Is it a sin? Is it a crime? Love and you do like I do.

If it's a crime, then I'm guilty. Guilty of love and you.

Hi everyone, welcome to Criminal Brawds, a true crime and history podcast about wild women on the wrong side of the law.

Sister Month is over. What are we doing with all our free time?

Personally, I am a gardening. I just put some basil and parsley on my fire escape along with some mint and a small oregano, a small suffering struggling oregano.

And I also have a hydroponic garden in my kitchen, so basically I am old McDonald 2021 millennial version.

And I have lots of butter lettuce to share. What do you guys up to?

Yeah, criminalbrods at gmail.com. All right, today's story is a shocker one with lots of twists and turns. I mean, aren't they all?

This is one I was very surprised I'd never heard of before, but at the same time only one person has written about this woman in the past like almost 40 years.

And really, there's only one big chunk of information available about this woman and it's article in the New York Times.

And I thought to myself, Tori, Tori, Tori, you could sit here and talk about the article from the New York Times, or you could ask the author to come on the podcast so we're going to hear from Michael Wilson, an amazing New York Times journalist who wrote about this woman.

So today, I'm going to introduce you to Blanche Wright, who was framed in the media one way and the truth as Michael Wilson reveals 40 years later was quite different.

So we're going to be traveling back to New York in the 80s, which was, as you know, if you've ever seen a single documentary about New York, a very violent time, a very different time.

Chaos rained in the streets are so documentarians like to make you think and we are certainly going back to a violent subculture in New York.

So travel with me there and you'll hear from Michael Wilson soon. Let's get going.

A couple of months ago, I was looking for stories. I was clicking around the online newspaper archives that I like to use and I was waiting for something to catch my eye.

Suddenly, I thought of Villanelle, the anti-heroine of killing Eve, the TV show, and so I typed in female assassin, hoping to find a real life version of her.

Most of the articles that popped up were about movies, though, movies about female assassins.

So I tried another phrase, female hitman, which brought me no lock, and then I tried hit woman, which only turned up terrible sentences about hitting women.

So then I tried the improbable and wordy phrase, female killer for hire, and there she was, the hit woman I'd been looking for.

She'd been arrested in 1980 for a series of vicious murders. The articles I was reading described someone who was clearly a psychopath, a killer with ice in her veins.

The articles were full of phrases like double killing and accused of murdering four men and a woman and cocaine dealer and luxury apartment and shoot out.

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