Some weeks ago I wrote an article about the odd rationale the public attributes to certain defendants for certain of their behaviors. (“Are All Black Widows Stupid?”) Several defense witnesses in the trial of Trooper Robert Higbee reminded me how often defendants in criminal trials are accused of having acted in a certain way for bizarre reasons—reasons that “do not compute” in the mind of this fiction writer.

In the Higbee case, a portion of the public and the prosecution (and possibly the judge) are accusing Higbee of intentionally blowing by a stop sign, because he just didn’t care about the risk. I guess the idea is that he must have been getting a kick out of speeding and chasing a “bad guy.”

Raynella Dossett-Leath and Hope Schreiner were both accused of trying to poison their husbands with overdoses of drugs and then—failing that—of attacking the men violently. In the Dossett-Leath case, she’s accused of “snapping” and then shooting her husband in the forehead. In the Schreiner case, she was convicted of “snapping” and then bashing her husband over the head.

OK. I’m a fiction writer, not a psychologist. My ideas of what makes people tick may be completely wrong. But I pride myself on being perceptive and observant. So, as I perceive these three cases, the public perception of these defendants is stereotypical, not realistic.

Trooper Higbee

At least one defense witness (Dr. Loftus, I believe) said that Trooper Higbee would have had no reason to lie to investigators about stopping at the stop sign, because he would have known that the investigation would reveal the truth, no matter what he said. Another witness said that Trooper Higbee would have had no reason to run a stop sign intentionally, because he would have known the risk to his own life far better than the average driver.

These witnesses correctly characterized human behavior—exactly as I would write about a similar character in fiction.

The public/prosecutorial perception of state police, clearly, is stereotypical. Many seem to think that all cops have high-testosterone and a need for extreme thrills to get their endorphin fix.

Female Poisoners

I have a similar concern about the stereotype of the “Black Widow.”

Let’s take the Dossett-Leath case as the example, since she is scheduled for a retrial in January, 2010. The public belief is that Ms. Dossett-Leath administered increasing doses of barbiturates to her husband until she finally administered a lethal dose at bedtime one night. However, he wasn’t dead the following morning. So she got a pistol, stood near his bed, shot once and missed, shot a second time and hit him in the forehead, and then shot a third time into the mattress near his head “to make it look like suicide.”

In a novel, I might create a nurse who slowly dosed her husband with barbiturates to control him and then who finally staged a suicide by overdose. But no self-respecting reader would let me get away with staging the suicide so poorly. Where’s the bottle of pills near his body? A clever Black Widow might even have tried to stage an accidental overdose. (Think Heath Ledger, who apparently simply overdosed accidentally.)

Another question my reader would ask me is why the murderer didn’t expect an autopsy to be performed? Wouldn’t a killer have expected the long-term drug abuse to be discovered? If the apparent cause of death was suicide by gunshot, wouldn’t the autopsy have revealed the final overdose? How would she have explained that?

If she had failed to kill him with the overdose, the next morning when she found him wouldn’t she have injected him to send him into the great beyond? Or—if she couldn’t get her hands on any more pills—wouldn’t she have called 911? Wouldn’t she have hoped he might die on route to the ER? And even if he were rescued, at that point his suicidal tendencies would be on his hospital records, and his “second and final successful attempt” at a later date would have gone unquestioned. (Assuming the man was completely ignorant of his drug addiction—which I think is a stretch—his protestations that he hadn’t tried to kill himself would have seemed self-serving. He would have had to go to the cops and formally charge his wife. Admittedly, this would have been risky for my Black Widow character.)

In the case of Ms. Dossett-Leath, she’s a nurse who would have had a better-than-average understanding of these processes (the autopsy, the ER, suicidal ideation).

In other words, either the Black Widow character in my novel must be a cold, calculating poisoner or she must “snap” and under the stress of a situation must lash out violently. And the reckless state trooper would have to have had a reason for believing the intersection he intended to speed through was going to be empty.

Yes, I know. Only in fiction do people act like people.