Image via Literacy And Language Center

If you’re bad at spelling, you could wind up in jail. Assuming, of course, that your plan is to poison your husband, misspell a word in a forged do-not-resuscitate statement, and then misspell the same word while being questioned by the police.

According to a Reuters wire story, this is what happened to Jacqueline Patrick, 55, who poured antifreeze into two glasses of her husband’s cherry Lambrini cocktail on Christmas Day, 2013. Another report, by Lucy Clarke-Billings for The Telegraph, says Mrs. Patrick claimed to find her husband collapsed on the floor the following morning, called an ambulance, and offered paramedics a typed DNR in which the word “dignity” was spelled “dignaty.”

Mr. Patrick was rushed to the hospital, where blood tests revealed he had been poisoned with antifreeze. Doctors called the authorities after Mrs. Patrick told them her husband “might have drunk a blue liquid by mistake.”

Over the course of their investigation, police discovered that Mrs. Patrick had been researching antifreeze poisoning on the Internet and exchanging text messages with her daughter that said things like, “He feels sick again I gave him more delete this.” But the smoking gun, of course, is that when police asked Mrs. Patrick to write down the word “dignity,” she, once again, mistakenly spelled it “dignaty.”