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January, 1991, Gillian Philpott was found guilty of the manslaughter of her husband and sentenced to just two years imprisonment. Her sister Janet always emphatically denied having any sexual relations with Graham Philpott.

     

 
    Dear Reader
     
    In the latest from Blake’s terrifying True Crime Library, Wensley Clarkson exposes the strange minds of killer women. The beautiful bride who had to have it all, and so brought her marriage to a bloody end. The obsessed mistress, tortured with jealousy, who savagely assured her place as the only person in her man’s life. Or the housewife turned drug-runner, who stopped her husband informing on her operations… with a bullet.
     
    These are women from every walk of life, a collection as diverse as they are deadly. All women who, before their crimes, were as different from each other as any group of people could be. Some loners, some seemingly innocent, others possessed of deadly logic.
     
    But as you will find to your horrified astonishment, they are all united in passion and anger, by the deadly bond of murder…
     
    James Ravenscroft
    Editor
    Blake’s True Crime Library

In Cold Blood
    St Jacob is the sort of place where nothing much happens. A sleepy little hamlet set in the middle of the Illinois flatlands, which many people describe as the heart of America. The population of this tiny community is just eight-hundred and the locals have always said that they dread the day it tops the thousand mark.
    As you drive into St Jacob you cannot helpnoticing the fertile fields that surround it on all four sides. Beautiful green pastures expertly farmed for maximum potential. They represent the real reason why the village even exists. The farming of land is the reason most of the population live and breed there – and that’s the way they all want to keep it.
    There are only half-a-dozen streets in St Jacob and they are never exactly bristling with traffic. There only ever seem to be a handful of pick-up trucks and the occasional car – and everyone knows the owner of each vehicle.
    Perhaps not surprisingly, property prices in St Jacob have never been high. You could pick up a perfectly reasonable detached home on the edge of town for £30,000 – hardly a king’s ransom by anyone’s standards.
    That was how Kathy Gaultney and her husband Keith came to settle in the town in the early 1980s. They had lived in larger communities nearby over the years, but both of them fell in love with the peace and quiet of St Jacob – and houses went for a price even they could afford.
    The problem was that neither Keith nor Kathy were working full time. He organised building site labour for construction sites all over the state of Illinois. But sometimes that could mean months of solid work followed by weeks of inactivity. Kathy – who had just given birth to their son Walter – wasnot working at all. You could say the Gaultneys were struggling to survive. But at least they had their pretty little white wooden – slatted cottage in St Jacob – even though the modest mortgage repayments were proving very difficult to keep up.
    It was fairly inevitable that Kathy had to get a job. She knew Keith was expecting it – and as their struggle to stay financially afloat continued, she came to the conclusion that any type of work would do. Within a few months of Walter’s birth, Kathy Gaultney found herself working behind the bar at a rough and ready hostelry in nearby Collinsville. It wasn’t exactly a well-paid position but it would keep the wolf from the door for the time being.
    Back at home, Keith’s work had completely dried up and he had taken to boozing excessively. There was a certain irony in the fact that Kathy’s income came from serving alcohol and Keith was wasting all her hard-earned cash on the very same stuff. She was working all hours God could send while he knocked back countless bottles of rye at their pretty little home. Often she would arrive back late at night,