Tree murders and the economics of crime

IT IS the sort of tale Agatha Christie might have spun. The setting is Camden, a picture-postcard coastal town in Maine filled with antique shops and cafés selling lobster rolls. Amelia Bond, an out-of-towner, is tip-toeing through the flower beds, her pockets stuffed with poison. She is making her way to a neighbouring property owned by Lisa Gorman, heiress to L.L. Bean, an outdoorsy retailer. Ms Bond stops at the property line: her target is not Ms Gorman herself, but a clutch of 70-foot oak trees that rise up between her windows and the sweeping vista of Camden bay; her poison not arsenic or cyanide, but tebuthiuron, a herbicide used mostly along motorways and near airports for long-term “control” of “woody plants”. Months later, when the oak’s foliage has withered, Ms Bond remarks to Ms Gorman that her trees do not “look good” and offers to split the cost of removal. Ms Gorman, smelling a rat, declines and has the tree tissue sent for testing. Next come lawyers, glossy magazine exposés and public spectacle.