In the summer of 2002, the quiet city of Hamilton, Ohio, became the center of a murder case so bizarre it redefined the insanity defense. That year, Tonda Lynn Ansley walked outside her apartment one morning and shot her landlady, Sherry Lee Corbet, multiple times in the head.
Neighbors heard gunfire and ran outside, only to see Ansley, who was 42 at the time, standing over the fallen woman. There was no robbery, no argument, and no obvious motive. When police arrived, the reason Ansley gave for the killing was so bizarre it would later spark a national legal debate. She told detectives she believed she was trapped inside a simulation, a false world much like the one depicted in the 1999 science fiction film The Matrix.
