Masumi Hayashi

At the hearing at the Osaka High Court, Hayashi, 42, said her 59-year-old husband intentionally drank the poison to obtain the payout.

She quoted her husband as saying, "I will earn hundreds of millions of yen using my body."

The former insurance saleswoman broke more than five years of silence at the appeal hearing in June to deny the murder charge.

The Wakayama District Court sentenced her to death in December 2002 for killing four people and making 63 others ill by lacing a curry stew with arsenic July 25, 1998. The lower court concluded that the arsenic found in the curry pot was identical to arsenic powder found in Hayashi's home and other places where she had been.

The Japan Times Weekly: July 31, 2004
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