She seemed like such a sweet old lady. Who would ever believe that elderly Mrs. Flint would be able to hurt a fly, let alone her own family? I was Ms. Flint's neighbor from down the block. She used to babysit me as a child, and my mother and she had been best friends.
Mrs. Flint, despite her grandmotherly ways, seemed to have had horrible luck. As a younger woman she married a poor, but amiable, man named William Flint. I barely remember him, as I was only a small child then. I do remember that he always had time to stop by to help my father with his latest project. Mr. and Mrs. Flint had financial troubles, or so my mother said. It made Mrs. Flint very anxious about making end meet. It was when she became pregnant that her reign of terror started.
There was honestly no way the couple could make ends meet with another mouth to feed, and Mr. Flint insisted they keep the child. Mrs. Flint disagreed, and they started to argue constantly over the issue. This is when an idea seemed to enter her mind.
A few weeks later, Mr. Flint had become seriously ill. He got headaches, started vomiting constantly, and got violent muscle cramps. Within a few months, he had died. Mrs. Flint wore mourning clothes for quite a while before she got out of her funk.
The insurance money she got from the death of her husbands was fairly large, but she spent it far faster then she could handle on the baby, Ezekial Flint. Multiple insurance policies taken out on her baby's life seemed suspicious, but no one really thought about more than once. A woman who had lost her husband had the right to be overly cautious. Especially when the child ended up dead in his crib a few months later.
Time passed, and I grew up. Mrs. Flint continued to be a friendly figure in my life. She babysat my child, Darcie, and did it for free. No matter who you were she always had a platte of cookies available for you. Eventually, Mr. Flint and Ezekial didn't come up in conversations. She became the neighborhood grandmother, and the insurance money she collected along with some smart investments had assured a comfortable lifestyle for herself.
Then my husband heard about the deaths in the Flint family. He hadn't actually been raised in the neighborhood, so he didn't really know about the whole event. When he heard a few old ladies gossiping about it, he was instantly suspicious. I denied the possiblilty of Mrs. Flint having done anything wrong, but then I thought about it a little more. Mrs. Flint hadn't been overly sad about the deaths, had she? There was no doubt she needed money at the time. Would she have desperate enough to kill her family?
Since my husband was a prominent local figure, he easily got the two bodies exhumed. The results were devastating. Both bodies had enough arsenic in them to kill a small horse. It looked extremely likely that Mrs. Flint had murdered them.
She was arrested on July 22, 2011. The evidence condemned her to life in prison, even though she still swears she was innocent. It's hard to believe that a woman like that could be a killer, but I guess you never know if the sweet smiles and kind gestures are lies. You never know what's behind the mask.
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