While divorce may be an attractive alternative to murder for hire in most cases, some women do not have the emotional and financial resources to go through a divorce. A contested divorce can take more than a year to resolve. After attorneys drain the couple's finances, the woman will be left with little money to get on with her life. Additionally, a discrete and well-timed hit protects a husband from the pain of discovering that he is no longer wanted. A truly skilled assassin can take his target painlessly in an instant, without any suffering. The end of a marriage can potentially ruin a woman's life, but if her husband can be taken out quickly and cleanly, it can be a new beginning for her.Read the whole thing. I thought it was hilarious.
H/T: Rev. Cary Gordon
Kind of tangentially related to this, I've been wondering about the extent to which the ready availability of divorce has reduced the "murder" rate, or at least boosted life expectancy. I have a habit of reading Wikipedia's front page every morning, and read a lot of the biographies. For people prior to about 1940, I've been struck by the high death rates of their spouses - most people who didn't die young themselves, seemed to have gone through two or three spouses due to *their* early deaths. Sure, they are almost all given as various natural causes from various poorly-defined diseases (except for the spouses of certain actual convicted murderers, of course). But, in the old days, if your disliked spouse fell ill it would have been soooooo easy to kill them through passive neglect, and nobody could ever pin anything on you. Or, you could call in the *doctor*, who most likely was going to bleed them, or feed them mercury compounds, or do something else regrettable, and end up killing them for you! All perfectly legal!
ReplyDeleteBut then, the advent of better hygeine, antibiotics, and surgery that actually worked made neglect during their numerous life-threatening illnesses no longer a practical way of getting rid of unwanted spouses. And so, instead of going for the hit-man route, we've gone to high divorce rates, instead!
And along those same lines: How Many Orphans Were There?".
Microbes make the best hit men? Hmm. Well, they certainly get paid less.
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