We don't yet know what happened in this case (WHSV, 10/27/09).  The pair have just been arrested and of course are presumed to be innocent of criminal wrongdoing. 

What appears to have happened, though is that Dennis "Chip" Taylor and Lorie Taylor were married and had three children.  They got divorced and were in the middle of a heated dispute about child custody.  In the meantime, it looks like Lorie married Nakia Keller.  On the night of October 23rd, Chip Taylor, his new wife Alaina Taylor and her daughter Kaylee Grace Whetzel were shot to death.  Kaylee was five years old.  The house they were in was then torched.  Nakia Kelly and Lorie Taylor have been arrested in connection with the shootings and fire which has been ruled arson.

Again, we don't know if Kelly and Lorie Taylor committed the crimes described, but let's assume they did for the sake of this question: if Lorie Taylor took part in the murder of her ex-husband, would it appear on the records of the Department of Justice as the murder of an ex-husband by his wife? 

The answer is 'no.'  It would appear as a multiple offender homicide.

The latest figures we have for husband/wife homicide show that about 1,200 husbands killed their wives that year (2007) and about 400 wives killed their husbands.  But the problem with those figures is that women, much more than men, hire or persuade someone else to do their dirty work for them.  So the figures for women murdering their husbands leave out all those murders-by-proxy.  Those are all hidden inside the multiple offender murders.

The good news of course is that husbands and wives both are, to a large degree, safe with each other.  As of March 2007, there were about 56 million married couples living in the United States.  That's about 112 million people.  If 1,200 wives were killed by husbands that year, each wife in the country would stand a one in 47,000 chance of being killed by her husband.  Since the numbers of husbands killed by wives is less certain, we don't know what each husband's chances of being killed by his wife are, but it's probably somewhat less than one in 47,000. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Domestic Violence/DV System, Crime/Criminal Justice System/Police. You can trackback from your own site.