Author Topic: The True Stories of History´s Deadliest Women  (Read 50 times)

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raul

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The True Stories of History´s Deadliest Women
« on: December 02, 2022, 06:22:17 am »
LINDA CALVEY
(1948–PRESENT)

Women’s magazines are constantly offering up lists of things men don’t like women doing. You may be relieved to know that killing men really doesn’t appear to be a turn-off. Just look at the luck Linda Calvey had in love despite, as one police officer noted, everyone she was with ending up dead or imprisoned.

Linda came from a middle-class family in East London. She had lofty goals, telling her relatives at age twelve, “One day I’m going to have a red Rolls Royce and a fur coat.”
At nineteen she fell in love with Mickey Calvey, who was what some would think of as “bad news” and what others would consider “an honest to goodness bank robber.”

“I married a bank robber when I was 22 because I fell in love with him,” Linda claimed. “I knew Mickey Calvey was a bank robber the day I met him at his homecoming party after his release from prison. I went into it with my eyes open.”  Indeed, she seemed to embrace their life in crime, helping Mickey as a getaway driver and later wielding a gun alongside him.
But then Mickey was gunned down in 1978.

Despite earning a million pounds through robberies, after Mickey’s death, Linda had financial concerns. Those were alleviated somewhat by her lover Ronnie Cook. Grim and controlling, Ronnie wasn’t as much fun as Mickey. Linda later told a reporter, “Mickey was flamboyant, [an] extrovert, smart, the man about town. Ronnie was quiet, soberly dressed. He had a reputation as a hard man and nobody messed with him.” That did not equate to him being an especially nice partner.

Linda may not have mourned when Ronnie was imprisoned in 1981 for an eight-hundred-pound security van robbery. Even in prison he remained controlling, dictating the sexy outfits she was supposed to wear when visiting, one of which was lingerie under her fur coat (so, she did get that fur coat after all). She agreed, but only because she thought, “with any luck I’ll give him a heart attack.”

It did not work. Given what happened next, he may have wished it had.

In 1990, Ronnie was released from prison. By then, Linda had a new lover, “another prisoner, a strong, good-looking bloke.”  His name was Danny Reece. The couple, probably correctly, felt that Ronnie would not look favorably upon their romance. Linda supposedly offered Danny £10,000 to murder Ronnie. Danny was, at least in theory, up for it. However, he panicked at the last moment. He claimed, “I aimed the gun but at the last moment I shot to the side, hitting him in the elbow. He fell backwards. I aimed my gun again but froze. I’d never killed anyone.” Undeterred, he said that at that point “[Linda] screamed ‘Kneel,’ then pointed the gun and shot Ronnie in the head.”

Linda denied this account for the rest of her life, but she was sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment. This didn’t seem to dim Danny Reece’s ardor, nor Linda’s, who said, “When I was found guilty, I held Danny’s hand tight as they led us down to the cells. They took Danny one way, me the other.”  The couple married while Linda was in prison, but the marriage ended in divorce. Reece was later accused of raping another prison inmate in 2011.

Upon her release, she found love yet again. Her third husband, George Caesar, wasn’t involved in crime but didn’t seem perturbed by her reputation. When a reporter asked if he’d at least considered a prenup before they wed in 2008, he replied, “You can’t go into a marriage thinking like that. You have to trust people. Life’s a gamble, but if you lose trust, what have you got? So, she might kill me. Well, hell, I’ll take the chance.”

George has since passed away, as far as we know from natural causes, not Linda’s hand.

Taken from author Jennifer Wright.

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