Paperback: Miriam Giles ran away to Colorado to bury her violent past but this seductive, charismatic widow had a dark side that could never stay buried.
After finding the 'sugar daddy' she was looking for in Alan Helmick, her new marriage seemed happy.
On 10 June 2008, two years after marrying their marriage, Alan met a gruesome fate.
Returning home from errands, Miriam found him lying in a pool of blood, bleeding from the back of his head, dead of a gunshot wound.
Miriam showed police a cryptic note warning her to 'run, run, run' but it was only a ruse to lead the police astray and toward a phantom killer.
But Miriam was no distraught housewife.
She was a master manipulator always able to stay one step ahead of her unwitting partner and the law until now, not excluding her own son.
According to the prosecuting attorney, Miriam always lied when it suited her.
In his closing arguments, the prosecuting attorney said that Miriam claimed that she was better off with Alan alive than dead. What she hadn't mentioned was that she was entitled to a $25 000 insurance policy and at least $100 000 from the estate, if not more. That was mandated by Colorado law no matter what a prenuptial agreement might say.
Her main motive for killing Alan was that he had found out that she was forging his checks and keeping vital business information from him.
On 7 December 2009, after a five-hour deliberation, she was convicted of first-degree murder and attempted murder of her sixty-four-year-old husband, Alan Helmick, and ten counts of forgery.
The prosecuting attorney told a reporter, "I don't think she's mentally ill. I don't know what her issues are."
Alan's daughter agreed, stating, "The things she says are beyond my understanding."
Miriam, now fifty-eight years old (2015), was sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 198 years in prison on 9 December 2009. Judge Robison said about the sentence, "Whether it's (the 108 years) symbolic or not, I think it's necessary."
Her estimated discharged date is 31 December 2207.
She is currently being held in the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility and not eligible for parole.
And Then She Killed Him was published in 2012.
About the author: Robert Scott was a New York Times best-selling American non-fiction author who wrote twenty true crime books. He has had numerous articles published in national magazines. He was a member of several writers' organizations and appeared on many television shows on Discovery ID, A&E, E! and Tru TV.
Robert Scott discovered that true-crime writing is incredibly interesting, as "You have to be part journalist, part detective and part analytical writer for the true crime market." Robert's books detailed the lives of killers and victims, police detectives and FBI agents from California to Iowa, from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. They depicted stories from a murderous male/female team in the High Sierras to a psychopathic killer on the mean streets of Los Angeles. They also told the stories of victims, from an exotic dancer, to a beautiful but naive college girl, to a loving and vulnerable ranch wife.
"The lives of the victims, and the detectives who brought them justice, are vitally important in these stories," Robert said. "I absolutely believe in a comment related to me by an Assistant United States Attorney, "'To the living we owe respect, to the dead we owe the truth.'"
In 2007, Scott was awarded Best East Bay True-Crime Author by the East Bay Express newspaper. His book Shattered Innocence - about kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard - was named a New York Times bestseller in October 2011.
Scott died at his home in Northern California on 9 January 2015.
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