3 Shocking Life Insurance Stories That Will Leave You Speechless

She was born on a November day in 1859 in Selbu, a small farming community in the Norwegian highlands — the youngest of eight children belonging to a stonemason and his wife. Her birth name was Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth. She grew up knowing hard labor, cold winters, and the particular hunger that comes not from having nothing, but from watching wealthier people have everything. In 1881, at the age of twenty-two, she boarded a ship and sailed for America.

The America she arrived in was the America of the Gilded Age — loud, expanding, unevenly prosperous, and full of Norwegian immigrants who had made the same journey before her. She settled in Chicago, changed her name to the softer, more American-sounding Belle, and set about building the life she had crossed an ocean to find. It would take her a few years to discover the most efficient method of building it.

In 1884, Belle married a Norwegian-American man named Mads Ditlev Anton Sorenson. They opened a confectionery shop together on the North Side of Chicago. The store burned down not long after. They collected the insurance. They built a house. The house burned down. They collected the insurance again. Nobody seems to have looked very hard at the pattern.

They had children, or acquired them — historical accounts differ on how many were biological and how many were fostered. What is clearer is that several died young. Each time, Belle filed an insurance claim.

Then Mads himself became unwell. He had been under a doctor's care for an enlarged heart, which made what happened next easier to explain and harder to prove. On July 30, 1900, Mads Sorenson died at home, reportedly of heart failure. His doctor was not entirely satisfied with the explanation, but no autopsy was ordered. Belle collected on two life insurance policies.

With the combined insurance money, Belle Gunness moved out of Chicago and purchased a forty-eight-acre farm on the outskirts of La Porte, Indiana — a quiet county seat about sixty miles from the city. She was now a woman of property, and she intended to use that property well.

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In April of 1902, Belle remarried. Her new husband was a Norwegian widower named Peter Gunness, who had recently lost his own wife and arrived at the La Porte farm with two young daughters in tow. One of Peter's daughters died shortly after they moved in. The death was not questioned. Then, eight months into the marriage, Peter Gunness himself died.

According to Belle, a heavy meat grinder had fallen from a high shelf and struck him in the head. She described the accident in tearful detail to neighbors who came to help. The coroner, examining the wound, reportedly described the circumstances as "a little queer" — the injury didn't quite match the story — but ruled the death accidental nonetheless. Belle dried her tears and collected Peter's life insurance policy: three thousand dollars.

She was pregnant at the time of Peter's death. The child, a boy named Philip, was born in December of 1902. Belle was now the sole legal owner of the farm, the sole surviving adult in the household, and a woman who had now seen four husbands, a business partner's worth of children, and two properties all produce insurance payouts in the space of fewer than twenty years.

She hired a farmhand. She raised her children. She told neighbors and anyone who asked that her eldest foster daughter, a girl named Jennie Olsen, had been sent away to a school in Los Angeles to further her education. No one had any reason to doubt this. Jennie was simply gone.

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Around 1906, Belle Gunness began placing advertisements in matrimonial columns. These were not unusual for the time — lonely-hearts notices ran regularly in newspapers, particularly in immigrant communities where unmarried people of similar backgrounds sought partners. What was unusual was the specificity and precision of Belle's ads, and the newspapers she chose to target: the major Scandinavian-language papers of the Midwest, publications with wide circulation among Norwegian and Swedish immigrant communities who were often relatively prosperous, relatively isolated, and relatively trusting of a familiar name and a familiar language.

One of her most frequently cited advertisements read:

Men responded. They were lonely, many of them — bachelors, widowers, men who had built modest fortunes in trades or farming and found themselves without partners in middle age. The promise of a Norwegian widow with her own land, her own farm, looking for a gentleman of similar means, was genuinely appealing. Belle wrote back in warm, romantic Norwegian, describing the beauty of the La Porte countryside, the friendliness of the people, the foods she would cook. She asked about their finances — naturally, as any sensible woman joining fortunes with a man would need to know what those fortunes were. And she always, always, required a personal visit.

The men came. They liquidated their bank accounts first, as Belle invariably suggested. They sold their farms, cashed in their savings, transferred their assets to cash. Then they made the journey to Indiana, to the farm on McClung Road, to the comely widow who had written such warm letters.

They were never seen again.

Among the men who came to La Porte and vanished:

What happened to the men who arrived at the farm, investigators would later learn from the confession of Belle's farmhand, Ray Lamphere, who revealed the details on his deathbed in December 1909. As soon as Belle had obtained a victim's money, she would strike them over the head with a hammer or hatchet, ensuring they were dead. She would then carry them to the basement of the farmhouse, where she would dismember the bodies — removing the head, the arms, the legs. The parts were packed into gunnysacks. Some of the heads, according to one account, were disposed of in the outhouse. The rest were buried around the property: in the hog pen, in the garden, beneath the soil of the forty-eight-acre farm that sat quietly six miles outside La Porte.

While all of this was happening, Belle was also maintaining the fiction of a normal life. She attended church. She spoke to neighbors. She told anyone who asked about her departed houseguests that they had come to see about work, or to visit, and had moved on. No one stayed long at her farm, she would say. Triflers, mostly. Unsuitable men.

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The beginning of the end came, ironically, from a letter. Asle Helgelien — the brother of Andrew, the South Dakota farmer who had liquidated his savings and traveled to La Porte after receiving Belle's "Come prepared to stay forever" letter — began writing to Belle asking where his brother was. Belle's responses were evasive, then contradictory. Asle wrote to the La Porte sheriff. The sheriff paid a visit to the farm. Belle, sensing the ground shifting beneath her, took a series of actions that in retrospect look like the methodical preparations of a woman about to disappear.

On April 27, 1908, Belle Gunness visited a lawyer in La Porte and updated her will. She told the lawyer that she had recently fired her farmhand Ray Lamphere, who had developed an obsessive romantic attachment to her, and that she was frightened — that Lamphere had threatened her life. She spoke of receiving menacing letters. The lawyer noted her concerns. She left his office having established, in at least one legal record, that she had a clearly identifiable enemy with a motive to harm her.

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The following night — in the early hours of April 28, 1908 — the Gunness farmhouse burned to the ground.

Neighbors who saw the glow on the horizon rushed to McClung Road and found the structure fully engulfed. They hammered on the locked doors. They shouted. No one stirred inside. The farmhouse burned until there was almost nothing left of it.

When investigators sifted through the ashes afterward, they found four bodies arranged in the basement ruins. Three were children: Myrtle Sorenson, eleven; Lucy Sorenson, nine; and Philip Gunness, five — Belle's children, all of them. The fourth body was an adult woman's. It was headless.

The official assumption was that the woman was Belle — that she had perished in the fire, along with her children. But the body was wrong. Belle Gunness in life had been a formidably large woman — nearly six feet tall, estimated between 200 and 280 pounds, a woman neighbors described as capable of lifting a 300-pound piano unassisted. The body in the basement was far too small. Several medical examiners who examined it said so. And without a head, there was no way to make a positive identification.

The farmhand Ray Lamphere was arrested for arson and murder. He denied the murder charge. And as investigators began to dig the farm — and the digging of the Gunness property became one of the most extraordinary public events of the era, with schoolboys skipping classes to watch on their bicycles, and tourists arriving from across Indiana to observe the excavation — what emerged from the soil made the question of whether Belle had survived the fire seem almost secondary.

Investigators found body after body after body.

They found them in the hog pen. In the garden. Wrapped in burlap, dismembered, buried in shallow graves throughout the property. They found the remains of Jennie Olsen — the foster daughter Belle had told neighbors was away at school in Los Angeles. They found Andrew Helgelien, whose brother's persistent inquiries had helped trigger the investigation. They found men whose families had been waiting months and years for word. Altogether, investigators recovered the remains of more than forty individuals from the farm at the end of McClung Road.

The trial of Ray Lamphere in November 1908 convicted him of arson but cleared him of murder — because without identifying the headless body as Belle's, it could not be proven that she had died in the fire, and therefore could not be proven that someone had murdered her. He was sentenced to prison, where his health rapidly declined. He died on December 30, 1909.

Before he died, Lamphere made a confession to a minister named Reverend E. A. Schell, who made it public on January 14, 1910. In the confession, Lamphere admitted that he had helped Belle bury at least one victim and had witnessed her chloroform another man after felling him with a hatchet. He also confirmed what the investigators had increasingly suspected: Belle Gunness had not died in the fire. She had set it herself, using the headless body of another woman as a decoy, and she had walked away. She had withdrawn the bulk of her money from her bank accounts in the days beforehand. She had established her alibi — the jealous, threatening farmhand — in a lawyer's office the day before the blaze. The fire had not killed Belle Gunness. It had freed her.

She was never found. In 2008, exactly one hundred years after the fire, DNA testing was conducted on the remains from the basement in an attempt to determine whether they belonged to Belle. The results were inconclusive.

As of today, Belle Gunness has never been officially confirmed dead, never been charged with a crime, and never been found. The street leading to her farm — once named Gunness Road — was quietly renamed by neighbors who wanted no further association with what had happened there. In La Porte, children still grow up hearing her story. The local historical museum has an entire wall from one of her farm sheds, its surface carved with names and addresses from the tourists of 1908, who came by the thousands to watch the digging, as though the most extraordinary murder site in American history was also a kind of attraction.

In a way, it was. It still is.

John Darwin had a problem that a great many people have had, and that a very small number of people have ever tried to solve the way he did. He owed money — a lot of it, accumulated in the way that financial disasters usually accumulate: gradually, then suddenly, through a combination of ambition, optimism, poor judgment, and the kind of quiet escalation that feels manageable right up until the moment it isn't.

Darwin was born in Prudhoe, Northumberland, in the early 1950s. He had spent much of his adult life in honest, respectable employment. He taught at a college in County Durham for eighteen years. He left teaching for Barclays bank. He later became a prison officer at HM Prison Holme House. He married Anne Stephenson in 1973. They had two sons, Mark and Anthony. They were, to all observable appearances, an ordinary northern English family.

The problem began around the turn of the millennium, when John and Anne — who had supplemented their incomes by renting bedsits across twelve properties in County Durham — purchased two additional houses in the small coastal town of Seaton Carew. The buy-to-let property market, which had seemed reliably profitable, turned against them. The debt accumulated. Then more debt. The total eventually reached somewhere in the region of £700,000 — an almost incomprehensible sum for a former prison officer and a doctor's receptionist — including substantial mortgage obligations and the personal debts of a man who had tried to build a property empire on a prison officer's salary, complete with a luxury car bearing a personalised number plate.

Bankruptcy loomed. Not the abstract, manageable kind — the real, courthouse kind, the kind that ends careers and reputations and a certain comfortable understanding of oneself as a competent person. John Darwin could not face it. And sometime in 2001 or early 2002, he formed a plan.

He would die. Not literally — not permanently — but officially. He would disappear at sea in a canoeing accident, be presumed drowned, and Anne would collect the insurance money. They would use the money to clear the worst of the debts. Then, eventually, they would find a way to start again somewhere else, somewhere warm, somewhere no one knew them.

It was, by any rational assessment, a deranged idea. It was also, for a while, a remarkably effective one.

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On the morning of March 21, 2002, John Darwin drove to the seafront at Seaton Carew, lifted his red kayak from his car, and carried it to the water's edge. The North Sea was unusually calm that day — almost glassy — which would later puzzle the investigators and the coastguard, who found it difficult to explain how an experienced canoeist could have come to grief in such conditions.

He paddled out. He did not come back.

The alarm was raised when he failed to appear at work later that day. Anne reported him missing. What followed was a genuinely significant search operation: an RAF helicopter equipped with heat-seeking equipment swept the coastline, five Royal National Lifeboat Institution vessels launched into the North Sea, two coastguard teams combed the shore. They searched for hours, covering substantial stretches of the Durham coast. They found a double-ended paddle floating on the water. They found the wreckage of the red kayak.

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They did not find John Darwin, because John Darwin was not in the sea. He was lying in a tent he had pitched further along the coast, listening to the sound of the search, waiting for it to end.

When the search was called off and the presumption of death set in, a death certificate was issued. This allowed Anne Darwin, now playing the role of the grieving widow with what would later emerge as extraordinary composure and commitment, to begin making claims. She collected £91,000 from John's life insurance policies and pension. She collected £137,000 from a mortgage protection policy. The total of approximately £250,000 was enough to pay off the mortgage on their home in Seaton Carew.

Anne told their sons, Mark and Anthony, that their father was gone. Both young men believed her completely. They grieved. They adjusted to the absence. They went on with their lives, carrying the weight of a father lost at sea.

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The tent, it turned out, was only the beginning. John Darwin needed somewhere more permanent to live. He needed to be close enough to Anne to coordinate their plan, but invisible to anyone else. The solution he arrived at — and which, when it eventually emerged, would cause grown investigators to pause and confirm that yes, this is what actually happened — was to rent the bedsit next door.

The house at 4 The Cliff, Seaton Carew was the Darwin family home. The house at 3 The Cliff was an adjoining property. John rented a room there. Between the two properties, there was a connecting door — a passage that allowed him to move between his secret existence and his wife's without ever stepping outside.

For months, then years, this was John Darwin's life. He would read in his room. He would watch television. He would slip through the connecting passage and have dinner with Anne, and they would discuss the progress of their plan, and he would return. He sent her emails — flirtatious, romantic emails, the kind of correspondence that would later be produced as evidence in court, and that would destroy Anne's defence that she had been coerced into the scheme. The emails were not the correspondence of a woman being pressured. They were the emails of two people with a shared secret, a shared future, and a mutual understanding of what they were doing and why.

Anne, meanwhile, maintained the performance of the grieving widow. She spoke to her sons regularly. She cried at the appropriate moments. She accepted the condolences of friends and neighbours, people who brought her food and sat with her and offered the comfort that people offer the bereaved. Her sons Mark and Anthony came to visit. They sat in the family home at 4 The Cliff — the same house where, on the other side of a connecting door, their father was quietly reading a novel or watching the news — and they talked with their mother about their grief, about moving forward, about making sense of a loss that was, in truth, not a loss at all.

In February 2003, John moved back into the family home entirely. He grew a beard, a substantial one, which changed his appearance enough that he felt reasonably confident of not being immediately recognized in public. He and Anne, careful to never be seen together by anyone who might know them, lived in the house as husband and wife, with the peculiar domesticity of two people running an elaborate lie.

John, for his part, was not idle. Using a birth certificate he had located for another John Darwin who had died in infancy — a common method of fraudulent identity acquisition at the time — he applied for and obtained a new passport under a slightly modified identity. He and Anne began planning the final phase: leaving England, moving somewhere warm and unfamiliar, starting the life they had committed insurance fraud and family betrayal to make possible. They settled on Panama.

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In 2006, John and Anne Darwin flew to Panama City to scout locations and properties. At a real estate agency, they were assisted by a relocation agent named Mario Vilar. At the end of the meeting, Vilar asked if he could take a photograph of the happy couple to remember them by — a common enough gesture in the property business, a souvenir of a deal being made, a relationship being established.

Before John or Anne could object, the shutter had clicked.

The photograph showed two people — a bearded man and a middle-aged woman — smiling in the offices of a Panama real estate agency. They looked relaxed. They looked happy. They looked like a couple with a future ahead of them. The photograph was uploaded, eventually, to the agency's website.

Anne returned to England to finalize the details of their move. John stayed in Panama, sending her long, warm emails describing his life on the balcony, his plans, his excitement about their future. He was, by his own later account, enjoying himself.

Then the photograph appeared on a search result. Then someone saw it.

On December 1, 2007, John Darwin walked into the West End Central police station in London. He was wearing what appeared to be hospital clothing. He approached the duty officer and made one of the more memorable statements in British criminal history:

He claimed he had no memory of who he was or where he had been. He said he had been wandering, disoriented, lost to himself. He presented a version of events in which the past five and a half years were simply blank — a man who had stepped into his canoe one March morning and stepped back out of the fog of amnesia in a London police station five years later, with no account of the time between.

The police were skeptical. They were significantly more skeptical when, on investigating Anne, they discovered she was at that moment in Panama.

What neither John nor Anne could have known — or perhaps could have prevented even if they had known — was what had happened when that vacation photograph appeared online. Their sons, Mark and Anthony Darwin, had seen it.

The same two men who had spent five and a half years grieving a father they believed had drowned in the North Sea — who had built their adult lives on that foundation of loss, who had cried at his memorial, who had watched their mother accept condolences she did not deserve — had seen a photograph of their dead father grinning in a Panama real estate office. Standing next to their mother, who was apparently very much in Panama, and very much aware of where he was.

They contacted the police.

Anne Darwin was located in Panama City and arrested. The investigation that followed unravelled the scheme with a thoroughness that the Darwins' five-year investment in the lie could not withstand. Police found the connecting door between the two properties. They found the emails — the long, romantic, flirtatious correspondence between John and his "widowed" wife, years of it, none of it resembling the communications of a woman under duress. They found the fraudulent passport application. They found the insurance claims, the pension payments, the mortgage protection payouts, all of it.

In court, Anne's defence was marital coercion — she had been forced into the scheme by her domineering husband. The prosecution introduced the emails. The jury deliberated for four hours. They found Anne Darwin guilty on all fifteen counts of fraud and money laundering.

John, who had pleaded guilty, received six years and three months. Anne, who had maintained her innocence and put the court through the full weight of a contested trial, received six and a half years. The detective who led the investigation, speaking outside the court, described Anne as a "compulsive liar" and said that what she had done to her own sons — allowing them to grieve a father who was eating dinner next door — was "absolutely appalling."

Mark and Anthony Darwin initially refused all contact with both parents. Anne and John divorced while in prison, in 2012. The family that had existed before March 21, 2002, did not survive what came after it.

The total fraud: approximately £250,000. The cost to John and Anne Darwin personally, measured not in money but in everything else, was considerably higher. The ITV drama based on the story — The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe — aired in 2022, introduced the story to a new generation, and achieved some of the highest drama ratings of that year, because even twenty years later, the sheer implausibility of a man living in a bedsit next door to his own death notice retains the ability to stop people in their tracks.

This story ended three weeks before this article was published, with a judge reading a sentence in a Park City, Utah courtroom on a date that had been deliberately chosen: May 13, 2026, what would have been Eric Richins' forty-fourth birthday. Everything about the case — from the financial desperation at its origins, through the escalating attempts on a husband's life, to the publication of a children's grief book after the murder was successful, to the search history on the killer's phone that included queries about women's prisons — has the quality of something invented, sharpened, polished by a crime writer for maximum impact. But none of it was invented. All of it happened, in Utah, in the America of 2022.

Eric Richins was thirty-nine years old and lived with his wife and their three sons in Francis, Utah, a small community near the upscale ski resort town of Park City in Summit County. He was, by the accounts of people who knew him, well-liked — a man his sports teams mourned by continuing a tradition he had started, breaking the pre-game huddle with "1-2-3 Eric" in the years after his death, in the same way they had when he was alive.

Kouri Richins was a real estate agent who had built, or was attempting to build, a reputation in the high-end Utah property market. From the outside, the family appeared successful — the kind of comfortable, photogenic mountain-town life that photographs well and circulates on social media. The reality, prosecutors would argue, was substantially different.

Kouri's real estate business was not performing as its public image suggested. A forensic accountant who testified at her trial described her finances as a "relentless debt cycle." By the end of 2021, the situation had reached crisis point. She was attempting to flip a two-million-dollar mansion in Wasatch County — a high-risk, high-reward renovation project that Eric had not approved and that, according to the prosecution, she did not have the funds to complete without a significant influx of cash. The influx of cash she needed did not exist. The business was not producing it. What she had instead were four life insurance policies on her husband's life, totaling approximately $1.9 million, that she had taken out between 2015 and 2017 without Eric's knowledge.

As prosecutors would later put it, with the kind of brutal economy that characterises the best prosecutorial summaries: "She wanted to leave Eric Richins but did not want to leave his money."

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On the first day of 2022 — January 1, a holiday, presumably a morning when the notification systems of insurance companies were still running quietly in the background while the rest of the world recovered from the previous night — Kouri Richins secretly changed the beneficiary on her husband's existing life insurance policy, a policy worth approximately two million dollars, from Eric's business partner to herself. She did not tell Eric. She was not authorized to make the change unilaterally.

Eric Richins received an automated notification from the insurer informing him that the beneficiary on his policy had been changed. He looked at it. He understood immediately what it meant. He logged into the policy's management portal and changed the beneficiary back to his business partner.

He told friends that something felt wrong. He could not have known how precisely right he was.

The timeline of what happened next — reconstructed from toxicology reports, witness testimony, phone records, and evidence presented at trial — is one that requires a moment to absorb in full, because it involves two separate attempts on the same man's life within the space of eighteen days, the first of which he survived without ever learning that it had been an attempt.

On Valentine's Day, February 14, 2022 — ten days after a new insurance policy went into effect, a timing the prosecution emphasised heavily — Kouri Richins made her husband his favorite sandwich. Eric ate it at home. Not long after, he broke out in hives across his body. His throat tightened. He struggled to breathe. He reached for his son's EpiPen and used it. He took Benadryl. He called two friends, both of whom would later testify about the calls, and told them that he felt like he was going to die.

He did not die. He slept. The next day he was alive, and whatever had happened was attributed to some kind of severe allergic reaction, and life continued, and the sandwich was not tested, and the moment passed.

Toxicological analysis would later confirm that the sandwich had contained fentanyl.

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On the evening of March 3, 2022, the Richins family had a small gathering at their home — what NBC News described in court reporting as a "quiet celebration." Kouri Richins prepared Eric's favourite cocktail and brought it to him. He drank it. The evening continued. At some point, Eric Richins went to the couple's bedroom. He did not wake up.

When investigators examined his body and conducted toxicological analysis, they found what the court record describes with clinical precision. Eric Richins' system contained a lethal dose of fentanyl. It also contained 16,000 nanograms per millilitre of quetiapine — an antipsychotic medication, sometimes prescribed as a sleep aid under the brand name Seroquel. The combination was not accidental. It was not a recreational overdose. It was a calculated formulation: a sedative to ensure the victim could not respond or seek help, paired with a lethal opioid dose to ensure the outcome.

Eric Richins was thirty-nine years old. His three sons were home.

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What happened next is the element of this story that tends to stop people. In the days and weeks after her husband's death, Kouri Richins grieved publicly and, to all visible appearances, earnestly. She spoke about Eric. She appeared on NBC's Dateline to proclaim her innocence with the kind of composed, articulate, television-ready performance that can be mistaken for the genuine calm of a person who has done nothing wrong. "You took an innocent mom away from her babies," she said, having been informed of the investigation. "This means war."

And she wrote a children's book.

The book was titled "Are You With Me?" It was written, its author said, to help children process the loss of a parent — specifically, the loss of the parent her sons had just suffered, the father of her three boys, the man whose favourite cocktail she had spiked with fentanyl and quetiapine on the night of March 3rd. She published it. She positioned herself publicly as a grieving mother who had found, in the act of writing, a way to help her children and perhaps other children like them understand what it meant to lose someone.

Investigators had not stopped working. They pulled the insurance records and found four policies — taken out secretly, in Eric's name, without his knowledge, over the course of seven years. They documented the January 1st beneficiary change and Eric's corrective action. They traced the acquisition of fentanyl through witnesses who testified about drug transactions involving Kouri. They recovered text messages sent to a romantic partner before the poisoning attempts. They built, over the course of the investigation that led to her arrest in May 2023, a picture of a woman who had spent years methodically positioning herself to profit from her husband's death, and who had executed that plan with two separate poisoning attempts before the second succeeded.

Kouri Richins was charged with aggravated murder, attempted criminal homicide (for the Valentine's Day sandwich), insurance fraud, and forgery. She pleaded not guilty on all counts. Her defence argued that the state had failed to prove she was responsible for the fentanyl in Eric's system.

The trial began in February 2026 and lasted three weeks. The jury of eight deliberated and returned a verdict in March 2026: guilty of aggravated murder, guilty of attempted aggravated murder, guilty of insurance fraud, guilty of forgery. Every count. The courtroom gallery, which had been full for the duration of the trial, absorbed the verdict.

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The sentencing hearing was held on May 13, 2026. The date was not coincidental. It was the birthday of Eric Richins, who would have been forty-four years old that day.

Before Judge Richard Mrazik delivered the sentence, the court heard from people who had known Eric — from the sports teams who still broke their huddles with "1-2-3 Eric," from the community that still felt his absence, from the colleagues and friends who described the specific shape of a life that had been taken. And it heard from Eric's sons, who submitted written statements to the court.

One son wrote: "I woke up to sirens. I was scared."

Another wrote: "You took away my dad for no reason other than greed."

Judge Mrazik sentenced Kouri Richins to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He described her as too dangerous to ever be released. She will spend the rest of her life in the Utah prison system she searched for information about on her phone in the weeks after her husband died.

The $2.2 million in life insurance was never paid out. It remains, as it should, with the people Eric had designated to receive it before his wife attempted to change that designation on the first day of the year she planned to kill him. His children wrote that they are afraid of her being released. She will not be.