It's time for her to report back to the prison.

And Marie says, John, before I leave, I really want to visit my mother's grave, and that's just two blocks from the street.

So I'll meet you at the Waffle House on the corner over here.

At the Waffle House, John waits patiently for Marie, but she never appears.

He quickly realizes something is very wrong.

John goes back to their room, and he notices there's a note sticking out under the pillow.

The note says,

I love you, John.

You're the only love of my life, but...

I can't go back to that prison.

I'm leaving the country.

So here we we go again.

History has repeated itself.

She was gone again.

John picks up the phone and calls the sheriff.

A massive show of law enforcement hits the streets and surrounding communities.

What really bothered me was how could this woman manipulate the penal system in Alabama to the point where they let her out on unsupervised leaves from the jail.

I couldn't believe that that happened.

Three days go by.

Nobody gets any lead on where Marie is or where she's gone.

Weather is brutal, brutal, wet and cold, icy.

Marie didn't dress for winter weather.

We've all speculated now what happened to her.

John Holman was still here.

He didn't know.

Everybody is wondering, where is she?

On the fourth day of Marie's disappearance, detectives get a break in the case.

A woman who lived in Blue Mountain, the part of Anniston where Marie had grown up, looked out the window and she saw someone lying almost still on the porch.

It seemed she had just traveled for miles through mountainous terrain.

She's bleeding.

She's bruised.

Her clothing is torn from her body.

The lady calls the police immediately.

The police respond and call an ambulance.

When EMTs arrive, they realize the woman is Marie Hilly.

They load Marie up, put her in the ambulance.

as they're taking her to Anniston Memorial Hospital.

she dies before they get to the hospital of hypothermia.

Nobody ever got to question her.

Nobody ever knew what happened.

While Marie's death is the final chapter of an unbelievable story, more than 30 years later, the impact of her twisted behavior is still being felt.

I've gone through a stage of hating her,

and now I'm to the stage I really don't care.

I live in my life it's like that was someone in another life that is gone and over.

People are still curious what would cause one human being to do that to another human being especially if they come from a culture where it surprises you.

A typical nice southern lady is just our local legend and I hope we don't have another one that comes along.

One is enough.

Carol Hilley has virtually no lingering effects from the poisoning.

Marie Hilley is buried next to her husband, Frank, in Alabama.

For more information on Snapped, go to oxygen.com.

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