Petit

• Presenting herself as a concerned mother and grieving widow, she was interviewed on “Good Things Utah” in April 2023.
• A few weeks later, on May 8, 2023, Richins was arrested and charged with killing her husband, Eric.
• An autopsy showed that the 39-year-old man died of a massive fentanyl overdose.
• And what occluded anxieties or longings do people confront or exorcise as they consume these stories of mayhem and murder?

‘Sleeping in a serpent’s bed’

• It also inspired the Elizabethan domestic tragedy “Arden of Faversham” and at least one ballad.
• The crime occurred on Valentine’s Day 1551, when Alice Arden conspired with her lover and some hired assassins to kill her husband, Thomas, at his own dinner table.
• In 16th-century England, where the majority of adults were married, women effectively became their husbands’ legal “subjects” upon marriage.

‘Like a fierce and bloody Medea’

• In March 2002, Yates was sentenced to life in prison, but a 2006 appeal found her not guilty by reason of insanity.
• She now resides in a mental health facility from which she routinely refuses to apply for release.
• Neither Vincent nor Yates had been involved in any previous crimes or scandals, but both had exhibited signs of spiritual or mental instability.
• Yet both were excoriated in contemporary media as monsters: guilty of crimes against nature, their husbands and their offspring.
• These events are unquestionably horrific, but the passage of two decades may have wrought some changes in the public’s response.

A queasy sort of comfort

• The media in every period are extremely skilled at weaponizing – and capitalizing on – worries about the family’s capacity to provide a safe haven in a turbulent world.
• In early modern England, highly gendered ideas about the home as a reflection of the state politicized anxieties about order, stability and the family as a patriarchal institution.
• Or the appeal may lie in the idea that any of us might, in fact, be capable of such things.