As a woman who has been married twice, I never considered murdering my first husband—who does that?! The 43-year-old woman in this true crime considered murdering her husband of ten years. According to her adult daughter, the woman even talked about murdering him.
When her 52-year-old husband came home from work with a headache, he took some pain-relievers. Then he went to the back deck to birdwatch and wait for the medicine to kick in.
Shortly after taking the pain-reliever, he collapsed on his back deck. His wife called 911, and they life flighted him to a hospital where he died. The hospital listed his cause of death as emphysema. The wife wanted his cause of death to be accidental poisoning—that’s what she planned when she took out life insurance policies on him. She thought she had a fool-proof plan to grind up some cyanide and then lace the pain-reliever with it. But the determination of emphysema was going to lower her payout by $100,000.
What did she do next? She laced a few more bottles of pain-reliever and placed them on the shelves at drugstores. When a young woman died suddenly a few days after the husband’s death. They linked her death to cyanide-laced, over-the-counter pain reliever and was all over the local news.
The woman who tried to kill her husband called the police and told them her husband had taken a pain-reliever. Perhaps his medicine was also cyanide-laced.
They became suspicious of the woman when she added she had two bottles of the same medicine bought at different stores and at a different time. They took the two bottles to a lab where they tested positive for cyanide, which made them more suspicious of the widow. What are the odds she would have the bad luck to purchase two tainted bottles? Slim-to-none.
As the investigation focused on the widow, they found more and more circumstantial evidence. Mixed in with the cyanide powder in the pain-reliever was also minute blue particles. The lab determined they were from a product used in fish tanks. The local fish store had special-ordered the product for the widow’s fish tank.
There was also the motive—money. When the widow’s estranged adult daughter heard about her stepfather’s death, she suspected her mother and called the authorities to tell them her reasoning. Her mother had researched poisonous plants and cyanide at the library book. She’d also checked out and never returned a book on common poisonous plants. They found her fingerprints on several such books at the library. The widow’s explanation was that she wanted to be sure there weren’t any toxic plants around her home.
A detective who worked the case said,
“I think that she probably killed [her husband] and expected them to find out that he died from cyanide poisoning.”
The daughter testified against her mother. She said her mother had tried before and failed to poison her stepfather with foxglove, a pretty, but poisonous, perennial flower.
A jury found the widow guilty of two counts of murder. Thirty-six years ago, a judge sentenced her to two ninety-year terms (one for each death) in prison, served concurrently. The judge also sentenced her to three ten-year terms for product tampering. She has proclaimed innocence and unsuccessfully appealed her conviction.
She blames her conviction on her daughter, who received a hefty payout in reward money from the medicine manufacturer for evidence leading to a conviction for the person responsible.
A two-man private detective team believes the widow is innocent and are on a mission to prove it. They have a history of taking on cases they believe result from wrongful conviction. One detective said,
“It’s entirely possible that the real killer is walking around somewhere out there.”
But how would they explain the minute blue particles in the cyanide-laced pain-reliever?
Source: U.S. Court of Appeals, CBS News, The History Channel, Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, Wikipedia
All data and information provided is for information and research purposes only and not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, or individual. Criminal cases may have been appealed or verdicts overturned since I researched the case. All information is provided on an as-is basis.
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