Born into a highly religious family, with members of her family prominent in the church, she grew up a devout, Christian woman. Graduated from a Christian College, found a Christian husband there.
Sometime after they married, she got a job as a secretary at a Christian College and met a young, promising Christian student there. Their friendship deepened and despite the sin of adultery an affair ensued.
When their relationship progressed and they fell in love, the student asked her, “Why don’t you divorce your husband?”
She replied to the student, “In my church people don’t get divorced, but if he were to die ….”
Unexpectedly the student did the unimaginable and killed the husband by sneaking into his home and stabbing him to death.
The police never solved the crime. The diabolical Christian couple eventually broke up. Perhaps they couldn’t live with their shared infamy.
Years later, the Christian woman had married a dentist and had twins. The student had gone on to another college for further study.
The police decided to reopen the cold case. They traveled to the Christian woman’s house not suspecting her as a suspect but to reexamine the details of the murder.
When the Christian woman opened her door to the police, she broke down and confessed everything and was arrested along with the student.
This true crime case puzzled me. At first, I couldn’t figure out how two Christians could even consider murdering anyone for fear of, in their belief system, going to hell.
After pondering it for a while, I came up with two theories. The first was maybe these Christians ascribed to the belief that once you are saved by Jesus, you are always saved no matter what you do after being saved.
And maybe they delusionally thought even murder wouldn’t negate what they may have seen as something akin to a binding, contractual agreement.
Or, probably more likely, they believed no matter how heinous the sin, all you had to do was ask Jesus for forgiveness and the sin would be forgiven, the slate wiped clean, the soul cleansed.
Still it’s hard for me to imagine how the student, supposedly a devout Christian, could have been duped into committing a murder and ruining his life and maybe his afterlife.
