Without judgment, Crimes of Passion will unravel the events that take love to its darkest place. Not that we might ever be able to explain, only that we might find a way to understand how someone, who seemingly functions in other areas of their lives, might lose their balance enough to commit the unthinkable in a passionate rage.

These crimes are not pre-meditated. In all stories, the perpetrator has no previous convictions, and has shown no violent tendencies. Driven by love or in most cases, the potential loss of love, these people lose themselves for a deadly moment of time to all logic or sense of right and wrong. For some it’s only a moment, for others a slow walk into the halls of what many a defence attorney would define as insanity. Less a study of the criminal or pathologic mind, the series is about people like you and me who venture away from themselves.

We can all recall moments in our lives when driven by an intensely dark and passionate moment, we might have been capable of anything. We like to think it could never happen. We wrap ourselves safely in the knowledge that our better selves, our logical mind, will always win out. That no matter what we might be thinking, in any given moment, our choice to act or not act is always within our grasp.

Elaine Trombley lived in the town of Windsor with her common-law spouse, Tim Stropkovics, with whom she had been living for three years. She loved him, despite their dysfunctional and sometimes abusive relationship. On 23 April 1993, after waiting to no avail for Stropkovics to return home for dinner, Trombley ventured over to the local tavern where she found him drinking with another woman. She then went to another local tavern to have a drink and arrived home shortly before Stropkovics. She proceeded to empty his drawers after deciding to end her dysfunctional relationship once and for all. Knowing that he would be arriving home drunk and angry at her barging in on him at the tavern, Trombley grabbed a small paring knife from the kitchen and put it in her pocket, just in case.

As expected, Stropkovics arrived home in a violent rage, instigating an altercation and Trombley was thrown against a wall and her blouse torn. The small, 5'2", 110 lb woman struggled with the 225 lb Stropkovics until she was able to manoeuvre the paring knife out of her pocket and stab him in the heart. After calling 911 and the ambulance, a distraught Trombley was found bent over the body, crying, with her lover's head in her hands.

At trial, Trombley's lawyer argued for self-defence due to her suffering from battered wife syndrome. She was sentenced to 7 years in a penitentiary. Upon appeal, however, it was found that the judge in her original trial had used "ambiguous" wording to explain the legal concept of self-defence to the jury, thus leaving the potential for confusion in sentencing. This resulted in the appeal court ordering a retrial. Once taken to the Supreme Court, Trombley was acquitted. She only served two months in jail.