I wouldn’t usually post a tabloid-worthy story from the homepage of cnn.com, but this one is just a bit too crazy to pass up.

Two elderly women were sentenced to life in prison without parole Tuesday for murdering two indigent men to collect insurance policies taken out on their lives…. The women were convicted of a scheme in which they befriended homeless men, took out insurance policies on them and then killed them in murders staged to look like hit-and-run auto accidents. Prosecutors say the women collected $2.8 million before the scheme was uncovered….

The jury that convicted the women saw a secretly recorded videotape of the defendants in a lockup after their arrests. Rutterschmidt berated Golay, saying her actions in taking out 23 insurance policies raised a red flag when the men died.

“It’s your fault,” Rutterschmidt told Golay. “You can’t have that many insurances. … You were greedy. That’s the problem.”

Ummm…this is even crazier than that time a bear climbed up a telephone pole. Seriously, not to pigeonhole old ladies, but I didn’t even know they had the capacity for something this twisted.

Also, it begs the question: what moral difference is there between killing someone and knowingly letting them die? I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of people living and dying in the streets of the most prosperous country in the world, and we can’t even elect leaders to do something about it? Aren’t we all responsible for these deaths in some way? If we let 100,000 homeless individuals die, is that as bad as killing 2 on purpose? Worse? I don’t know, but I bet you Peter Singer does.