(RepublicanNews.org) – Carl Hiaasen, the novelist whose plots are all centered around events in Florida, jokingly says that the state’s physical shape is conducive to criminality. The writer has opined many times that the region’s seemingly endless supply of bizarre stories may have been a result of someone having tilted a map of the United States slightly to the right and allowing all of the nation’s bad elements to drain to the southeast before putting the map upright again.
Most would probably agree that recent developments in the Sunshine State have all the hallmarks of a Hiaasen novel, but they are not fiction. On November 3rd, authorities in Marion County arrested a 55-year-old man named Herbert Swilley for allegedly murdering his 59-year-old husband, Timothy Smith, in March.
As opposed to being a crime of passion or the result of a brief lovers’ spat, officials allege that Swilley killed his spouse in order to get his hands on what most would likely consider to be a significant sum of life insurance, some $333,000. According to investigators, after discovering that his husband planned on leaving him, Swilley allegedly hatched a complex scheme.
He allegedly dosed his husband Timothy Smith with a copious amount of a common over-the-counter allergy medicine known as diphenhydramine and waited for his spouse to get sleepy. Most know the drug diphenhydramine by the name of the most popular brand containing it, Benadryl. Authorities say that Swilley then strangled Smith to the point of breaking his neck.
After the victim was dead, Swilley allegedly drove Smith’s body to a nearby vacant apartment and staged a fake crime scene. According to the sheriff’s office, he went to great lengths to cover up his alleged actions, including deleting a digital record of his comings and goings from a doorbell camera, dumping physical evidence at a landfill, and driving Smith’s vehicle to the staged crime scene.
Swilley posted about the tragedy of his husband’s murder a number of times on Facebook and also created a GoFundMe page for Smith’s remembrance service.
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