Ex-Mirror editor Piers Morgan meets with five of America’s most notorious female murderers in the second ITV series of Killer Women.
Billed as Morgan’s quest to discover just what drives a woman to kill, the first episode sees the Good Morning Britain presenter travel to Lowell Correctional Institution in Florida to meet 49-year-old Rebecca Fenton, who in 2015 was convicted of the murder of her husband Larry.
Fenton called the police in February 2008 to report finding her 57-year-old husband lying dead in a pool of blood at their Clearwater home.
She told detectives she had been exercising in the couple’s detached garage at the time of the shooting. She said she heard what sounded like something falling off the roof but didn’t check on her husband until later.
Fenton told detectives she kneeled to check for a pulse, but the pool of blood “appeared undisturbed” and she did not have blood on her hands or shoes, according to the indictment.
Investigators say they found a .38-caliber revolver the dead man had purchased inside his wife’s car. The revolver contained five spent casings – the same number of bullets that had been fired in their home.
Authorities were later able to determine that the bullets had been fired from the same revolver.
Fenton wasn’t charged with the murder until March 2014, after authorities said she had threatened a boyfriend with a knife and told him she would kill him “like she killed her husband.”
Fenton insists she had no reason to kill Larry but unless she can clear her name, she will remain in prison for the rest of her life.
As he delves into the case, Morgan discovers a compelling motive for murder: divorce would have meant the end of Fenton’s extravagant lifestyle. Yet if Larry died, Fenton would become a rich woman. But, as the lead detective Kerri Spaulding, explains, despite the motive, all the evidence they had was circumstantial.
Morgan meets also Detective Mike Hasty who began working on Fenton’s case four years after the murder. Hasty explains he believed Fenton was guilty, but he had to prove it. The break in the case came after Hasty contacted a former boyfriend of Fenton’s who testified that she had held a knife to his throat during a domestic dispute.
The show also features a meeting with Fenton’s biological mother, who gave up her daughter for adoption when she was a baby, and who reveals that even she believes her daughter to be responsible for Larry’s murder.
Morgan is left asking himself whether Fenton is a “cold, calculating murderess” and “the best liar” he has ever met, or innocent and the victim of an appalling miscarriage of justice.
Killer Women with Piers Morgan airs on ITV on Thursday 22 June at 9pm.