Justice is blind, they say, but perhaps not to beauty. In
supposedly dispassionate courts of law, attractive women have long
avoided punishment, based largely on their looks, for cold-blooded
crimes. The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial gathers the
true stories of some of the most infamous femmes fatales in
criminal history, collected by attorney and true crime historian
Laura James.With cases from 1850 to 1997, these 32 examples span
more than a century, across cultures, ethnicities, and
socioeconomic status. But all were so beautiful, as James
demonstrates, that they got away with murder. When Madeline Smith,
a Glasgow socialite, tried to end a relationship with one man to
date another, her jilted lover proved difficult to shake. She
solved the problem, James writes, with arsenic-laced chocolates.
And in Warrenton, Virginia, mild-mannered heiress Susan Cummings
gunned down her polo-playing husband, Roberto, following a
disagreement. While these two women lived in different centuries
and on different continents, both of their lawyers argued that they
were too beautiful to be killers. And in both cases, the juries
bought it. In telling the stories of Madeline Smith and Susan
Cummings-and 30 others-James proves the existence of the so-called
Beauty Defense and shines a spotlight on how gender bias has
actually benefited femmes fatales and affected legal systems across
the world.
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