Killer Women by Wensley Clarkson Read Free Book Online

finger tightened its grip on the trigger, she placed her left hand over the gun to help steady it. She did not want it rebounding back on her. All those lessons at the gun club had given her a good basic knowledge of the mechanics of guns.
    Now it was time. She pressed hard and felt the gun tremble as it fired. The bullet went through his head in a split second. But he was no longer asleep. The full force of that bullet had somehow awoken him from his drunken stupor.
    For a moment, Kathy was taken aback. She had not expected this by any means. With the gun still firmly in her hands she pulled back a few inches and aimed again at his head. This time it would have to work.
    In those few moments between shots, her eyes explored every inch of his body, trying to establish whether his apparent consciousness was just a passing phase. But she could not take any chances. She fired again from close range. This time the bullet tore a gaping hole in the side of his head and took off on a helter skelter of a ride around the inside of his brain.
    Without even a flicker of emotion, Kathy Gaultney pulled out a drawer from the chest next tothe bed and dropped it on to her husband’s corpse. It seemed the perfect way to make sure it all looked like a robbery that had gone tragically wrong.
    Ten minutes later she was leaving the house with her young son, completely unaware that her daughter Rachel was lying in wait across the street.
    Rachel and her pal crept in the back door of the house in silence just in case they woke Keith Gaultney. The youngsters opened the door to the bedroom like two cat burglars on the prowl.
    When she looked inside that bedroom where her step-father lay dead, she had no idea of the brutal killing that had just taken place. No one knows if there was even a flicker of life left in his body when she snooped around the room looking for his wallet. But one thing is sure – she took no notice of the drawer emptied over his body. It was all pretty much par for the course for the ever-drunken Keith Gaultney.
    Once she found what she was looking for, Rachel left the room, completely unaware that she had been just a few feet from the body of her dead step-father.
    But the timing of her secret snoop around that room was to be the crucial evidence in convicting her own mother of first-degree murder.
    ‘Is that the police? My husband’s been shot. You better come quickly.’
    Kathy Gaultney sounded distraught to the telephoneoperator who took her emergency call later that evening. She told officers she had returned home from late-night shopping at a number of local supermarkets to find her husband shot dead in their bed. It seemed like a robbery that had gone terribly wrong.
    As the paramedics, medical examiners and assorted police milled around the Gaultney house, one figure stepped back into the shadows and found herself examining her own conscience – Kathy’s 13-year-old daughter Rachel.
    For she had witnessed her mother leave that house with her half-brother and she had seen what later transpired to be the body of her step-father. Basically, this scared young girl was withholding the key to his murder and she just did not know what to do.
    While the flashing lights of the police cars disappeared into the distance some hours later, she retired in silence to her little bedroom, haunted by the role she had played in the whole tragic scenario.
    It was only a few weeks later that Rachel decided to call the police and tell them what had happened that fateful night. Detectives later admitted that without her testimony it is entirely possible that Kathy Gaultney might never have been arrested.
    For those first few weeks after the murder of her husband, Kathy Gaultney cut a pretty confident figure in St Jacob – still reeling from the first deliberate killing in its hundred-year history.
    People may have been whispering behind her back, but Kathy did not care. She had got rid of her drunken, nagging husband and that was all