Automobiles and Old Lace

Two elderly women accused of killing two transient men with a car so they could collect nearly $3 million in insurance money were videotaped talking about the scheme while in FBI custody, the prosecutor said in opening statements Tuesday…. Truc Do, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, said the women befriended the two men and took out insurance policies on their lives, then drugged them and ran them over to make it look as if the two homeless men had been killed in hit-and-run accidents.

It doesn’t matter how old she is, if a woman is overly friendly or uncharacteristically solicitous, keep your guard up. It’s strange how men find overly friendly men to be creepy in the extreme, but then are suckered readily by an overly friendly woman. Perhaps it’s my Scandinavian upbringing, but if someone I don’t know is smiling a little too broadly at me, I tend to put one hand on my wallet and the other on my gun.

Indifference and suspicion, that I can handle. General goodwill towards the world, as with the Italians, that’s fine too. But a smile combained with an inexplicably particular interest is the sign of the human predator.