Jill Coit was the marrying kind.
All up, she was married 11 times to 10 different men. The “Black Widow” was known to marry any man she slept with and once allegedly said, “I sleep with them, I marry them, okay? I could just sleep with them.”
Coit had a way of seducing men and keeping them under her spell until she decided she no longer had any use for them. Then she would throw the men away, without a second thought, and move onto her next target.
Like John Meehan, the protagonist in the world’s most popular podcast – Dirty John – Coit left a trail of confused victims of in her wake.
“If you were to meet her and talk to her, you’d think she’s just the greatest person you ever met,” one ex-husband, Carl Steely, told the LA Times. “Why would all these people marry her if she weren’t that way?”
The former model was born in Louisiana on June 11, 1943. She spent the next 15 years in the Pelican State enjoying a typical American childhood. When she was 15 years old Coit, who was then known as Jill Lonita Billiot, decided to move to Indiana to live with her grandparents. There, it’s said, the boys were attracted to her Louisianian accent and her Southern good looks.
Not long after enrolling in her new high school in Indiana, Coit met a classmate named Larry Eugene Ihnen. Soon she was infatuated with him and by the time she was 17, Coit had dropped out of school to marry her high school sweetheart.
Top Comments
Interesting case! Very sad for her victims and their families. I'm always curious though when I see a life play out like this and hear "typical childhood". With her...why did she randomly relocate to another state to live with her grandparents in the first place? Especially during adolescent years when peer relationships/belonging is so important. Not that everyone who commits crimes like this suffered childhood trauma but often, that seems to be the case. So yea just really curious.
I wondered too.
I agree, true crime is a big interest of mine & I've looked into it a lot. In almost every case of a serial killer they were abused as a child some how. If they weren't they're definitely the exception to the rule!