"Most of the story I told you was true. We were married for five years. At first it was blissful, like I said, and the whole part about me not being able to have children was true. What I didn't tell you was how abusive my husband became—emotionally and physically. He would hit me sometimes, but even worse was that he would always play with my mind. The emotional abuse was horrible. And then he would force himself on me, as if that would somehow fix me and I would get pregnant. He would fly into a rage when I got my period. When it was confirmed that I was sterile, he almost killed me. He had beaten all the confidence out of me—everything I had once been. Somehow though, I was able to plan my escape—I don't know how my mind was even working at that point. It took weeks from the moment I decided to do it until the time I killed him—weeks of more abuse and weeks of fighting with my desire to just lie down and die. He came home one night from work, and I was waiting for him with a shovel. I meant to just hit him over the head with it—even with all the planning, I'm not sure I really had it in me to kill him—but the shovel turned as I swung, and I hit him with the edge of the blade, splitting his head wide open. He was dead immediately."

She talked in a monotone, the quaver gone. It was as if she had long ago lost any feeling for her actions of that night.

She continued. "The police arrested me and I stood trial for murder."

"Did they know you had been abused?"

"I told them, and they could see the old bruises, but I had never called the police and he had never hurt me badly enough to go to the hospital, so there was nothing to back up my statements. You have to understand, I was young and I was scared. My parents were dead and my sister was not in my life. This was his hometown. I had no close friends. It was my word against his family's word. I had no hope of winning that battle. The only thing that saved me from life in prison was the fact that the judge believed me. Maybe he had dealt with that family before. I don't know. But when it came time for sentencing, he took pity on me: Eight to fifteen years, with the chance of parole after six. I served the six and was released from prison four years ago.

No way! She didn't have the prison mentality, the crudeness, or the hard looks of someone who had done six years in prison—other than the way she had dispatched Mario's guy. Now Izzy I could believe, but not Sabrina. Not at all. I told her as much.

"I was lucky … if you could call it that. Not my first year. My first year was the most absolute hell you could ever imagine. I was beaten by the other inmates and raped repeatedly by the guards. If I had been resourceful enough to find a way to kill myself, I would have."