Greed comes in all shapes and sizes, but it takes a special kind of greed to kill someone for money. Here, we’ve assembled some of the most notorious, notable and nasty cases, proving that some people really will do anything for money … even kill.

Posted 31 January, 2012
By Constance Parten

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This Washington state woman convicted of planting cyanide in over-the-counter pain pills, killing her husband and a stranger, lost her federal court appeal in August 1989.

Stella Nickell was sentenced to 90 years in prison on five counts of product tampering in the two June 1986 deaths.

Prosecutors said she poisoned her husband, Bruce, 52, with cyanide-filled extra-strength Excedrin capsules to collect $176,000 in life insurance, and later put bottles of poisoned capsules on store shelves to create the impression of a random killer.

The second victim was a customer of one of the stores, Susan Snow, 40. Three more bottles of contaminated pills were found in stores.

Authorities were ultimately led to Nickell by her daughter, Cynthia Hamilton, who quoted Nickell as talking about killing her husband. A check of a local library found Nickell's fingerprints on four books about cyanide, two of them checked out shortly before the deaths.

Nickell, 68, remains incarcerated in Dublin Federal Correctional Facility in California. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, her projected release date is Dec. 7, 2017.

Source: The Associated Press

Stephen Leslie Bradley, then 35, was sentenced to life in prison in March 1961 for the kidnap-murder of 8-year-old Graeme Thorne (inset, left) whose father had won A$224,000 in an Australian government lottery intended to help fund construction of the Sydney Opera House.

The boy was kidnapped in July 1960, just a few weeks after his father, Bazil Thorne, had won the lottery prize. The Thorne family received a demand for A$56,000 ransom but no instructions where to leave the money.

According to news reports, Bradley confessed to the slaying. "I told them that if I don't get the money I feed him to the sharks and I have told them I ring later," Bradley reportedly wrote in his handwritten statement to police.

According to his written confession, the plot went awry when Bradley put the bound and gagged boy into the trunk of his car. When he returned hours later, Graeme was dead. His battered body was found five weeks later in a vacant lot, wrapped in a carpet.

During his trial, Bradley retracted his confession, claiming it was made under duress, and pleaded not guilty to the charges. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The case led the government to allow lottery ticket purchasers the option of remaining anonymous. Bradley died in prison on Oct. 6, 1968.

Source: The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald

Mother and son Sante and Kenneth Kimes were sentenced to life in prison for the 1998 murder of a family friend and business associate.

Sante Kimes, then 71, was found guilty in March 2005 of ordering her son to shoot their Los Angeles business associate David Kazdin.

Kenneth Kimes, who testified against his mother to avoid the death penalty, said he shot Kazdin on his mother's orders. Kimes, who was 29 when the trial began, said his mother wanted Kazdin killed after he discovered she had fraudulently taken out a $280,000 loan by forging his signature.

In a separate murder, the Kimeses were sentenced in June 2008 for the slaying of New York socialite Irene Silverman in 2000. Convicted on more than 118 counts, mother and son were sentenced to more than 100 years in prison for the killing. The Kimeses denied killing Silverman, who was 82 when she vanished from her Upper East Side townhouse in July 1998. Her body was never found.

Prosecutors in that case said the mother-son duo laid out their plans in 14 spiral notebooks filled with details of the scheme — Silverman's Social Security number, her habits and finances.

Sante Kimes remains in prison at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York. Kenneth was extradited to California and is serving a life sentence at R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility.

Source: The Associated Press

This former child actor who appeared on the popular kids’ TV series “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers” was convicted in October 2008 of three counts of first-degree murder.

A jury in Orange County, Calif., convicted the then-29-year-old Skylar Deleon of murdering three people, including a couple who were tied to an anchor and thrown from their yacht off the California coast.

The jury found him guilty of three counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances for financial gain and multiple victims.

Arizona couple Tom Hawks, 57, and wife Jackie, 47 were last seen in November 2004 after setting sail aboard their 55-foot yacht with Deleon, whom they believed to be a potential buyer for their boat.

Prosecutors said Deleon and two other men, posing as interested buyers, took a test cruise with the couple, forced them to sign over ownership of the yacht and then tied their bodies to the anchor and threw their bodies overboard. The bodies of Tom and Jackie Hawks were never recovered.

Deleon also was convicted of murdering Anaheim resident Jon Jarvi, slitting his throat after Jarvi gave him $50,000 in December 2003. The two met in a jail work furlough program, according to prosecutors.

Deleon, who was sentenced to death in April 2009, later tried to cut off his genitals in prison. He remains on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

Source: The Associated Press

Deidre Hunt was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in May 1998 for the slayings of Kevin Ramsey, 18, and of 19-year-old Bryan Chase, who was gunned down by Hunt’s lover, Kosta Fotopoulos.

Hunt pleaded guilty to the killings and testified against Fotopoulos, who videotaped her shooting Ramsey multiple times while he was tied to a tree.

Prosecutors said the murder was part of a scheme to kill Fotopoulos' wife, Lisa Fotopoulos, for her money and insurance proceeds. As part of the plan, investigators said, Fotopolous asked Hunt and Ramsey to join a secret assassin’s club. Ramsey had information that Fotopolous had been passing counterfeit bills and was threatening to blackmail him, according to the authorities. They said Fotopolous had Hunt kill Ramsey as her initiation into the club. Prosecutors said Fotopolous then had Hunt hire a hitman for $10,000 to break into his home and kill his wife, Lisa Fotopolous, while she slept.

Hunt hired Chase, who managed to break in and shoot Lisa Fotopoulos in the head. That's when Fotopoulos fired several rounds, killing Chase. Fotopoulos claimed in court he fired in self-defense. Chase died, but Lisa Fotopoulos miraculously survived, even with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in her brain.

Hunt remains in prison at Homestead Correctional Institute in Homestead, Fla. An appeals court overturned two death sentences for her. Fotopolous awaits execution on death row at Florida State Prison.

Source: The Associated Press

Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to life in prison in July 1996, for killing their wealthy parents in a salvo of shotgun blasts in 1989. Prosecutors said the brothers murdered their parents to inherit the family's $14 million fortune.

The judge sentenced both Erik Menendez, then 26, and his brother Lyle, then 28, to two consecutive life sentences, saying he believed the brothers carefully plotted the killings.

At their first trial, the brothers testified that their father had abused them and their mother had been his silent accomplice. They acknowledged killing them, but said they did so out of fear their parents were about to kill them to prevent them from disclosing the family's incest secret.

The first trial ended in 1994 with two juries —one for each defendant _ unable to make a decision. The brothers were found guilty in a second trial.

Source: The Associated Press

Helen Golay (left) and Olga Rutterschmidt were convicted in February 2009, of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder for financial gain in the deaths of two homeless men.

Paul Vados, 73, and Kenneth McDavid, 50, were just two of the men Golan and Rutterschmidt had targeted as part of their scheme to befriend men down on their luck, house them, open bank accounts in their names, then take out life insurance policies in their names with themselves as beneficiaries.

The duo was finally caught after police spotted similarities between the two supposedly accidental deaths, in which both women were associated with the victims. In all, they'd taken out nearly $7 million in insurance policies on Vados, McDavid and others. Review the "American Greed" case file.

Source: The Associated Press, CNBC

When Victor Chang's body was found on a suburban Sydney, Australia, street in July 1991, it shocked the nation and the global medical community.

Chang, 54, was Australia's leading heart surgeon. He led the heart transplant team at St. Vincent's, a private hospital in Sydney, and in the late 1980s had performed Australia's first successful heart and lung transplant operations. He also pioneered construction of an artificial heart.

The father of three was found shot to death near his car in the tony Mosman suburb, the victim of a bungled extortion attempt "hatched by three men who had read a magazine article profiling 'filthy rich' Chinese businessmen," according to Melbourne newspaper The Australian.

The men, Chiew Seng Liew, Phillip Choon Tee Lim and Stanley Ng, had planned to abduct Chang and tie him up with his family at his home.

Ng, who pulled out of the extortion plot and later turned prosecution witness, said the three men planned to threaten to hang Chang's family unless he withdrew A$3 million.

Liew, who shot Chang twice in the head at close range, pleaded guilty to the surgeon's murder and was sentenced to 26 years in prison with a minimum sentence of 20 years. Lim, a former chef, was convicted of Chang's murder following a jury trial. In his interview with police, he said he was "very sorry" that Chang had died.

Source: The Australian

In 1998, Judi Buenoano became the first woman to be put to death in Florida's electric chair. She was executed for the murder of her husband, James Goodyear. Buenoano was not suspected of involvement in his death until she attempted to kill her boyfriend 12 years later by giving him arsenic-laced "vitamins" and then blowing up his car. When her husband's body was exhumed in 1984, it was found to contain arsenic.

The same year, she also was convicted of killing her partially paralyzed 19-year-old son by intentionally capsizing a canoe while he was in it.

Over the years, she collected more than $240,000 in insurance money for the deaths of her husband, son and a previous boyfriend in Colorado. Buenoano never admitted to any of the killings.

Source: The Associated Press

It's a new year and "American Greed" has a whole new season of scams and schemes. Some people really will do anything for money.

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