⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ (4/5 stars)
One woman. Eleven marriages to nine men. Three kids. Two murders. Countless webs of tangled lies and lives and personas and masks.
Some would call the life of Jill Coit fascinating. Full, even. Some might call her adventurous, others might say relentless. In “Poisoned Vows”, Clifford L. Linedecker explores the life of this vivacious, stunning, and conniving woman. Written during her trial, and weeks before the sentence hearings, Linedecker takes the reader through each of Jill’s marriages, children, various plots to get money, different job and career changes, and finally, a trial that exposed her bigamist and selfish ways.
From each husband, she’d swindle money and affection until she no longer had a use for them, then leave them for the next shiny toy in the form of another man who would fall for her attractiveness and charm. Her third husband, Clark Coit, whose last name she would use throughout her life, and her ninth husband, Gerry Boggs, were both shot to death by an assailant who entered their homes. Coit met his fate in 1972, and a hauntingly similar murder would rob Boggs of his life in 1993. Jill was convicted of Boggs’ murder in 1995, and while it is believed she also killed Coit, she was never brought to trial for the first murder.
Linedecker does an excellent job of unravelling the messy details of Jill’s life. The emphasis on Jill being “sexy” in the first part of the book was a bit much, but otherwise, it provided a riveting read for true crime fans, for a case that was massively overshadowed at the time by the OJ Simpson trial.