Deadly Triangles

The love triangle turned lethal has been a favored subject of writers from Euripides to the creators of All My Children. But last week the deadly drama of scorned women and the men they can't have played offstage in three different real-world courtrooms.

Femme fatale No. 1: Carolyn Warmus, a former schoolteacher with a taste for high fashion and a penchant for liking the wrong guy. On May 27, a jury in White Plains, N.Y., convicted the Columbia graduate of murdering the wife of her onetime paramour and co-worker Paul Solomon. This wasn't the first time a rapt audience had heard the steamy details of Warmus' affair with the sixth- grade teacher. The "fatal attraction" case went to trial last year but ended in a hung jury. Now the 28-year-old killer could face life in prison.

On the same day that Warmus learned her fate, an appellate court in Wisconsin upheld the murder conviction of a former beauty queen who is already serving a life sentence for killing her ex-boyfriend's fiance. Lori Esker, erstwhile Marathon County Dairy Princess, became wildly jealous when she discovered that her prince, a local farmer, had decided to take up permanent residence with on-again, off-again girlfriend Lisa Cihaski. Esker strangled Cihaski in September 1989, leaving her body to be found in a parked car.

As the curtain came down for Warmus and Esker, the legal theater was just beginning for a Merrick, N.Y., teen indicted for attempting to murder -- you guessed it -- her lover's wife. Last week grand jury deliberations wrapped up in the case of the girl the press called Long Island's Lolita. Playing Humbert Humbert was Joseph Buttafuoco, a 38-year-old auto mechanic who had an affair with the young woman. Their relationship apparently soured, and the teenager became "obsessed with revenge," said Daniel Severin, a Nassau County police detective.