2006-05-26 - 1:21 p.m.

Barbara Stanwyck Eat Your Heart Out

If you've never seen Double Indemnity, do yourself a favor and rent it. It defines both 1940s American film noir and the quintessential femme fatale in the person of La Stanwyck.

I do need to rent it again -- I hear my 300-plus-title Netflix queue calling.

Anyway, I am just reminded of that classic of yore because this story from last Friday's Los Angeles Times has been on my mind all week.

An excerpt:

Two women in their 70s were arrested Thursday after they allegedly befriended two homeless men, took out 19 life insurance policies on them and filed claims worth more than $2.2 million after the transients mysteriously died in hit-and-run pedestrian accidents in Los Angeles.

One of the men was hit by a car and killed in an alley off La Brea and Melrose avenues in 1999, and the second victim was run down in a Westwood alley last June.

Detectives said they connected the two cases several months ago during a chance meeting between two investigators in the LAPD's West Traffic Bureau squad room.

A detective handling the death of Kenneth McDavid, 50, was talking about the peculiarity of the case when another detective interrupted him to say he had worked on a similar-sounding, unsolved hit-and-run six years ago.
...
"Our first thought was � they would leave the actual dirty work to someone else," Kilcoyne said. "We're not so sure about this anymore�. This is pretty evil."

I find this story fascinating. There've been several follow ups in the L.A. press this week as well.

There's something cinematic or literary about this story. I feel like it's going to stay with me for awhile.

Stay tuned.