Husbandicide

The crime of husbandicide—the word is as permissible as infanticide—is as old as the discovery, made a very long time ago, that marriage is a failure.

From the time of the Empress Agrippina the world has progressed in many things, but the art of husbandicide, in which the amiable spouse of Claudius was already so proficient, has remained practically stationary.

Arsenic in the soup is fast supplanting firearms as a husbandicide among the more dashing members of the younger set.

"They're from my dear husband. I thought he'd forgotten to order them, and I was quietly plotting husbandicide."

The murdering wife became the heroine of yet another twisted variation on the fairy tale, one that came to include husbandicide as an acceptable female fantasy.