Mary Ellen Samuels, The ‘Green Widow’
Screenshot/OxygenMary Ellen Samuels had her husband killed, then arranged the murder of his assassin.
Women who murder their lovers are often referred to as “Black Widows,” but in the case of Mary Ellen Samuels, she was given the name “Green Widow” due to her lavish spending of the $500,000 estate she inherited from her murdered husband.
According to a 1994 Los Angeles Times report, Samuels was in the middle of a tumultuous divorce with her husband Robert when she devised the murder-for-hire plot.
Had the divorce gone through, she would have received a settlement of roughly $30,000 — but as a widow, she inherited half a million. She realized her husband “was worth more to her dead than alive.”
She didn’t have to look far for someone willing to kill her husband. It was her own daughter’s boyfriend, James Bernstein, who accepted the job.
On Dec. 8, 1988, Bernstein broke into Robert Samuels’ home, hit him over the head, then shot him through a pillow with a 16-gauge shotgun.
An investigation was launched into Robert Samuels’ death, and apparently Mary Ellen didn’t trust Bernstein to keep quiet about the job. On June 27, 1989, Bernstein was found dead after having been strangled, his body dumped in Ventura County’s Lockwood Canyon.
Bernstein was himself the victim of two killers, Paul Edwin Gaul and Darrell Ray Edwards. They were also hired by Mary Ellen Samuels, who was, at the time, spending her inherited funds like there was no tomorrow.
It didn’t help that she was rather blasé about the whole affair, taking photos in the nude from her Cancun hotel room while covered in bundles of cash, and adorning her brand new Porsche with a license plate that read NAST VXN, for “nasty vixen.”
This evidence contributed to Samuels being sentenced to death for two counts of first degree murder. Today, she is no longer on death row but remains in prison.
After reading about these failed murder-for-hire plots, see our list of 8 presidential assassination attempts that failed spectacularly. Or, read about the many, many plots to assassinate Hitler.
